Questions of Plato

With all my papers (and nearly everything else in my house) still boxed up, I'm trying hard to find and/or remember assignments. I could create new ones, but I have some favorites I like to use when the opportunity presents itself. This week, two of my classes are discussing "The Allegory of the Cave" or, as our textbook calls it, "The Myth of the Cave." I'm still presenting it as "The Allegory . . ." because I think it's a nice lead-in to that particular style of writing. Of course, I can still explain the allegory, whether it's called that in this book or not.

Anyway, I have six brilliant (IMO) questions I have developed over many years of teaching this particular reading. Well, really only five of them are brilliant; the sixth is meant to mess with students' heads a bit, and Plato (through Socrates) never really gets at the answer to that one. It is, perhaps, unanswerable. But the other five are answerable, and all the answers can be found through deep analysis of the reading. For that reason, I usually break the class down into several groups and assign each group one question. In smaller classes where it doesn't make sense to have five groups, I leave some for us to explore together. My current classes in which we're discussing this reading have sixteen students each, so I wouldn't do more than four groups. The idea is that students fully explore their group's question -- more reticent students speak up more readily in smaller groups -- and then we get back into the large group (full class). Each group explains its questions, other students add their ideas to that groups', and everyone comes away with a better understanding.

In all the time I've spent trying to figure out where my questions are, I could have written new ones or re-created the old ones. I remember at least two. But there's something about those particular questions that makes me want to use them over new ones. I have until 9:30 tomorrow to figure something out. And the thinking behind this last paragraph probably fits Plato's allegory.