WithMentalReservations

Some thoughts on a very pleasant Spring day in Bellingham. It has been a good day, perhaps one of the best so far this year.   Three events made it so, two of which were unexpected.   It was the last, however, that helped me articulate why the first event was so meaningful. I had come to the Starbucks Coffee just over the hill from the campus from Village Books where I had enjoyed an author reading, one I went to mostly out of curiosity, tinged with a bit of nostalgia.   The author, John Gierach, is a well-known writer of books about fly fishing read from his latest book “No Shortage of Good Days.”   The chapter he chose was about going on book promotion tours, and was filled with dry wit and sometimes “belly-laugh” humor.   As I am a book addict, I ended up buying one of his first books, just to see if he is in the same league as a few of the other outdoors writers I’ve read in the past, like Havilah Babcock, the legendary South Carolinian poet of upland ga...

Today was graduation day at Clarion University of Pennsylvania, where I taught for 23 years.  Two former students of mine walked across the stage, two young folks whose lives I had the great privilege of sharing, if only briefly.  Their achievement made me look back on my career and reminded me of why I taught, why I miss teaching, and why I think so many of the contemporary critics of higher education miss the mark completely. Teaching is, first and foremost, an act of love, a multifaceted expression of our collective regard for the generation(s) that will follow us.  It is also an expression of our own love, for our students and for the subject(s) that we pursued for our advanced degrees.  It is also the manifestation of our inner need to learn, a primal aspect of our very humanity, for it was our capacity to learn, using the rapidly evolving brain we inherited from our pre- sapiens ancestors, that gave us the tools to make ever increasing sense of the world abo...