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</div>This week my students actually read their assignments and participated in class discussion. I'd assigned <a href="http://www.engl.virginia.edu/faculty/edmundso.html" target="blank">Mark Edmundson's</a> <a href="http://www.student.virginia.edu/~decweb/lite/" target="blank">essay</a> about his disaffected, consumerist students at the University of Virginia (and consumerism in the university in general), and I suspected they might be motivated to talk by defensiveness at being called shallow thinkers, at being characterized as people whose level of engagement never rises above what's required for viewing a television program. The students in all three classes showed evidence of having read the essay; some showed evidence of having thought about it. Only one class seemed to identify with the attitudes of Edmundson's students, and they didn't seem very offended, or even concerned, by his analysis of their (anti-) intellectual inclinations. Students in the other two classes seemed to not see themselves at all in the Edmundson piece. Then came Friday.

For Friday, in addition to the Edmundson essay and a <a href="http://www.math.mcmaster.ca/~pierced/texts/shorris.html" target="blank">companion piece</a> by <a href="http://www.mfh.org/newsandevents/newsletter/MassHumanities/Spring2000/shorris.html" target="blank">Earl Shorris</a>*, I asked my students to read Plato's "<a href="http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/allegory.html" target="blank">Allegory of the Cave</a>." Frankly, I didn't expect them to get much out of it. They surprised me, however&mdash;I love it when that happens. Of the three classes, two had lots to say about Plato's idea of knowledge and the pathway there. They really got it&mdash;not only that, they really <strong>liked</strong> it. I was especially pleased at my first class, a group whose number has dwindled to fourteen and whose attitude typically sticks firmly to one of two poles: bored or belligerent. When confronted with this classic of Greek philosophy, they managed to put on their thinking caps, making connections between what they read (Plato's distinction between two different modes/theories of education at the end) and their own educational experiences (agreeing that up to now their schooling has been mostly in the "empty vessel" mode).

It was such a pleasant&mdash;dare I say, exciting&mdash;change to see them so engaged with what they'd read. In fact, it was a pleasant change to find that they'd read the assignment at all. I've been torn over what kinds of outside readings to bring in; up to now I've chosen mostly articles and essays that demonstrate various aspects of writing (tone, structure, audience considerations) that I want them to be conscious of in their own work, nothing I really wanted to discuss in terms of content. Now I definitely want to give them something that will inspire thought and discussion, but I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to do that in a way that will support their remaining (department ordained, research-oriented) paper assignments. More philosophy is probably ticket, but it can't be anything too difficult, or their eyes will no doubt glaze over. Finding additional reading materials will be my task for this week (that and grading the three stacks of papers I've been shamelessly avoiding since last Monday).

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*Both essays were published in the September 1997 <a href="http://www.harpers.org/" target="blank">Harper's</a> under the heading "The Uses of a Liberal Education."
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