End of the Semester A semester seems to be an eternity when it begins. You look at the syllabus you have created for a course and you see something like sixteen weeks laid out ahead of you. That’s a something like fifty hours of class time lectures, hours of reading papers and grading exams, hunting for parking spots and lots of freeway time back and forth to campus. Then, before you know it, its the…
The Club What has ever become of the Club? No, I do not mean that kryptonite steel bar that we used to use to secure our steering wheels so that when we parked on the streets of New York, perpetrators could not easily steal our cars. I checked and those contraptions are apparently still available for about $40, so I assume that they still work. Old school, but, I guess, pretty effective. No, I am…
Risking Everything I am stealing that headline from the New York Times this morning as that theme seems to be screaming this morning for attention. The article in the Times is about the rising protests in Iran and China and the fact that the oppression in those two autocratic countries has gotten incredibly severe and economic salve is so absent, that people cannot help themselves but protest. This is in the light of the economic…
Fresh Garbage When I was in high school, my sister Barb was a groupie of a European band called The Free Love. Their hit song was called Fresh Garbage and it’s tagline was “Look beneath your little morning, see the things you didn’t quite consume, the world’s a can for your fresh garbage….nah, nah,nah,nah,nah,nah, Na-nah, nah…” It was quite a hit. My pal Mike gets a regular 8+ hours of sleep each night. He goes…
We Can Dream We all take way too many things for granted. I don’t like to think of myself as “privileged”, but I am. I was fortunate to be born when I was, part of the post-war Baby Boom and yet not so far after that I’m part of the downward mobility trend that is permeating our children’s lives. I didn’t quite make it into the top half of the Boomers, who are the ones…
The World Needs More Italians I am perhaps the least Italian-looking person you may ever meet. People might mistake me for German, Eastern European, Russian, Scandinavian and yes, I even get mistaken for being Jewish more often than you might think (must be the Eastern European shtetl look I have about me). But for the three years I lived in Rome, the many times I have visited Italy and spoken reasonably fluent Italian and any…
The Cookie Starts to Crumble In wrapping up my ethics course, I have just gone over my final lecture where I will review all the fundamental concepts we have discussed and debated during the semester. I really think I have, over two semesters of teaching this course, pulled together an excellent set of almost universal topics that would be worthwhile for almost anyone to spend some time considering or studying. Obviously, it is geared to…
Hope Floats Today my daughter texted me that her two daughters were signed up for several courses for the winter session of extracurricular activities. She did this not only to keep me abreast of their goings on, but also because Kim and I give her holiday money intended specifically for the purpose of keeping her daughters enrolled in such activities to broaden their horizons. This past semester it was lacrosse for Charlotte and soccer for…
How Many Christmases? None of us know what the future brings other than that it is likely to surprise us. I am sixty-eight years old, so if I want to believe the actuarial table, I have a life expectancy of 16 years. That means that including this one before us right now, I have sixteen Christmases left. If I matched my father, I would only have two Christmases left, but if I track my mother,…
Fraternization I’ve been teaching since 2007, so that makes the span of time fifteen years. However, I took a few years off after ten years at Cornell, so I’ve really only been actively engaged in teaching for fourteen semesters, ten of them at Cornell and four of them at USD so far. I am scheduled to teach my ethics course again next semester so I will hit fifteen semesters for sure and will most likely…