Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post
ANHS1003 Foundations for Ancient History: Greece
Lecturers: Dr Alastair Blanshard, Dr Julia Kindt, Ben Brown
Ease: 8/10. In terms of assessment load, this was the easiest subject I did this semester. There's only one piece of non-exam assessment, other than tute participation, which is a 1500-word essay on one of the tute subjects. Unfortunately they do the stupid thing where each essay topic is due in a different week, corresponding with the topic of the week's tute. This has the effect of discouraging people from doing the earlier topics, some of which I would've liked to have done, but I didn't feel confident enough to write a 1500-word analytical essay in my first couple of fortnights of uni. Literally half the people in my tute did the final week's essay. In terms of content, I don't think it's really that difficult a course. Some of the lecture material can be a bit difficult to start off with, because it does challenge a lot of the assumptions you have from HSC ancient history. In particular there's more focus on looking at how objects and ideas functioned within society, which can be a bit hard to start off with, and in your essays you need to focus a lot more on critical analysis of the sources than at high school. In the end, though, you don't really need to know all the content, because in the exam there are questions from each lecture and tute and you just pick two. So all you really need to know are your essay topic and one other, and the reading lists help out a lot with researching them.
Lecturer: 9.5/10 for Alastair, 8.5/10 for Julia, 7/10 for Ben. Alastair is a fantastic lecturer. He's very funny and he has a flair for explaining things with real clarity, and he was probably helped out by the fact that he had some of the most interesting topics. Julia is also very funny - once you work out her accent (Bavarian), which might take one or two lectures - and she has a real passion for her speciality, the Delphic Oracle. She also kept us awake during less interesting lectures by interspersing them with amusing stories from the ancient texts. Ben... oh, Ben. I hated hated hated him for most of the course, because I thought his lectures (particularly the ones on Homer) dwelt unnecessarily on meaningless abstractions, but listening to them again while preparing for the exam I realised that he actually has a lot of really interesting things to say. Approach his lectures with an open mind. He's an appalling tutor - just talks for the whole hour instead of trying to stimulate discussion, so I gave up on doing the readings eventually - but some of the things he said in tutes were quite handy, like demonstrating to us the process by which the Cyreneans might have rewritten their history with reference to the example of Gallipoli.
Interest: 8/10. The course focuses on late dark age and Archaic Greece, a period which I and probably most other HSC ancient history people didn't have much experience with. (For the record, we pretty much start with Homer and Hesiod and then proceed thematically, but roughly chronologically, to the Persian Wars.) It's great to learn about this period, which had previously been pretty neglected academically but has more recently been acknowledged as the period in which a lot of the features of the better-known Classical period developed.* There's no real thread joining together the lectures, which is frustrating at first, but then I took a look at the course title and realised that the point of the course is really to introduce us to the key features and concepts in the study of ancient Greece, as a foundation for further study. I thought it did that pretty successfully.
Overall: 8.5/10. Pretty easy, good lectures in a good lecture theatre (Eastern Avenue), reasonably interesting. No major complaints.
*I'd recommend reading over an introductory text about this period before starting the course, just to get an idea of how this period fits in to earlier Greek history. They don't really put it in context fantastically in the lectures. Try Pomeroy et al, Ancient Greece: a political, social, and cultural history, from the section on Homer onwards for a few chapters. The actual course textbook, Greece in the Making (which isn't at all necessary for the course), might also be good - I don't know, I've never laid eyes upon a copy.
