For his presentation on the second chapter of the second part of Don Quixote, a student wrote two sonnets. In Spanish. Of his own free will, obviously. I don’t ask people to write poetry.
My class on Cervantes is the best-enrolled of all our highest-level seminars in the past 14 years (and maybe before but I wasn’t here then). This is a response to those who say that students aren’t interested in reading the Old Masters and are bored by complicated works of literature. It’s simply not true that students want gimmicky courses that are easy. We have weekly writing assignments and two essays in the Cervantes course. And I’m a very harsh grader.
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