Tutorial and Two Towers on Outschool: pragmatic considerations

So we just wrapped up the second in our Lord of the Rings courses on Outschool. The first one on The Fellowship of the Ring ran twice with only one or two students each time, but this go-round there were five students signed up, which made it more of a discussion, less of a tutorial. Nothing against tutorial, august and essential format that it is, whether in the Oxford or St John's incarnation, but I was billing the class as a live discussion, so I'm glad that it got to happen this time.

Some of the kids' favorite parts were our discussions of the faces in the Dead Marshes and Tolkien's experience in WWI, his friends and his sense of duty to their memory, and the warriors Sam sees fall by the oliphaunt and wonders about. Also Sam hitting Bill Ferny in the face with an apple, or imagining what would happen if a squirrel got the One Ring.

The folks at Outschool have made a renewed push for enrollments in the new year--concomitant with a larger percentage of any costs remaining in-house, naturally, so they can continue to grow at a clip that will make their big venture investors happy--but their advice to try offering shorter classes so as to build a following was also instrumental, I think, in helping more people take the plunge on the six-week Tolkien class. I found designing and running the one-off class on myth in popular fantasy and video games really interesting, and I'm looking forward to running it every so often in the future, or even recording it as a free version to help with advertising; however, longer courses on single works and series are where the ideas sparked by a single conversation have the room and fuel to get a'kindling.

Still, I'd like to see what the demand is for online tutorial, if there are kids and adults out there who would pay for the time spent reading and discussing books and games together. If people pay for tutoring, for music and language lessons, I feel like the reading of great books and discussion of other art forms can't be too unreasonable. Whether it is a kind of sophistry is another question, but facing that frankly might be more honest and simpler in the long run than continuing to sub in the public schools and pretending I am having great any impact so long as they are gradually being hollowed out by social reclamation initiatives and any actual teaching and learning is shifted to the online and private sphere. Perhaps it comes down to whether one thinks a community of learning is resilient enough to subsist despite the countless interruptions and distractions of the public schools, whether a genuine relationship of teacher and student is still possible there where the state administration of tests and metrics looms over everything that might have intrinsic value; whether one thinks it is better to embrace Corey Olsen's insights about online and so to speak independent learning vs institutional academia, that online learning makes scholarship accessible and facilitates actual connection between people, and go for it.

I mean, it is one thing--and something incredible to really think about--that we can listen to something like Bach's St Matthew Passion and look up any line of Shakespeare or Proust for free at any time; it is something else again to find people willing and able to talk meaningfully about them, if so articulating one's thoughts about such works is supposed to go hand in hand with integrating the truths they point towards into one's own soul, to be a light to one's neighbors in one's life and actions, as Dostoevsky's Underground Man caustically, sadly remarks, as Kierkegaard yearns for, along with that one reader he hopes to find...

In the meantime, for those interested in reading books together, check out the discussion on the mythgard forums. For those interested in playing games together, starmen.net is the place!