David O'Hara

This book looks like it would be a great holiday gift for each of your friends.

We live in interesting times in higher education. Fascinating to see the split between techno-optimists and techno-pessimists in academia. Similarly fascinating: some see the current moment as an opportunity for disruption and renewal, while others are doubling down on old systems. I just spent several hours wading through syllabus checklists for a weeklong course abroad that we have taught for almost 40 years. For 21 of those years I have taught it. Most of the course is spent touring sites around Greece. I take the students to museums, to farms, to ancient ruins, to monasteries old and new, to wineries and vineyards, to modern cooking and dance lessons. I have no idea how to capture all the “learning outcomes” in the appropriate verbs. I don’t care whether students use AI on that course (or on my backcountry Alaska course). I don’t feel the need to list my office hours, or the location of the campus writing center, or a number of other things the syllabus checklist requires. The grading feels rather unimportant, provided the students show up and give their attention to the place and to its people.

I do very much care about the students, their growth, and their presence. And I care about Greece, its people, its history and languages, its culture and agriculture, its islands and ocean and fish, its flowers and its churches, the immigrants who arrive, the people who trace their family roots to this land for millennia.

The university provides me a foundation from which to teach these things. I teach not by proferring data but by bringing students along as I continue to learn.

Teaching should not be merely about what tools the students use, nor about what metrics we can contrive to justify our teaching. The proof of the education should be in the students themselves. And the teaching should come not from the techniques and devices of the teacher (very few of us learn how to teach, and fewer still can honestly say they know how to teach others how to teach) but from the teacher’s character. We should show up as the best students in the class. We should exemplify wonder and curiosity. We should ask good questions so that our students can ask even better ones. We should bring students along as we continue to learn, not studying for the exam, but delighting in this world that is our to explore.

…right after I finished that last sketch two hummingbirds flew up. I snapped a few photos and then painted this one. I like the way the colors of thid green and white bird changed against a gray sky.

Weekend sketches in my nature journal. I am once again requiring my students to keep nature journals, and so I am doing the same myself. In fact, I require much more of myself than I do of them, but so far their journals have been wonderful. Each one is drawn and written by hand. I let them use whatever research tools they wish, but they have to begin with observation and sketching. I don’t grade the quality of their art but rather the quantity, believing that practice is more important than worrying about perfection. If they keep sketching, they’ll become better observers of the world around them.

If you were still waiting for evidence that the Great Books can be an excellent education (if they’re done right), here you go:

St John’s College (my alma mater) undergrad alums will receive a triple major in philosophy, literature, and natural science.

Ktema is one of my favorite old ideas. It can mean an heirloom, something you cherish, a piece of land you work to raise food, or even a vineyard. It’s also the name of my consulting firm, for which I should probably make a better website someday, but only if I have time to take on more clients.

What is your ktema?

After reading a few very helpful articles this week, I looked up the authors and sent them notes of gratitude for their writing and thinking. One wrote back and said she doesn’t often hear from readers, so it was pleasant to read affirmation of her work. And she is up for promotion this month, so might she use my email in her promotion narrative? Of course! Makes me glad I took those few minutes to write to those authors.

I wonder how many college campuses no longer have bookstores, and how many will soon no longer have libraries with physical books. Over the last decade there has been a big shift towards first purchasing and then just renting access to digital texts. Along with that, many schools have their students complete all their assignments and assessments online. In some cases, it makes sense to have a textbook that can be digitally updated, or to buy a textbook that comes with digital study tools. For Great Books classes like mine, the digital texts don’t make a lot of sense, and renting texts (as though you might not want to return to them later in life, and who needs marginalia anyway?) is a wasted long-term opportunity.

When I was in my doctoral studies I spent a lot of time with unpublished manuscripts from the scientist/philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. He left roughly 100,000 unpublished pages of notes, drafts of books and articles, diagrams, and translations. What a treasury!

Later, when I was writing my book on the environmental vision of C.S. Lewis, Narnia and the Fields of Arbol, I had the privilege of spending time in the Lewis archives at the Wade Center at Wheaton College. The Director, when he learned that I was studying Lewis’ work in environmental philosophy, disappeared into a back room and then came out holding Lewis’ copy of Henri Bergson’s Évolution Créatrice. Lewis read that book while in the hospital, recovering from wounds he suffered in WWI. Every page was filled with Lewis’ marginalia. Again, what riches, to hold the book that Lewis held a century before me, and to see his pen strokes that were a record of his reflections.

This semester for the umpteenth time I am teaching Plato’s Republic. My copy is worn, full of post-it notes and bookmarks, with pencil marks on every page: underlined passages, circled words, notes in the margins, questions the text provoked, summaries of arguments, diagrams and sketches of Plato’s ideas, summaries and outlines of chapters. The book is no longer just Plato’s book. It is a record of a long conversation, with my part of that conversation stretching back almost forty years. Yesterday in class as we discussed the book, my students were full of questions and observations. They had paper copies of the same translation open before them, (it has been in print a long time, and those copies are cheap.) The conversation was not about a dead author; it was very much about living questions for our time.

A quick evening sketch to remind me of what I see in the prairie restoration garden my students built.

That’s my office right there. Photo taken from the orchard my students and my colleagues and I made a few years ago.

Reflection: when I am abroad with students, or teaching outdoors with them at home, I require them to pay attention to their senses.

This is interesting to me: why do we need to pay attention to our senses? Don’t our senses call our attention to themselves?

But perhaps we fall into habits of NOT paying attention to our senses so that we can do other things like walk to the next class, drive to work, etc.

Our tehcnologies make it easy to prioritize the visual, especially as it is rendered in two dimensions on a rectangular screen.

And the auditory, especially in isolation from an environment, mediated through headphones.

Often, while we are together, I will ask my students what they smell.

And it can be a challenge for them to put into words what they are perceiving through olfaction. We notice the extremes, the highlights, the sudden changes. We don’t mind the ordinary.

A shout-out to everyone who writes letters and carries postage stamps with them; To all who pick up an instrument and make music where others can hear it, no Bluetooth speaker required; To the weirdos with watercolors sitting for an hour to admire a city street or a tree or a moth; To people gathering sticks, or splitting wood by hand, and burning only what they need to burn; To the kids jumping from rocks into the plunge-pool in the Catskills; To greasy hands and scarred fingers looking up at the beater on the lift, or jacked up on the garage floor; If you’re watching the wind with a hand on the tiller or both hands on the paddle; Or if you’re watching the children roll on the grass and bending birches; To those of you sitting still, needle in hand, not rushing the evening on; Friendly greetings to you, and to all of you picking berries, and watching the apples turn red and the beans on the vine turn brown, and gathering seeds.

Yesterday I got an email from someone claiming to be an editor at a well-known publisher. The email looked legit, and the writer described one of my books in detail, talking about its contents and structure, and asking me if I’d be willing to consider a follow-up volume.

At a time when it seems like readers (and buyers of my books) are becoming more scarce, such emails excite moments of unwarranted hope. Of course I reached out to my co-author to ask him whether he had also heard from the “publisher.”

He had not, but pointed out to me that he gets these emails regularly now.

Which is to say that someone has been feeding our books through A.I., and having A.I. write emails to authors like us, and trying to scam us beginning with using our own text, for which they likely did not pay a cent.

I work hard at avoiding scam emails, and at trying to keep good internet “hygeine.” But it feels like a war of attrition, like the attacks will just keep coming, probing us for weaknesses. It feels relentless, the constant poking at firewalls and at our own vigilance. I’d like to think I’ll keep my wits about me, but one can only keep up the vigilance for so long.

A.I. offers so many possibilities for good uses. If only it didn’t also offer so many possibilities for bad actors to act more badly and at scale.

From today’s garden bestiary: an American toad and a band-winged meadowhawk dragonfly.

This piece in the Christian Science Monitor about Goddard College (and other small colleges closing and trying to reimagine themselves) speaks to me in many ways, but the photos of those stone walls make my heart thrum.

I have loved working with stone since I was a boy, and have practiced masonry on three continents. To build with stone is one of the loveliest things one can do, especially when the stone is cut by hand, or not at all, and laid dry.

If I were not a professor, I would gladly return to stonework. As a professor, I bring my students to work with stone whenever I can (too infrequently, alas).

A scene from my garden as I strolled through, harvesting some breakfast berries this morning.

One of my experiments this year was installing 16’ cattle panels that I bent into arched trellises between raised beds. Cucumbers, pumpkins, beans, snow peas, grapes, clematis, and morning glories climb them in various parts of my garden. We also hung a hummingbird feeder, and the hummers seem to love the placement. They have easy access to the feeder, protection from above, and lots of flowers blooming from early morning until late at night.

The whole summer of 1984 I was working in Kathmandu. Ever since then it has felt like my heart has a major vein running through Nepal, and when Nepal suffers, my heart aches with it.

We must teach critical thinking and ethics.

So many schools have steadily whittled these down to near meaninglessness.

Most schools still have the capacity to rebuild these, but are choosing not to do so.

Teach the old stories.

Teach ethics that is not just moral vocabulary. Teach more than compliance with laws and professional norms. Teach the stories that have persisted for millennia.

And teach students to wrestle with the questions that have no easy answers.

Teach by example, wrestling with the stories so the students see the teachers wrestling, and perspiring as we do.

It’s not easy.

But it is good, and it is necessary.

At a recent gathering of university and college faculty I attended, the driving question was how are we planning to re-tool our assignments so that students cannot use A.I. to cheat.

It’s understandable why this is on the minds of so many faculty. Cheating has never been easier. I have watched university students in our campus coffee shop cut and paste assignments from Canvas onto Chat GPT and then copy the answers into their Canvas pages.

The problem with focusing our teaching on overcoming the impulse to cheat is that it affects the way we think about our students, and about ourselves.

If we focus on students cheating, that causes us to think about our students first and foremost as potential cheaters. So we think about ourselves as people whose job it is to prevent this cheating. All our students become potential criminals, and we become the police.

That’s not why I got into teaching.

My own approach is closer to what Parker Palmer writes about in his classic The Courage To Teach. His thesis is that good teaching focuses on the character of the teacher rather than on the teacher’s technique. Technique has its place, but if we put technique (or technology) first, then the technique and its technology will become the center of our attention. Students will fade into the background.

Both students and faculty are harmed by this. We find ourselves in hallway conversations about students looking for an easy A, complaining about students who don’t read well, gnashing our teeth at the software that has received so much attention.

I wish that that faculty retreat had instead focused on character. What kind of people are we teachers trying to become? How are we modeling good learning for our students? How are we growing, and what are we inviting students to learn from our example?

Rather than focusing on the students as potential violators of the rules, what if we were to focus on them as people who are here to learn, people who are growing and who need some guidance? What do we have to offer that they need, and how can we offer it in a way that is helpful?

There is an old tradition in many religions and mythologies of the divine showing up in modest human form. A baby in manger, a divinity who is a charioteer for a prince, a god who shows up in humble dress to mentor a young person who has lost their way. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews writes that we should not give up showing hospitality to strangers, “for some of you in so doing have entertained angels unawares.”

Every great person in history was once a child. Every scientist, pastor, ambulance driver, firefighter, farmer, doctor, caregiver—everyone who has done good for others—was once a child. And someone taught that child. Quite possibly, some teacher saw in that child more potential than the teachers themselves had.

What a gift to be that teacher! To be in the presence of someone who is becoming something great, and to have the opportunity to play a small role in their growth.

To my fellow teachers, then, I ask you to consider this: of which of our students can we confidently say that there is no potential for them to someday be great? On the contrary, which of them might someday be revealed to be a helper, a healer, an angel in disguise? Which of them might someday be regarded as a saint?

As my semester begins, I will let that frame my teaching. What a joy to spend time with these people in whom great things might be stirring! They are not potential scoundrels; they are potential saints. And my job is to do the little things I can to nurture that, and to see the saintly things grow in their lives.

Three Hymenoptera.

They don’t seem to mind sharing the same flowers, the same source of food.

Today’s sketch, from my garden.