Teaching

For my “Celebrity” friends….

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Pop Culture/Film, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Teaching, The Search for Values 1 Comment

When I was in grad school, we used to regularly play a game called “Celebrity” at parties. It’s a fairly standard name-guessing game with three rounds in which the clue-giver is allowed fewer and fewer words to decsribe the “celebrity” whose name his/her teammates must guess. There aren’t many rules to “Celebrity.” However, the game…

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Brain Sex

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Teaching 1 Comment

Here’s something we all need to talk more about: eros in the classroom. I was reminded of this just recently by an excellently written article in The American Scholar by Yale professor William Deresiewicz entitled “Love on Campus.” (If you haven’t read the piece already, please stop and read it now. The references follwing will…

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The Folly of Youth

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Teaching Comments Off on The Folly of Youth

I’m often amazed at the size of my students’ egos and, to be honest, their cajones. An illustrative anecdote: I recently read several midterm papers by students who lambasted Plato, Aristotle, Kant and other great thinkers of the West for being, variously, “naive”, “idiotic”, “illogical”, and “close-minded.” While seemingly unburdened by the assignment’s requirement that…

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