Welcome to the Odyssey Program!  “Odyssey” is a one-credit, first-semester class, consisting of one-hour, small-group discussions of an important text every Friday afternoon during the fall semester.  The Odyssey Program is intended to help students achieve the following objectives:

Our hope is that first‑semester freshmen will:

• become acquainted with university life;
• become acquainted with Catholic higher education, and UST in particular;
• begin to develop the skills that will facilitate their success at UST;
• develop an understanding of and appreciation for the university core curriculum;
• develop an appreciation of the different "ways of knowing" characteristic of each of the major disciplines and the methodology unique to a particular core discipline or area;
• acquire strategies to improve reading, writing, and research competencies;
• develop an understanding of the interrelationship across disciplines of the core curriculum; and
• develop an understanding of and appreciation for the relevance of the core curriculum in preparing students for effective living.

 II. What Will Be Expected of Students Each Week:

1. 25-35 pages of reading per week.
2. Completion of an on-line weekly reading quiz via Blackboard prior to class.
3. Attendance at weekly discussion sections.
4. Arrive at class with 3 possible questions for discussion.
5. A five-minute reflection paper at the end of each class.

III. List of Readings :

1. Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, tr. Gerard Malsbary (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998).
2. Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book:  A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972).
3. The Odyssey Reader (which will contain short selections from various sources, such as Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos, and Wendell Berry’s Home Economics).

As you can see from the “list of readings” above, and from the “calendar of sessions” below, the bulk of the semester will be dedicated to reading and discussing two major books: Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture and Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren’s How to Read a Book. We are sending you a copy of both of these books by mail, along with a supremely useful study guide for each, so that you can get started on the reading this summer if you wish.   The study guides will give you an idea of the kinds of questions that will be covered on the quizzes, as well as the kinds of topics that might arise in the course of the discussion sessions. 

IV. Calendar of Sessions:

A)  Who Am I?  Where Am I From?  And Where Am I Going?: The Student’s Search for Meaning

1. Wed, Aug 20:  Dessert with Odyssey faculty members after dinner.
2. Thurs, Aug 21:  Movie discussion:  The Quarrel
3. Fri, Aug 22:  Discussion on two PBS documentaries:  People Like Us and The Merchants of Cool

* NB: There will be no on-line quizzes to take during the three Orientation sessions.  But participation at the discussion sessions is mandatory.  Faculty members will be taking attendance each week.  (Let’s be clear; taking Weekly quizzes will commence next Friday morning, Aug 29, and continue throughout the remainder of semester.)

4. Fri, Aug 29:   Reading and discussion of selections from Harvard professor Juliet Schor’s two books The Overworked American and The Overspent American.
5. Fri, Sept 5:  Reading and discussion of short selections from Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, J. J. Van der Leeuw's "The Meaning of Life," and Linda Duval's article "Cranky? Darn Right We're Cranky!"

B) The Nature and Purpose of a Liberal Arts Education (And Its Relationship to the Student’s Search for Meaning)

6. Fri, Sept 12: Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, ch. I
7. Fri, Sept 19: Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, ch. II
8. Fri, Sept 26: Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, ch. III
9. Fri, Oct 3: Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, ch. IV
10. Fri, Oct 10: Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, ch. V

C) Civic Engagement and Protecting the Environment

11. Fri, Oct 17: Wendell Berry, “Preserving Wildness,” from Home Economics (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), 137-151.

D) The Nature and Purpose of University-Level Reading and Research:

12. Fri, Oct 24: Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book, ch. I and ch. II (pp. 3-20), ch. III and IV (pp. 26-44).
13. Fri, Oct 31: Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book, ch. V and ch. VI (pp. 45-74).
14. Fri, Nov 7: Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book, ch. VII and ch. VIII (pp. 75-113).
15. Fri, Nov 14: Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book, ch. IX (pp. 114-136).
16. Fri, Nov 21: Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book, ch. X and ch. XI (pp. 137-167).

V. Grading:

70% = Weekly Reading Quizzes and Blackboard Exercises
30% = Class Participation

This formula seems to put enough weight on the reading quizzes and Blackboard exercises so that students will take them seriously, while leaving enough weight on class participation to encourage them strongly to come to class and take part in the discussions.

VI. A Note Regarding On-Line Quizzes on Blackboard:

As mentioned above, students will be required to take an on-line reading quiz each week.  This quiz will be made available to the students Friday morning before class and must be completed before 11 a.m.  The quizzes will take you no longer than 15 minutes.  That is to say, the quiz will take you no longer than 15 minutes because you will not be allowed more than 15 minutes to take it.

The way to prepare for these quizzes is to (A) do the reading (this is essential) and (B) look at the “Study Guide and Questions to Guide Your Reading.” Once you take a look at the Study Guide, don’t panic! Many of these questions suggest important things to think about; not all of them represent information to be tested. By no means will all of them be on the quiz.

The on-line quizzes will not be made up of essays.  They will consist of fairly straightforward multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, or true-false questions.  Some of the “Questions to Guide Your Reading” will have as many as 20 long questions.  Will all of these be on the quiz?  No.  What the quiz tests is whether you have read the text, not whether you have written out answers to all the “Questions to Guide Your Reading.”  Indeed, you will not be required to write out answers to the “Questions to Guide Your Reading” and turn them in.  But they will help you to prepare for the quizzes and the class discussions, so you should look them over in advance.

The weekly quizzes will appear on the University’s “Blackboard” system, which is a restricted-access system for which you will need a “user name” and “access code.”  It will be important for you to learn to use this system and to get your user name and access code during the first evening of Orientation, if not before.

If you have trouble accessing the system, ask one of the several Information Technology people who will be available to answer questions on the first evening of Orientation.  If you can’t access the Odyssey course on the “Blackboard” system, you won’t be able to take the quizzes.  And if you don’t take the quizzes, you will get a big, fat zero on them, and there will be no make- up quizzes.  But again, don’t panic.  At the end of the semester, we will drop your three lowest quiz scores.  So, if you miss a quiz (which can happen), then we will merely take that quiz as one of your low scores to be “knocked out.”  It makes sense, however, to take all the quizzes if you can, so that your “low scores” will not be zeros.

VI. A Note Regarding Class Discussions:

My experience from past classes suggests that while students often find class discussions interesting, they also find them a bit frustrating, and this generally for two reasons.  First, class discussions tend to wander around a lot; they don’t always develop logically from Point A to Point B to Point C.  And second, they often don’t resolve the