Selections from the approximately two million words I've written for classroom handouts over 45 years of college teaching.
For twenty years, I taught in an honors program called “Philosophy, Politics, and the Public." I and a series of colleagues taught the sophomore block where we got the students involved in electoral campaigns (in the fall) and legislative politics (in the spring). I taught a series of topics on political history, civic culture, political philosophy, public experience and the like. As the first fall meeting approached, I tried to find some engaging articles just get them engaged and get the ball rolling. This post is the result of serendipity. *The New York Review of Books *(which I've been reading since my mentor Christopher Lasch introduced me to it 1975) just happened to have reviews of a book about Elon Musk and Pope Francis's Laudato Si'. The juxtaposition struck me as odd and provocative and I wrote this handout for the first day of class. Rereading it, i would have thought I was more critical of Musk. Surely I would be today.
One summer I attended the University of Iowa's writers' workshop, the duffer camp not the real one, the fellowship for real novelists. This is one of the pieces of writing I produce and perhaps the best one (although that might be damning with faint praise).
For my first twenty years of teaching, I taught a two-semester survey of U.S. History. Some great students along the way, but a lot of apathy too. Way too late, after the Philosophy, Politics, and the Public program had already rescued me, I recognized that I needed to craft a new survey that would attract more engaged students. I did it for two years and thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm posting here materials from the last semester I taught it. In that semester, I read American environmental history since 1865 through the lens of philosophical pragmatism and, specifically, Louis Menand's entertaining The Metaphysical Club. I'm not sure I had the students all the way (given the above description, perhaps understandable), but by the end I gave a class session that I labelled “the Revenge of the Metaphysical Club.”