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.

A photo from my research in the Brooks Range 11 years ago. I took this after my pilot said “if the weather is good, I’ll be back in three days.” And then he took off. And one more photo of the bear tracks outside my tent the next morning.

That was a good trip.

A filmmaker friend just sent me this Vimeo film about Roman Dial. Dial worked in the Brooks Range for almost half a century; I did research there one summer, and my son was there doing research another summer.

It’s a film about a very tangible and visible effect of a warming planet. It’s also a film about Alaska, and about being a father to a son, and the joy of introducing our kids and our students to wild places.

And it’s also about the very real dangers that come with those places, which is something I’ve often thought about when, after bringing him along with me on my work in Alaska and Central America, my own son went off on adventures of his own—many of them far greater than mine!

There’s pride in knowing he’s off climbing a hard summit, or rafting down a distant river, or helping a medical team in Ghana. And there’s also the fear that something might happen to him while he’s doing the thing he loves and that I encouraged him to do.

Anyway, watch it if this interests you, and take a deep breath before you dive in, because there’s a tragic turn that has my heart aching. There’s also some beautiful scenery, and a beautiful story of a teacher and father, and his son and his students.

Thanks to @jthingelstad for inspiring this: indiewebispunk.net

Another kind of sketch a day.

Tinkering with Arduino, because I can.

Each day I try to do at least one sketch of something around me. Some days it’s done live, plein air. Other days I’m moving quickly so I snap a photo and sketch in the evening, as I did tonight. Here I offer the photo, the rough sketch, and the finished product. I used to worry about every line, every fine detail. The more I do this, the faster I get, and the more pleased I am with both process and product. The photo took me about five minutes of standing still in my garden. The pen sketch took 2 minutes, and the watercolors took another five. Time well spent.

And i am happy to report that when i took the photo of the watercolor my phone identified the species correctly.

A sketch from a photo I took in the woods today.

Why your email still isn’t finding me.

Paying attention to some of the little things here at the lake before I return to paying attention to the big questions, the great books, the important people in my classrooms (“students” as we call them), and the tiny things that demand great attention and merit little of what they demand (“bureaucracy” in the common parlance).

Two chipmunks, painted a month apart and half a continent away from one another. Neotamias minimus in the Paha Sapa / Black Hills of South Dakota, and Tamias striatus in Ontario.

Sketching and painting these have helped me to see the differences between them. Slow observation with a paintbrush.

Here, for your delight, is a link to the etymology of “chipmunk.”

The work in progress. Probably should have posted this one first. I was distracted by the beauty of nature around me, I guess.

My sketchbook and I greet you from Lake Muskoka. This is how your email finds me today, if it finds me at all.

Nature journaling as a way of feeding my curiosity. I keep wondering about the relationship between a little insect and a plant I like in my garden. Looking closely at both of them helps me focus my questions. When I have time I dig into the science journals. In between I take photos, sketch, make detailed observations, write down my questions. The journal doesn‘t replace the scientific inquiry; it boosts the signal.

More wasps on the rattlesnake master in my garden. So far these flowers have only been visited by wasps while I am watching them, never by bees. Bees are nearby on the monarda, silphium, and coneflower plants. I’ll need to watch some more to find out if this is a pattern or a fluke. Interesting to see how many kinds of hymenoptera are drawn to the native plants