The midterm project was, to say the least, a challenge. In case you were unaware, the last few weeks, our class been working feverishly on the midterm project: a political campaign. From character analyses to history papers (but without theses...T Humps would not be happy), this project analyzed every possible angle of each character and time period we did. I was Antigone. And by the way, I would just like to mention my clever (or at least clever to me) campaign title: Antigone Regina; it is inspired by Oedipus Rex, but with "Regina", meaning "queen" in Latin as opposed to king (rex). I felt that this flew over many head, so I just wanted to point it out.
But back to the project. I personally feel that it was a little overcomplicated, with 6 big steps (and a secret seventh...shhhhhh) including multiple papers and a concluding symposium. I really enjoyed looking through the text to find clues about Antigone's character, then using those to form political positions. This really helped me to explore her character and motives for her actions. By focusing in on only her, I got a much better understanding of the text as a whole, as opposed to what I got by reading just the lines in the fall.
Despite this, I felt that the project involved a little too much, so I was jumping around from step to step that included a large variety of aspects that are needed for a campaign. For example, the history paper-esque step was focused very little if at all on the actual text and character, and it was essentially just a list of information. It goes against what we are taught in both history and English as it had no argument or thesis, so it was literally just a summary. Although it is definitely important to know the time period and issues at that time, I think that it would be better to link this step with the issue statements step so that it would have been focused directly on Antigone, not other aspects of Thebes. This was also a problem, as the Thebes presented in Antigone was not actually a real place, so I had to use a mixture of the history Athens, sketchy articles, and the little information presented in the text to make conclusions.
But back to the project. I personally feel that it was a little overcomplicated, with 6 big steps (and a secret seventh...shhhhhh) including multiple papers and a concluding symposium. I really enjoyed looking through the text to find clues about Antigone's character, then using those to form political positions. This really helped me to explore her character and motives for her actions. By focusing in on only her, I got a much better understanding of the text as a whole, as opposed to what I got by reading just the lines in the fall.
Despite this, I felt that the project involved a little too much, so I was jumping around from step to step that included a large variety of aspects that are needed for a campaign. For example, the history paper-esque step was focused very little if at all on the actual text and character, and it was essentially just a list of information. It goes against what we are taught in both history and English as it had no argument or thesis, so it was literally just a summary. Although it is definitely important to know the time period and issues at that time, I think that it would be better to link this step with the issue statements step so that it would have been focused directly on Antigone, not other aspects of Thebes. This was also a problem, as the Thebes presented in Antigone was not actually a real place, so I had to use a mixture of the history Athens, sketchy articles, and the little information presented in the text to make conclusions.