Another American Adventure: Professor Starbird

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Professor Starbird

This is Professor Starbird, our Calculus Teacher. Yes, John and I are taking Calculus (again), via a set of classes on DVDs that we purchased from the Learning Company. John saw them advertised in the Wall Street Journal and suggested that we do this. So far, we're not lost. Great for watching on a rainy Sunday morning. It may take us all winter to make it through the 20 or more lessons.

The old laptop, which is not good for much else, is serving as a DVD player.

2 comments:

BarbaraOctober 3, 2010 at 12:22 PM
Interesting that you two would take a course in Calculus over again. Mind you, Calculus is so much fun. I was surprised how much of it I remembered when I looked at the Cal tests one of my colleagues gave the Honours Science kids. I think Integral Calculus was my best math course, although I did enjoy Differential Equations, too. I majored in Chem so that I could take a number of math courses. Majoring in math would not allow me to take many Chem courses.
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beth cioffolettiOctober 3, 2010 at 2:58 PM
I have always loved any kind of Math, Barbara. It was the one subject that I could ace without much effort. I should have been a math teacher - though I did love organic chemistry as well. I am thoroughly enjoying this 2nd venture into calculus. The very idea that time (and motion) cannot be held still, and yet we try to do it in order to observe!
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.