I’ll confess to being completely surprised by the students in my seminar. The seminar deals with the theory of evolution by natural selection, how it was developed and how it’s been applied and interpreted in the 150-plus years since. There’s an attitude that seems to be common among my students that I just plain wasn’t [...]
Tags: darwin, history, teaching
Posted in academic | 8 Comments »>The exam scoring work is done, and it was fascinating. I was scoring short essays, and while I obviously can’t talk about the essay questions and answers, they did get me thinking (again, as always) about the ways that history is used to create worldviews. For example, by way of an unrelated-to-exam-scoring story: at WorldCon [...]
Tags: economics, history, perspective
Posted in academic, science fiction | 2 Comments »>What I assumed was a quick thinking-time housecleaning break yesterday turned into a full-scale cleaning assault. Somewhere around the point where I decided it was a good idea to sweep behind the hot-water heater, I realized what was going on. On some level, it is apparently very important to me to have a clean house [...]
Tags: birthday, history, strange horizons
Posted in personal | 8 Comments »>I’ve been re-reading The Years of Rice and Salt recently, and I’m even more impressed than the first time I read it. I picked it up again because I’ve been thinking about alternate histories, and what the form has to say about history in general. I don’t normally like alternate history stories–there was a period [...]
Tags: alternate history, history, years of rice and salt
Posted in academic, science fiction | 6 Comments »>
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