Tag: StudentsPage 2 of 3

Set on a Path by Socrates

As a college freshman, Thérèse Cory encountered Plato’s Socratic dialogue Euthyphro for the first time. Reading Socrates’ exhortations for Euthyphro—a man bringing charges of murder against his father—to…

Madonna’s Mandorla

While acting as a teaching assistant for a large art appreciation course, Caroline Jones witnessed a student’s curiosity about a painting of the Madonna. Such symbols, so pervasive…

Discovering How Literature and Art Place Demands on Us

From reading Crime and Punishment as a high school senior and the Depression-era masterpieces Absalom, Absolom! and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in college, Gil Greggs describes…

Southern History, Turned Upside Down

J. Porter Durham, Jr. grew up in the segregated South during a time when public Ku Klux Klan sightings were not uncommon. In this video, Durham describes how…

The Currency of Emotional Intelligence

Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye is the 28th Chief Justice of the State of California. She recalls her experiences as a student in a humanities class in college, her upbringing…

Learning How to Read a Poem

Janet Napolitano, President of the University of California, reflects on her life growing up in New Mexico and how a low grade on a poetry analysis assignment in…

Learning How to Sing Stories

Juan Felipe Herrera, a performance artist, activist, and U.S. poet laureate in 2015, recalls how his third-grade teacher’s compliment on his singing voice led to his lifelong belief…

History, (Re)imagined

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism compelled Alexander Knirim, then a young historian, to re-think the role of imagination in history. Knirim…

Inspirational Literature

In this video Marlene Daut describes how teaching literature to college students enables them to both understand their lives and history better, as well as be inspired regarding…

The Transformative Power of Dialogue

Growing up in a very small town that once had the most churches per capita in the country, Catherine Newell was around many people who were believers. Moving…

Broccoli, Anthropology, and the Humanities

Caitlin Patton discusses how the work of Ted Fischer, an anthropologist focused on food culture, specifically the cultivation of broccoli in Guatemala, inspired her choice to study at…

Response to a Response

I was in my English class and we were talking about humanities moments for extra credit. We talked about a woman who disagreed with the “mimetic” effect and…

Unlocking the Code

In this clip, educator Kathryn Bentley discusses an early moment in her teaching career when she came to realize the role emotions play in learning to read and…

What Happens When We Share Our Stories?

Teacher Theresa Pierce discusses how the accumulation and sharing of personal narratives help generate individual moments of realization among students as they also help build a sense of…

Feeling the American Revolution

History teacher Steve Oreskovic discusses how he gets his students to empathize with the feelings of injustice among colonists in the run up to the American Revolution, helping…

What Does It Mean to Be Southern?

Community college teacher Julie Mullis describes how a classroom experience with students from diverse backgrounds and perspectives created a memorable and “multi-colored” sense of place and belonging. The…

Deciding Not to Be a Doctor

Larry Kramer, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, went to college expecting to become a doctor, but taking a course on religious ethics and moral issues…

An Unexpected Insight

At the end of my sophomore year in high school, during the awards ceremony in June, I received my varsity letter for playing football. And then my history…

Harmonia est discordia concors: A Paean to Choral Singing

According to the ancient Greeks, harmony is discord rendered concordant, a concept that applied not just to music but everything from the order of the cosmos to human…

A Lifelong Passion and Appreciation for History

Ben Vinson III reflects on how an appreciation for history can enrich our understanding of what he calls the “depth to our days.” Specifically, he recalls how the…