Discussion of History, Trinity, and Philosophy If you’d like to see how a Calvinist pastor and a Postmodern Thomist English teacher can debate philosophy and keep things civil, check out the comments section of this post.? (The post itself is my work and frankly isn’t all that spectacular.) I give all the credit to Jay; [...]
The Stupid Distraction Once again, once Tom Tomorrow stops trying to do electoral politics and focuses in on the news industry, he’s right on.? And once again, I have to wonder whether there’s actually any good reason to have 24-hour news networks.? I don’t watch any of them very closely, but the Fox News I [...]
On my way home today, my mp3 player’s battery died on me.? (The gauge on the thing is really the only thing I don’t like–it’ll register “almost full” for hours, then dive from halfway to empty in twenty minutes.)? So after the city bus dropped me on the outskirts of Athens, I listened to ten [...]
Once again I pushed both sections right up to dismissal time, largely because my EMMA demo took longer than I had anticipated.? Next Tuesday will be a relatively easy day, as my only preparatory task will be to design some exercises for early-finishing groups, but once we dig in to Republic, I need to be [...]
The Living Tradition This little piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education doesn’t break any wonderfully new ground in pedagogical theory, but it’s a nice little meditation nonetheless.? I especially like his description of the community of teachers: Most of us share our melodies freely and happily with one another (unlike our scholarship, which we [...]
Crying Censorship Had I known this week’s Stanley Fish column treated distortions in the word “censorship,” I would have paired it with my own post that took on distortions in the words “intimidation” and “indoctrination.”? It’s Fish’s standard riff on censorship and judgment, but it’s nonetheless a standard riff that bears some truth: But censorship [...]
I overplanned for today.? I put into my lesson plan a 20-minute lecture on clause structure and the grammatical concept of agreement; a lengthy get-to-know-each-other activity now that final rosters are set; and a discussion of (Platonic) dialectic reasoning in the context of Euthyphro.? That’s just too much stuff for seventy-five minutes.? I don’t think [...]
Tolerant Faculty, Intolerant Students Leave it to those Social Scientists. Faced with repeated and backed-only-with-anecdotes accusations that universities are simply indoctrination grounds for the DNC or some other treasonous group, decided to conduct a study to see if it’s true. It ain’t. According to the study’s data, students are more intimidated by their fellow students [...]
Although the inspiration to write this post came while reading The Shaping of Things to Come by Hirsch and Frost, the outlines of the ideas have been brewing in my head for some time.? Hirsch and Frost are not the first and certainly not the most egregious among those who ignore the state of war [...]
Huge exhale of relief this evening–upon returning from Chuck E Cheese, our favorite rainy day stop (with a coupon from the Sunday paper, one can get 100 tokens for twelve bucks), I received an email indicating that my committee has approved my dissertation prospectus.? Dr. Teague (my beloved dissertation director) gave me a parcel of [...]
Marv emailed yesterday to let me know that he couldn’t make the wedding that he was going to be out of town for, so I suppose I’ll have to wait to preach Exodus 3.? He did say that he’d be out of town at least once more before the year’s out, so I will have [...]
I have to admit that, in spite of myself, I did check this morning to see if Evan Bayh ended up on the Obama ticket.? No dice.? I would have preferred, all else being equal, an Evan Bayh-versus-Republican Candidate presidential race in the first place, but I know that, though he was an excellent governor, [...]
I didn’t get as many pages composed today as I would have liked, but I did have a pretty fruitful insight that might give me some more production next week.? For now, I’ve got Mary and Micah home, and I’m solo at the library tomorrow, so next Monday I’ll hit it again. I’ll admit that [...]
It always happens thus: if I overplan for half a period, the instructor taking up the other half runs long.? If I underplan, the other instructor runs short. Today I overplanned. So by the time my classes got back to their respective classrooms, I had to fly through an introduction to Socrates, a re-introduction and [...]
If you’re scandalized by the fact that… ah, you read the disclaimer on my Sopranos post.? I finished the last season of The Wire last night, and looking back, there’s simply nothing like it on TV or in the movies.? I realize that the cool people of the world who subscribe to HBO saw the [...]
Christian Standard Web Site I intended to write about this Sunday, when I read the articles, but the first week of teaching got in the way.? The Standard is taking on the continuing debates about women in ministry in about as smart a way as I can imagine, using the weekly publication not as a [...]
Things went quite well today in both sections.? I presented the parameters of the class, let them know that college writing was going to be something quite different from their high school classes, and introduced the technologies that keep my classroom paper-free.? I never can tell which students if any are going to drop out [...]
The Key It’s probably a symptom of my own vanity, but I do enjoy looking at myself through my students’ eyes.? That means going on ratemyprofessors.com, reading their customer satisfaction surveys each semester, and here at UGA, looking at the Key.? The Student Government Association figured out that teachers’ records are public domain, and so [...]
I turned on the Olympics so that I could watch some track and field while Mary finishes up her lesson plans for tomorrow, and at the first commercial break, there were two political ads, one apiece for McCain and Obama.? Has Georgia become a swing state while I was in my cave studying for comps?
For the first time this summer, we remembered to bring the camera to Fort Yargo with us.? Here are some pictures of our big swimming boy.? (The band-aid on his neck, in case you wonder, is to keep him from scratching at what we’re pretty sure was a bug bite.) Beach 2008
