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EDUCATION AND LEARNING

“DO YOU BELIEVE?” CAREFUL.

April 13, 2015
EDUCATION AND LEARNING, PEOPLE, THINKING AND THOUGHT
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BY: JAMES F. O’NEIL

As a teacher of humanities, I often posed a question to myself.  “As a professor of literature and humanities, can I offer my life as an illustration of the benefits that accrue from humanistic studies?”

Does the study of literature and other “humanistic” subjects result in one’s becoming a more decent, liberal, tolerant, and civilized human being? No guarantees, was my answer.

I often thought of Dr. Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich, the ideological head of the Nazi Party: at age 24, he earned his PhD in Romantic Drama [Humanities] from Heidelberg University.

? ? ?

 

“ONLY CONNECT!”

March 23, 2015
ARTISTIC VENTURES, EDUCATION AND LEARNING

“Only connect! … Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. –E. M. Forster (Howards End)

“. . . the chief problem of teaching anything in our atomized period lies precisely in the fact that the ordinary student cannot or will not connect the few facts he knows, the slim insights he has previously attained, the chance extensions of sensibility into which he has been once or twice tempted, into a large enough context to make sense of the world he inhabits, or the works of art he encounters. Only connect! should be the motto of all critics and teachers.” –Leslie Fiedler

Creation_of_Adam

“Reach out and touch someone you love!”

“WHAT DO I HAFTA KNOW?”

March 18, 2015
EDUCATION AND LEARNING, GROWING UP
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“Remember this, my child: The basics: Being able to count to 100.  Knowing LEFT from RIGHT.  Reciting AND understanding the alphabet.  All else follows from this.”  So, quadratic equations, the Pythagorean Theorem, and the Bill of Rights: learned in time.  “Know your basics.”  (“Oh, and know, also, the colors of the rainbow: R-O-Y-G-B-I-V, for that is basic to appreciating BEAUTY.”)

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“DEAR JONATHAN SWIFT”: REMEMBERING

February 24, 2015
AUTHORS, EDUCATION AND LEARNING, FAVORITES
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BY: JAMES F. O’NEIL

gulliver's travels and other writings by harper honey com Pic of Old Text by HarperHoney.com

James F. O’Neil

2111 Ash Street

Des Plaines

11/29/62

So this is written on the first page of my “textbook” for my 18th Century Literature course in my undergraduate English major program (1962-1964, BA ’64).

I have too many books. Reaching this conclusion (again, as I have noted before), I have been giving away my books to the library. But many, like this volume, have too much writing in them, too many annotated passages in them for the library to accept them. Too much marginalia, too many underlinings and highlightings (mostly in pencil and red ballpoint ink, the latter soaking through the pages; pencil works best).

Thus I have been sorting (again, again) and culling: those books no longer usable (silverfished or book-wormed) or useful have found their lives with me cut short: into the recycle bins. That’s that.

recycle bin arborday foundationCredit: Arbor Day Foundation

The Swift book had a long life with me. By the first page alone, its life and use has time-dates: 11/29/62; 1-15-66 (graduate school, MA ’66); 3-21-68; 9-3-68; 11-18-70; 11-10-71 (dates I taught from the text for undergraduate courses in Minnesota); then a hiatus while I did school administration. The book was again opened 12-11-80 when I was teaching 12th grade English classes in Florida: many memories there, for sure, as my students reacted to the modest proposal, for cooking fattened Irish babies! Next, 11-94, 11-95, 12-2-97, the years I taught British Literature I at a Florida community college. The end.

That was the last time I had need for the text, for I moved on to teach other subjects until retirement in 2003.

The book has sat, has been boxed-unboxed-re-shelved, gathering dust on its pages, as do other unused books that reside in bookcases.  “Some books are to be tasted; others swallowed; and some to be chewed and digested.” [Francis Bacon]

Even though downsizing, I had to keep one page, to remind me of what I learned, of what I remember. I look upon this page (now glued intomy current journal) and see written in pencil, in addition to all the dates of my book’s life, the essence of what I needed to take with me from Gulliver’s Travels:

1. Explain the main point of each voyage, the theme of each book.
2. Explain through the work how “man fails to use his reason.”
3. Discuss the Utopian society in each book. Explain “dystopia.”

Under this handwriting (in cursive, of course with me), I find some other notes of mine: science fiction; Vonnegut. H. G. Wells. Bradbury. Bellamy. Verne. Butler.

the-time-machineNice Cover for The Time Machine

How important Jonathan Swift was. How important the other authors were. Are?

The text is gone. Its residue remains with me: flying machines, time travel (like one of my favorites, The Time Traveler’s Wife?), horses and apes (like Planet of the Apes?), ice-nine, giant octopuses; Erewhon (the novel/place AND the cereal), Dandelion Wine, and Fahrenheit 451 (and now, Fahrenheit 9/11?).

Enough. Enough memories and connections for now. Enough “teaching” and reminders of what was learned or retained from school.

I understand.

So the text was carefully placed into the recycle bin, a text that brought back (brings back?) so many memories of a time. . . .

And so it goes.

But, I have Gulliver’s Travels in my Kindle…

© James F. O’Neil   2015