A few weeks ago we had a really special visit to class. I can't believe it's taken me this long to write about it, but that's just how things go sometimes.
Last semester, I found out that the Spanish writer León Arsenal would be visiting campus. He has written a number of historical novels and science-fiction pieces as well as historical essays and other works. I decided to have my students read one of his more ambitious historical novels Última Roma, an epic-scale adventure story about the Visigoths (under Leovigildo) and the Romans in Iberia at the end of the 6th century. We all read the eBook version because the print version is so hard to come by in the US, but the print version is about a 700 page book, written in a tough style, with a sprawling cast of characters. I challenged my students to read it, told them I'd give them 14000 points in our game if they could finish the book and come up with a good question for the author before he got to SUU. Most of them did!
For many of my students this was what in the gaming community is called an epic win -- a moment in which you surprise yourself by your ability to accomplish something you never thought possible. If I had just told my students at the beginning of the semester "Oh, and we'll be reading well over 1,000 pages during the semester -- on top of all of the writing you'll be doing," I'm pretty sure I would have had a mutiny. This truly may have been one of the toughest (if not the toughest) academic assignments these students were ever given. Because I folded into the game framework, gave them a clear goal and taught them some reading skills so that they could start to believe that it was possible, suddenly I had a class of super-readers.
Arsenal's visit was great. He visited our class and gave us a quick but very informative and engaging outline of the history of the Visigoths and the Romans in the peninsula. He talked about military tactics, social hierarchy, and daily life -- even clothing. The novel is good as a novel and absolutely astounding as a piece of imaginative historical storytelling. When Arsenal finished teaching us, he opened it up for questions, and I was impressed by the depth of the questions my students asked. They really took this seriously and it became an epic win for all of us -- truly something none of us will ever forget.