As professors, we are asked (although in truth most of us take it upon ourselves) to explain our teaching philosophy, as if there were a single coherent system to our methods. These days, teaching philosophies are often reduced to statements affirming contemporary pedagogical standards of accreditation. The reader wishing to understand what those standards are need only consult standard departmental syllabi or those guidelines identified by accrediting organizations and governing boards, such as the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board's assumptions for the core curriculum (see Core Curriculum: Assumptions and Defining Characteristics at http://www.thecb.state.tx.us/AAR/UndergraduateEd/fos_assumpdef.cfm).

I affirm these standards, and I state that I desire to maintain an active learning environment in the classroom that involves traditional and non-traditional assignments; class lecture, discussion, and group work; a pedagogy based on theory, imitation, and practice; and I prefer emphasizing critical thinking, including as much as possible the Socratic method. While I affirm these as being useful, I also understnad that the success of all of these depends upon the subject being taught and the circumstances of any given class. I also maintain that teaching is an art, rather than a knack. It is part of a human experience fraught with many variables and requiring many approaches and perspectives.

On this portion of my webpage I offer two perspectives. The Portfolio of Dry Bones is a philosophical reflection upon the effectiveness of my department's instruction after reading student portfolios prepared when they were close to graduation. These portfolios consisted of evaluatory essays about their experience in the program and samples of the essays and projects they completed in their courses. After this is an early example of my teaching philosophy, An Introduction to Pyramid Building. This was prepared many ages ago, and it was intended as an ideal example of how an honors seminar might be organized. Although the program described in this statement was never fully implemented, I continue to use aspects of it in many of my courses. The remainder of this website, with its course links and other webpages, should give the reader a sense of my experience as a teaching professor, as well as many (although definitely not all) of the methods I frequently use in my profession, a profession of which I continue to be a serious student.

In Ezekiel 37, the prophet finds himself in a valley of dry bones; there were very many, and lo, they were very dry. "Son of man," God asks him, "can these bones live?" Lord, you know, he answers, and in turn he is told, "Prophesy upon these bones." So he does, uttering the words coupled with the spirit that will draw the bones together, cover them with sinew and flesh, and breathe new life in them.

I am a medievalist trained in the four-fold theory of interpretation, so it should not seem strange that I find great pleasure in applying biblical exegesis to deconstruct the portfolios of our English majors. At times it seems that I have much in common with Ezekiel, staring at a valley of dry bones, knowing I am powerless to breathe life into them on my own, yet ready to do as I have been told and seeking inspiration to bring about new insight into them. Hence, the following exegesis: literally, I am among the dead products of our students' academic performance, commanded to bring them to life. Yet allegorically, the portfolios are only a stage in a process of composition that culminated in the students' dry bones; once the living products bearing the essence of our students' thoughts and skills, now dead they become a part of another process, an inverted one, a reconstruction of what has already decomposed, leading to a resurrection of the truths that supposedly will lead us to something substantive about what they have learned and how well we have taught them. In so doing it is inevitable that we should examine the dry bones tropologically, exploring their moral significance in our own lives as prophets or professors, and I for one confess that I am also among the dead, waiting for an instrument and a new life that will breathe life into the dry bones of my instruction. Viewing the valley of portfolios from this perspective, it seems as though all the powerful forces of physics that wear our students down through their academic careers are the same that take us down with them, and just as we had a part in grinding their bones into dust, our students had a part in our own pulverization.

But can we bring new life into these bones? I take a turn now to the anagogical. Of course they can! But believing so often requires the faith of a prophet and a willingness to look beyond the dry bones of contemporary pedagogy with its emphasis on learning goals, student outcomes, and assessment procedures. Faith is, as the apostle Paul observed, the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. This probably is not likely to inspire confidence in the hearts of pedants or administrators! You may equate the role of professor as prophet to the role played by Bunyan's "Shining Men" calling at the gate, or Coleridge's ecstatic and incomplete construction of Xanadu, or Yeats' "artifice of eternity" taking the "form as Grecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enameling," or the Marxist state that will wither away, or, as Plato speculates about death and the philosopher's soul. May we not say, as Plato does in Phaedo, that the dry bones, like the soul,

After which, Plato records: "There was some silence for some time after Socrates had said this."

I am not Socrates, nor was meant to be. It would be unfair to imagine me as Aristophanes imagines Socrates, hanging from a basket in The Clouds, but neither do I wish to be seen as the Socrates of Parmenides, staring at the dirt examining minutiae, but I do hope I am mindful not to fall into "a bottomless pit of nonsense." We may stare at the dry bones, one by one, wondering whether that femur attaches to this tibia, or this scapula to that humerus, and lose sight of the fact that all these parts were once part of whole and living beings. It seems most certain to me that our students can identify an ankle here and a knuckle there and even distinguish , an odd jawbone from a tailbone, but they often seem unable to put all the bones together, or at least put them in the right place, and I'm not sure what we are doing to help them because I'm not sure how capably we are professing how to put everything together: here we have a skeleton missing a sternum and a leg, there we have one without a head and toes for fingers, and although there is nothing quite like God on earth as a professor in a classroom, I wouldn't even begin to think that I can create skin and muscle out of dry bones and breathe life into them. As one of the earliest professors, Protagoras, says about knowing the nature of the gods, "many things hinder such knowledge-the obscurity of the matter, and the shortness of human life." Or, as Eliot says in "The Hollow Men,"

I couldn't put it any better than that, hence the epigram to this essay, to which I am tempted to add: "The horror, the horror!" Or, as Shelley says:

These, then, are the portfolios of dry bones. These are our students, and this is us, and we can see what they can do and what they can't, but we better not forget what we are capable and incapable of doing, lest we all fall within the shadow and build our own Ozymandias only to watch it become "trunkless legs of stone" standing in the desert, overrun by sand. We have taken upon ourselves Penelope's "endless task," and although we recognize it as "bondage" we desire that after our training is finished and we are separated from our students and ourselves will not "be blown away and scattered by the winds, and so disappear into thin air, and cease to exist altogether." So, here we go 'round the prickly pear at five o'clock in the morning.

These are some of the dry bones I found among the portfolios: One student urges conformity in standards and argues that professors' standards are subjective, latent with bias (pick your bias). Another argues the opposite. One student argues that instructors urge students to write about their own opinions on the basis that all opinions are equal, only to discover that he was never able to satisfy the instructor or meet his standards, which are to the student mere opinions. About the same professor another claims the contrary, presumably having learned to put a bone or two together. Many students are uncomfortable with having to do so much reading, having to do so much writing, of being made uncomfortable by being asked questions in class, of the inequity of having to take quizzes on which they do poorly (although they have mastered the material, they assure us!); to be fair, a few suggest they have learned from the reading, the writing, the thinking, the testing, and they are known by their fruit; their bones seem to have some life to them. Some resent teaching to the ExCet that occurs in many classes; others welcome it. Etc.

Nevertheless, in spite of what they say or think, it is obvious as we read what they have written that many of our students still have a variety of problems writing according to conventional standards of English grammar and punctuation (form), and furthermore, almost universally, they are unable to write at length or in depth on any subject (content). But some of them can write, well and extensively, creatively and critically. These students possess the skills or their foundation that would allow them to prosper anywhere and even proceed to graduate school. Not surprisingly, they wrote the better reflective essays that were in the portfolios that were better prepared (more bones, something better able to breathe life into); the poorer essays were in the more poorly prepared portfolios (less bones, and even less inspiration).

Here are some more bones, scattered in the valley: Here some students praise one professor, damn another; but there others consider the same professors and read different conclusions about who is worthy of praise or blame. Here a professor is praised for caring, there for not caring; here for being exciting, there for being boring; here for being fair, there for being biased; here for being prepared, there for being lost; here a course is deemed useful, there inane. Such assessments may be reflective, but they are not "reflexive": very few of the students took time to evaluate the most important thing, what it was that they had done that was worthy of praise or blame, whether or not they had cared, whether or not they were exciting or boring, fair or biased, prepared or not. In short, the tables may be so easily turned. Still, there is great hope in those who saw the bones at different angles, and saw themselves in them; some of them have become critically self-aware, and some of them are gifted in prophecy!

This is my prophecy, here in the valley of dry bones: The faculty here are human beings, and so are the students. We all need to remember that, and respect it. The faculty (and the student body) is a diverse group: one professor is descriptive, another prescriptive. One concentrates on mechanics, another on critical thinking. One is more practical, another more philosophical. A head is not a heart is not a foot is not a hand. All this diversity is a good thing. One Church is enough, and so is one Petrucci or Harris or Dameron or Garza or Gallegos or Islam. None of us are the Apostle Paul; we can't be all things to all people. We all have a role to play. We lost a right hand when we lost Sledd, and we will lose something special when we see Petrucci go, but we are all more than the individual parts that make us a whole. If there were a way to turn the capstone course that requires collecting these portfolios into one that taught students to realize the mutual responsibilities of students and professors, tempering that realization with some humility and self-criticism, the course will have achieved its purpose.

But for the most part, discernment is lacking among students about what constitutes a healthy university environment, or program of study, or faculty, or course, or student. They do not often see the whole body because they are ground up in its bowels, and many of them are quite content to be shat out of the system. This suggests that we are not making the most of our opportunities, through clear arguments and inspiration, about what we do or why we do what we do, or why there are differences among us in spite of our common purpose, and why such diversity is a very good and human thing. I know many of us often try, but even at our best we can hardly be responsible for everything a student can not comprehend or aspire to. They often complain about the restraints placed upon them by prompts, classes, and particular professors, claiming that they restrict their creative faculties-but they fail to see the creativity that comes from working within requirements and conventions and going beyond them, or of the importance of mastering material and ideas before opinions can be substantiated or valid, before reading, thinking, and writing can be critical and creative and inform, persuade, and delight. They want to write free verse or paint like an abstract expressionist before learning to write in meter or paint a classical line. They don't understand the synthesis of material and method. They often don't understand the difference between "opinion" and "argument," or why one response is invalid or improbable and another is not; after all, they often believe that all opinions are equal! An apple is not an orange, but they are both fruit, and a foot is not a hand, but they are parts of body. In short, they read, they write, they think, not always as much as we would like and not always critically or creatively or independently or comprehensively. If I were to explain it in rhetorical terms, they lack a complete system of invention, a clear grasp of artistic and inartistic proof, a knowledge of modes as a means of analysis, not to mention arrangement, memory, style, and delivery! The relationship of things to each other, of things past and yet to come, is often lost on many of them: the relationship between letters that form a word (spelling), between words that form a sentence (grammar), between sentences that form a paragraph or between paragraphs that form an essay (composition), between literature and the contexts that inspire them (history), between contexts in the scope of different methodologies (criticism). We need to continue to ask ourselves, "What do we do to inspire this?" They need to ask themselves, "What can I do to acquire it?"

If I were to prophesy about pedagogy, I would say we should strive to develop a clear understanding, a reverence in our students, of education and learning; we should nurture the discipline required to achieve it; we should demonstrate the creativity that comes from it; we should promote the security it provides their minds and souls, the inspiration that sustains life in a valley of dry bones. We need to explain our teaching philosophies, and not offer them up as simple, standard solutions to complex problems, but as living parts of a larger being of which we are only a small part. We need to show we are aware of what others are doing, and why they are doing what they do. We need to teach students that ideas are the levers which will move their worlds, and that worlds collide.

But what claim do I have on wisdom? I know so bloody little, and my righteousness is like rags. I have sought wisdom, and came to know much madness and folly, as Ecclesiastes says. Why shouldn't I speak to you, my colleagues, in my accustomed manner, however much madness and folly it might contain, professing only a little wisdom? You have your role to fill in the Department, and I have mine, and my students are your students and your students are mine, and none of them are ours: they ought to be their own students. But I have had my say, and in closing I ask for one final indulgence,

l wear the bottoms of my Dockers rolled! Son of man, can we breathe life into these bones? God knows! Eat a peach or two and prophesy to the dry bones. Some of them will come together, grow muscle and flesh, and find they have a soul that can clap its hands and sing.

     Learning is monumental in importance, but at its most basic level it consists of the simple dynamic of a class with students and a teacher. That dynamic requires constant respect and careful consideration lest, to paraphrase Plato, learning becomes more of a knack like cookery than an artful discipline, lest the hard and sharp mind produced by the rigor of mental gymnastics becomes the fat head concealed by the cosmetics of pathos. At worst, in an average class many students arrive and remain unprepared and indifferent to their own education; others arrive eager to embrace any self-affirming presupposition or unexamined opinion regardless of logic or even common sense. Instructors, too, sometimes suffer from the same faults as their students, to which we may add arrogance, egotism, and, dare we say, solecism and solipsism; in these things, by imitation their students regrettably may become more apt pupils. And as for the material of instruction, have we not often lamented its degradation? With curricula created like the smorgasbord, education has become more popularly conceived as a matter of gratuitous choice than of grave necessity and centuries old substantive traditions of learning are too cheaply dismissed as subjective and irrelevant, so the subjective and irrelevant may take their place. Under such circumstances, what monument may be made and what would it signify? A tomb for reason? A vacuous vault of our own vanity? Or, perhaps in the end we will have nothing to show other than the debris of our own deconstruction. In worst-cases, the dynamic process of learning becomes perverse and its product antithetical to education's traditional liberal purpose–the acquisition of knowledge and free and open search for truth. Imagined more broadly, that purpose is the construction and maintenance of civilization on the one hand and the preservation of the republic on the other.
     My objective as a teacher is to build, not to tear down. I use the materials and tools long provided by the liberal arts education. This tradition demands that I teach not what to think but how to think. It requires respectful consideration of all human achievement, and a constant subjection of ideas to the test of reason and appreciation of human nature. It demands discrimination between opinion, idea, and fact. It requires the humility that stems from an understanding of one's limitations, but the confidence that comes from knowledge and experience that the method works and its end is good. It calls for a commitment to students extending beyond the classroom and illustrating that learning is a way of life that ought always be shared and open to inspection by others. Based on the simple dynamic that exists within a class, we begin to build a monument of learning. This monument can not be made without dedicated students considering the best that has been thought and said. It can not be made without a teacher who questions and listens and encourages analysis, answers, and more questions in return. It can not be made without a teacher who understands that for himself as well as his students learning is a lifelong adventure extending beyond the classroom, and thus he makes himself available outside of class accordingly. And it can not be made without critical reading, thinking, speaking, and writing, the long effective tools of learning.
     In the presentation which follows, let us imagine the monument we build to be a pyramid. We will construct our pyramid bit by bit, securing its construction week by week, class by class, revealing to all a life's work in progress. The materials and methods of that construction are illustrated on the next page by the figure, "Pyramid Building." It abstractly represents my teaching philosophy in the context of the learning environment described above. It is in the form of a pyramid because throughout human history pyramids have been impressive symbols of great achievement, monuments of civilization requiring collaboration and commitment. So I imagine education as a collaborative effort and the substance of humanity's crowning achievement.
     We will begin simply by building a three-sided pyramid consisting of three separate triangles: "The Seminar/Tutorial Triangle;" "The Lecturer's Triangle;" and the "Learning Triangle." Each triangle represents what I perceive to be a fundamental aspect of the learning environment, and each aspect has by its very nature three sides. If viewed from the aspect of the Seminar/Tutorial Triangle, we see the three elements: student, teacher, and text. From the aspect of the Lecturer's Triangle we see the three elements: seminar/tutorial, preceptorial, and lecture. Finally, from the aspect of the Learning Triangle we see the elements: listening/reading, thinking, and speaking/writing. In the following pages we will explore each triangle in turn and see how they are used to construct a specific pyramid, "The Honors Program Pyramid."
     Understanding the pyramid and what it signifies is preliminary to appreciating how I would like to go about teaching an honors seminar, which will be represented later by the figure "A Holistic Guide to an Honors Seminar." Thus we will see how my teaching philosophy applied in an integrated studies program, firmly rooted in the liberal arts tradition, goes beyond the curriculum itself and embraces every aspect of the learning process involving students and their teacher. This clear, unified system of instruction is the best statement I can make of my teaching philosophy.

     This triangle represents the three essential elements of any college course: student, teacher, and text. For our purposes, we will think of this triangle in the context of a traditional liberal arts seminar, an interdisciplinary course essentially grounded in primary sources, attended by motivated and intelligent students and directed by an equally gifted instructor. Specifically, it will correspond to the sample syllabi provided in "Appendix A" of this proposal for an Honors Seminar such as those that are now or someday may be offered at your college.
     A "Seminar/Tutorial" is not a typical college course where the professor lectures to students about content, nor is it only a seminar where an instructor advances his or her own ideas equal to or to a greater degree than the students. It is a seminar which emphasizes group discussion and analysis of course material, which are whole texts and/or excerpts of primary sources. The primary responsibility for this open yet critical examination of ideas belongs to the students, for whom this may be their first time exposed to the ideas being considered or at least in the sources from which they are derived. But the instructor does not remain aloof; it is his job to guide the discussion. Thus the course is a tutorial in the sense that the professor focuses attention by asking students questions compelling them to define, divide, elaborate, and explain their own opinions through a process of critical analysis. The method of instruction is primarily Socratic, exploring the meaning of things said and testing the validity of ideas through the proof offered to support them. All three aspects of the triangle need careful preparation if this approach is to be successful.

     Clearly such approach does not work with all students, as our experience shows. It requires students who come to class prepared, having read all the material, and possessing a certain eagerness for the adventure of learning on which they are embarked. Such students will already possess a natural curiosity for the application of ideas that to others remain alien and remote, and will likely hold predetermined opinions which may or may not have already been tested. The purpose of the seminar is to teach them the means by which opinions and ideas–even, especially their own–may be sorted through, separating wheat from chaff. It provides them with the necessary practice to analyze, express, and defend their ideas and those of others in speaking and in writing, and to do so rationally, fairly, and civilly. The students are the foundation on which the seminar will be built.

     The texts used in the seminar mostly must be drawn from "the best that has been thought and written," the great works of our common culture. These works span ages and nations, genres and disciplines, and are the rightful heritage of all who claim their ideas. They are our history of what has gone before us, who we are now, and who we are yet to become. Their neglect these days does not do us credit. One need only recognize the disparity between requirements and electives at most colleges and see how the canon has been abandoned among the requirements to realize that the majority of students graduating from "liberal arts" programs today are often ignorant of their own heritage; how then are they to be considered educated? Not surprisingly standards of critical thinking have deteriorated correspondingly. By adhering to the great books, we may maintain the best standards for students and introduce them to the origin and development of human events still in the making.

     Finally, the teacher of the seminar needs to be committed to the liberal arts tradition and dedicated to imparting that knowledge through the students' own participation in the seminar. Having himself been educated through study of the great books, it is his great joy to have the chance to share that learning with others. From the texts the students may explore ideas; from the teacher the students are shown the means by which ideas may be explored, and hopefully they will be inspired by the teacher's own love of learning as well as by the method which encourages critical thinking. To that end, the teacher has a greater role to play that will take him beyond the class and the Socratic method and provide him with the opportunity to teach students certain skills he has acquired and found useful and, in a less intimidating forum than the seminar itself, provide him with a venue for presenting his own ideas in lecture, yet still affording and encouraging the students every opportunity to put those ideas to the test. At all times the teacher needs to be impressed by the awesome responsibility he has been given and seek to be accessible to students and a model of decorum.

     This triangle at first may seem to be misnamed, for the seminar demands discussion and the Socratic method, and places less emphasis on traditional lecturing. Any number of synonyms are interchangeable with the lecturer: professor, teacher, instructor, tutor. Suffice it to say that this triangle represents the responsibilities of the person into whose charge the students of a seminar have been given. Thus it consists of three parts: seminar/tutorial, preceptorial, and lecture. These are, as I see it, the three main responsibilities that a teacher has in supporting the education of his students.

     The foundation of the teacher's ability to teach is the venue provided the course and its students. Thus we have spent some time already discussing the dynamic represented by the "Seminar/Tutorial Triangle." All of what was said there applies here, but there is a difference in perspective. Then we considered the general characteristics of the seminar and the corresponding disposition of the teacher. Here we must consider the duties of the teacher more narrowly. The first of these considerations is how he conducts the seminar. First, he must always be prepared; from experience, we know that professors sometimes aren't, some of them more often than others. Showing for class unprepared is simply unacceptable. An instructor must devote ample time to preparing for the day's discussion, even if the work under consideration has been long familiar. Every reading of a text is an opportunity to explore or re-explore ideas of the great works; this is one of the great joys of learning, and it reinvigorates the instructor and the course. It also provides the focus necessary to make the Socratic method work and the substance to sustain class discussion. But in addition to working with familiar texts, the instructor ought also seek to introduce other works so as to constantly expand his repertoire; this, too, is reinvigorating. Some time also ought to be spent exploring the respected opinions of critics on particular texts, for this too provokes new analysis. He should be prepared to explain the context in which a work, and its author, were produced. Second, he should lead the seminar by example. His preparedness and the earnestness with which he sets about directing the class will be recognized by students, as will his civility and the respect which he shows for others. He should be friendly and accessible to his students, but he should not try to be their "friend," for he is different from them–he is their teacher, and he must maintain propriety and decorum. From their instructor they should learn good methods and good behavior. Finally, he must develop a reasonable progression for the course that is demanding, yet possible to complete. This includes developing a schedule for reading , exams, and assignments that keep the students focused on the process of learning.

     Next let us consider the preceptorial. Preceptorial activities take place during established office hours or some other time set by the professor in agreement with the college and/or students. Preceptorials need not take place on a weekly basis, but should be held frequently enough during a term to provide students with practical instruction to help them complete assignments out of class. Primarily, preceptorials will be used to provide students with focused presentations on critical thinking and writing. For instance, sessions could be held on thesis statement/topic sentences; invention strategies (argumentative and organizational); argumentative stasis theory; inductive/deductive reasoning; and logical fallacies. While I concede that some students already come with considerable talent, ten years of teaching have convinced me that all students benefit from an introduction to analytical writing and logic. Under ideal circumstances, preceptorials would be part of the curriculum, for the information imparted by them is crucial. By taking responsibility for that material, an instructor will ensure that standards for critical thinking in writing essential to the course have been introduced to students appropriately, for he may not be able to rely on others to have done that job for him. Under most circumstances, however, preceptorials are entirely voluntary. Students will not have it held against them should they choose not to attend. However, it is in their greatest interest that they take advantage of the extra efforts of the instructor to ensure their success by providing instruction on the type of tools that will directly support the students' completion of assignment.

     As for the lecture side of the triangle, this too occurs outside of normal seminar hours a few times during a term. Having refrained from any traditional lecturing in favor of the Socratic method of the seminar, occasional lectures provide the professor with an opportunity to share his own responses to a text or series of texts in a manner which might further stimulate the students' own interest in the course material and provide them with more insight on material already discussed or material soon to come.

     The final triangle we need to consider as we build our pyramid is the learning triangle. Its parts are listening/reading; thinking; and speaking/writing. These are the mental activities common to student and teacher alike as they explore the ideas of a given course.

     Listening and reading are the first essential step in the successful completion of a seminar, and they are similar activities. Students and their professor must first of all read the material which brings them together in a seminar, and then listen to one another as the ideas of that material are explored. If the works are not read, the response to the ideas are meaningless for they are out of context and no material will underlie the students' opinions. If questions and comments are not registered and responded to, then ideas cannot truly be analyzed and put to the test, defeating the whole purpose of the seminar. But if students and teachers come prepared by their reading and then expected to listen, then they can realize the other sides of the triangle and maximize their learning potential.

     Thinking is more than resting on one's opinions. It is a critical activity that requires as completely as possible understanding the material at hand and the ability to use a variety of analytical tools to distinguish between the possible and probable and the true and the false. The seminar has to its advantage the best ideas from the great books and the Socratic method which seeks to define, divide, classify, and clarify those ideas. Through such analysis even those already familiar with the material are given fresh insight into the complexity of the human event. Ultimately, the activity becomes a reflection of ourselves as much as an understanding of others. But thinking requires discipline. It depends on a triumph of reason over emotion, the ability to distinguish between the possible and the probable, a respect for logic and watchfulness for logical fallacies.

     As for speaking and writing, these are the means by which we may as yet reap the fruit of our listening, reading, and thinking, for these activities force us to take the necessary action by which we ultimately prove our reasoning valid and our understanding sophisticated. Being able to explain in speech or in writing is a demanding task that often forces us to re-evaluate our own thinking and opinions. During the seminar, we must explain our positions as clearly and effectively as possible as we interact with one another. The instructor must be the primary model, for through his guidance the discussion begins and is focused. But all students must follow in turn. Through the effort of speech, inchoate ideas comes into being and undeveloped arguments are exposed. The practice they have speaking is good in its own end, but it achieves its fullest achievement through the demands of writing. With the advantage of reflection over things previously claimed and argued, writing provides students with the chance to martial their army of ideas with full support in an impressive and compelling display. While they are given an opportunity to speak during every class period, they will be given an opportunity to write during exams and out-of-class assignments. The expectations of these exercises should be high for form and content. This work will represent the clearest indication of the students progress in the course. When appropriate, the instructor should provide writing samples of his own and others to serve as models for discussion which the students in turn might use. In sum, speaking and writing are the tools which polish the ideas gleaned from reading, listening, and thinking.

     Now let us see what type of pyramid we have built using all the triangles integrated. The figure on the next page abstractly renders the pyramid having been constructed from the three triangles. It is a complete approach to the education of a student such as may be expected by an honors or interdisciplinary prorgram at your college. With the best material, students, and teacher, with the method of the seminar backed up by preceptorial and lecture, and with all the faculties of learning anticipated and employed, surely this is the type of vision you already embrace in your program. And although this pyramid is only meant to represent the activities of a single seminar in the course of a term, notice how the ends and the means are perpetual. They are continued in every course the student and teacher participate in, and they are continued after college is at an end and the free citizen, a rational being, continues to use the tools his liberal education has provided for him. The pyramid has no end; it is a work in progress consisting of all the pyramid constructed in the past. If we labor well, eventually we will be able to leave its construction to our children and grandchildren, and the student will assume the role of the teacher and impart the wisdom of the great books.

     Now let us turn our attention to what such a vision means at a more practical level as it applies to an actual course. We will begin by examining the progression of a course and the construction of a pyramid beginning with the figure, "Seminar/Tutorial Timeline." This timeline is the format for the following figure, "A Holistic Guide to an Honors Seminar," and is based on the sample syllabi contained in "Appendix A" which is found after this presentation.
     The left column of the Timeline and its corresponding diagonal line represent the progression of a seminar from the beginning to the end of the term through a sixteen week course. Each week the seminar takes its normal course: students read the primary works out of class and discuss them during class hours, guided primarily by the professor's use of the Socratic method.
In addition to the normal classroom discussion, the seminar provides ample opportunity for students to write at length on course material. Essays are due on weeks four, seven, and eleven. These essays are primarily the students' own arguments in response to some issue raised in their readings, and need not consist of more than five to eight pages, double-spaced. The term paper due on week fourteen represents a more rigorous paper, requiring the student to incorporate secondary material in addition to the primary sources. It should be about ten pages long and show some synthesis of sources, but the primary emphasis of the paper needs to be the primary source or sources themselves. A midterm and a final exam will consist of short answers in response to brief excerpts from the students' reading material, as well as a longer response to a choice of topics provided from that reading material.

     In this illustration we see the additional support provided for the seminar by the professor's activities outside of the classroom and in addition to his normal office hours. In "Appendix A" at the end of this presentation there is a practical application of this holistic approach in "Sample Syllabi with Course Guidelines."
     First, you will notice the seminar/tutorial timeline, with the left column describing the weeks of the term and punctuated by the dates when significant assignments are due. The diagonal line with its corresponding asterisks denoting each week of the term divides the page in half, into an upper left portion and a lower right portion. Our main concern is with the latter.
     The lower right portion illustrates the preceptorial support the professor provides for the seminar. Beginning with the second asterisk on the diagonal line, corresponding to week two, we see a horizontal line extending in the lower right portion of the page to the page's right margin. This line represents the first in a series of preceptorials designed to provide students with some additional instruction about analytical writing. Specifically, this initial preceptorial will address the "Four bases of effective writing" (focus, support, coherence, and sentence skills), "thesis statements and topic sentences," and the "paradigm," a method of planning and organizing writing using an outline in sentence form. This preceptorial will be held sometime before the end of the second week, and its immediate impact will be felt by the end of the fourth week of the term, at which time the first essay is due. This support is illustrated by a vertical line extending from the second week preceptorial to the fourth week.
     The first preceptorial will be complimented by another one by the end of the third week. Notice the horizontal line extending from the third week asterisk to the right of the margin. This is a preceptorial on "Invention: Analytical Topics," which employs Aristotelian topical categories as tools for analyzing and organizing writing. The vertical arrow from the first preceptorial bisects the horizontal line for the second, illustrating how this preceptorial also directly supports the completion of the first essay assignment. But these preceptorials also provide basic support for all remaining class writing assignments, which is illustrated by other vertical arrows drawn on the chart. (They also provide support for the midterm and final, which I do not draw.)
     The remaining preceptorials should be obvious and are illustrated by horizontal lines extending from the week in which they take place, and how they in turn are bisected by vertical arrows pointing to the completion of a specific assignment.
     The upper left portion of the chart illustrates a series of lectures. The first one takes place by the end of the first week. It provides the professor with an opportunity to give a short presentation outside of class to any interested students on the material being discussed in seminar. There should be no more than one such lecture in the period before a major assignment is due, for the burden should be placed on the students to discover material about which to write; the danger of the lecture is that students' will come to rely on the instructor's opinion as a crutch. But this need not happen, and it can rather be a positive impetus to the students' development of ideas if practiced in moderation. The diagonal arrows extending from the lecture lines show that their purpose is to point the way toward the completion of a portion of the seminar.

     Of course, the Great Pyramids of Egypt are all four-sided, a fact which many of you may have already noticed. Certainly, we can expand our pyramid to reflect this, if we wish. I have not done it until now so as to emphasize the most basic dynamic in the liberal arts education--student, teacher, and texts. Yet really, these three things can only come together with institutional support.
     The college triangle represents the addition of another triangle to the pyramid. It consists of college, curriculum, and faculty. It is up to the college to provide the physical and mental infrastructure necessary for a liberal arts education. The college maintains the buildings, undertakes scheduling, determines the curriculum, and hires the faculty. Clearly the college has a place in the pyramid. It is instrumental in setting the high standards expected of student and teacher alike.
     If one is to construct a four-sided pyramid, we might imagine its foundation to look something like this: college, curriculum, faculty, student. On this foundation of facilities, program of studies, professors, and students , the process of building a four-sided pyramid begins.
     In sum, we can construct a four-sided pyramid. Remove one side, and the structure collapses. Add to them all, and education becomes integrated, meaningful, and complete.
     This is the ultimate type of pyramid I would like to construct in an honors or interdisciplinary program anywhere.

     This syllabus represents how I would teach using only anthologies, specifically Volumes I and II of Classics of Western Thought, listed above under course guidelines. The advantage of using anthologies is that it is cheaper and more convenient for students. The disadvantage is that it makes for a more superficial study of primary sources, which ideally ought to be read in their entirety (an example of a syllabus using whole texts follows this one).

Week 1: Epic of Gilgamesh; Old Testament.

Week 2: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War. Optional Lecture: Why Thucydides Remains Important Today.

Week 3: Plato, Apology. Optional Preceptorial: Four Bases of Effective Writing; Thesis, Topic Sentences, and Paradigm.

Week 4: Plato, Phaedo. Essay 1 due. Optional Preceptorial: Invention and Analytical Topics.

Week 5: Aristotle, Ethics. Optional Lecture: Composing Hymns to Apollo.

Week 6: Cicero, On the Laws. Optional Preceptorial: Argumentative Analysis–Roman Stasis Theory

Week 7: New Testament. Essay 2 due. Optional Preceptorial: Organizational Strategies; Extemporaneous Strategies.

Week 8: Augustine, City of God. Midterm. Optional Lecture: God and Caesar, Spirit and Flesh.

Week 9: Aquinas, Summation of the Catholic Faith.

Week 10: Papal Documents. Optional Preceptorial: Inductive and Deductive Reasoning.

Week 11: Dante, Inferno. Essay 3 due. Optional Preceptorial: Logical Fallacies.

Week 12: Everyman. Optional Lecture: Reason, Faith, and Man

Week 13: Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man. Optional Preceptorial: Research Methods.

Week 14: Erasmus, The Praise of Folly. Term Paper due. Optional Preceptorial: Documenting Sources.

Week 15: Luther, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. Optional Preceptorial: Continuity from Antiquity to the Modern Age.

Week 16: Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises. Final Exam.

     This syllabus represents how I would teach the Honors Seminar using whole texts and excerpts. The advantage of the whole text approach is that students have the opportunity to immerse themselves in primary sources more completely. The disadvantage is the cost. The editions I would choose would be inexpensive, such as those produced by Penguin. The sources below are loosely based on the theme: Justice and Government, God and Man.

Week 1: Gilgamesh; excerpts from Old Testament, all of Job. Preceptorial: Four Bases of Effective Writing; Thesis, Topic Sentences, and Paradigm.

Week 2: Aeschylus, Oresteian Trilogy. Optional Lecture: Goddesses, Heroines, and Women of Renown in Ancient Sources.

Week 3: Sophocles, The Theban Plays. Optional Preceptorial: Four Bases of Effective Writing; Thesis, Topic Sentences, and Paradigm.

Week 4: Plato, Euthyphro and Apology. Essay 1 due. Optional Preceptorial: Invention and Analytical Topics.

Week 5: Plato, Republic. Optional Lecture: Composing Hymns to Apollo.

Week 6: Optional Preceptorial: Organizational Strategies; Extemporaneous Strategies.

Week 7: Aristotle, Ethics. Essay 2 due. Optional Preceptorial: Roman Stasis Theory.

Week 8: . Midterm. Optional Lecture: Fortune and Fate and God and Man.

Week 9: Lucretius, De rerum natura.

Week 10: Epictetus, Moral Discourses. Optional Preceptorial: Inductive/Deductive Reasoning.

Week 11: Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy. Essay 3 due. Optional Preceptorial: Logical Fallacies.

Week 12: Dante, The Inferno. Optional Lecture: Poetic Justice.

Week 13: Optional Preceptorial: Research Methods.

Week 14: Macchiavelli, The Prince. Term Paper due. Optional Preceptorial: Documenatation.

Week 15: Shakespeare, The Tempest. Optional Preceptorial: The Tempest in the Eye of the Modern Critical Storm.

Week 16:. Final Exam.

     By the previous examples, you can already see how I might go about constructing a syllabus for the first part of a two-part Honors seminar. Here, I will provide some sample reading lists for the second part, using anthologies, whole texts, or a combination of the two.

First, a reading list based on Vol. III of Classics of Western Thought:

Bacon, New Organon.
Descartes, Discourse on Method.
Hobbes, Leviathon.
Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Of Civil Government.
Voltaire, Candide.
Rousseau, On the Origin of the Inequality among Men.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.
De Toqueville, Democracy in America.
Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience.
Hegel, Reason in History.
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
Bakunin, Anarchism.
Nietszche, The Genealogy of Morals.
Hitler, Mein Kampf.
Sartre, Existentialism.

     A reading list could be compiled with an alternate anthology, such as Western Literature, Vol. III: The Modern World, but even better would be to combine some of the excerpts of Classics of Western Thought with whole texts. For instance, some of the items in the list above could be replaced with the following texts:

Federalist Papers and United States Constitution.
Goethe, Faust.
Tolstoy, Death of Ivan Ilych.
Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground.
Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, A Doll's House
Yeats, selected poetry.
Eliot, selected poetry.
Kafka, The Trial and Metamorphosis.
Orwell, 1984 and Animal Farm.

     The possibilities are endless, so there is no need to go on. The problem is not coming up with ideas, but trying to limit one's selections so that they are manageable for the seminar and provide the substance the students need to respond to the works and the contexts within which they were produced.

     This syllabus shows what kind of a course I might prepare if given the chance to teach an upper division Honors seminar. Naturally, the instructor has greater leeway in such a course. In this one, I rely on my training in rhetoric to provide a course which examines the use and abuse of rhetoric from Antiquity to the Modern Era.

     This course studies the perception and application of rhetoric from antiquity to modern times and especially explores the historic quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy, a quarrel arising out of the fact that as an amoral tool rhetoric is not only used by good men skilled in speaking but also by demagogues capable of persuading contrary to the truth and the common good.

Plato, Apology, Gorgias, Phaedrus.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (excerpts.)
Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric (excerpts).
Hellenistic and Early Roman Rhetoric (excerpts).
Cicero, De Oratore. (excerpts)
Quintilian., Institutio oratoria. (excerpts).
St. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana.
Encyclopedic rhetoric; excerpts from Martianus Capella, Cassiodorus, and Isidore.
Bacon., The Advancement of Learning.
Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Ibsen., An Enemy of the People.
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
Hitler, Mein Kampf.
Orwell, 1984.
Martin Luther King and other contemporary orators.
Primary Colors.

Week 1: Introduction to rhetoric, from Archaic Greece to the early Imperial Roman period.

Week 2: The quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy. Plato's Apology and Gorgias.

Week 3: Plato's Phaedrus. Excerpts from Thucydides.

Week 4: Rhetoric as an amoral, political tool. Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric. Essay 1 due.

Week 5: Excerpts of Hellenistic and Roman Rhetoric.

Week 6: Philosophic rhetoric, Roman style. Cicero's De Oratore.

Week 7: Rhetoric from the cradle to the grave. Excerpts from Quintilian's Institutio oratoria. Essay 2 due.

Week 8: From The Second Sophistic to Christian rhetoric. Midterm.

Week 9: St. Augustine. Excerpts from the Encyclopedists.

Week 10: Bacon.

Week 11: Locke. Essay 3 due.

Week 12: Ibsen.

Week 13: Communism and Fascism.

Week 14: 1984. Term Paper due.

Week 15: Martin Luther King and other contemporary orators.

Week 16: Primary Colors. Final Exam.

Baldwin, Charles S. Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic. 1924. Cloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959.

---. Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic. 1928. Cloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959.

Horner, Winifred Bryan, ed. Historical Rhetoric: An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Sources in English. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980.

---, ed. The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric. Rev. ed. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990.

Kennedy, George A. Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

---. A New History of Classical Rhetoric. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Miller, Joseph M., et al., ed. Readings in Medieval Rhetoric. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1973.

Murphy, James J. Medieval rhetoric: A Select Bibliography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978.

---, ed. Medieval Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Medieval Rhetoric. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978.

---. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974.

---, ed. Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971.

---, ed. A Synoptic History of Classical Rhetoric. Davis, Calif.: Hermagoras Press, 1983.

---, ed. A Short history of Writing Instruction from Ancient Greece to Twentieth Century America. Davis, Calif.: Hermagoras Press, 1990.Grading

I am committed to providing my students with rigorous academic discipline in the context of a caring environment. Many of the statements I make below about my teaching philosophy and commitment to students are borne out in colleague and student evaluations.

* I am the product of a time-honored, liberal arts education. I strive to teach students how to think, not what to think, and I hold them to a high standard of critical reading, thinking, and writing. Education is an adventure, but it requires discipline, motivation, and hard work. Opinion and emotion ought never replace evidence and reason.

* I care about my students; they are the reasons why I teach, not vice versa.

* I challenge my students; academic standards must be high if students are to become educated graduates. I resist grade inflation, and I make sure my students are aware of this!
If a high mark is set, students will learn the material and also learn that they can reach it. If a low mark is set, most students will have learned little, if anything, and leave a class with unrealistic expectations about themselves and education.

* I challenge myself; I am not content to recycle syllabi and course material. A stagnant instructor makes for a stagnant learning environment. I am always looking for new materials and methods. Every course and term hold the promise of new opportunities for instructor and student alike.

* A teacher must always be prepared, and should not place his own professional interests ahead of his students' interest. This preparation precedes the term and each class period and is evident in the scope and conduct of the class.

* I respond to my students; I am not content to plod through a course, indifferent to whether or not my students are learning. I respond to their needs at as many opportunities and in as many different ways as I can think of to improve their understanding, even if that inconveniences my preparation.

* I am available to my students when they need me. Teaching is not done in isolation, it is done in the agora. The more my students have access to me, the better for them and me.

* I believe that teaching and learning are inseparable for students and their teachers. I teach so I can learn, and I hope my students learn so that they can teach what they have learned.