Archive of Past Topics

The essay is a vast and sprawling genre that comprises a broader variety of forms and possibilities than most people realize. High schoolers in particular could understandably believe that essays exist exclusively as vehicles for mandated literary analysis and somewhat strained attempts to get into college. This course is an attempt to broaden students’ notion of the essay. It introduces students to the form’s varied possibilities by sampling some excellent examples from many styles and traditions. Each week we will read one or two essays, discuss how and why they are interesting or compelling, and practice writing short pieces that emulate some of the successful features of these essays.

• Week One: The Philosophical Essay
• Week Two: The Philosophical Essay, Continued
• Week Three: The Persuasive Essay
• Week Four: The Personal Essay
• Week Five: Literary Criticism
• Week Six: Literary Criticism, Continued
• Week Seven: The Reported or Journalistic Essay 
• Week Eight: The Comic Essay
• Week Nine: Art Criticism Essay
• Week Ten: Hybrids and Impossible to Categorize Essays

Instructor:

Nick Romeo has written both reported features and cultural criticism for many national publications: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, National Geographic, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Slate, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, NPR, The MIT Tech Review, and many others. His work has explored everything from looted antiquities and drug trafficking to underwater archaeology and the meaning and purpose of a good education.

What is knowledge? What do illusions, magic tricks, and cognitive biases reveal about our brains? What do babies know and how do they learn? Can robots ever have knowledge? In this class, students will engage in philosophical inquiry on these classic and contemporary puzzles about knowledge. Each session will begin with a short lesson, followed by a discussion question. Students will be encouraged to label their contributions to the inquiry (hypothesis, reason, analogy, thought experiment, counter-example, etc.) and fill out inquiry diagrams to map out the discussion. In the last 20 minutes of each session, students will come up with their own questions to discuss as a class. On the final day, students will give presentations to parents and guests on their two favorite inquiries.  
 

• Week 1: Philosophical Theories of Knowledge: Foundations, Coherence, and Infinite Regression
• Week 2: Perception (Part 1): What can we know from perception?; Descartes’ Skepticism, The Matrix, and Fallibility
• Week 3: Perception (Part 2): Optical illusions and Magic Tricks—How our brains deceive us. 
• Week 4: Reasoning (Part 1): What can we know through reasoning?; Deduction, Induction, and Abduction 
• Week 5: Reasoning (Part 2): Can our reasoning go wrong? Cognitive biases —how to spot them in ourselves and in others 
• Week 6: Memory and Experts: What can we know from our own memories and what can we know from expert testimony? Can our memories deceive us? Which experts should we trust?
• Week 7: Babies: What are babies born knowing? How do they learn? How does early knowledge influence later knowledge?
• Week 8: Robots: Can robots ever be said to have knowledge? How are they similar to and different from humans?
• Week 9: Presentations

Instructor
Iris Oved (PhD 2009, Rutgers University) studies knowledge acquisition in human adults and children as well as in robots. Her PhD is in Philosophy with a cognitive science focus, and she has three years of postdoctoral experience in Developmental Psychology and two years of experience in Machine Learning, designing ‘robot babies’ that learn the way that human scientists and children do. She currently does research on causal learning in preschool children in Alison Gopnik’s developmental psychology lab at UC Berkeley and is the founder and director of the Paradox Lab, a non-profit organization aimed at teaching creative critical inquiry to the youth (paradoxlab.org and magaicandthemind.org). 
 

In Spring 2018, we will offer one course for students in grades 6–8. The focus is Arts & Literature. Classes begin the week of April 4th and run for 10 sessions through June 6th. The class will meet on Wednesday evenings: 6:15–7:30 pm. 

The class will explore the role of art in society and the relationship between arts and literature. What is art? How do different artists respond to an idea or event? How does art change lives? Students will gain an understanding of a selection of major aesthetic movements in relation to key cultural and historical events. Participants are introduced to the interplay between disciplines such as architecture, art, photography, music, literature, and major social, political, cultural, and historical forces. 

• Blending Fiction and Non-Fiction in Storytelling
• American Abstract Expressionism in Context: What is Abstraction?
• Visionary art and altered experience - Pop, Minimalist, Psychedelic: The art of the 1960s
• Jazz Music, the Harlem Renaissance, and the poetry of Langston Hughes
• Meter, Rhythm, Shakespeare, and Hamilton
• Visuality in Modernist Poems: Introducing the technique of the pastiche
• Photography: Story
• Photography: Composition 
• Photography: Light

Instructors

Maria Cichosz is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Program in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University, where she studies the history of ideas as told through literary and visual forms. Her interdisciplinary work brings together literary history, philosophy, and art historical inquiry, with a particular focus on the late twentieth century through today. She has taught at the University of Toronto, where she earned her M.A., and will be teaching in Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies Summer Institute 2018. As a fiction writer, Maria has a unique understanding of the relationship between thought, language, and visual form. 

Azar Kafaei holds a B.A. in History with a focus on Modern Middle East from Yale University. She is currently an MFA candidate at the Department of Art and Art History, where she studies in the Documentary Filmmaking program. She is interested in blending fiction and non-fiction in storytelling.

Gretchen E. Kellough (Ph.D., Northwestern University, Comparative Literature; M.A., Northwestern University, Francophone Studies; A.B., Occidental College, French and Comparative Literature) is a middle and high school English teacher at The Nueva School in Hillsborough. Prior to teaching at Nueva, she taught English at ‘Iolani School in Honolulu, Hawaii and at The Quarry Lane School in Dublin, CA. She also taught courses in French language and world literature at Sonoma State University, Lake Forest College, and Northwestern University. She specializes in postcolonial novels by women writers and has published articles on the ways in which these female authors weave together multiple genres, languages, and communities.

Joel Simon studied with Leo Holub at Stanford and has worked as an editorial and fine art photographer for four decades. His documentary assignments have taken him to nearly every country across the globe. He is as at home photographing beneath the ocean’s surface as he is on land. His work has been published in Vanity Fair, Time, GEO, Condé Naste Traveler, Aqua, the Chicago Tribune, Sunset and Skin Diver, and he maintains an extensive portfolio of Stanford University images. His work may be viewed at joelsimonimages.com. Joel teaches in Stanford’s Continuing Studies program and has taught in students in the SPCS Summer Institute and Humanities Institute.