My Father's Stories

 

Dear Dad,

 

We recently had a conversation about what kind of wisdom comes with age. We’ve both known some old people who seem unwise, and some young ones who are ahead of the game. And I think you and I (both of us now being over the trusted age of thirty) have occasionally been unwise in our post-adolescent days. Oh, well.

 

While I’ve known a few foolish geezers, over the years my respect for a certain kind of wisdom I see in you has continued to grow: your stories. Again and again when I have faced uncertainties in my life, I have returned to your stories.

 

Your stories aren’t doctrines, because that’s not what stories are. So I’m not saying they’re right or wrong. What matters is that they’re yours, and when you tell stories about your own life, they’re some of the truest stories I can imagine. You only mess them up when you try to explain them. That’s best left for Aesop. Your stories are more like compressed data. They do more work than any quantum computer I’ve heard of can do, and they are like a vein of gold that keeps growing and branching the more I dig into it. They explain themselves, and they are resilient.

 

Some of your stories are entertaining. My kids have heard stories of your experience in the National Guard so many times they probably not only think that I was there with you in that tank, they probably can imagine themselves in there, firing at trees hundreds of yards away in target practice.

 

But your stories do much more than entertain. They teach. When I think of you riding in the back seat of the car while your parents heard the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and you wouldn’t shut up, I feel like I am present there, and I feel like I am learning about my family, and what it means to be a family. You’ve never told me what Gram did when you were making too much noise, but that doesn’t stop me from remembering what I know of her, and imagining her response. And you haven’t mentioned your brother in that story either, but I can imagine him learning a lesson as well when Gramps turned around and smacked you to get you to shut up while he contemplated what was about to become of his military service, and of his wife and sons, and his widowed mother and his younger siblings. Just reflecting on that makes me think more seriously about my own obligations to others. It’s a tightly-packed story that is full of webs of relationships, and I am grateful for every time you’ve told me.

 

The same goes for all the stories you’ve told me about your life during the war, and afterwards. The way Gramps prepared you all for the trip back home while he prepared himself and his men for war. The way Uncle Charlie taught you to use the tools he knew. You’ve told me about Uncle Charlie so many times I wish I knew him myself. In fact, I think I do, through you.

 

Because, after all, your stories are also like tools. I think about the stories you’ve told me about how to take an engine apart so that you can put it back together again. I remembered that when I took apart my lawn mower engine once, and I thought about it the other day when I took apart the vacuum cleaner to figure out why it wasn’t working. I took out the parts methodically, and laid them out in order of removal, so that I could put them together again. You taught me about algorithms when I was a kid, sketching some out on napkins at the pizzeria in Woodstock, but also teaching me the word “algorithm” and then telling me stories that illustrated algorithms. You were making me a philosophy professor whether you knew it or not. Not bad for an electrical engineer!

 

A few years ago my youngest brought his friend over to our house. Her car door wasn’t working right. He told her to park it in the driveway and said that his dad could fix it. Somehow he knew that I wasn’t afraid to take things apart and tinker with them. He also knows that I still own and use tools you gave me when I was a boy. As we took apart that car door there in our driveway, Matt watched and learned. Not long afterwards, when he wanted to fix something on his own car—something he had never done before—he asked to borrow my tools, and got to work. He was unafraid to use tools, and unafraid to try something new. You know why? Because he saw it in me. And you know what he saw in me? He saw you. Your stories—the ones you told and the ones you showed me—those live in me all the time. Not surprisingly, he's now certified as an automotive electrician, and working as an auto mechanic. And he's good at his job. That's a picture of your stories, living in your grandson. I hope you're as proud of him as I am.

 

I think one of the things I have learned from your stories is a willingness to try to work with my hands to make good things. I’ve made a lot of the furniture in our house, and as you know, I’ve worked with stone and bricks and mortar on three different continents now. When I lay stone, I am always thinking about the structure in front of me, thinking about stresses and balance, physics and aesthetics. Despite a lack of formal training in engineering, standing beside you while you built a pier on the reservoir, or while you explained the bridge you built across the creek behind your house, gave me both the gumption to try building things myself, and a sense of what would work and what wouldn’t. Of course, that bridge also came with a lesson in law (which is why you couldn’t modify the banks) and a lesson in measuring the rate of flow of a river (something I had no idea how to do until you told me that day.) I can’t look at bridges and cantilevered and suspended structures without thinking of the engineering lessons you taught me through your stories.

 

The same is true for my adeptness with languages, and for my ability with music. Yeah, some of that is probably genetic (from you, again) but a lot of it is just learned fearlessness. I have never seen you turn away from a musical instrument just because you hadn’t yet received lessons in it. And I’ve seen you play in public many times, and your stories—I want to emphasize this—your stories of messing up have been a huge gift. “Don’t stop, just keep playing!” This is one of the things I tell my students now about public speaking, and about writing essays. “Always have a song you’re ready to play.” Years ago when I was having dinner at the home of the Lutheran Bishop of Nicaragua, someone handed me a guitar and said “Play us a song.” This was a complete surprise to me, but thanks to your stories, I was ready, and I led the whole group in several songs.

 

If I tried to write down all the stories you’ve told me, it would take a long time. I hope you continue to write down the stories you know. And I hope you tell them simply, unadorned, without feeling like they need to be dressed up. Just pick up that guitar and sing them, Dad. You have such a good voice, such a gift for music. You’re our family’s Homer, our Vergil.

 

In the same vein, if I tried to write down all the ways you show up in my classes, or in the ways I raised my kids, I doubt I’d be able to get it all down, but I hope this little letter at least gives you an idea of that. Those napkins you scribbled on at the pizzeria helped my kids do better in math and science. The times you told me about meeting someone who spoke another language and you tried speaking to them have indirectly emboldened your grandkids to study and work abroad in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. You taught me my first lessons in logic, and I taught them to my kids, and then your granddaughter grew up to be a far better reasoner than either one of us. Hopefully you and I will get a little credit for that when her biography is written—a little, but not too much. She deserves most of the credit for taking the stories we passed on, unpacking them, and then retelling them in her own way. And I love to watch her do that.

 

Speaking of languages, your stories have taught me in some other ways, too. Well before I could read Chomsky you mentioned him to me. I don’t remember what you said, but I remember the way you said it. It was like when you mentioned Feynman, Bernoulli, Les Paul, Vivaldi, Buckminster Fuller, Linus Pauling, or one of the other creative thinkers you were the first person to teach me about. Years later, when I was teaching at Penn State, one of my students mentioned Chomsky, and said wistfully that she wished she could have the chance to meet him. I asked her “Have you tried writing to him or giving him a call?” “I can do that?” “Why not?” I was passing along to her some of your willingness to try. After she went home to Boston for semester break she came to visit me in my office, and told me that she had called him and he invited her over to his campus. They talked for an hour over coffee. She was thrilled! That’s a win in your column, Dad. Well done.

 

When I was a boy you also bought me a subscription to Scientific American, and a copy of Van Nostrand’s Scientific Encyclopedia. I wish I still had that Van Nostrand’s. It’s horribly out of date, but I spent many hours paging through it, and it was a gift of love. People don’t often think of science as stories, but what else are scientific papers? They’re letters written to strangers, telling stories as clearly and as straightforwardly as they can. I remember reading about the work of Benoit Mandelbrot in Scientific American, and I have not stopped learning from that story ever since. If I had a list of how many times I’ve taught principles I learned from those articles, it would be a very long list. Another win in your column, I think.

 

I could go on for a long time, but I have more work to do today, so I’ll end here. I just wanted to say, in the form of a letter about stories, that I love you. Thanks for telling your stories, Dad. I keep telling them all the time.

 

With love,

 

Dave

*******

I write about my father in several places, including in my book Downstream. If you want to see some more of what I've written about him on this blog, click the "my Dad" link, below.

 

Of Fish and Forests

When people ask me what I do I sometimes reply “I study the relationships between fish and forests.”

A more precise way to describe my job might be to say I’m a teacher, a scholar, and a department chair and program director at my university. But that answer is pretty dry and uninteresting.

Adding detail doesn’t always help, though I could say that I teach philosophy, classics, religious studies, theology, field ecology, study abroad, environmental studies, and sustainability; and that I take my students to the places I study: rainforests in the tropics and in Alaska, deserts, and the Mediterranean.

So instead I say “fish and forests.” The words are simple and easy to understand. I hope they invite more questions, and often they do.

Salmon bones on woody plants beside a river near Lake Clark, Alaska. A bear left these bones after a meal.

The question I hope for is some version of “what do fish have to do with forests?” The short version is: nearly everything.

Nearly as good as that question is when someone points out that fish don’t live in trees. Short version of my reply: that’s not exactly true, and many of my students can tell you the various ways fish do live in trees. Here are a few:

Around the world, the edges between land and water are held together by roots, and in those places, fish find food, shelter, and places to spawn.

A great example of this is mangroves, which are some of the most important ocean nurseries. Thousands of species bear their young and lay their eggs in mangroves. The mangroves provide shelter from predators; they stabilize the soil, protecting land from hurricanes and strong waves, and protecting the sea from too much runoff. Birds, mammals, insects, and reptiles live in the branches. Fish and myriad aquatic invertebrates live among the roots.

A mangrove on an island off the coast of Belize.

 

We could add that there are “forests” of kelp and coral underwater, too.

Wherever birds eat fish, those birds also build the soil when they return to the land. Their waste becomes fertilizer for all manner of grasses, forbs, and trees. Visit the rivers of Alaska and you will find shrubs and trees growing on the banks, where seeds found fertile gardens in mounds of bear poop.

When a bear eats salmon and berries, the berry seeds pass through the bear undigested. The bear deposits the seeds in a steaming pile of fecundity. Bears are forest gardeners.

Here in the middle, between the tropics and the Arctic, the Big Sioux River is entering its quiet winter’s rest. We haven’t had much rain, and the river is ankle-deep in many places. The fish gather in deep holes that were sculpted out by fallen trees. When the river claims a tree, that tree doesn’t simply float away. It becomes food for beavers and decomposing insects. It creates eddies that dig deep holes on one side and deposit sediment on the other. Sometimes the tree becomes a new island, and new trees grow up on its rotting wood and on the debris it collects. Raccoons grab mussels and crayfish, and eat them in the branches. Mink and otters dine from a similar menu further down on the bank.

Tree growing on an island in the Big Sioux River. The tree makes habitat for both terrestrial and aquatic life.

Near the roots, a deep hole has been carved out. Habitat for fish, hunting grounds for raccoons and other mammals.

A fallen tree has created an island in the Big Sioux River

Everywhere I go with my students I ask them to pay attention to the water. The fish and the forests alike need it. The forests keep the water cool and clean, and the fish fertilize the trees. Often, when I am teaching in Morocco or Spain or Greece, I ask them to notice the architecture of water, and the way it relates to our values. Religions have rituals of ablution, and ancient temples collect water from their rooftops, letting it flow down ancient marble columns that imitate the tree trunks that once made porticoes, to flow into cisterns. The narrative of the Christian scriptures begins in a forested garden, and ends in a city with a river flowing through it.

My students smile and roll their eyes at hearing me repeat the same question yet again. What do fish have to do with forests? What does water have to do with dry ground?

 

Traditional Itzá canoes on the shore of Lake Petén Itzá.

 

And then one will point out a young mangrove shoot, a migrating salmon, a traditional Itzá canoe on a lakeshore, a baptismal font, a hammam, a public fountain, a Roman aqueduct.

And we will all stop for a moment and consider the way that this water, right here, flows through every part of our lives.

A Professor's Environmental Humanities Summer

Dear Students,

Do you know how your professors spend their summers? In a few days I will shift from my summer work to the work you're more familiar with: my work in the classroom. As you and I prepare to make that shift, I thought you might appreciate a glimpse at what I've been up to this summer. 

When I was a student I knew very little about my professors' lives outside of the classroom. They were people I saw for a few hours a week, and whom I rarely saw outside of lecture halls. Every now and then I'd see one in a grocery store or walking down the street, and it was a bit of a surprise to see them living ordinary lives. On the one hand, I think it's good thing to give my students space apart from professors. It is helpful to have some boundaries, after all. On the other hand, the way we live our lives can be part of our teaching. This is one of the advantages of study-travel courses, and it's why I invite you to come to my office for tea and not just for formal advising. I hope you will see helpful lessons (hopefully good ones!) in the way we professors choose to spend our time, and that those spontaneous and organic conversations will offer more food for thought than I have time to offer in formal lessons.

Other than the science professors who spend a lot of time doing lab research, you might think we professors are simply on vacation in the summer.  In part, you're right: we have three main responsibilities as Augie professors: teaching, scholarship, and service. And most of us are on a nine- or ten-month contract; we've chosen a life that pays us less in money than we might make in other jobs, and in return, we have significantly more flexibility with our time.  That's a nice tradeoff for most of us, and it's one of the delights of being part of an academy.While most of us do use some of that time for rest after working hard for an academic year, we also use the summer to catch up on our scholarship, to learn more, to find new resources that will help us to serve our community, and to prepare to be better teachers.

Since I teach a wide range of courses (in philosophy, classics, religion, environmental humanities, Ecology, study abroad, and more) my summer is usually spent in study. This summer was no exception. This isn't a complete list of what I did, but it'll give you the big picture anyway:

One of the lycaenids I photographed in my garden this summer. Actually a very small butterfly, but some small things can give you a big picture nonetheless, if you know what to look for.

May

After grading exams and Commencement, I started a week of meetings. The big picture: wrapping up the school year, and getting ready for the next. Meetings may not sound appealing, but we tend to get a lot done that makes the rest of the school year possible. This is also often a time when I get to meet with alumni, community leaders, and people who need my help with various projects. File this under "service," I suppose.

June

The first week: I taught a weeklong graduate class in philosophy for our Sports Administration and Leadership Master's program. This was an intensive 40-hour seminar on Plato's Republic and Augustine's Confessions. We discussed a number of things, like the roles of a leader; the difficulties of knowing anything with confidence and of making decisions when one doesn't know with certainty; and the important place of sports and playfulness in the ethical development of individuals and communities.

The second week: As soon as that class ended I hopped on a plane for Sweden, so I could participate in the EAT Forum in Stockholm. This was a remarkable experience, unlike any academic conference I've attended. EAT is a non-profit based in Oslo that aims to make science-based changes in the world's food systems. The EAT Forum is a place to meet and network with a number of influential, thoughtful people from diverse backgrounds, with the aim of making sure everyone on the planet has access to safe, sustainable, healthy food. They aim high, and I found the experience to be very helpful for me as a teacher and practicioner of sustainability; as someone who researches salmonid fish (salmon, trout, and charr, especially); and as someone who aims to improve our policies concerning those fish and their habitats. Three highlights of this Forum: (1) I met people I wouldn't likely meet anywhere else, mostly working on fishing policy; (2) The presentations were well-crafted, all of them aiming to teach briefly and to introduce a positive possible solution to a well-defined problem; (3) Chance conversations with people like Shafinaz Hossain, a woman from Bangladesh whose Business professor gave her an assignment: go home and look for a problem no one has solved, and regard it as an opportunity to start a business that helps people. What a great assignment! And what an impressive solution she came up with! (Well done, Shafinaz! I'm glad to have met you!)

The third week: Shortly after getting home from Sweden I was on a plane again, this time to Chicago, where I spent a week with 25 scholars - mostly religion professors - and with Dr. Eboo Patel and Dr. Laurie Patton. Dr. Patel is founder of the IFYC, and  Dr. Patton is a scholar of religion and President of Middlebury College. This was a seminar put on by the Council of Independent Colleges.  If all I did this summer was the EAT Forum or this week in Chicago studying Interfaith Understanding, it would have been a summer well spent. I learned a lot (ask me about it!) but here are some highlights: (1) Again, I met people I wouldn't have met otherwise, and that in itself is valuable; (2) rather than teaching how religions can debate one another, this seminar helped me think about how we can help our communities bridge differences without diminishing the importance of faith traditions and theology. To put it in the terms of my own tradition, it helped me to think about how to love my neighbor as myself. That's a vast oversimplification, so look for more from me about this in coming months. I'm really grateful for this opportunity to be a student learning how to help other students.

The fourth week: I had a little downtime at home, but not much. More meetings, and preparation for a long trip in July. I packed up my little Subaru with books and camping gear and started driving west.

July

The first week of July I spent studying Alaska Native Law at the University of Montana Law School in Missoula.  No, I'm not an attorney, and I probably won't become one. But when I can, I audit law courses on environmental law in order to be a better teacher, scholar, and pre-law advisor.  A few quick facts to help you see the complexity of the matter: there are 229 different tribes in Alaska; Alaska is the largest state in the United States, but one of the smallest by population; and the history of how the federal government has dealt with Alaska Natives is quite different from the way that history developed in the contiguous 48 states. Want to know more? Take my classes! Once this class ended, I was back in the Subaru, headed south.

The next two weeks were spent in Boulder City, Nevada, a city that was built as a home for the workers on the Hoover Dam.  I was there on a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on the Hoover Dam. We spent two weeks working in archives, touring the interior of the dam, visiting sites of importance around the dam and in the Lake Mead and Valley of Fire parks; hearing lectures by experts from around the country; and reading and discussing historic documents and scholarly works about the dam, water, the desert, Native American history, geology and geography, and much more. As with just about everything else I've mentioned so far, it's hard to summarize all this without doing a great injustice to the value of this Summer Institute. Instead, here are a few more highlights: (1) As before, the people. Dr. Anthony Arrigo and Dr. Michael Green, who led the Institute, and the 24 other scholars from around the country who attended with me are some of the best parts of the institute. (2) Not much can beat direct experience for learning. As Aristotle said, 

 “Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.” Aristotle, De Generatione et Corruptione, 316a5-10 (Basic Works, McKeon, trans.)

Let me assure you that when you're studying the history of the dam and it's 115F outside, you have a better understanding of how the workers who built that dam (often in heat up to 140F!) suffered. (3) I spent a lot of my time researching the environmental history of the place, focusing - as is my wont - on fish and insects.

The fourth week was a little more relaxed: my wife flew to Nevada from a meeting she had in California, and we drove home together, visiting some National Parks (my first visit to the Grand Canyon!) and some favorite places in New Mexico, where I did my first Master's degree at St John's College. We didn't take too much time on the road, since I had the privilege of helping to officiate at the wedding of two beloved alums in the Augustana Chapel of Reconciliation. This is one of the joys of teaching: we get to watch our alums live and grow, and sometimes we get to participate in that growth in delightful ways.

August

I'll spare you the week-by-week of August, and instead I'll tell you some of the other things that have made my summer rich. 

Family: I probably spent too much time away from home this summer, mostly as a result of having an abundance of good opportunities that only come around occasionally. It has been good to spend August at home with my wife and sons. 

Reading: For most of the summer, I've read about a book a day.  If you wonder at that, then you should ask me how I do it. I'd be glad to teach you. Or have a look at this Twitter thread, where I give a quick overview.

Observing: If you follow me on social media, you know I like to look at the small things in nature. I learn from experience, and it is my hope that when we post simple images on Twitter and Instagram we are producing a searchable phenology database. Anyway, feel free to see some of what I have seen this summer here.

Tending my garden: This is both figurative and literal. Two months away from a garden allows a lot of weeds to grow, so my literal garden has needed work.  There is great value in working with one's hands, especially if one's main job is theoretical and based in an office. I like growing some of my own food. As preparation for the coming year, I've also been catching up on home maintenance that I've had to put off during the past school year; and I've been making time to reacquaint myself with natural areas around Sioux Falls where I intend to do some more environmental studies teaching and research this fall. 

Getting ready: I've been meaning to write this blog post for a month, but much of the month has been spent preparing syllabi, working on new projects, finishing up old ones, doing scholarly writing, and many other small things.

Sustainability: the last thing I'll mention is that I've taken on a new role at Augustana, that of Director of Sustainability. I've only been at this for a few weeks, so I''m still figuring out what this will mean for the coming year, but the short version is that I am looking forward to developing some new academic programs in Environmental Studies and Sustainability, and to making the whole campus culture and our practices more sustainable. What does that mean? Short version: I want our descendants to be glad we lived as we did, and I want us to be glad, too. This is another version of "love your neighbor as yourself." Want to know more about this? Let's talk.

When you get back to campus, (or if you're new to Augustana) please feel free to come by for a cup of tea or a quick chat. I look forward to hearing about the new things in your life.

Wishing you all joy in the new academic year,

Dr. O'Hara

Teaching Outdoors

As September approaches, people keep asking me, "Are you ready to get back in the classroom?" 

As early as middle school I knew I wanted to become a college professor, and I love my job.  It is a delight to spend time with young people who are curious, after all.

Years ago, my friend Matt Dickerson pointed out to me that it's also my job to help those who are not curious to see why they should be.  As it turns out, that work is usually delightful, too, a rewarding challenge.

So on the whole, I love my work.

But I admit I don't love classrooms, for several reasons:

First, no matter what decade, every classroom I've been in has exhibited an unhealthy tendency towards becoming cluttered with the latest technology, and most of that tech seems to take up a lot of space and to become the center of attention.  I'm not opposed to technology in the classroom, not at all.  But I'm opposed to letting it get in the way, as it does when the "Smart Cart" leaves me no room for my lecture notes, or when I can't seem to turn the ceiling-mounted projector on or off.  I'm a fan of chalk, because chalk allows spontaneity, and it allows for much more than alphanumeric writing in neat rows.  Sadly, concerns about chalk dust getting into computers is threatening to make chalkboards disappear from my classrooms.  Alas.  Chalk is an excellent technology, and if it vanishes, I will mourn its loss.

Second, classroom architecture is not some value-free, neutral design.  Classroom architecture makes a big difference in how people teach, and how they learn:

• This too is related to technology, of course.  If the class is focused on video screens, then all the chairs will face the screens, and the classroom might even be structured like a theater.  Etymologically, "theater" means something like "a place of gazing," and theaters tend to encourage people to gaze.  Sometimes this can work against other activities, like colloquy, small-group interaction, and really anything that involves students moving from one place to another.  
• If that last sentence made you ask,"But why do you want your students to move from one place to another?" then you see that we have some pretty strong presuppositions about how education should happen: students should sit and listen, teachers should stand and lecture.  This communicates something about authority, and at times that's helpful.  But it can also invite students to lean back into passivity, and to assume they have no role in their own education.
• The furniture in classrooms tells us how people are to behave, because it has been made and purchased by people who had in mind some idea of how students should behave.  Most wrap-around desks are made for right-handed people, for instance.  And most classroom desks I've seen expect students to sit upright, at attention, with a book open in front of them.  I really don't like those desks, and I feel trapped when I sit in them.  I wonder sometimes how they make my students feel. I wish we had fewer chairs and more sofas.  Maybe a fireplace, or some tables with glasses of water, and ashtrays on them.  I suppose I wish I could teach in pubs or ratskellers, which are, after all, places consciously designed for people to meet and discuss what most matters to them, informally, passionately, amicably.
• Classrooms that privilege video screens tend to undervalue natural light and windows.  I am reminded of Emerson's reflection on a boring sermon he once heard.  Emerson wrote, in his Divinity School Address, that while the minister droned on, Emerson looked out the window at the falling snow, which, he proclaimed, preached a better sermon than the minister.  I have no doubt that nature can often give a better lecture than I can.  

Step off the trails! Explore! An ironic sign at Walden Pond.

Which is why, as often as I can, I get my students out of the classroom.  When we are reading Thoreau's Walking, we go for a walk.  When I teach environmental philosophy, we often meet under the great tree in our campus quad, where I encourage students to daydream and to play with the grass, to look for worm-castings and owl pellets, feathers and seed-pods, invertebrates and fallen bits of bark.  What good is it to gain the world of theoretical knowledge at the expense of knowledge gained through vital, haptic, bodily experience?

And this is why I am a preacher of the importance of study abroad.  Not just travel, but serious, engaged, rigorous study in the classroom of life in another place.  This is why I teach Classics in Greece every year, and why year after year I take students to Central America to study environmental philosophy and ecology.

More and more I've been trying to shift the learning focus in my classes from the classroom to the laboratory - where by "laboratory" I mean anywhere that allows students to learn with their whole person.  I make my ancient philosophy students devote hours each semester to star-gazing, in part because this is what the ancients did, and in part because I don't want them to miss the stars.  I want them to gaze in wonder at the firmament so that when they read Aristotle and Galileo they know that they've looked at what those great minds saw as well.  We even occasionally take field trips to really dark places like the South Dakota Badlands so we can see the skies even better.

My environmental philosophy students must observe a square meter of earth for a semester, spending an hour at a time without a camera, drawing and writing about what they see, because it does not make sense to me to talk about the earth when you have not taken the time to sit upon it, to listen to it, to smell and taste it, and to see what other lives creep, and walk, and fly across it.

My friend Aage Jensen advocates the Norwegian philosophy of Friluftsliv, life and education outdoors.  And when he organizes a conference on it, he eschews conference centers and holds the conference while walking through the mountains, or paddling a river.  Because he believes that one should practice what one preaches, and that nature is always ready to teach.

To paraphrase the Stoic Musonius, teachers would do well to talk less and to take their students with them into the fields, because there they will learn far better and far more than in the lecture hall.

Nature is full of things worth seeing.

Re-entry: Bringing It Home After Studying Abroad

In one of my last posts, I talked about what you should do when you come home from study abroad.  We often refer to this as "re-entry," which makes me think of spacecraft falling back to earth on a turbulent cushion of superheated air.  Exhilarating, terrifying, and hard to explain to those who haven't gone through it, I imagine.

Now let me offer one more step that will make re-entry even more valuable for you.  As you journal and reflect on what you saw while you were abroad, take time to look over your journal entries, and ask yourself, What do I want to bring home?

What will you bring home?

Charles Peirce once wrote, "An American who has never been abroad fails to perceive the characteristics of Americans." Now you've been abroad, and you see things differently.  Make your new vision matter.  Is there one lesson you can incorporate into your life? One thing you saw abroad that you wish you could have here?

When I've lived in Europe, I've never needed a car, but here in the U.S. I often feel I need to drive even when I'm not going very far.  So I've decided to try to walk or bike whenever I can, and to use public transit.  It's a small thing, but it makes a big difference for my health, and it might make a difference in the lives of others around me.  This is one thing I've brought home.  

So how about you?  What did you learn?  What do you see differently?  And what will you bring home?

When You Come Home From Studying Abroad

It being the end of our January term, Augustana College students have just returned from studying abroad in Thailand, Cuba, India, New Zealand, touring Europe, and elsewhere.  We place a high value on study abroad, because when you return, you can never see the world the same again.

Epidauros

We think that when Americans study abroad, that's good for the whole world because it helps Americans to see America as they could not see it otherwise. 

Of course, it's not without its costs.  Our students who have just come back are jetlagged and road-weary.  Many are a little deeper in debt.  And the new term is about to begin.

That being the case, let me offer some advice to those of you who are returning from studies abroad.  I know you're tired, so I'll be brief:

1) Get some rest.  Stay up until it's dark out, and then sleep deeply.  Get back in sync with the sun on this side of the world. 

2) Journal every day.  Trust me.  Do this.  Do it now. Don't put it off.  Your memories are already fading. Get it down.  Write however you want - impressionistically, narratively, whatever.  Write about all five senses.  Write about language.  Write about the people you were with, and write their names down. Write down names of places, hotels, restaurants, museums. Do it now.  Go.

3) Tell stories. To anyone who will listen.  Storytelling is one of our oldest and best ways of sharing our experiences.  Enrich your classmates and professors who couldn't join you.  Tell us what you saw, what surprised you.  Tell us anecdotes about specific times, places, meals, people, vehicles.  Give us detail.  As you do, you will nourish your own memories, and you'll sort out what matters most to you.  As Umberto Eco once wrote,

"One who tells stories must have another to whom he tells them, and only thus can he tell them to himself."* 

And perhaps most importantly,

4) Come up with a couple of one-liners.  This is how to prepare for the inevitable question, "How was India?"  If you say "It was amazing!" the conversation is over and the opportunity is gone.  Instead, try something like "I never had food like the food I had in Delhi!" or "I wish you could have seen the quality of the rivers" or "The best day was the fourth day."  If the questioner was just being polite, that will satisfy them.  But these specific memories, offered as one-liners, are invitations to further conversation.  They are a way of saying "Would you like to know more?"

You had a great experience.  Some of it was wonderful, some was no doubt very difficult.  This is why we go.  Now, you've brought it home.  Do what you can to preserve the memories, and to share them with the rest of us.

So welcome home!  And now, go get some sleep.  (And then you can read Part Two of this post.)

My mother in Rome during her college years.

*****

*Umberto Eco, Baudolino, (New York: Harcourt, 2002) p. 207.

On Traveling and Journaling

It's been too long since I've blogged.  My excuse?  I've been traveling a lot, including quite a bit with students.  In the last few months I've been in Belize, Guatemala, Greece, and the UK with my students.

This probably sounds like a dream life, and I have to admit it's not all that bad.

But it's also a lot of work.  A weeklong class in Greece usually takes me a little over a year to prepare, and in the semester leading up to it the workload approaches the amount of preparation I do for any of my other classes.  Last fall I was teaching my usual load plus prepping two study-abroad courses, so I was swamped much of the time.

But it's worth it.  My students come back with perspectives they could not have gained at home, if their journals are to be believed.

I always require my students to keep a journal while we're traveling.  Sometimes I ask them specific questions, but usually I tell them to journal not for me but for themselves.  You may think this naive, and you may be right.  But I'd rather be naive than cynical.  That is, I'd rather appeal to their self-interest and to their own sense of themselves as growing learners than force them to write answers to my pre-fab questions.

I do give them some guidance, however.  Here are some of the things I teach them about journaling:

1) Pay attention to the little things, and write down whatever catches your attention.  If you noticed it, it probably matters.

 

2) Pay attention to all of your senses.  We tend to write about major events that happened, as though we were news reporters looking for the big story.  But why not write about the smells?  What sounds do you hear?  What do the birds or the streets or the nighttimes sound like?  How does the place you're in feel on your skin?  What new tastes have you encountered?  And so on.

3) Write continuously.  Don't plan to write a sketch or outline and then fill it in later.  As soon as you are on that plane home you will begin to forget what you experienced, and you will forget far more quickly than you want to believe.  Write now.

4) Write "gestures" and impressions.  Some of us have very good prose composition skills, and some of us do not.  But all of us can write down a few phrases, a few adjectives, a few words we've heard in passing.  Why not include entries in which you stand in one place and write down a list of nouns, of verbs, of adjectives that strike you as you soak the place in?

5) Draw pictures.  This is one of the best pieces of advice I've ever received, and I am no artist.  Cameras are great, but they capture what they see.  Drawing captures what you see.  Drawing also forces you to see what you wouldn't have seen otherwise.  As Louis Agassiz once said, a pencil is one of the best tools for seeing.  One of the best drawing tools I know of is a cheap ball-point pen.  You don't need fancy paper, and you don't need a lot of time.  Most of my best journal drawings are made in under two minutes with a cheap pen.

Try this out, and see if it doesn't completely change your journals.  When I'm in Greece, I like to show my students the different kinds of stonework in ancient walls.  The kind of stonework is helpful for dating the site, and it tells us a lot about the technology of the people who built the walls.  I've found that as I try to draw a section of wall, the differences between cyclopean walls, Lesbian walls, and Roman walls become clearer to me, I remember them better, and I am better able to teach about them.


6) Revisit your journal periodically.  Last of all, when you get back, revisit your journal from time to time.  Start off doing so every week, and then every month and every year.  When you revisit it, add a page or two of notes.  What does your experience traveling back then mean to you now?  Traveling is a luxury some of us enjoy, but it can also be a valuable learning opportunity, one that continues to be valuable for as long as we continue to reflect on it.

Do you have other journaling tips?  I'd love to hear them.  Meanwhile, I've got to get back to preparing for my next trips and courses abroad.


Buen viaje!