In this section, Prof. Arthur Bahr describes how he may change the way he teaches 21L.601J in future years.
I’m considering substantially reconfiguring the class by dropping Beowulf, which would become the subject of its own, six-unit readings class for which 21L.601 would be the prerequisite. There are a few advantages I can see to doing so: 1) it would let me build more slack into the syllabus, bringing it in line with my other classes (I had to drop Wulf and Eadwacer this semester because of my own Mental Health Day, for example); 2) it would allow us to translate a few more short poems; and 3) it would give Beowulf the time it deserves. Right now Beowulf gets just a few class periods, which is better than nothing but nowhere near enough!
One other revision to the syllabus that I’m considering would give students an opportunity to do prose composition: composing Old English sentences as a way of gaining more active control over the inflectional endings and syntactic rhythms of the language. Prose composition has a long, distinguished history in Greek and Latin pedagogy, and students from multiple semesters have proposed this innovation, so I’m going to try to figure out how to make it work.
