So, the Huainanzi project in my early China class went ok, and would have worked better if I had been better at explaining what I wanted from the final paper. I did an anonymous survey and the students pretty much all claimed that they got something out of it, and the only complaints were about the massive workload (one) and that they procrastinated too much (many). They seem to have liked the group research project thing. To summarize, each group of 1-3 (they got to choose how big a group they wanted) had to present on one of the chapters in The Essential Huainanzi, and they were expected to also draw on the chapter in the full version. Then each student wrote a paper on the work as a whole, drawing on their own readings and what others presented.
As I said, it went ok, but the final papers would have been better if I had come up with a prompt that got them to focus more on specifics. The prompt was fairly general, and while I encourage them to limit it somehow, many of them did not, and I ended up with a lot of papers on “the meaning of the Way in HNZ” that did not dig much into the specifics of how the text explained things and made its points and were, as a result, pretty vague. I should have used this
… if we spoke exclusively of the Way, there would be nothing that is not contained in it. Nevertheless, only sages are capable of grasping its root and thereby knowing its branches. At this time, scholars lack the capabilities of sages, and if we do not provide them with detailed explanations,
then to the end of their days they will flounder in the midst of darkness without knowing the great awakening brought about by these writings luminous and brilliant techniques 21.3
They seem to have assumed that their reader was a sage, and I need to encourage them to dig more into the specifics of the text so that they could explain (and understand) things more clearly.Huainanzi assignment.332.s22
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