I had a really successful debate class today. In the first half of the class, my students were able to successfully derive Ayn Rand’s basic philosophical premises (and sometimes plot points) from her two paragraph description of music (on the first or second page of “Atlas Shrugged,” if you care to look it up), as a part of a discussion of using ( Read more... )

Last night I saw a performance put on by the student musical club at Nanjing U. They call themselves “Phantoms of the Musical” and did a great job, even if I was sitting a little too close to the speakers that handled the music they sang to. I felt quite a mix of emotions, from being pleased at the positive emotional reactions of the student ( Read more... )

One of the things I’ve noticed about the young women in my university is how safe they feel on campus. We were reading an essay that ended in a discussion of date rape without actually using the word “rape,” and I asked the students what the end of the article was talking about. It took these college kids ten minutes of trying to read between the ( Read more... )

I went to see the musical “Chicago,” as performed by the local student club “The Phantom of the Musical.” Every year they put on a well received, and very well attended, musical. The ushers had lost all control and students were sneaking in without tickets, so I was lucky to get a seat even with an advance ticket. The singing was in English but the ( Read more... )

So, here I am at Nanjing University.

Pro: awesome library with an English reading room I could never finish using even if I lived here until I died.
Con: I took a pay cut to work here.
Pro: Nanjing is the Boston of China, with an art scene, lots of bookstores, lots of universities, but past its political and economic heyday.
Con: I have to get myself ( Read more... )