Saturday, August 21, 2021

Retirement!

 So the SASW Department gave me a retirement send off yesterday. Very relaxed and informal, and with kind words. They know I like primates, so they gave me what appears to be a Spider Monkey and donated a brick in my name to the Jax Zoo. Little do they know I’ll be around a lot, cleaning 32 years of experience out of my office. Thanks, Everybody!



Tuesday, August 3, 2021

Grades are in!

Grades are in. I had 19 students for my last (?) Introduction to Anthropology class. The course was presented over Zoom for six weeks from mid-June to last July 30. We met on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:00am to 12:30pm. I typically gave us a 15-20 minute break at around 10:30.

I tried to cover a couple of topics each meeting, although that didn't always work out. I used the first three weeks to cover biological anthropology, and saved culture and language for the last three. Throughout, I used videos from the old Faces of Culture series as well as a film on documenting endangered languages and a segment from David Mayberry-Lewis's Millennium series.

Lectures were supplemented with Powerpoint slides. Generally I use the slides as bullet points; only if there's an especially worthwhile quote do I include it on the slide, for example this from Teddy Roosevelt:




In lecture, students were exposed to all the things wrong with TR's worldview.

The class average was in the B range and lowest grade was a C. I would have preferred face-to-face, obviously, but still they were a pretty good group.

Word of the day

I know I'll get pummeled for this, but: I keep seeing children in Gaza being pulled, some dead, some alive, out of rubble created by bom...