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Title: Decline and Renewal in the Heartland, Fall 2003 Syllabus, Tutorial, Fall 2003, Decline and Renewal in the Heartland
Description: The first year tutorial, taken in the fall semester, is Grinnell College's only general academic course requirement. The college intends the tutorial to assist students in further developing their critical thinking skills and in improving their written and oral communication skills. Each of the tutorials offered in a given fall semester is based around a particular subject matter, which provides the vehicle by which the above goals are accomplished. The arrival of European Americans in the Upper Midwest in the middle of the nineteenth century led to dramatic changes in the region's ecology. In what was perhaps the most rapid and extensive degradation of a natural ecosystem in human history, in the space of 50 years settlers plowed under millions of acres of the native tallgrass prairie and replaced it with a diversified agricultural ecosystem on what proved to be some of the best farmland in the world. As agriculture expanded, the prairie diminished.
Date Created: 2003
PID: grinnell:316

Title: Degradation and Development in Tropical Forests
Description: This tutorial explores why the world's tropical forests are disappearing focusing on Latin America and the Amazon Basin.
Date Created: 2003
PID: grinnell:3435

Title: Dis/Connected, Tutorial, Fall 2003
Description: It has been said that we live in a dog-eat-dog world. Some have likened human life to a continual struggle for the survival of the fittest individuals, mirroring certain evolutionary processes observed in non-human life. Still others cherish a view in which we are all brothers or sisters in one human family, a view that urges awareness of how human relationships bring inspiration and meaning to our lives. This tutorial will examine the ways in which we are isolated from each other and in which we are connected to each other as human beings.
Date Created: 2003
PID: grinnell:3438

Title: Doing History: the Pullman Strike, Pullman Strike
Description: The purpose of this tutorial is to sharpen your sense of the ways in which history is constructed, educate you about the standards governing that construction, and develop your own skills for engaging in such construction. We will use the story of the Pullman strike to develop reading, research, and writing strategies and to ponder the multiple choices every historian must make in writing a narrative that both recounts and analyzes a historical event. So this is a course in skill-building, story-telling, and scholarly ethics.
Date Created: 2003
PID: grinnell:3439

Title: Freedom, First year tutorial : Freedom
Description: Is freedom the "natural" condition of humankind, as some theorists maintain, or are humans subject to forces over which they can exercise little control? Indeed, do humans covet freedom at all, or do they, as Dostoevsky has the Grand Inquisitor say, prefer to abandon their freedom in favor of happiness? From numerous perspectives, both classical and modern, this tutorial will examine freedom and itslimitations. We will consider how dystopian fiction, religious discipline, slave narratives, Nazi culture, neuroscience, and molecular biology, among others, contribute to our understandings of freedom and its boundaries, and what these understandings mean for a liberally educated person.
Date Created: 2003
PID: grinnell:3443

Title: Living an authentic life, Tutorial, Living an authentic life, autumn 2003
Description: Socrates taught that the unexamined life is not worth living. This tutorial will put this bit of classical wisdom to the test. Focusing on Existentialist thinkers Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Martin Buber, we shall seek to identify the qualities that make a human life authentic. Although these writers are alike in their Existentialist approaches, they differ widely in their ethical, metaphysical, and spiritual conclusions.
Date Created: 2003
PID: grinnell:3449

Title: Primitive Skills in the Modern World, Tutorial, Fall 2003, Whittaker
Description: The first year tutorial, taken in the fall semester, is Grinnell College's only general academic course requirement. The college intends the tutorial to assist students in further developing their critical thinking skills and in improving their written and oral communication skills. Each of the tutorials offered in a given fall semester is based around a particular subject matter, which provides the vehicle by which the above goals are accomplished. Modern popular culture is seeing a revival of interest in primitive skills. Practical experience; reading and writing will be applied to the the exploration of primitive.
Date Created: 2003
PID: grinnell:225

Title: The Hero's Journey
Description: This will be a course in comparative heroic poetry. Through exercises in writing, spoken presentation, and discussion we shall study and analyze various aspects of five epic poems, in particular the portrayals of the hero(in)es and conceptions of the heroic in four (very) different cultures. Among topics to be addressed are the narrative patterns of quest and journey (spatial and spiritual), the role of religion and the divine, the role of women, and the diverse cultural value systems reflected in the poems. Particular attention will be paid to the organization of papers and the effective expression of ideas in writing.
Date Created: 2003
PID: grinnell:3444

Title: The Social Politics of Having Children, Tutorial, Fall 2003; Social politics of having children
Description: This Tutorial will take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding some of the issues and controversies that surround childbearing and childrearing. At the same time, the Tutorial will help students to develop the skills and capacities needed for a successful college career.
Date Created: 2003
PID: grinnell:54