{"id":1642,"date":"2011-07-07T11:00:51","date_gmt":"2011-07-07T15:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=1642"},"modified":"2011-07-07T06:59:20","modified_gmt":"2011-07-07T10:59:20","slug":"operation-menis-after-action-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=1642","title":{"rendered":"Operation MENIS after-action report"},"content":{"rendered":"

Operation \u039c\u0397\u039d\u0399\u03a3<\/a> is very nearly in the books. Most of the nine students who stuck it out have done extraordinary things. Seven of the nine have some kind of A, and I sincerely believe that they would have those A\u2019s no matter how the course was being assessed, but that at least four of them wouldn’t have A’s if the course were being delivered in a traditional way. What I see in these students’ work is what I can only describe as a \u201csituated\u201d attitude about ancient Athens that far exceeds anything I\u2019ve ever seen in even the best students in this course previous to it being turned into Operation \u039c\u0397\u039d\u0399\u03a3.<\/p>\n

The easiest way to characterize that attitude is by describing their ability to make connections between texts. In the traditional version of the course, year after year I\u2019ve lectured until I\u2019m blue in the face about how Thucydides and Sophocles are talking about the same problems in pre-Peloponnesian-War Athens, but the exam essays answering the question “How are Thucydides’ and Sophocles’ views of Athens similar?” always came back in the form of a laundry list. I never managed to get students to think about it like a classicist until I had Aeschylus, grandson of that<\/strong> Aeschylus, introduce my students\u2019 avatars to the grand-daughters of Pericles.<\/p>\n

And the way I see this difference is in a trivial little mechanic I\u2019m using for the very first time: team annotation. The texts for the course are all on Google Docs (all public domain), and the operation team earns Hellenism Points every time they comment on the text. Casually now, they draw connections between Plato and Homer, Aristophanes and Thucydides in these little comments that are hardly bigger than tweets, and then they share those insights with their individual character-teams as they deliberate on what action to \u00a0take in 399 BCE without even realizing that they’ve absorbed an understanding of ancient Greek culture far more nuanced than that of the A-students of past years.<\/p>\n

I think that\u2019s because they know they need to use the intel in these texts to figure out how to meet the challenges their characters face in ancient Athens. Here at the end of the operation, they\u2019re trapped inside Plato\u2019s head as he tries to figure out how to deal with the death of Socrates. The \u039c\u0397\u039d\u0399\u03a3 operatives have to figure out how to help him, by explaining to him why he wrote what he wrote. They can\u2019t do that unless they understand how he agrees with Thucydides and Euripides about the reasons for Athens doing things like killing Socrates.<\/p>\n

Their final exam–their final boss fight–will of course be to justify, on the basis of everything they\u2019ve read and \u201cseen,\u201d their characters\u2019 votes to convict or acquit that same Socrates. And when they do that justification, to my great joy, they\u2019ll be voting as Athenians. That is, they will have achieved the learning objectives of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies 1101.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Operation \u039c\u0397\u039d\u0399\u03a3 is very nearly in the books. Most of the nine students who stuck it out have done extraordinary things. Seven of the nine have some kind of A, and I sincerely believe that they would have those A\u2019s no matter how the course was being assessed, but thatContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[142],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["entry","author-travis","post-1642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-articles","tag-operation-"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1642"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1646,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642\/revisions\/1646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1642"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=1642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}