Circle | Day | Time | Texts |
---|---|---|---|
Comparative-Historical English + Gothic | Thursday | 8-9 AM | The Gothic and Anglo-Saxon Gospels in parallel columns, with the versions of Wycliffe and Tyndale |
French | Thursday | 10-11 AM | Émile Zola – La Fortune des Rougon |
French | Thursday | 12-1 PM | Corneille, Racine & Molière – Pièces |
German | Tuesday | 2-3 PM | Wolfgang Borchert – Draußen vor der Tür |
German | Wednesday | 12-1 PM | Schiller – Dramen; Goethe – Dramen |
German | Saturday | 12-1 PM | Walter Moers – Rumo & Die Wunder im Dunkeln |
Great Books of the East | Tuesday | 12-1 PM | The Bhagavad Gita; The Dao De Jing; The Life of the Buddha |
Great Books of the West | Wednesday | 10-11 AM | Herodotus – Histories; Thucydides – The Peloponnesian War; Tacitus – The Annals & The Histories |
Great Books of the West | Saturday | 2-3 PM | Herodotus – Histories; Thucydides – The Peloponnesian War; Tacitus – The Annals & The Histories |
Language Learning Support Group | Friday | 12-1 PM | |
Latin | Tuesday | 10-11 AM | Selection of Stories from 13th and 14th century Manuscripts; Traupman – Conversational Latin |
Medieval Literary Languages: Ancien Français | Friday | 8-9 AM | Chrétien de Troyes – Erec Et Enide (Le Livre de Poche, Lettres Gothiques) |
Medieval Literary Languages: Mittelhochdeutsch | Wednesday | 8-9 AM | Das Nibelungenlied: Mittelhochdeutsch/Neuhochdeutsch (Reclam) |
Office Hours | Friday | 2-3 PM | |
Office Hours | Saturday | 8-9 AM | |
Spanish | Tuesday | 8-9 AM | Carlos Fuentes – La muerte de Artemio Cruz; Gabriel García Márquez – La mala hora |
Spanish | Saturday | 4-5 PM | Carlos Fuentes – La muerte de Artemio Cruz; Gabriel García Márquez – La mala hora |
Study with Me: Arabic & Persian | Tuesday | 4-5 PM | |
Study with Me: Germanic & Romance | Saturday | 10-11 AM | |
Study with Me: Greek & Russian | Wednesday | 4-5 PM | |
Study with Me: Hindi & Sanskrit | Thursday | 4-5 PM | |
Study with Me: Korean & Hanja | Friday | 4-5 PM |
The purpose of the academy is to foster a community of lifelong learners. Instead of classes or courses, the offerings are referred to as circles, which will be kept small so as to provide for an intimate learning environment. There are two kinds of circles:
These are for learning to read literature in foreign languages with ease, enjoyment, and understanding. In these circles, participants prepare readings ahead of time, then, during the session, go around the circle in turn, reading aloud, summarizing what they have understood, and discussing the material in the target language.
As far as possible, these foreign language circles are grouped by proficiency level, judged by your responses to the sample text reading provided in the application form.
These are for discussing the content of Great Books read in English, and for support group consultations for self-study of languages. These are in a more traditional seminar format than the smaller circles, with focus on content rather than language. Thus, there is greater responsibility for participants to actively engage in discussion.
For the Great Books of the West, we read the texts chronologically and thematically, beginning with works of history and biography.
For Sacred Books of the East, we work through major texts by respective tradition.
This is an invitation to join me in my actual weekly maintenance routine to revise and review the following language groups:
Language group |
---|
Arabic & Persian |
Greek & Russian |
Hindi & Sanskrit |
Korean & Hanja |
Germanic & Romance (currently Dutch, Swedish, Italian, and Portuguese) |
The purpose of my Virtual Academy to continue to offer the guidance I have provided for over 20 years as a university professor of languages and literature, but now to participants from all over the world who want to continue the journey of lifelong learning.
The focus of the academy will be on weekly reading and discussion circles exclusively in the target languages. These circles provide the support you need to become an independent reader of literature in a foreign language. The regular meetings ensure that you form the habit of reading consistently, and in them you will gain cultural knowledge, conversational ability, and enriched vocabulary. Whether you have just finished teaching yourself a language or whether you studied it in the past and have now grown rusty, these circles can help you make the transition from intermediate to advanced.
The overall purpose of the academy is to take advantage of advances in technology that now permit people from all over the world to congregate together virtually. This ability represents a development that can and should revolutionize education, which has become too enshrined in degree programs for those primarily in their first decades of life, with institutions offering little in the way of continuing lifelong learning opportunities despite the fact that this is held out as an ideal.
The academy aims to remedy this by offering opportunities for adults to develop the ability to read literature in foreign languages at any stage of life, as well as support for learning languages in the first place, and for reading and discussing the Great Books of various civilizations in the kind of ongoing seminar environment in which they can be increasingly appreciated. This learning environment is designed to be suitable both for those who want to develop abilities in a single language or area, as well as to provide a foundation for those who might wish to develop more wide-ranging skills and understanding.
If you are interested in the academy’s offerings, you should plan on attending for at least several months. You may sign up for a single month initially to see if this form of continuing adult education is for you, but after that, we urge you to become a member by signing up for a continuing subscription.
This is because the Academy works by reading and discussing significant longer texts, which is naturally a question of multiple months. To do this effectively, we need to form cohesive cohorts whose participants can commit to conversing together for long enough to digest, analyze, and enjoy a text of 300+ pages. To that end, the Academy will run on a quarterly basis:
1st Quarter = January, February, March
2nd Quarter = April, May, June
3rd Quarter = July, August, September
4th Quarter = October, November, December
Each quarter will consist of 12 weekly meetings (an average of 4 meetings a month, with some months having 5, others only 3), with a 1-week break either between or during quarters. Please note that quarters may begin or end on the first or last days of adjacent calendar months. When you subscribe, you will be asked how many quarters in the calendar year you currently plan to attend.
Becoming a member of the Academy with a recurring subscription provide the following benefits:
You may cancel your subscription at any time should your circumstances change, but in that case we ask for as much advance notice as possible.
You may also opt to pay for a single “month” (4 sessions) at a time. However, please note that you will not have access to the first three advantages listed above, and the price will be higher at $140/month for circles and $75/month for seminars.
Those who recall my old website may also recall the extensive description I had there for an ideal systematic training in polyliteracy and the ideal of developing it into an academic discipline. This virtual academy represents the initial steps in that direction.
First and foremost, the above offerings should provide the stability to eventually offer more and more specialized instruction. Furthermore, the offerings themselves combined can form the core of a master’s of arts program. For instance, someone who takes two full years literature courses in two languages, two full years of two Great Books seminars, and two full years of guided self-instruction in an exotic language should have completed the equivalent of enough credit hours for the award of a degree pending completion also of a master’s thesis.
Anyone interested in this should indicate his intentions from the outset so that hours and progress may be carefully tracked, and should also understand that this is still an ideal with accreditation and affiliation with an awarding body still pending.