Three Courses

Walking around the pretty darn empty campus during last Thursday’s nor’easter, I passed by a thicket of the recycling buckets that get repurposed during heavy rain. Several had been rebranded as seen in the image below.

As walked by I thought, “This seems an opportunity to form an ad hoc committee to study bucket use.” Several questions might be studied: do repurposed recycling buckets have the optimal design for catching rain; might some other color bucket draw attention better and keep passersby safer; should a snappy “rain leak container” logo be designed and implemented; might we pass future messages by an editorial board?

I will note that there was very little debris in this particular container.

I was thinking about hats the other day, and started me thinking about George Carlin, and that led me to Louis CK speaking in honor of Carlin at a memorial service. You can see Louis’ comments on youtube.

At 4:20 on the video Louis starts to discuss Carlin’s ability to toss out old material, starting out fresh every year. I think about this idea in my teaching. It is not quite the same of course. I don’t toss out everything I’ve said about Taming of the Shrew, searching for entirely new ideas. But I do try to think freshly and deeper each time I approach a work, topic, or assignment. One of my pleasures over the last decade has been teaching English Language and Grammar and creating entirely new examinations three or four times each term. Those tests are challenging to write, but they keep me honest, and focused on the class and topic at hand. I can only test what I know I have taught and the students should have learned. Increasingly I try to use this same evergreen approach in each class that I teach.

Carlin on Hats.

Tonight after class I stopped by a colleague’s office to chat for a bit. “How’s it going?” she said. “Fine,” I replied: “Quite nicely. Just came out of a very good Dylan class.”

Of course I meant “Shakespeare” class, but there you have it. Thinking of one famous entertainer and swapping for another.

And earlier in the day I had seen the new interactive video of Bob’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” Check it out here.