After a crushing interlude of unemployment subsequent to my first teaching job, I was fortunate to pick up some courses for my old department, giving an intro course I had refined repeatedly and a moral problems course I was not at all prepared to teach.

People often have the mistaken idea that, when teachers themselves go to school to become teachers, they are taught everything they know, and then go on to re-teach it to their own students. But there is often a deep gap between the things faculty in higher education cover in school, and the things they are expected to cover to make a living. In reality the work, especially early-career work, is a constant struggle to create and refine the courses and their materials, starting from almost nothing.

These were larger than any courses I’d taught before, or since, and I found that the format pushed me to lecture more like a lecturer. I’ve never liked to be observed while I teach, but during these courses I also had five different TAs—another first—and I learned from them how to trust the presence of an appreciative ear, one that could hear more than a student would understand just then.

This was where I first started to teach Thoreau; I tried to learn something about how to do it from his insistence that ‘the volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement’. There’s a way to tease out an astonishing implication from that if you lecture a little bit about spirit and speech and breath and evaporation and the etymology of ‘volatile’. Once when I did it, I actually saw a student in the back of the lecture hall open his mouth in astonishment.

It was a great stroke of luck to land my first position immediately upon graduating with my doctorate, at a small liberal arts college, even though it was ‘only’ a what academics classify as a ‘visiting’ position (one year, temporary). Now, almost fifteen years later, it seems idyllic. Nowhere else have I been as welcomed as a colleague; nowhere else was there such collective enthusiasm among students for philosophy, indeed for college in general.

Having seen many years of students since, I have learned to connect this to the just-recent financial crisis; the group at this school didn’t yet know the crushing anxieties that would set in in higher education, and could still manage to approach their college experience in some spirit of exploration and experimentation.

One of my students went on to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy; her career is now better than mine. It is bittersweet when she tells me: your ancient philosophy class was what made me think I could become a philosopher.

'… when we’re able to maintain a practice, day after day, week after week, then we can make progress, even if it’s in very small increments.'

Musil's writer's block

Amateur

Rocks.

In big piles.

Of rocks.

'We haven't invented the Hula-Hoop or anything. We're only contemporary. And if we're different from the rest of TV, it's because the rest of TV isn't even contemporary.'

'Listeners, not speakers, are the main reasoners'

Atop a massive tree stump, a Lime scooter on its side, as if a sacrifice.