Learning Classics is a bit like putting on a magic pair of 3-D glasses. Once you start delving into the language and the culture, you'll start to see it all around you. This blog is a record of the club's journey through the worlds and language of ancient Rome and Greece... and through modern times, too, searching for the influence of classics all around us. You'll also be able to find vocab, home tasks, links and generally enlightening info here, too.

25 April 2015

Lesson 20 - more morality

A bit more of the same as last week for this lesson: parsing exercises online and on paper, then down to some more discussion about Plato and moral dilemmas: do we always act in our own self-interest if there is minimal risk of repercussion, or is there a in-built conscience that checks us? Here's a great summary of the tale of Gyges:

A couple more of our dilemmas this week were:
You have a maths test in a week’s time. You think you’ll do OK in it as you’ve been working hard all term. Your mate is really worried as he’s been finding the work really difficult. Walking home on your own from school you find a brown envelope on the floor. You open it to discover it contains a copy of the test – your teacher must have dropped it. What do you do? Who do you tell? Anyone?

You need to catch the bus: you’ve been late for school three times this week already and you’ll be on report if you’re late again, and your parents will ground you for a month. There’s a party this Saturday that you’ve been looking forward to since you got the invite six weeks ago. All your mates are going. Just as you see the bus pulling up, you notice a kid, no more than four or five, sobbing in a shop doorway by the bus stop. No-one is helping them. What do you do?

 Next week, we'll be looking at some more Plato: rather topically, given the upcoming general election, we'll be looking at ideas on the best way to govern/rule/control the masses.

 In the meanwhile, there are two important links to look at for our home task. Classics Club now has a dedicated online vocab tool: you can access it in the right hand menu. You'll have to sign up to the Memrise site to access it, but it's a process that's quick and free. Secondly, we've been asked to give our feedback on The Bacchae, which we saw last term. If you have time, please complete the survey here.