Plans For Teaching

I was just notified that the advance enrollment in my prospective course in Homer's Odyssey is sufficient to make definite plans to offer it in the winter season which begins in early January.  It's an offering in the so-called life long learning institute or something like that, an educational program devised for the large number of elderly people in the Sarasota area who have the time and enthusiasm for instruction but perhaps not the educational background nor as they say in German the Sttzfleisch (the flesh on the ass to endure sitting for hours on end) to take a full term academic course. The course meets eight times.  Learning lite, you might say.  I taught one in ancient Greek tragedy two years ago, Homer's Iliad last winter and this will be my last since the only other subject that would interest me would be the invention of democracy in Athens in the sixth and fifth centuries for which I would have to prepare strenuously since I do not know the subject that well.  I realize that I am turning eighty seven in March, and have balance problems that make standing for any length of time problematic, so I am sure that this will be my last. Since I started some students have complained about the length of the reading assignments, but I always say the course is a general survey, you certainly don't need to feel obliged to read every line of every text, I am handing out outlines and paraphrases of everything, and since you are not receiving academic credit nor paying much beyond administration fees, you should only do what you want. I anticipate that the course will be an antidote to the general woe in which our country, if not the world, is mired.  Last year the soldier males of the Iliad were engaged in killing every day, or watching their comrades die, and the expectation of every one was about the possibility of a short and rather unhappy if glorious life.  The Odyssey is the great happy contrast: a soldier overcomes a variety of obstacles to get home to his wife, a teenage son searches for his father with whom he is reunited for the first time since infancy, a variety of louts and despoilers are either tricked or overcome with tests of strength, and in addition to his beautiful wife (albeit by the time he gets home perhaps a little long in the teeth) the hero has had long term affairs with two ravishingly beautiful bewitching--in every sense since this story is partly out fairy tale--women, and politely declined marriage with an extremely nubile princess whom he first meets when as a shipwreck he emerges naked from the bushes on a beach where she and her playmates are playing catch themselves only scantily clad.  The Odyssey  is a totally fun story, and I anticipate sharing my enthusiasm for it with a group of interested people my age, which has the benefit of not having to play the mule driver, whipping a group of youngsters through something that is definitely work, a labor, however much of love.