David O'Hara

Tonight I got to speak with one of my alums who is working on her PhD in entomology. She helped me start the beekeeping program at my university, and I created a class just for her because we didn’t offer a class on Hymenoptera, which were and are her passion. So I made the class up from scratch and then made her my teaching assistant. It was such a delight to hear her tonight as she told me about her research. She now knows far more than I will ever know about bees, and she just keeps learning and growing. A teacher’s dream! As she talked, I took notes about her dissertation, and I started making sketches in my notebook. When she mentioned Lasioglossum (some of my favorite tiny bees) I had to sketch one. Here it is, in honor of my wonderful alum.

Links to some of my public speaking:

davoh.org/speaking/

This was my second TEDx talk — I gave one in Fargo a few years ago — and it was nice to be doing one in the city where I live. I spent the first half of the evening with my wife and some friends in the audience, then went backstage for the second half so I could get miked up (mic’ed up? What’s the right way to type that? So they could put a wireless mic on me.)

I spend much of my life standing in front of groups and talking with them about “ideas that matter.” It’s what I do as a teacher, and it’s also a big part of what my business does. It’s a good feeling when people come up to me later and tell me that they learned something helpful, something that helped them to examine their lives, and to live as better neighbors, better ancestors.

I don’t advertise my business, but I let it spread by word of mouth. No website, no contact information or “landing page,”no description of what I do. Maybe that’s a bad business strategy, but it seems to work pretty well.

The day after my TEDx talk I gave a presentation at the Dakota Conference at the Center for Western Studies at Augustana University. Two men who came to my TEDx talk (and whom I did not know before that) came and sat in the front row. Before my talk began I apologized and said they’d be hearing a lot of the same material. They said that’s why they were there! They liked it the first time around, and had told friends to come to my second talk. They seemed pleased with the second round as well.

Tomorrow I give another talk for a local faith community, then I’m off to Texas this week for another talk, once my classes are done. So far, no worries about running out of work to keep me busy!

The Sioux Falls talk is not available online yet, but I’ll post a link once the TED channel has edited it and posted it.

The pines I planted along my driveway have become home to a half dozen bird nests this spring, a welcome set of additions to my garden.

Getting ready for my TEDx talk tonight at the Washington Pavikion in Sioux Falls.

Fascinating and disheartening to watch small colleges gamble away their strengths (small classes, close relationships between teachers and students, excellence in liberal arts, connections to communities, heritage and tradition) in an effort to chase the “best practices” (an insidious euphemism) and the apparent safety of imitating the mediocrity of alleged comparison or aspirational schools.

The students in my Classical Asian Philosophies class really seem to enjoy the lesssons I give them in how to play the game of Go, in Chinese calligraphy, and in writing Sanskrit.

Some say that college should focus on job skills, but I’m busy over here teaching the liberal arts, fostering delight in learning, and having my heart filled by the smiles and laughter of my students as they learn to use a brush pen and explore ancient ideas that still have life in them.

It might just be that the “job skills” my students most need are found in the practices of wonder, attention, curiosity, love of neighbor, rigorous thinking, reading closely, learning others’ words, examining their own lives, sitting still with texts, developing skills of conversation about great ideas, living lives that include contemplation and not just busy action.

For several years a group of friends and I have been gathering to discuss the history of the Peloponnesian War. We’ve been reading primary sources, and working our way through them together.

The process has been helpful for me as a teacher, because it has deepened my understanding of the context of some of the ancient philosophers whose works I teach regularly.

More importantly, it is a reminder of how perennial these texts are. My friends and I work in a range of different fields, but each of us notices how relevant the old histories are for our times.

Perhaps best of all: reading and talking together has been a good practice in friendship.

If you’re in Sioux Falls tomorrow, feel free to come to my TEDx talk! I’ll be speaking about my research over the last decade on the native freshwater mussels of our rivers, why they’re important for making clean water, and what we can do to restore them.

Mussels have been called “the livers of the rivers.” They can clean 25 gallons of water a day. They also have complicated reproductive lives, and it was easy for us to disrupt them. Restoring their ability to reproduce will take work, and it will require us to ask better questions.

Come tomorrow and I’ll tell you what questions we should be asking, and how to begin to answer them together.

In my informal logic class I begin every day by reading a passage from a mystery story. I don’t tell the students the name of the story or the author (and no, I won’t tell you, either).

It’s an incentive to show up to the beginning of class, of course, so you don’t miss out on the next installment.

Each day we also talk about how the detectives are reasoning about the evidence, which always leads into a discussion of informal logic.

It’s probably not how I’m supposed to teach, but I’ve been doing this for 25 years and it hasn’t failed me yet. Some would argue that I should spend more time on logic exercises, get more formal about informal logic, use the precious time to teach the terms and to give examples from a textbook, etc.

I began to wonder recently whether I needed to switch my approach. Do students really want to hear a professor read a story to them? Maybe that’s outdated and childish.

But I have stuck with it because I believe we have been a story-telling species for a long time, and that we often learn best through stories.

Yesterday in class I thought I might finish the story, but I still have a few pages to go and ran out of time. When I stopped on a cliffhanger, the students groaned. How does the mystery get solved? How does it end?

Turns out they’re engaged and eager to see it through.

I doubt that would be the case if I were using a standard textbook.

A rare sighting of a great blue heron on campus today led me to get out my sketchbook, binoculars, and watercolors and spend twenty minutes observing. A photo with my long lens would have captured lots of details that others might like, but I think I saw more this way. I’ve never noticed how many colors there are on this bird, or the different kinds of feathers on its breast.

I hear a lot about vibe-coding at work but it seems we keep buying software from outside vendors that is worse than the software we currently have, at least from a UI/UX perspective. I wonder how long before that changes.

The closure of Sterling College in Vermont makes me sad. It was one of just a handful of “work colleges” in our country where students helped run the college. They grew much of their own food, learned how to build and repair their own buildings, cared for draft horses and sheep. It was always a small school, and never had much of an endowment to fall back on. Such places are fragile, but they can also be places where friendship and community can grow in good, rich soil.

I often dream of having such a place to teach, ideally one that would combine the skills and farm and forest of a work college; the intellectual breadth and practices of St John’s College’s “Great Books” program; a connection to a religious tradition that would offer meaningful rituals, shared texts to contemplate and debate, and a deep sense of calling and purpose; and a freedom to tinker and innovate in workshops and labs made by and for human hands.

In a way, this is what I try to create around me at my little Midwestern Lutheran college, where I teach “great books” classes, run some gardens where I can teach students beekeeping and urban agriculture, landscape design, ecology, logic, art, writing, the use of hand tools to make fences and signs and sheds and furniture, religious liturgies and traditions, and technical innovation. But that turns out to be a lot to teach, especially when I add in my field and travel courses and all the incursions and demands of bureaucracies everywhere.

And even here it’s only a handful of students who see the value in learning these things. Not surprisingly, most high school students hope to get the high-paying job they’ve heard about from parents, teachers, guidance counselors, and others who have shaped their view of what matters. When they pick up Plato or Kongzi, or a DeWalt power drill and some cedar boards, or a pair of binoculars and a field guide, or their sleeping bag and camp stove, and follow me to wherever class is leading, most of them wind up having fun.

But it’s not clear to them or to many others that sitting on a beach in Kachemak Bay and cooking fresh-caught salmon over a driftwood fire, or discussing the Melian Dialogue, or designing an outdoor classroom out of local stone, or learning about categorical syllogisms and their uses for legal debate and for coding—it’s not clear to them or to many others that any of this is worthwhile, or that it will lead to any good outcomes later in life.

These things all have a long tail.

Often students will comment on the life I have led. You’ve had such an interesting life, they say. We would like to have interesting lives, too. How can we do that?

I don’t have a simple path for them to follow (though I do have a way to begin to answer the question, and to keep answering it for a lifetime). But I do have an interesting one. And why should life not be interesting?

Much of what captivates them about my life is that I keep learning new things, meeting new people, going to new places. I have lived and worked around the world, and yet I doubt if I lived to Methuselah’s age that this place would run out of wonders to amaze me.

That wonder, that curiosity, and that delight in learning—these are things I hope to teach. And there isn’t a single course you can sign up for that teaches it as a fact to be memorized.

You just have to take the next step, do the next thing, continue to immerse yourself in wonder.

Not vague, airy wonder.

I mean wonder that happens when your hands are at work in shaping the cedar boards into a chair.

Wonder that happens when you see that Thucydides was indeed writing a ktema es aei, something relevant for all times, and not just his own.

Wonder that sneaks up on you when you pluck a raspberry from a cane you planted and tended for two years and, without anyone else handling it first, pop it into your mouth, and taste the sweetness of soil, sunlight, water, and patient, hard work.

Prairie smoke starting to bloom in my garden this week.

Often in the summer my wife and I teach an ecology week at our church camp in the Paha Sapa (Black Hills of South Dakota) and when we do, one of the easiest ways to engender wonder in the campers is to invite them to look at the flowers of the fields. This is one of them. Understated, delicate, and lovely.

More information about this beautiful flower: Geum triflorum / piŋkpá hiŋšmá

Just read a roundup in the Chronicle of Higher Education (probably paywalled, apologies) of all the schools that are closing or cutting programs this month. It’s dreary.

It also has me wondering how much of this would have happened were it not for federal funding. Federal funding was well-intended, but its downstream effect has been addiction to federal funding.

I keep imagining a small college that focuses on teaching students from its own place, where bodily fitness and joy in play matter more than televised competition, where professional training happens at low cost for those who will serve their community, where teachers are valued because they teach more than because they publish academic papers, where majors are an afterthought, where students are regarded as people to be helped rather than as a target market.

I love teaching, and have felt it to be my calling since my youth. I also love writing and publishing, but I mostly prefer to write for people outside the walls of the academy. I enjoy campus athletics, but would prefer to see more students involved, and wish we regarded physical well-being and playful rigor as something available to all rather than as the province of the few.

And while I like seeing what comes out of different disciplines, there’s far too much emphasis on isolation of disciplines from one another for most schools to accomplish anything like liberal education. Everyone should learn the three R’s. Everyone should learn at least one other language proficiently. Everyone should learn skills with which they can make a living and contribute to the community.

The latest page in the book I am writing for my infant grandson. It’s a bespoke book, full of sketches and family stories. I won’t include the text I included after painting Artemis II, but I can tell you it is full of stories of my father’s work on the Mercury Project in the 1960s. He worked for IBM and was on loan to NASA when he figured out how to get a stream of data from Goddard onto all the correct terminals in Florida. He helped train Deke Slayton, and watched Enos launch from the Mercury Control Center. His stories inspired curiosity and wonder in all of his kids.

And now Earlham doesn’t have a philosophy major anymore.

TBH, I don’t care that much about whether majors continue, except schools are infatuated with unimportant metrics, and if you don’t have a lot of majors your admin looks askance and wonders whether you’re really helping anyone out.

Perhaps it is special pleading for my guild, but the classes my philosophy colleagues and I teach to non-majors feel important. I mean classes on ethics, logic, critical thinking and reading, the history of ideas, the development of mathematics and science, great texts of the world—those classes seem to benefit students and the community regardless of the line of work our students wind up in.

It feels like it is time to reimagine education altogether.

Reading Xenophon’s encomium to Agesilaos this morning. His words seem to arise out of a love for Agesilaos’ virtue, and maybe out of a desire to see more people know that such a life was possible.

“What opinion some hold in regard to these matters I know well enough; but for my part I am persuaded that many more men can gain the mastery over their enemies than over impulses such as these. No doubt when these things are known to few, many have a right to be skeptical: but we all know this, that the greater a man’s fame, the fiercer is the light that beats on all his actions…” (Loeb edition, Xenophon VII, Scripta Minora, 109)

The text reads as a eulogy, and as an encomium, and almost as a hagiography. We have very little of that in our time. We are skeptical of sainthood, skeptical that anyone can live a life of virtue. We are more inclined to be Diogenes, doubting that there can be any good man.

This morning I am finding that even if Xenophon’s praise is an exaggeration, the thought of a king who sought the good of his people, who led them to battle at the risk of his own skin, who sought to avoid battle when alternatives were available, who refused statues in his honor and who would not gild his own throne when his people were suffering, who refused wealth and its comforts and preferred to give the best places and the best portions to those whose lives were worthy of imitation — this morning as I read all of this I am finding it to be an invitation to self-examination. What kind of leader am I? What kind of leaders do I follow? Maybe Agesilaos was not as good as Xenophon remembers him, but his memory of Agesilaos is enough to make me want to be better, to have better leaders, to work harder for the common good.

Ever since I was young I have found that during lectures I take better notes and pay better attention if I am also sketching. In a long meeting today that wound up being more lecture than conversation, I took out my pocket watercolor set and, for the first hour, painted sandhill cranes. For the rest of the meeting I decided to practice calligraphy with a new Pentel brush pen that uses the same cartridges as my fountain pens. The brush is pretty smooth but when I hold it as one should for Chinese calligraphy it takes more art than I have to get the words right. So I kept practicing.

In both cases, so much depends on how I hold the brush.

In my teaching I do want my students to gain skills that will help them get jobs and earn a living. But those are things that are generally easy to learn anywhere. Much more than that, I want them to gain what will help them to flourish. I want them to develop practices of contemplation. To learn to have sustained and thoughtful and convivial conversation. To write not just as an efficient practice but as a means of thinking with pen and paper, and of creating a record for themselves and for others to remember.

I want them to consider the stars slowly. To see the stars twinkle. To see the Milky Way turn overhead.

I want them to know that scorpions fluoresce, and to wonder why, and to let that wonder be the nursery of new questions.

I want them to know the bees that are so small they would not cover the whole eye of a bumblebee, and to ask what else they have not yet known about the myriad small lives that fill every space. I want them to know nothing is empty.

I want them to believe that when they look a friend in the eye, when they listen to a mourning stranger, when they hold the hand of a child, when they dance in celebration, when they engage in acts of humble devotion to the highest good their mortal hearts can imagine, they do something that approaches holiness.

My morning thoughts as I pray for my students and prepare to read with them once more, with attention to what ancient authors might have meant for us to hear.