John, why do you teach?

I teach because I believe in the ultimate worth of higher learning, in the Academy, the Lyceum, the schola, the collegium, and the universitas. I still consider the first time I walked onto a university campus the most liberating experience of my life, the beginning of a great intellectual adventure, my own never-ending story. You might suspect that I never quite got over being a student, contracted a fatal disease of sorts—let’s call it academentia—and I would have to agree with you. I suppose that would make knowledge my femme fatale. She holds me willingly captive to this day and she and I refuse to let go of each other. I am reminded of a delightful little book on medieval monastic culture entitled The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. In it the noted scholar Jean Leclercq describes the monk’s search for knowledge in the Middle Ages as a thoroughgoing passion. I would have been perfectly happy to have been a 13 th-century Dominican, spending my whole life in some great monastic library, in love with antiquity, pouring over the manuscripts, preserving the texts, and in turn adding to the body of human knowledge. Now I sound a bit like one of Umberto Eco’s characters in TheName of the Rose. All of this may explain why I went off to The University of Chicago—the omphalos of the world—to do doctoral work in Medieval History. If I ever disappear, look for me on Mt. Athos or in Hyde Park. Again, why do I teach?  I am convinced—perhaps deluded into believing—that I have the greatest vocation in the world. I get paid to read books, think about what I have read, and then tell others what I think about what I have read. I really cannot conceive of doing anything else. That is why I prefer the word “vocation” instead of “work” or “job,” both of which suggest toil and labor. In the classical sense a vocation is a “calling” and that is precisely how I envision what I do. At the end of the day I am actually foolish enough to believe that I can make a difference by educating a generation of students to join me in the task of making this world a better place. You see I really am a closet utopian. This explains why I am never satisfied with the state of things. Just ask my colleagues. Now I have just morphed into the ever-searching Faust or perhaps poor, naïve Candide. My quest for the best of all possible worlds—that illusive Utopia, Shangri-La, El Dorado—begins and ends with knowledge, and the closest I have ever come to that Nirvana is on a college campus.

Why history?

Honestly, I came to history because I could never decide what field interested me most. Perhaps I did not choose history, but she chose me. In a novel way history saved me from actually having to make a choice. You see, everything, literally everything imaginable, eventually finds its place under the rubric of history—languages, art and architecture, philosophy, economics, science and medicine, engineering and technology, geography, mathematics, law, international relations and foreign affairs, music, literature, theatre and film. Everywhere I studied for the first eight years of my college life—a local community college, a private Liberal Arts college, seminary, a medium-sized urban university, a large rural state university—I kept coming back to history. Wherever I went, the most engaging, urbane, literate, and interesting people I encountered were all historians. This realization is what ultimately led me to pursue the doctoral program at Chicago where I knew history in all of its marvelous forms really mattered. I would spend five more years at Chicago. My life truly has been an intellectual Odyssey. In my World Civilization and Humanities courses I have the opportunity to put all the pieces of my life and experiences together. Throughout the year I discuss everything from Venice to Vietnam, the Burgundian code to the Bolsheviks, Herodotus to Heinlein, the Scientific Revolution to Surrealism, the Buddha to the Baroque, Aristophanes to Asimov, the U.S. Constitution to the Übermensch. The great challenge of history, of course, is to know everything about everything, to attempt something quite impossible and perhaps even suicidal, but what is life without a worthy opponent? History will continue to challenge me until the day I die, and, if my speculations are correct, long afterwards.

Favorite historical subject? Why?

Everything is grist for the historian’s mill and my appetite is legion. I definitely have a serious case of neophilia, another splendid academic ailment from which I hope to never recover. I love anything and everything new and knowable. This may be why I enjoy teaching the Humanities sequence so much. My course undergoes a metamorphosis every semester based on my most recent reads. Just last week when I introduced Dante’s Divine Comedy to an unsuspecting group of tyros, I made connections between the “Inferno,” Book 11 of the Odyssey, Book 6 of the Aeneid, and, for the first time, Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come, a contemporary novella I read over break about a man’s journey into the nether regions of the afterworld to save his wife who had committed suicide. Just as easily I might have included in the discussion the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the medieval tradition of St. Patrick’s Purgatory, or George Bernard Shaw’s “Don Juan in Hell” from Man and Superman. Are you beginning to get the picture? The String Theory of Quantum Mechanics suggests another intriguing way to describe my approach to learning. Rather than being composed of discreet particles or bits of data, knowledge consists instead of strands of energy connected to the surrounding world in incredible ways and multiple dimensions. In terms of history proper, I am just as polyphagous; I hunt and forage for anything edible. You might say historians are the ultimate hunter-gatherers of the world. From a strictly professional standpoint my most advanced training is in things medieval—paleography, hagiography, kingship and Germanic law, feudalism, ecclesiastical Latin, apocalyptic thought, Byzantine studies, scholasticism, sermon studies and exempla, vernacular literature, the Crusades, Islamic Spain, the alchemical tradition, theology, monasticism, and Gothic architecture—but I refuse to limit myself to those happy few. Ask me the same question in six months and I might mention that my newest interests are the Persian Wars, the campaigns of Alexander, the Gallic Wars, the Hundred Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, WWI and WWII, the Korean Conflict and Vietnam. If, though, I had to find a final resting place for my heart, to bury it somewhere for eternity, I might choose the crypt of a medieval cathedral.

Let’s talk about your teaching philosophy. How would you describe it?

My philosophy of teaching is one of rigor and academic discipline. I often tell my students that knowledge is unbending, unforgiving, and inflexible—that the solution for c 2, the hypotenuse of a right triangle, refuses to be anything but the sum of the legs, a 2 plus b 2. Our quest for knowledge should possess the same persevering qualities as scientific and mathematical truths. I demand the best of my world and the most of myself and students. Learning can be a harsh taskmaster or demanding mistress—both are appropriate metaphors. The quest for knowledge demands sacrifice. Have I become epigrammatic here? Let me put it another way. I refuse to allow a mediocre doctor, mediocre lawyer, mediocre accountant, mediocre pilot, mediocre nurse, mediocre pharmacist, mediocre mechanic, mediocre cook, mediocre secretary, or even mediocre lawn worker to take care of me, my body, or my possessions; therefore, why should I help to produce a mediocre pre-professional in the classroom? I happen to be very old-school when it comes to academia and the scholarly life, believing the student work ethic translates directly into the professional work ethic. Learning has incredible rewards, but is not necessarily fun. I simply hate that misguided notion. The “education heads” of the world have it all wrong as far as I am concerned. Sometimes the acquisition of knowledge is just plain hard work. That we ought to always entertain our students is a ludicrous concept. The professor is not the court jester. Sublime joy is in the arriving and the knowing, but not always in the journey, no matter what Joseph Campbell says. The best proof of this is my own experience. I dedicated years as an undergraduate and graduate student developing a proficiency in ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. That, for me, was a Churchillian struggle and I wear the blood, toil, sweat, and tears of that campaign. To read Ovid, Virgil, Caesar, Cicero, St. Paul, or the Hebrew prophets in the original is a genuine joy for me now; to reach that summit was a long, arduous climb. If anyone disagrees with my philosophy of teaching, I warn that I have the massive weight of history on my side. From the Greek pedagogues to the magister of the medieval university to the Herr Professor of the 19 th-century German university, the pursuit of knowledge, the lecture hall, and the classroom scarcely changed. Consider how much the human race achieved with apparently so little—a papyrus scroll, a wax tablet, a quill and parchment, the spoken word, the lecture and the debate. From the sound of things these days I marvel how Plato ever managed without PowerPoint, fiber optic cable, and a remote mouse! Do not tell me how much students and learning styles have changed. The human brain has not evolved that much in the past 2,500 years. A truly educated individual can learn in a multiplicity of styles or just one if need be. Is that not what we ideally want of our students? That, in my opinion, is the true essence of learning—to teach students to learn under virtually any condition. I can learn from a lecture or in a group or by doing or by seeing or by whatever method you present to me. True teaching should raise students to this higher level where they can stand along side us rather than require us to stoop to meet them and in the process lose ourselves.

What’s the ultimate complement you could receive?

That someone might mistake me for a polymath. Right now I only consider myself someone who has read few books, traveled a bit, and who occasionally has a good idea or two.

What are you thoughts about the college’s learning theme of responsibility?

The theme is solid, but should be adopted universally across campus, from bottom to top, and I see only piecemeal evidence of that. If I have any reservations about the notion of a yearly learning theme, it is that the administration too needs to be held accountable for embracing it fully. If an institution promotes integrity, for instance, but lacks that virtue in taking care of its own faculty, then the game is over. Integrity and responsibility have many faces. Inconsistency can turn us into hypocrites rather quickly if we overlook even one of the faces. If the administration expects me to carry the theme of responsibility, then I expect it to be truly responsible everywhere and everyway. A recent example comes to mind, a failure in my opinion on the part of the administration. Last semester, one of my students willfully tried to break the terms of a contractual agreement I had with him, namely my syllabus. When I refused, all he had to do was have one of his parents put in a well-placed phone call high enough up the Food Chain. Of course when daddy calls, administrators generally contract a sudden fatal failure of nerve. My experience has been that institutional resolve and support for the faculty quickly wither away with one irate phone call from a “concerned” parent. I know it, my colleagues know it, and our students know it. When the school retreats in the face of this kind of inappropriate pressure, what lessons are we teaching about contracts, one’s word, obligations, duties and responsibilities?

Favorite book? Why?

I never have to struggle much with this one. My favorite book is generally the one I am currently reading. When I am in my intense reading mode, something I have been in of late, I go through one or two books a week. I definitely have a methodology to my mania, focusing on particular themes, genres, or authors for weeks or months at a time. I never read just one book by any given author. For me to come to some thoughtful opinions about a writer, I need a minimum of three books. I am not sure how much credibility I carry with anything less than that. Lately I have returned to some of the great science fiction writers of the 20 th century. I grew up reading classics by H. G. Wells and Jules Verne and have never quite kicked the sci-fi habit. Journey to the Center of the Earth, The First Man in the Moon, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, and Mysterious Island are the very first books I remember reading as a boy. This past month I have worked my way through Arthur C. Clark’s Rendezvous with Rama, Childhood’s End, and The Fountains of Paradise, another of Azimov’s Foundation series, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, and I am now in the middle of Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. If you want some of my more traditional favorites I would mention Umberto Eco, Orhan Pamuk, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Hardy, Tolkien, Goethe, Gogol, Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis, Naguib Mahfouz, Homer, Shakespeare, and Steinbeck.

Aren’t you on the curriculum committee?

Yes, and I consider it one of the most important committees on campus. The heart of our college is the body of knowledge it professes, something expressed in the collective learning of our faculty and the courses we teach to our students. Everything else is ancillary. Our mission statement ought to be only three simple words: To educate students. After all, that is the reason why students ought to come to us, to learn. Serving on the curriculum committee offers me the opportunity to help influence what we are and what I hope we can become.

If you could create a curriculum for an ideal intellectual community, what would it look like?

Hold on, this is a good one. My ideal curriculum would be an Encyclopedia Galactica of the knowable. I would begin with the Great Books of the Western World series, the grand realization of the mind and imagination of Mortimer J. Adler, one of the last true polymaths of the 20 th century and cofounder of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago. From Homer to Freud, I would immerse every one of our students in the genius of western civilization first. Firmly rooted in that tradition, I would branch outward to all parts of the globe, to all times, and to all peoples. Two years of biology, two years of chemistry, two years of math, two years of physics, a year of astronomy, a year of logic, two years of physical geography and one of historical geography, four years of world history and humanities, two years of American history, two years of either ancient Greek or Latin, four years of a modern foreign language, four years of English grammar and composition, one year of contemporary Nobel Prize literature, one year of international relations, two years of philosophy, and two years of religion would round out the curriculum for the undergraduate degree. I am not kidding. Forget about majors; forget about graduating in four years. Specialization would come only later at the graduate level and in professional schools. Can you imagine what kind of brilliant New Atlantis we could create with such a shared intellectual, scientific, and cultural consensus?

What do you say to the student who says he or she is going to college to get a good paying job?

I would say you are in the wrong class at the wrong time with the wrong professor, and then spend the rest of the semester trying to convert him to the “Cult of the Humanities.”

In your opinion, what’s the most significant historical event and why?

That’s an easy one—whatever event I am covering in today’s lecture. Seriously, I am actually working on an article suggesting that the most significant event in the history of the human race is the invention of the bicycle; one of my enduring loves, but that would fill up a whole other issue of Directions. Let’s save that for another day.

Is it true you are referred to as the “The father of Brain Bowl”? Tell me about this group.

I think that honor actually goes to my friend and mentor Jerry Seibel who retired recently from the Business Division. He was on the hiring committee that recommended me for my current teaching position here. In my first semester on campus he drafted me to work with him as assistant Brain Bowl coach. The next year he stepped down from coaching and turned the reins over to me. I have been running with the program ever since. We went to only one tournament that first year I was assistant coach; last year we competed in nine. The program has experienced phenomenal growth and marked up some nice successes, primarily because I have been lucky enough to have some very good players come my way. Don Hunt deserves a lot of credit too because he supported me all the way as VP over the program, even through one very rocky season. My best season was the year we won the State Brain Bowl Tournament. During my tenure as coach we have come back with trophies from the Valencia Community College Fall Invitational Tournament, the Berry College Invitational College Bowl Tournament, the Gordon College Two-Year College Bowl Tournament, the Palm Beach Community College Quiz Bowl Invitational Tournament, and a good number of FCCAA regional tournaments.

I hear you are quite serious about triathlons…do tell.

I am wholly dedicated to the ancient Greek aristocratic ideal of mens sana in corpore sano, “a strong mind in a strong body.” I run, I bike, I swim, I train with weights, and generally watch what I eat. Chocolate high-protein smoothies are definitely a virtuous vice of mine. Three to five nights in the gym a week keeps me happy and at my best. I have more than 50 triathlons under my belt, mostly sprint and Olympic distance, and a good number of duathlons, a run-bike-run event, but took last year off from the sport. The past two years I have focused more on running ½ marathons, 10 and 5 kilometer races. Of the three distances, my favorite is probably the ½ marathon. I weigh a good deal more than the average endurance athlete—I tip the scales at 205 pounds and these guys are generally less than 150 pounds—so I am at a bit of a disadvantage, but, once again, what is life without a challenge or two?

Math Students:Helping Them Separate Myth from Reality

by Jerry Meyerson, Math

H aving served as an adjunct and engineering instructor in three states, I suppose I should not be surprised at the fear and anxiety that many students bring to a math and science classroom. But the fact is that I continue to be amazed at some of the ideas that I hear during the early days of a semester. Thus, the purpose of this article is to relate some of the “myths” that many of my students have brought to the mathematics classroom, and my efforts to help these students separate their preconceived notions from reality. I feel these efforts are important. While some of the expectations of the students are amusing, many create a state of anxiety that hampers performance in the course. Hopefully, some of the techniques that have worked for me will be helpful to others.

Myth # 1

Mathematics professors live in another world that normal people never see. They live in some “Twilight Zone” full of rocket trajectories, trains traveling toward each other and other obscure problems. Regular students would have a hard time asking questions because the answers would be complicated and involve some abstract concept. The professor will never know what it feels like to have to struggle with math because he/she has always found the “stuff” easy.

Reality

The fact is I have never met an instructor who sailed through school with absolutely no difficulty in math classes. I daresay the overwhelming majority of math instructors have encountered at least one or more very challenging courses.

I get interesting responses when I tell my students early on that I know many of them are afraid of the course and my imagined response to their “preconceived” poor performance. I go on to say; to the disbelief of many, I felt the same way in several of my undergraduate and graduate courses. I told them about some of my adventures in actuarial science and combinatorics classes, and my intense fear of approaching the instructor with what I surely thought were stupid questions. It took awhile, but I gradually grew to believe that most of my instructors really meant it when they said, “there are no such thing as a stupid question.” I try to allay the fears about my approachability, and some anecdotes about my very similar experiences to seem to always help.

Myth #2

Math professors for the most part are eccentric and lack a sense of humor. The stereotypical “absent-minded professor” was no doubt a mathematics instructor, in the view of many. The “Einstein hair style, the ill-fitting clothes, the “other world” odd behavior that many view as normal for math instructors are suggestive of an inability to communicate with the “normal” student.

One student told me her father had a math instructor come to class late the first day. Upon being told he was late, the instructor started pulling a long chain of connected paper clips out of his pocket. Attached to the end of the chain of paper clips was a very, very, small Mickey Mouse watch. He had to put the watch face very close to his eye to read it, upon which he acknowledged he was late. The student told me the first thing she looked for in my class was whether I wore a conventional watch.

Reality

All of us have some eccentricities, and odd behavior is not confined to math instructors. Yes, Einstein was considered eccentric and Richard Feynman, a renowned physicist, liked to pick locks and walk the street playing bongo drums. But Michael Moore will never win the best-dressed man award and Howard Hughes was a little bit offbeat. I make a point of laughing with my students about some of the odd things I have done. The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate on occasion that their instructor is not so preoccupied that he can’t share a laugh about some amusing “normal” gaffe. Many of my married students appreciate the anecdote involving the Christmas present I bought my wife one year. It was a very beautiful, large framed painting of a collection of birds. However, the identical painting had been hanging over our couch in the living room for 18 years. But, Hey! Give me credit for knowing she liked birds.

The ability to laugh at this kind of behavior together is yet another subtle demonstration that, yes, math professors can have a sense of humor and are not by definition “unapproachable.”

Myth #3

I understand math and do great homework papers, but I will never do well on tests because I freeze up. I can’t tell my instructor because I will look stupid. I see everyone sitting around me going right to work while I panic at the words “a train leaves Pittsburgh at 12 noon and another train leaves New York an hour later…” I shake, I panic, my mind blocks out my every effort to work problems. If I can scrape a ‘D’ out of this course I will be ecstatic.

Reality

In fact, math test anxiety is not a myth and is real. But the feeling that nothing can be done to at least significantly ease the problem is not based on facts.

We have all heard performers or politicians say they always get butterflies in their stomachs before a concert or a speech, but once they get started the anxiety seems to go away. The same notion applies to taking a math test (or any test). An overwhelming percentage of test takers would agree that they never feel completely calm walking into an exam room. Recognizing this is a completely normal reaction is a big first step for students battling what most perceive as a problem unique to themselves. I have a handout for my students who complain that they get so up tight before tests that their performance does not come close to their actual competency with the material. In addition to accepting that a certain amount of anxiety is normal the following additional points are made in the handout.

A regular routine, repeating approach is extremely helpful both before and on test day. Professional golfers emphasize the critical importance of a routine before every shot. The same psychology applies to math test. There is something comforting about the feeling that, “Hey, I’ve done this before. This is not strange territory.”

Sports psychologists stress to their clients the importance of focusing on positive thoughts in pressure packed situations. They emphasize visualization of successful field goals that win games and 10-foot putts that go in and win tournaments. Negative images such as “I can’t do this, I’m not good enough” seem to be self-fulfilling prophecies, and most often assure failure.

Nothing builds confidence and generates positive images more than serious preparation, practice, and a measure of success, no matter how small. While most people cringe at the thought of curling up in bed with a “really good math book,” the fact is that success in tackling concepts and problems at home leads to confidence, positive visualizations, and success on test day. It may take days of practice to be able to arrive at the correct book answers on homework assignments, but the resultant surge in confidence and reduction in anxiety clearly justifies the effort.

I’ve had students tell me that they have been turned off on a math course after buying the book and recognizing very few words in the table of contents. I had one student approach me about dropping the course after opening his new book and noticing a subsection entitled “imaginary numbers.” I caution against this negative mindset early on, and explain how new concepts are built on older established concepts, and the book methodically strives to build a skill such that new concepts on the next page or chapter can be introduced. It is not helpful to turn to the Chapter 3 summary for example, without having studied chapters 1 and 2.

Myth #4

I don’t like math and have never done well in math, but if I get a really good instructor, I can get by without spending a lot of time on stuff I really don’t like.

Reality

Mathematics cannot be mastered by simply listening to good presentations by an instructor. Mathematics is learned by doing mathematics. I tell the class that they may understand a concept or manipulation at the end of a class, but if they don’t apply the knowledge very soon, they will find the understanding fleeting and soon gone. Applying concepts repetitiously over a large number of examples, including checking answers obtained with book answers leads to mastery. I justify the assignment of a lot of homework on the need for repetition. I further justify grade penalty for late and incomplete homework on the need for students to do math and to do it soon after introduction of new material.

In summary, I have learned over the years that running a good mathematics class involves a lot more than introducing new concepts and techniques of manipulating expressions and equations. A successful class involves being mindful of the fact that some students will enroll steeped in fear of mathematics, and very anxious about what to expect in class and from the instructors. Assuming their anxieties exist, and addressing them early on, often results in a desirable reduction in tension and more student/instructor, student/student interaction.

The Living Reed by  Pearl S Buck

History becomes prophecy; this novel takes the format of historical fiction, set in Korea between 1881 and 1945 and following three generations of a family of characters Buck names Kim. Through the lives Buck paints in the anguish of a culture beset by formidable enemies (China, Russia and–most frightfully specific–Japan), divided from within by feudalism, anachronism and cultural tradition, but ever longing for a sovereignty still denied in these, our times.

Although Buck’s focus is on the details of the period, many of her observations are written with an almost casual tone as the musings of one of the characters and have a striking resonance. In the section that passes through the European war of 1917, Buck attributes the character of Il-han with the thought “though peace was the proper way of life[…]tyranny, conceived in the mind of an angry man[…] could light a fire that in some future time, joined with other minds, even such as ruled now and here in Korea, would put the whole world into darkness”(313). Despite the four decades that have passed since Buck wrote these words, the sense of dread is palpable and current.

Pearl S Buck was the first of the two American women awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and it might be viewed as an act of patriotism to read her work. Patriotism seems to be the motivating force behind Buck’s characters; characters fevered with patriotism enough to suffer foreign rule, oppression, imprisonment, torture, exile and family deaths, but with utter love of their culture and with a desire for national autonomy solidly the driving force of their lives.

~ SuZi

Painting as Pastime by Winston S. Churchill.

Winston Churchill painted for 40 years as a diversion from his primary life’s work. Painting as Pastime is a tiny tome, in which Churchill expounds on his admiration for the French landscapists, his preference for oil over watercolor, and his travels to Avignon, Egypt, and Palestine for different light qualities in those places. It also includes several color plates of his works, in which his influences, namely impressionists and Cezanne, become evident.

The Citrus campus recently purchased a portrait of Churchill, which was donated for auction by a local county official, whose history and origins of the work are pending.

~ M.Wirt

bell hooks. ain’t i a woman?, killing rage, bone black  and salvation

To be honest, after reading these four titles over the winter holiday, it seemed crucial to order the two other titles of what publisher HarperCollins refers to as hooks’ Love Trilogy – as salvation is part two. hooks is unapologetically didactic, but the overarching point of her work strikes this reader as ever urgent, as relevant to each of us if we are to bridge ancestral misconduct or ancestral agony and go forth a more enlightened, humane people.

Using a writing style that moves gymnastically between sociopolitical lingo and a comfy vernacular, hooks not only drops into first person but cross references her own work. Additionally, hooks often makes careful analysis of other writers, is obviously scholarly without the formality of academic writing. At one point, hooks’ discusses her choice of language use with a sensitivity to her varied audience that reveals much about hooks herself: the stridency is born of a passionate caring.

Although hooks writes as a black woman in our current society, anyone who has ever experienced a sense of marginalization will recognize themselves at points in her text. The passages detailing the soul-destroying requirements of conventionalized masculine roles almost seem infused with heartbreak (salvation). What seems to annoy hooks the most is arrogant entitlement, yet she carefully details our internalized assumptions and exhorts us to “decolonize our minds and imaginations” (killing rage 119).

There are points in these texts where this reader laughed out loud, and there are points in these texts where I was called back to my New Orleans exhortation of “yeah, you right.” Most gratifying was hooks’ castigation of the media, calling it “the biggest propaganda machine” and further stating “mass media are neither neutral nor innocent[…]”, she beseeches us to refuse and resist media’s socialization (killing rage. 116-118).

Anyone with even the most minimal investment in self-actualization or the empowerment of others owes it to themselves to read any of hooks’ engaging and challenging work. Committed as she is to epistemologies, hooks is committed to us. It would be rude not to employ some small gratitude.

~ SuZi