His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, has a message for us (reposted from Lion’s Roar):
My hope and wish is that, one day, formal education will pay attention to what I call education of the heart. Just as we take for granted the need to acquire proficiency in the basic academic subjects, I am hopeful that a time will come when we can take it for granted that children will learn, as part of their school curriculum, the indispensability of inner values such as love, compassion, justice, and forgiveness.
Ursula K. Le Guin is one of Portland’s greatest enduring gifts to the world of letters. I keep three of her so-called “young adult” books in my nightstand and I have obtained several copies of her rendering of the Tao Te Ching over the years, partly out of forgetfulness, but mostly out of enthusiasm for the spirit that she fires into these ancient teachings.
Ms. Le Guin received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the National Book Awards ceremony last week in New York. Her acceptance speech has gone viral online (people still care that much about authors and books!?) and a follow-up interview with the Oregonian explores how the speech came about and her ideas on authoring, publishing, science fiction, and capitalism. Read the speech, the Oregonian interview, and listen to NPR’s coverage.
Some speech highlights:
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. …
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. …
We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.
Move over G.N. Lewis. Forget electron sharing, bonding orbitals, and ionic attraction. xkcd has finally deduced the secret of chemical bonding. (And guess what? I see some unexpected connections between C and U chemistry!)
Eric Mazur is well known in science teaching circles for the innovative teaching approaches that he has popularized. He pays close attention to student behavior and data on student performance, and he also thinks deeply about what is going on in our classrooms. Most importantly, he isn’t afraid to try new things and advocate for them. So when he says something is wrong with the way we assess student work, one should listen. Or better yet, watch and listen because his 2013 lecture* “Assessment: The Silent Killer of Learning,” can be found on YouTube.
*Presented on Oct 29, 2013 as the Dudley Herschbach Teacher/Student Lecture
The Dalai Lama Environmental Summit was held in Portland in May 2013. Many thousands attended. Maitripa College, the first Tibetan Buddhist college in the Pacific NW, has released a free 11 minute video highlighting some of the speakers, ideas, and feelings from that day. I hope some of this continues to echo one year later.
See the video. It will make you smile.
(Update: On 11 Oct 2021 the Reed College Board of Trustees announced its decision to divest the college’s endowment from fossil fuels. Read about it here.)
Reed’s plans to divest all fossil fuel holdings from its endowment were announced today by commencement speaker, Igor Vamos ’93. In the midst of his speech, which focused largely on the challenges of climate change, he told today’s graduates that their job is to “do what they must” to address these challenges rather than just “do what they love” (a reference to a phrase used by Steve Jobs at a Stanford commencement address). Vamos then added that Reed College Pres. John Kroger had informed him over breakfast of Reed’s decision to join 11 other colleges and universities and divest from fossil fuel companies.
This statement, along with much of the speech, was greeted with wild and enthusiastic applause. Let’s hope that the President and the Board of Trustees were listening.
DIVEST !!!
May 22nd update: link to the Oregonian’s coverage of the Vamos prank.
In a few days I’ll sit under the big white tent and watch a few hundred Reed seniors walk across the platform and accept their diplomas. It will be a proud, happy moment for the graduate, their family, and all of us at Reed. Then, hours later they will drive away from campus, heading off into a new life. Maybe a job, more school, or just testing the waters for what to do next.
All of this takes me back to my own college graduation in 1976. It was a sunny day in Pasadena and even as I accepted my diploma I was already thinking ahead to Madison, Wisconsin, my future destination. I wasn’t really interested in a ‘summer vacation’ (I had come down with a case of senioritis in the final quarter of my senior year so that had felt like vacation enough) and I was eager to get into a real research lab and start on my life’s work: being a professional organic chemist.
While I’m on the topic of science animations (see Animation Students take on Science), here’s another one that certainly deserves a larger audience. (And maybe should have attracted a little more notice at last Sunday’s Oscar ceremony?)
The video tackles the distinction between scientific theorizing and water-cooler speculation right from the start with, “You might say that you have a theory about alien spaceships or who ate the last piece of cake, but a scientist would not call these theories.” One key difference: scientific theories rest on facts. But there’s more.
Like the animations that I posted yesterday, this one came about as a 2012 class assignment. The class was offered jointly by Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, and the video was written, animated, and assembled, by two Brown undergrads: Jessica Brodsky and Alexis Shusterman (disclosure: my daughter).
The Commercial Animation students at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts may have thought that their science days were over, but their professor, John Serpentelli, had other ideas. Last year he asked his class to create animated movies that would bring archival materials from the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s collection back to life. Here are the results:
The Times reported today that Pete Seeger died in Manhattan yesterday. He was 94. That means he was already 70 when I arrived at Reed.
My older brother was the first one to share Seeger’s name with me and it was also through him that I first heard Seeger’s music: One summer, while my brother was in college, a friend asked him to store a box of LPs for the break. One of those LPs was an early 60’s recording of Seeger singing at Carnegie Hall concert on behalf of some social cause (freedom riders most likely, but perhaps labor or Vietnam war). I played that album 40 times or more that summer and I could sing every song by heart. It never occurred to me that I was probably ruining the LP by playing it so often and my brother never complained.
