David O'Hara

Just got a text from an alum who is about to be awarded her J.D. at Georgetown today. I’m so honored that she took the time to text me and to thank me for teaching her as an undergrad.

She was my T.A. for a semester when she was studying for the LSAT. No, I don’t have funds to hire teaching assistants. Instead, I created an independent study for her, and every week I took her out to breakfast before class so we could strategize how to teach well and how she could learn from the experience. It was a class on “sustainable entrepreneurship,” combining philosophy, ethics, law, and practical problem-solving. She was wonderful. And still is.

And yeah, I might be crying a little right now, with joy and pride at what she had done.

I built these Adirondack chairs six years ago so our campus pastors could meet with students outdoors during the beginnings of Covid. People asked me to paint or stain them so they’d last longer. I made them from cedar so they’d enjoy cedar’s natural resistance to decay, and I told people that I liked the idea of them someday rotting into the ground without leaving the residue of paint.

The chairs were hugely popular, and I have since made many more for our campus. I teach students how to make them, and I share the plans with others who want to build them.

The following year someone bought 25 more plastic Adirondack chairs. Within a year or so all had broken and were thrown into dumpsters because plastic chairs are so hard to repair.

I have occasionally replaced a board on one of the cedar chairs, and I keep making more. The wooden ones continue to be enjoyed by students, faculty, and staff needing a little time in the fresh air.

Each one costs about $60 to build. I donate my time and my tools because I like to do things that benefit the university and that don’t cost the university anything. Someday it would be nice to have funding from the university, sure, but the upside of not having a budget is that I never fear budget cuts!

And I have a lot of fun teaching students how to work with their hands.

I am not sure what this sign is asking for

How it’s going so far today. Books I’ve pulled from the office shelves for my classes today.

This spring I asked my Asian Philosophy students to buy good quality paper notebooks or journals, journals they’ll be glad to own for years. I also suggested they consider buying one good brush pen, a calligraphy pen, a fountain pen, or some other writing instrument in which they could take some joy and pride.

As the semester ends, I’ve really enjoyed seeing them write notes. When I write a word on the chalkboard in Sanskrit or Classical Chinese (or sometimes in modern simplified Chinese) they watch me make the strokes slowly, then copy them in their notebooks. I often write words multiple times so they can see how my hand moves. I also brought in a “magic” cloth with squares on it for learning Chinese calligraphy. When you use a water brush on the cloth, the water makes the cloth dark, then fades back to white after a few minutes. We’ve practiced writing together in class. I think we’ve all enjoyed the process.

Yesterday when Canvas/Instructure went down due to a cyberattack, one thing remained unchanged: my students’ notebooks. We had a calligraphy quiz in class, and it was both low-tech and fun. Everyone took a few minutes to write in Chinese or Sanskrit (their choice) and they handed in a piece of paper with their brush strokes and handwriting. As a professor, I was delighted with the results.

Today’s shelfie. Books that came off the shelves while talking with students in my office. These are authors from whom I have learned, and whose books I’m glad to share with others. Among the recent titles: Evan Selinger and David Perry have both written especially helpful books for people interested in the ethics of technology, and for scholars who want to write for broad audiences. Lars Chittka’s book on bees is a fun and enlightening read.

This was a pleasant surprise with which to begin my day: students from the student government came to my classroom to give me this award. And they brought cookies for the whole class!

So many of my colleagues are excellent teachers. At a small school like this most of us, and probably all of us in the humanities, are in it because we love teaching students. Any of them could have been given this award. I’m grateful to those who thought I was worth nominating, and I’m especially grateful for the way they’ve committed to learning the “useless” things I teach. (I am thinking of [Abraham Flexner’s essay](Source: Institute for Advanced Study) here)

Another beloved professor from grad school, gone too soon. Rest in peace, Emily.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil…

She urged me to send my poetry for publication. Perhaps it’s time to do what she told me to do, in her memory.

One thing I keep wondering about as we have read Thucydides and Xenophon: how did their works spread? Did they intend to publish them? Did they share them with family or a select few friends? Were they written as pieces of political philosophy in response to bad decisions by other leaders? Did they write them to train others in both war and peace?

Xenophon is attested to by a handful of his contemporaries (Plato and Aristotle) and certainly by a number who come later, like Plutarch. He also seems to mention his own writing in the Hellenika, but there he refers to it pseudonymously, as the work of Themistogenes of Syracuse. Perhaps that means someone named Themistogenes (about whom we know nothing) was the author, and the Anabasis is wrongly attributed to Xenophon? Or perhaps Xenophon’s pseudonymous self-citation is a sign that the Hellenika was also intended to be published, and he wanted to separate these two works from one another.

One effect of reading these books again is I am seeing more depths in what is not written. The first time I read them I saw what was on the surface. They helped me become a Greek scholar and teacher, and they helped me understand some of the major events in Ancient Greek history. This time through, I am seeing things that were left out, or left unsaid, and those things are helping me to understand what Xenophon (and Herodotus, and Thucydides, and Diodorus Sicullus, and others) were doing when they wrote histories.

My book group recently finished Xenophon’s Hellenika and it was one of the best conversations we have had over the last few years. Our conversations get better with time. The book group is not just about reading books, but reading them together. We are learning, but we are also deepening our friendships. This is treasure.

I have now given two TEDx talks, both of them reluctantly, after friends pestered me into doing them. This week I received a great reward for my most recent one: one of the regional tribal offices asked me about collaborating to improve local water health. Yes!

Columbine and forget-me-nots in my garden today.

As I drove in to work today, singing part of the liturgy as my morning prayer, I was transported in my memory to my time in grad school at St John’s in Santa Fe. We only had one car so I’d leave the car with my wife and kids and walk to work in the pre-dawn hours, often walking through arroyos to avoid traffic and to take in the rosy dawn and the awakening high desert wildlife. And as I walked I’d quietly sing the liturgy. Nature’s liminal edges, the thin air of the high desert, the thin space where heaven and earth are so close in the words of the sursum corda. A heartening memory.

Met this beautiful western foxsnake today. It rattled its tail like a rattlesnake so I sat down beside it at a respectful distance so I wouldn’t tower over it. It looked me over and then slid away into the tall grass. What a fun encounter! They’re relatively common, but it was my first urban encounter with one. Non-venomous, with wonderfully curious eyes and a goofy smile.

Hairstreak in Amarillo.

Everywhere I go I look for small lives. I’m always glad when I find them.

At the Episcopal Church Grasslands Eco-region meeting in Amarillo this weekend. Presenting about our church’s food forest, and the work my students and colleagues and I have done to grow food and create outdoor learning environments on campus.

Can’t help sketching this beautiful church we are meeting in while listening to the other presenters.

Some things I am thankful for this morning, in no particular order:

• Home
• Friends
• Family
• Food
• Rain
• Trees
• Meaningful work
• Books
• Libraries
• Peace
• Good government
• Health
• Growing older
• Becoming an elder
• Conversation
• Coffee shops
• Local community
• Perennials in my garden
• Food I am able to grow
• Wood ducks
• Insects
• Moss
• Lichens
• Crayfish
• 70+ species of ladybugs
• 300+ species of native unionid mussels
• 4000+ species of native bees
• The one spike of Solomon’s Seal popping up in the prairie garden
• The dratted rabbit that ate the liatris buds
• The Cooper’s hawk that ate the rabbit
• Sunflowers
• Perennial sunflowers, like Maximilian’s
• The peace of wasps as they walk the tall Maximilian’s stems
• The small lives I have yet to find in nature
• Hidden treasure everywhere
• The full sky

Just learned that my first grad school advisor died suddenly this weekend at the too-young age of 66. We had been corresponding over his future travel plans just last week. He changed my career as a teacher, and I am deeply grateful for his life. Rest in peace, my friend.

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/