Ruins and Ruin: The Temple to Poseidon

       If a picture is worth a thousand words, then it shouldn’t be difficult to write a few pages about any photograph that comes my way, especially since I’m an English professor. The particular photo I’m attempting to translate into prose is of a structure left in ruins. By virtue of having been there and actually taken the photograph, I know that it was once a Greek temple to Poseidon. The photo, however, shows little more than a few remaining pillars of what was once a grand edifice overlooking the Aegean Sea, a symbol to all of the power, wealth, and awesomeness of a people and their god.

       I took a lot of pictures that day. I was in Europe traveling with my cousin, V., and my dear friend E. We had flown in to Paris; traveled to and through Croatia; taken a frigid, frustrating, forty-hour, capricious train ride through Bulgaria and a number of other countries; and arrived at the temple of Poseidon during a day trip on which our host’s friend T. was taking us. It was nearing sundown when we parked the car and started to walk up the hill, though it was more a gently-sloped, rocky mountain. There was not much to see, structurally, once we got to the temple, but the view was breathtaking.

The Worst Part About Traveling: Other Tourists

       Since I first purchased a digital camera, I have taken well over 100,000 photos. This is symptomatic of a deep-seated desire for perfection in almost everything I do. Where I used to stand around for several seconds, minutes, and, on more than one occasion, hours composing a shot and waiting for the perfect moment to click the shutter, I now stand around for several seconds, minutes, and sometimes even hours composing a shot and waiting for the perfect moment to take a hundred pictures in quick succession. All the time that this and other compulsions (I am also an inordinately detailed journalizer) take up when I am traveling tends to annoy even the most amiable of traveling companions.
       One of my worst, or possibly best, photographing habits, however, is waiting for all other tourists to clear out of my pictures before I take them. A bird here or there is sometimes acceptable, but a full-blown human in the midst of a composition is right out. When you visit national landmarks, this photographic tick can be extremely time consuming; e.g., I was at the Louvre trying to get a decent shot of the Venus de Milo, and despite the fact that there were about thirty people milling about, I arranged the shot and took it when several people were passing exactly behind the statue. It took about thirty minutes, but the room looks completely abandoned in my picture and it is glorious.

The Most Dangerous Game: Jeopardy?

Aside from military personnel and doctors, I’m fairly certain that teachers have the most harrowing initiating experience into their field: student teaching. You spend an inordinate amount of your college career in education courses, almost always more than in your major area of study, and you don’t really learn anything about teaching because you’re too busy making posters with magic markers and being affirmed by positive thinkers. The classroom observations and experiences in which you’re required to participate are really only vague, cloudy representations of what teaching is actually like. You have to prepare and teach one lesson for one hour; any chump off the street could do that. You need to design a week’s worth of course material and teach that; almost any chump off the street could do that. Once you get to student teaching, however, the requirements exponentially compound and you are, seemingly out of the blue, expected to plan for and execute nine weeks of teaching a full load of classes with students you've never met, and you have essentially no supervision or oversight. Granted, that is how my student teaching experience was. I had many classmates who were given all of their materials and who only taught for two or three weeks on their own with their supervising teacher flitting around the classroom like a fairy godmother; I suppose their teachers took a more loose interpretation of “nine week internship” than the ex-military, decades-of-teaching veterans who supervised my student teaching and who were moderately disappointed that they didn't get me hammered before parent-teacher conferences.

I'm a Writer, not a Philosopher; or, Ownership and Identity: Resolving the Problem of Theseus’ Ship

Author's note: I write all the assignments I give out to my students, and this is my version of one of the writing assignments I gave to the students in my Advanced Composition class. Although not the most interesting thing I've ever written, it illustrates the basic trajectory of an argumentative essay and provides good examples of all the essential parts of any paper.

     What does it mean to own something? Does ownership even matter when something already has an established identity? In the case of Theseus’ ship, a philosophical problem based on the exploits of a Greek hero, concepts of ownership and identity become extremely unstable. Using the most fundamental definition of ownership, however, clarifies some of the trickier elements in this classic philosophical problem and shows that whoever is in possession of an object is ultimately responsible for its value and safety regardless of its symbolic identity.