Freshman (First Year) Classes:
Science (Ryan Patin, Instructor)
Over the course of this week we utilized our time getting to know each other and learning principles of Scientific Methodology with a critical thinking approach.
Monday: Meet and Greet. Allowing the students to learn about me and getting to know each of them.
Tuesday: introduction to the scientific method overview and covered Purpose and Research.
Wednesday: Reviewed the prior day’s lesson and covered Hypothesis and Experimentation.
Thursday: Reviewed the prior day’s lesson and covered data collection, analysis, graphs, trend, and understanding what our data truly means.
Friday: Reviewed the prior day’s lesson and covered Conclusion and an overall review of the process and application.
Composition (Ryan Abshire, Instructor)
Week One: Becoming Better Readers and Writers
For the first week, the students did multiple in-class writing exercises, including group activities. While each of the following weeks focus on a particular genre, we used this week to explore students’ interests and preferences in genre, media, and writing. In addition to homework writing assignments, on Tuesday the students received an assignment sheet for their first major writing assignment due Friday, a 3-page essay about their history with reading and writing.
Humanities (Chris Hebert, Instructor)
Humanities are defined as “ the branches of learning (such as philosophy, arts, or languages) that investigate human constructs and concerns as opposed to natural processes (as in physics or chemistry) and social relations (as in anthropology or economics)”. In Humanities I at the GPGC, we cover three branches: history, philosophy, and literature.
Week One is concerned with the history of Greece, starting from the Neolithic era to the early beginnings of the peoples who would become the Greeks. As part of this crash course, we covered foundational myths of city-states and how those stories helped explain the culture and values each of these places held. For example, Athens chose Athena as their patron goddess and so the city took its name from her, and excelled in education, philosophy, and was the birthplace of Democracy.
Monday: Introductions, explanation of expectations and procedures, go over what we’ll cover this summer.
Tuesday-Wednesday: Mediterranean history, discuss foundational myths
Thursday-Friday: Students were put into pairs and given the task to craft their own foundational myth. They had to come up with a list of values, etc, that they hold dear and come up with a story to show how their created city-state is a beacon for those ideals.
Sophomore Classes:
Composition (Ryan Abshire, Instructor)
Week One’s Topic is: Finding Your Voice
The students spent week one learning to discuss topics and work together to explore their writing journey and goals. For the first week, we did various activities to gauge student interests and what got them excited about writing and reading. Each week moving forward will focus on specific genres and types of writing: fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and others.
Monday, in addition to getting to know one another, the students broke into groups and received the lines of a song printed out individually on cardstock. Working together, they assembled the lines into their own version, attempting to locate patterns, rhymes, or (for some) geometrical similarity. When they were all assembled, we listened to the original song, “Shake the Frost,” by Tyler Childers. For homework they wrote a 100 word detailed description of a strong image that invoked a memory.
Tuesday: Students received the assignment sheet for their first major weekly writing assignment, the Artist’s Statement, which is a reflective essay in which they describe their experience, preferences, or goals in writing and reading. We discussed different forms of writing and how many genres and styles can overlap. We read two poems, “A Noiseless Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman and “Mussels” by Mary Oliver, both of which use an animal image to contrast and compare with human experience. For homework, the students wrote a brief piece about an experience with a non-pet animal, with full artistic freedom regarding form and format.
Wednesday: As a class, we read through two different translations of “The Panther” by Rainer Maria Rilke, examining the possibilities of taking the same poem (originally in German) and finding subtleties of meaning. Students then wrote a letter to Mr. Rilke inquiring about the nature of poetry. For homework, they were assigned to read Letter 1 from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and make progress on their Artist’s Statement.
Thursday: We discussed effective paragraphs and how to stay focused in their essay using a classic five-paragraph structure and, for paragraphs, five sentences. The students spent time working on their introductions and body paragraphs while I met with each student individually to discuss their progress and answer any questions. After general discussion about the writing progress, essay format, and writing effective paragraphs, students spent class time making progress on their writing projects while taking turns to have individual conferences with me about their paper and address any concerns.
Friday: To wrap up the week and prepare students for next week’s focus on fiction, we had an extended group discuss of various genres of writing, like science fiction, mystery, historical fiction, and realism. We used this as a basis to identify and refresh the students’ memories on the six elements of fiction—character, setting, style, theme, POV, and plot. Students then wrote the first line of a story and passed the story along, each contributing one sentence, with the goal of making a coherent story that fulfilled all six elements. For homework, they are tasked with creating a polished piece of microfiction out of the story they started.
Humanities (Chris Hebert, Instructor)
Humanities are defined as “ the branches of learning (such as philosophy, arts, or languages) that investigate human constructs and concerns as opposed to natural processes (as in physics or chemistry) and social relations (as in anthropology or economics)”. In Humanities II at the GPGC, we cover three branches: history, philosophy, and literature and how those play into the ideas of “Utopia” and “Dystopia”.
For week one, we refreshed our memories of Plato’s “Republic” and discussed his own version of Utopia and discussed the flaws of this system. We also started reading Sir Thomas Moore’s “Utopia” and discussed the literary tradition that he uses in his own little book.
Monday-Tuesday: refresher on Plato
Wednesday: Intro to Sir Thomas Moore, his life, and his time period
Thursday-Friday: Read and discussed “Utopia”
Senior and Grad (Third & Fourth Year) Classes:
English (Jack Vanchiere, Instructor)
This week we got started with introducing new folks to each other and discussing forms and techniques for reading, writing, and workshopping with one another.
Monday-Tuesday: Introduction
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday: Ab Illo Acrostic poem writing
History (Carson Savoie, Instructor)
We began our first week discussing the life, work, and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Key themes to our seminar discussions were the notions of reclamation, recollection, memorialization, and collective memory in the political consciousness of the United States. Students were introduced to several speeches and statements written and orated by Dr. King, including his (in)famous 1967 speech delivered at Riverside Church, New York City, colloquially known as “Beyond Vietnam.” As well as debates over the memory of Dr. King waged in the political arena of the United States, such as Ronald Reagan’s 1983 remarks on the creation of Martin Luther King Day.
Students were challenged to juxtapose Dr. King and his famous “Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom, in comparison to Dr. King in the latter, often forgotten, years of his life from 1965-1968. By beginning our discussion of the Civil Rights/Black Freedom Movement in American Memory with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the class quickly challenged conventional knowledge of the movement as a whole. In doing so, our class gained insight into the production of historical memory, both by professional historians, and by those outside of traditional academia.
Monday, June 8th — Introductions & Icebreakers
Tuesday, June 9th — Introduction to Course Theme
Reading: May, Page, “Reclaim King: Beyond Sanitized Narratives.”
Wednesday, June 10th — “Recalling” King
Reading: Harding, Vincent, Introduction “Setting the Captives Free” & Ch.1 “The Inconvenient Hero: The Last Years of Martin Luther King Jr.” from Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero, Orbis Books, 2008, pgs. 1-22.
Video: “Rev. Jesse Jackson & Dr. Vincent Harding on MLK Memorial, DC March for Jobs & Freedom 2 of 2,” Democracy Now!, 8/26/2011, 9:07min.
Thursday, June 11th — Narratives of Nonviolence (as a Philosophy of Life)
Reading: Martin, Michael, “A Peaceful Demonstration of Our Feeling Toward the Death”: University Students in Lafayette, Louisiana, React to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Assassination,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Summer, 2000, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Summer, 2000), pp. 301-316.
Friday, June 12th — Film Day
Film: King in the Wilderness: The Last Years of MLK Jr.’s Life (2018)
International Relations (Joshua Brown, Instructor)
We spent the first week introducing the concepts important to the study of International Relations – states, nations, war, trade and others. We also discussed the book we will be using for the majority of the class: Theories of International Politics and Zombies by Daniel Drezner. I also spent some time getting a feel for the students’ awareness of international news and suggested some reliable news sources for them to start paying attention to. One of the weekly assignments the students will have is to read an article from one of those sources and prepare a summary and analysis for the class.