Stuff from April, 2009
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on April, 2009.
Finals Schedule
Might be busy for a while here.
News from the outside world is welcome!
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on April, 2009.
It’s snowing this morning. April Fool’s!
Oh, wait…
Dan McKeown. May 8, 2006.
I’ll bring the peanut butter!
Tumbledry was pretty active back then. I’m sure those days will come again.
Might be busy for a while here.
News from the outside world is welcome!
Here are some selected quotes from literally the best professor I have ever had the pleasure of learning from. Dr. Katz could teach p-chem to third graders.
“I’ve seen your schedule — it’s incredible. You guys are really, really busy. Me, I just sit around all day and blow bubbles and come in here occasionally to talk to you.”
A great Minnesota poet died recently. His name was Bill Holm. Alas, I did not know of him until after his death, when I heard a wonderful tribute to him on April 19, on Minnesota Public Radio Presents. I had just jumped in the shower and (thanks to the shower radio from Kourtni) heard a beautiful poem by another Minnesota poet, Robert Bly. Mr. Bly was reading (with musical backing) some of his works, to honor the late Bill Holm. One of these pieces was particularly beautiful, so I had to give you the opportunity to listen:
The public archives of tumbledry go back to my embarrassingly rudimentary scrawling in October, 1999. By that calendar, we’ll turn 10 in October of this year. However, I only registered the domain tumbledry.org on July 22, 2003. At the time, I was smack in the middle of leaving high school times for college life. My intensely narrow understanding of the world around me expanded agonizingly slowly; however, something during that time made me think it would be a good idea to hop on the evolving internet and get a proper website going. Before that, this space was called “Alex’s Website.” I’ve some mortifying splash pages from that era. Perhaps I’ll share those if I get time. Before that, dating to sometime around the beginning of 1999, I put together a site called TI Chip. It was mostly an archive of 1200+ calculator programs. I loved piecing together websites on Angelfire and Tripod, two free hosting sites of the day.
“Good lord, you guys look like you came out of a war zone — it’s just a test!”
— The fantastic Dr. Tautin, after our 4 hour prosthodontic lab practical
This man, one of the bench dentists who evaluates and guides us through labs, saved my sanity in Oral Anatomy lab first semester. In a class with the purpose of weeding out those who didn’t want to be in school (and the distant second goal of teaching oral anatomy), he did his best to get a new flock of uptight students to settle down. On waxing up a tooth: “If it looks like a tooth, you’re on the right track.”
David Foster Wallace - Commencement Speech at Kenyon College
So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.