During the week before the beginning of second-semester classes, the campus undergoes
Paideia (drawn from the Greek). This "festival of learning" takes the form of a week (although originally a
whole month) of classes and seminars put on by anyone who wishes to teach, including students, professors, staff members, and
outside educators invited on-campus by members of the Reed Community. Many such classes are expicitly silly (one long-running
tradition is to hold an "Underwater Basket Weaving" class), while others are trivially educational (such as "Giant Concrete Gnome
Construction," a class that, incidentally to building monolithic gnomes, includes some
content relating to the construction of pre-Christian monoliths). Genuine classes
(such as martial arts seminars and mini-classes on obscure academic topics), tournaments, and film festivals round out the
"class" list, which is different every year. The objective of Paideia is not only to learn new (possibly non-useful) things, but
to turn the tables on students and encourage them to teach.