Appleton Visit-Day Three

Meg making a point during class discussion

Friday was a campus day.  I went with Megan to her office and finished watching The Battle of Algiers in preparation for sitting in on her Freshman Studies class.  They are finishing up Milgrim's Obedience to Authority before moving to the movie.  This is a very serious and innovative program that in many ways recaptures the experience I had at Rockhurst college in the late fifties.  since our curriculum was highly structured with almost no electives, we were all taking the same courses at the same time.  It created, intentionally or not, a sense of intellectual community which was subsequently lost when "liberal arts" requirements shifted from specific courses to distribution requirement in areas of study.  This freshman studies program is an attempt to recapture that sense of intellectual community.  The works are diverse and include not only written works but other performances:  movies and music.  For example, in addition to the above mentioned works, this quarter will consider Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, The Collected Fictions of Jorge Borghes (an Argentinian writer), and Stephen J. Gould's Bully for Brontosaurus.  Megan will assume the directorship of the program next fall for a two year term, clearly an indication of how highly she is valued by her colleagues here.

After class we went to Harmony Cafe for lunch.  Meg returned to campus to do some work and stayed at the cafe to finish reading A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.  This won the 2011 Pulitzer for fiction.  It is obviously a good read.  It is a novel but very creatively arranged into 13 chapters that seem as though each is a short story but each is a window into a slice of time and life of a set of characters loosely organized around the music business from the sixties and into the near future.  Well worth one's time and effort.

Then I returned to campus for Happy Hour with the usual suspects from the faculty, dinner out at Rancho Azul, ice cream purchase, and then relaxing at home watching the end of Valkyrie and the entire Full Metal jacket.  Given that I have the original All Quiet on the Western Front loaded on my iPad for the trip home, I am getting my fill of war movies.

Go here to see the updated photo album.

And here is video of some interchange in the Freshman Studies class.