Teaching

A Nobel laureate walks into a first-year physics class…

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 18:57:11 +0000

A Nobel laureate walks into a first-year physics class… Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/19/2024 - 12:57

Rachel Sauer

General Physics for Majors course designed by �� Boulder Professors Eric Cornell and Paul Beale shows students that the furthest reaches of science are built on fundamental concepts

The Nobel laureate was not feeling happy about his minus signs.

He stood back from the blackboard—yes, an actual blackboard on which he wrote with actual chalk—and considered the calculus he’d jokingly hyped just moments before with, “This is some of that real calculus sensation. This is why you sat through that whole calculus class: for this moment.”

His team teacher, a noted scientist who this year is marking 40 years teaching physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, called from the back of the classroom, “That’s right, Eric.”

Professors Paul Beale (left) and Eric Cornell prepare for a Tuesday morning PHYS 1125 class. (Photos: Rachel Sauer)

Advanced math is not always easy with an audience watching—in this case, about 85 first-year physics, astrophysics and engineering physics students in PHYS 1125, General Physics 2 for Majors.

It’s a class for students who know they want to pursue a field of physics and are newly starting out in it. And it’s taught by a Nobel laureate.

“I harken back to freshman physics every day of my life,” explains Eric Cornell, a �� Boulder professor adjoint of physics and 2001 Nobel Prize winner in physics for his work with Bose-Einstein condensates. “I’m in a Facebook group with people I met my freshman year in physics.”

In other words, there’s absolutely no reason a Nobel laureate shouldn’t teach first-year physics.

Basic, foundational concepts

Cornell and Paul Beale, a �� Boulder professor of physics, created the course six years ago, in part to help students interested in pursuing physics to find community and support among like-minded peers. While other introductory physics courses are open to all majors, this one is specifically for physics, astrophysics and engineering physics majors. Steven Pollock, a professor of physics, and Yuan Shi, an assistant professor of physics, in the fall taught the first half of the course, PHYS 1115, which was created by Professors Chuck Rogers and Shijie Zhong.

“We start from ground zero,” Beale says. “Most (of the students) have had some physics in high school, most have seen these ideas before—they know that same charges repel. But even students who have had really good high school physics classes, maybe even AP classes, we say, ‘That’s great! Take our class.’

“Being with other physics majors helps them relax and get immersed in the field. Everybody in there really wants to be in there.”

Professor Eric Cornell (center, striped shirt) answers student questions in the physics help room.

A cynic might ask, however, why a Nobel laureate would be teaching a first-year class. Shouldn’t they be, you know, spending their time in the furthest, most esoteric reaches of physics? Doing the kind of science only a handful of people on the planet can understand?

“I want to push back on that idea that the basic, foundational concepts of physics don’t have considerable charm of their own,” Cornell says. “This is really fun stuff, and one of the things I like about this course is it gets into really interesting things right away.”

“It’s also a hard class,” Beale adds. “The concepts are difficult, so the challenge for us is to do everything we can to make them approachable. (The students) have got to get them right even though they’re hard, because everything else in physics builds on what they learn here.”

Cornell and Beale designed the class not only with beginning physics students in mind, but learning assistants and graduate students as well.

“In a lot of schools, grad students—who might be just one year past undergrad—are thrown in the classroom and told, ‘Here, go teach,’” Cornell says. In this course, however, graduate students assist with weekly tutorials but meet with Beale and Colin West, an associate teaching professor of physics, before each one, because the skills of teaching need to be taught. The same is true for class learning assistants, who are undergraduate students who took the course the previous year.

Cornell and Beale also spend time in the physics help room each week, which is a space where students can drop by for help with anything physics related.

“I would say that we are a very good teaching department, and not just our graduate program,” Beale says. “This is your introduction to physics, and you’re either going to like it or not, so we put a lot of effort into the first years.”

“We’re always asking, ‘How do we do better teaching?’” Cornell adds. “People like Paul and me have the advantage of people in this department who have studied teaching and have tried approaches like using clickers, using a conversational approach, using hands-on demonstrations. There are ongoing discussions about how we can be teaching better.”

Physics with a purple crayon

Sometimes, better teaching means an apology: “It’s my sorry duty to apologize for all the sins of physicists who went before me, and electrical engineers. And Ben Franklin,” Cornell said, writing “sorry!!” on the blackboard and underlining it twice. “I’m here to apologize for this thing called ‘potential.’ The whole rest of your life you’re going to be thinking about electric potential. It’s unavoidable. Your intuition will overwhelm your minus-sign errors.

Professor Paul Beale (standing, blue sweater) walks around the classroom during PHYS 1125 to help students and answer questions.

“It’s a ‘sorry, but...’ though, which is another way to say, ‘Suck it up.’”

While Cornell pivoted to voltage, “a happier, friendlier term (than electric potential),” Beale walked slowly among the rows of seats, stopping to sit by students who had questions and prompt them toward their response on class-wide clicker questions.

Pranay Raj Poosa, a freshman majoring in astrophysics who hopes to study black holes and neutron stars, cites Cornell’s and Beale’s enthusiasm for physics and their personal, conversational approach to teaching as two of the reasons he likes the class: “The fun they generate makes my understanding crystal clear,” he said. “The first day of class, (Cornell) made a joke about himself, which I personally felt was clap-worthy.”

Poosa added that he was in “utter disbelief” when his advisor mentioned a Nobel laureate would be teaching the class.

For Min Wang, a sophomore majoring in physics and interested in theoretical neuroscience and writing science fiction, Cornell and Beale have shown her that “great minds are not the ones who are walking in front of others all the time. They always slow down and let the young generation be on their shoulders.

“Even though what Professor Cornell taught us is just a tiny piece of knowledge in his mind, he shows amazing patience to every student and shows us how profound even a little, tiny bit in physics can be. And since I have time conflicts with all the office hours, Professor Beale gives me a special office hour time according to my school schedule. It is after class and work time on Friday! They make me feel welcome in the world of physics.”

Wang noted that while learning physics is not without its pains, she doesn’t feel alone in tackling them because she is part of a “lovely and supportive physics community created by the professors.”

Which is good, because it was time to do “a very modest amount of algebra, the kind you could do with a purple crayon if you’ve got one,” Cornell said, explaining how they could figure capacitance between two metal plates and then telling the students, “I’m going to show you something which I think is very neat. It’s kind of an advanced idea, giving you a taste of physics to come.”

The key thing to remember? “The whole idea of physics is zooming all the way into what does matter and ignoring what doesn’t.”

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General Physics for Majors course designed by �� Boulder Professors Eric Cornell and Paul Beale shows students that the furthest reaches of science are built on fundamental concepts.

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Pirates and zombies are not so different

Anonymous — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 18:53:32 +0000

Pirates and zombies are not so different Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/31/2023 - 12:53

Rachel Sauer

In a recently published article, �� Boulder researcher Kieran Murphy traces the concurrent paths and points of intersection between pirate and zombie lore in Haiti and popular culture

High in the rugged mountains above Saint-Marc, Haiti, is a cave that even today, some don’t dare visit. It is a legendary, almost mythical place called Trou Forban (Pirate Cave).

Stories say it is an enchanted cave filled with coffee and sugar plantations worked by crews of the undead and ruled by the Man of Trou Forban. “When the master of Trou Forban walks,” author Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “the whole Earth trembles.”

Notorious 20^th-century Haitian dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier is whispered to have visited Trou Forban and participated in a black magic rite that invited evil spirits to live in his presidential palace.

Despite its spooky reputation, Trou Forban and its surroundings have for centuries been a literal and spiritual meeting place for clandestine communities like buccaneers and Africans who escaped slavery, who came to be known as “maroons.” Interactions between these clandestine communities—sometimes amicable, sometimes not—gave rise to pirate and zombie myths whose similarities and concurrent paths might surprise modern audiences.

�� Boulder researcher Kieran Murphy explores the origins and interconnected trajectories of pirate and zombie myths in Haiti.

In a recently published paper tracing the origins and trajectories of interconnected pirate and zombie lore, Kieran Murphy, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of French and Italian who teaches a class called “The Zombie and the Ghost of Slavery” (FREN 1880), highlights how ritual piracies by both Black and White clandestine people “left traces of mutual recognition, traces which shed light on lesser known influences that played a role in fomenting insurrection and anti-colonial sentiment in the events leading up to the Haitian Revolution.”

“The zombie is a Haitian invention that represents the nightmare of these formerly enslaved people, these maroons,” Murphy says. “Meaning, they fought for their freedom, but they have this vision of a monster that comes back from the dead to be a slave again on plantations.

“You can see why this horrific figure would emerge in Haiti for people who were finally free and trying to make a life outside the plantation system. This fear that, after death, they would come back and be forced to work the plantations again reflects the social death that was imposed on enslaved people, that they fought against, when, after defeating Napoleon’s army, they declared the abolition of slavery.”

Connecting pirates and zombies

Before an invitation to a conference themed “Pirates and Zombies” at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, Murphy viewed the two entities separately. He’d written articles and taught classes on horror films and zombies since graduate school, but it wasn’t until this conference that he thought, “Hmmm, how am I going to connect these two things?” he says.

He turned to colonial records, but it wasn’t until he came across a photograph by Phyllis Galembo that something clicked. In the photograph, a Vodou devotee is posing as Bawon Lakwa (Baron La Croix), one of a group of Vodou deities who rule over the dead and are collectively called Guédé (Vodou is an Afro-Caribbean spirituality that has little in common with the portrayal of “Voodoo” in Western media). The man is wearing a black top hat adorned with both the skull and crossbones of a Jolly Roger flag and the word “zonbi,” the Creole spelling of “zombie.”

Oungan Celestin Montilas Philippe, a priest from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, posing as Bawon Lakwa in a photograph by artist Phyllis Galembo.

“In many ways, buccaneers were themselves clandestine, unauthorized communities,” Murphy says. “Reading old colonial reports, I saw interactions between maroons and pirates, which makes sense because both communities were living on the margins of European empires in the Caribbean.

“They were sometimes trading partners, and there was sometimes violence between them, but they both originated outside the plantation system of the colonies. In many pirate communities, it didn’t matter if you were White, Black, Indigenous, they were clandestine people united outside the colonial European framework.”

Rebels and outcasts

Because of scant historical record, it’s difficult to find the precise moment when pirate and maroon communities began intersecting, Murphy says. However, once he saw the Jolly Roger and “zonbi” on the same hat, it provided a clue that cultural exchanges and appropriations had happened among these communities.

For example, pirates and Guédé deities have been known for their Dionysian attitudes and for mixing eroticism and death into their symbols (in 18^th century slang, the word “roger” meant “penis” and “to copulate.”)

Further, there are historical records of Vodou rituals that involve drinking rum laced with gunpowder, which was also a tradition among mutineers and pirates, Murphy says. Maroon and pirate communities shared a certain rebelliousness and outcast nature.

Maroons played a central role in fomenting slave revolt in the colony, including the world-changing events now known as the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). When they declared their independence, Haitians abolished slavery in their constitution long before France, England and the U.S. did. However, France agreed to recognize Haiti as an independent country only after Haitian leaders signed an indemnity agreement to repay France 150 million francs as restitution for lost property—including lost human property.

"Vol de Zombis" (1946) by Haitian artist Hector Hyppolite

As Haitians struggled under the almost unbearable weight of this financial burden and leaders made moves to reinstate a form of the plantation system, some maroons remained in hiding and the zombie as an embodiment of a nightmarish future grew stronger.

By the 20^th century, however, popular culture had absconded with the zombie, turning it into a symbol of Western anxieties, Murphy says. A similar cultural appropriation happened with pirates. Yet, the framework and archetypes—and the commonalities between them—have continued to inform their portrayals in mass media.

Murphy cites “The Walking Dead” as an example of the pirate-zombie-colonialist structure, with the protagonists sometimes claiming allegiance to imperialist groups like “The Saviors” while behaving like a clandestine pirate group and fighting flesh-eating zombies. In the TV show, zombies embody early European paranoid fantasies linking Indigenous peoples with cannibalism, Murphy says.

“Through a story involving zombie, pirate and imperialist characters, ‘The Walking Dead’ reenacts colonial history while relying on the trope of the undead to suggest that the present remains haunted by the violence and tragedies of the past,” Murphy writes. From this perspective, “The Walking Dead” is just a reinterpretation of the Haitian legend of Trou Forban.

Top image: (left) "Three Zombies" (1956) by Haitian artist Wilson Bigaud; romanticized pirate image (iStock)

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In a recently published article, �� Boulder researcher Kieran Murphy traces the concurrent paths and points of intersection between pirate and zombie lore in Haiti and popular culture.

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Course on science of happiness draws rave reviews

Anonymous — Tue, 09 May 2023 18:57:34 +0000

Course on science of happiness draws rave reviews Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/09/2023 - 12:57

Clint Talbott

But June Gruber’s teaching, which recently won a Cogswell Award for Inspirational Instruction, doesn’t mean she shows students the path to unmitigated joy; on the contrary, the science of emotional wellness is more nuanced

June Gruber flashes the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” onto large screens in her classroom. Her students immediately identify the source as the Declaration of Independence.

Gruber nods, noting that the nation’s founding document heralds “my inalienable right to be happy.” Such a message, she adds, engenders “a kind of expectation that we must pursue happiness.”

But must we?

June Gruber

That’s one question Gruber answers in her Science of Happiness course at the University of Colorado Boulder. Gruber, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience and a faculty fellow at the Center for Teaching and Learning, teaches the upper-division course that is popular with students, who give Gruber glowing reviews, sometimes in deeply personal terms.

Her course is popular not because it unlocks the secrets to unlimited happiness. Rather, Gruber’s course pores over the developing research—some of which is Gruber’s own—that reveals a “dark side to happiness.”

As Gruber has shown in her peer-reviewed research, a Tedx talk and now a �� Boulder course, it is not that happiness is bad. Rather, evidence strongly suggests that happiness is but one of the human emotions to which people should be open, and that excesses of apparent happiness can signal problems such as mania (or bipolar disorder), excessive spending, problem gambling or even high-risk sexual encounters.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Gruber cites evidence that the act of pursuing happiness can leave the pursuers, paradoxically, less happy than they would have been if they’d not tried to maximize their own happiness. They report being less able to be emotionally present in moments that could be happy, and they are more likely to experience mood difficulties and anxiety.

Whether the American founders sent us on a Sisyphean task is beyond the scope of the class, which focuses on how happiness is defined and measured, what makes us truly happy and how we should pursue it.

In addition to regular class assignments, students in the Science of Happiness course (PSYC 4541) complete weekly “science-to-life” exercises, which apply the theories and practices learned in class to everyday existence. For instance, students kept gratitude journals, performed random acts of kindness and completed the UPenn Authentic Happiness Inventory. Students also took “awe walks,” in which they visited novel, physically vast spaces and observed their surroundings mindfully.

Some shared their experiences in class, rapidly budding flowers and greening leaves and the enchantment of focusing on the movement of a squirrel.

In addition to science-to-life exercises and regular coursework, the students also have done outreach projects, in which the goal is to share the science of happiness outside the brick-and-mortar classroom to the local Boulder community and beyond.

Ashlee Lewis, one of Gruber’s students, has worked in a Boulder retirement home for two years. For her outreach project, she presented a slideshow of the science of happiness across the lifespan to the retirees.

“They were very excited that I was coming in to do a presentation, and the feedback I got was positive and informative,” Lewis said. “It feels like I actually made a difference in the retirement home community.”

Lewis said Gruber’s course was the “most relatable” psychology course she’s had in four years at �� Boulder, adding “I am so grateful I was able to take this class with Dr. Gruber.”

For the first time, I felt that a class wanted to encourage the outward personal growth we were learning about. Our science-to-life projects brought the lecture material into my own life. I find every opportunity possible to share with my friends and family the things we are learning in class because it feels so valuable to live a healthier life.

Such praise helps explain why Gruber has been recognized for her teaching. She has won the Boulder Faculty Assembly Teaching Excellence Award, the UROP Outstanding Mentor Award and, this spring, the Cogswell Award for Inspirational Instruction.

The last award is named for and funded by Craig Cogswell, a three-time alumnus of �� Boulder, who says Gruber is an “amazing educator and teacher.”

“The depth and variety of her research and instruction is inspiring,” Cogswell says. “She comes at her study of mental health from a variety of directions and offers multiple perspectives, insights, and strategies. It’s especially gratifying that her work comes at a time when so many young people need emotional support. I can’t imagine a more deserving recipient.”

Gruber also has developed a free online Coursera #TalkMentalIllness course to tackle stigma and mental health and has written articles for Teaching Current Directions in Psychological Science about the importance of teaching students about the positive side of psychological disorders. She also shares career and professional advice for students in Science Careers.

Leaf Van Boven, professor and chair of psychology and neuroscience, says the Cogswell award is a “well-deserved honor for someone who has made such a positive impact on students and colleagues.”

Van Boven adds that Gruber is an exceptional teacher and mentor who brings passion, creativity, and dedication to her work. “Professor Gruber’s ability to engage students and inspire them to learn is remarkable. … We are grateful for June Gruber’s commitment to teaching excellence and the positive influence she has had on students.”

Underscoring that point is feedback from the students themselves. Lauren Weber, who wrote an op-ed newspaper essay for her outreach project, says that learning about the science of happiness will stick with her long after graduation.

“I was hoping to take this class as a way to improve my happiness in my last semester of college, but through the research we read and personal discovery this class allowed, I will be able to understand and control the happiness in my life far beyond this class,” she says,

Above and at the top of the page: Gruber and her students pause for a class photos on the last day of the semester. Images courtesy of June Gruber.

Fellow student Emma Ringman says Gruber’s course was both meaningful and helpful. Ringman says she’s struggled with anxiety and depression and even failed out of college “due to extreme mental-health circumstances” stemming from the pandemic.

“And here I am, two years after the fact in my last semester as an undergraduate, preparing to graduate with a degree in psychology and French. As a result of my historical struggles with school, I have often slipped into old habits as a result of a fixed mindset, my brain often telling me that if I have to try hard that I’m not smart, or if something I am working on isn’t perfect, it’s better to not turn it in at all.”

While other psychology classes often focused on “negative” psychology, diagnosable diseases, and “abnormal” aspects of the human experience, Gruber’s course was different, Ringman says.

“I almost cried sitting in our lecture on the first day of the class, seeing our lineup of guest speakers at the top of their field and the truly fascinating and groundbreaking work we would be reading about and directly interacting with,” she adds.

“For the first time, I felt that a class wanted to encourage the outward personal growth we were learning about. Our science-to-life projects brought the lecture material into my own life. I find every opportunity possible to share with my friends and family the things we are learning in class because it feels so valuable to live a healthier life.”

Ringman notes that a key lesson is that a variety of emotions yields a richness in life, that obsessively pursuing happiness is futile.

To that end, Gruber shares a quotation from another bulwark of Western civilization, John Stuart Mill, who wrote:

“Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”

To learn more or support Gruber's research to support student mental health during and beyond COVID-19, follow this link.

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Hip-hop dance class lets engineering students turn tables

Anonymous — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 23:39:01 +0000

Hip-hop dance class lets engineering students turn tables Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 11/12/2019 - 16:39

Kenna Bruner

‘Learning hip-hop can give engineering students an opportunity to get out of the lab and use a different part of their brain,’ instructor says

Students in the College of Engineering and Applied Science looking for a fun way to take a break from math and science have a new opportunity: Hip-hop.

Engineering students can now enroll in a new hop-hop class being offered by the �� Boulder Theatre and Dance department where they can learn hip-hop dance moves and get in shape while earning two hours of humanities & sciences credit.

Larry Southall, right, gives pointers to a hip-hop class. At the top of the page, some of his students puts his lessons literally into action. �� Boulder photos by Patrick Campbell.

Rhonda Hoenigman, senior instructor in computer science and an associate dean in engineering, and Larry Southall, instructor of dance, developed the hip-hop technique course, which is a special section of an existing course. Other sections will be taught next semester that aren’t restricted to engineering students.

The class starts in the spring 2020 semester. The instructors created the class exclusively for engineers to make hip-hop dancing a less intimidating experience. Engineering students won’t be dancing next to dance majors and will have the opportunity to interact with other engineering students in a different context.

“The idea for this class started because I took a hip-hop class as a faculty member,” Hoenigman said. “I have no dance experience, but I saw the class as great exercise and a way to try something that was completely unfamiliar to me. Learning hip-hop can give engineering students an opportunity to get out of the lab and use a different part of their brain.”

This is the second hip-hop class for Kevin Yang, a senior in computer science. Last semester he had some open slots in his schedule and looked around for a new class.

“This class is unique,” Yang said. “It’s a lot different from an engineering class. Collaboration with other students is strongly encouraged. It’s a fun way to meet people. I feel a sense of closeness to my classmates where I don’t necessarily feel that in a traditional class. Other people in class might be able to see the moves one or two times and get it. I go home and have to think about how (Southall) did that move. You have to put in the time, but I find it rewarding.”

Southall was born in the Bronx borough of New York. He has an MFA in dance from �� Boulder and is on the dance faculty. He teaches traditional hip-hop, different styles such as locking, popping, b-boying, b-girling, hip-hop party dance, and its history and multifaceted culture.

In addition to learning the dance, in his class students also learn about hip-hop’s origins, evolution, and the social, economic and political environment where it began.

“When we talk about hip-hop here, it’s different from what you see on TV,” Southall said, addressing students. “That’s rap culture. Rap is something you do. Hip-hop is something you live and breathe. I’m asking you to use the other part of your brain to stimulate and grow and make yourself stronger.”

Hip-hop emerged in the economically depressed South Bronx section of New York City in the late 1960s and early ’70s, as a response to dramatic socio-economic changes. When the white, middle-class population moved out of the area and into the suburbs in the 1950s and ’60s, the remaining population was primarily black and Hispanic.

Learning hip-hop can give engineering students an opportunity to get out of the lab and use a different part of their brain.”

The construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway that runs through minority neighborhoods devastated the inner-city areas in its path from 1948 to 1963. In the late ’60s and ’70s, an arson epidemic swept through the Bronx, leaving burned out buildings in its wake.

Urban decay, rising crime and poverty spurred young people in the South Bronx to look for creative ways to express themselves through art, music and dance as a way to find wellness for themselves.

“Hip-hop came out of the South Bronx with people trying to get out of gangs and avoid that violent lifestyle,” Southall said.

“There were no social services; Mother Teresa came to visit the children. So, people at that time wanted something to keep themselves from falling through the cracks. Hip-hop was it. I want students to understand the difference between what you see commercialized and commodified versus real hip-hop culture. Within that context, I teach the culture of the dance. I tell my students it’s OK to come in and struggle, because hip-hop is hard, but you will get there. Students coming in think we’re just going to dance, but no, they’re going to learn where it started, who started it and why we do this.”

For more information, contact Rhonda.Hoenigman@colorado.edu or Erika.Randall@colorado.edu. To enroll, contact Stacy.Norwood@colorado.edu.

‘Learning hip-hop can give engineering students an opportunity to get out of the lab and use a different part of their brain,’ instructor says.

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Fourth graders dig into pop music and poetry at �� Boulder

Anonymous — Sat, 06 Apr 2019 00:23:21 +0000

Fourth graders dig into pop music and poetry at �� Boulder Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/05/2019 - 18:23

Clint Talbott

As they learn how writers revise their work and use literary devices, the students gear up for a school assembly led by Australian rap star Nelson Dialect

When superstar Taylor Swift writes a song, she deploys the same creative tools used by a girl named Henley, a Denver fourth grader.

Henley, a fourth-grade student from Asbury Elementary School in Denver, recites her poem "Bullies Stand Down" during a poetry workshop at the Innisfree Poetry Bookstore and Café, an event that was part of Pop in the Classroom at �� Boulder. Photos and video by Justin Golightly. At the top of page, Taylor Swift performs in 2018. Getty Images.

In a first draft of her hit song “Out of the Woods,” for instance, Swift repeats the phrase “I remember” three times in a row. In the studio recording, however, she sings it once.

Henley noticed the difference when she and her classmates were in a sound room at the University of Colorado Boulder comparing an early version and final rendition of Swift’s hit song and others. She said the final version is better. And that’s the point of the exercise: learning that writing well means revising carefully.

This is one of several eureka moments during a half-day poetry boot camp organized by Adam Bradley, �� Boulder English professor and director of the Laboratory of Race and Popular Culture—or RAP Lab. The lab’s Pop Lyrics in the Classroom program brought kids from Asbury Elementary School in Denver to Boulder last month.

But why teach elementary-school kids about rhyme, meter and the process of revision? What do popular songs have to with the art of language? And who cares about poetry?

Bradley and teachers at Asbury Elementary strive to help kids learn—and love—writing, which can be equally wonderful and laborious. Popular songs are crammed with literary devices, and students who understand this are more likely to love wordplay, or at least feel comfortable tackling essays, book reports and, later, professional writing.

In previous years, Bradley ran a program called Hip Hop in the Classroom, which worked with high school and middle school students. This year’s program, which will culminate in May with a school assembly led by Australian rapper Nelson Dialect, focuses on younger children.

Desi Kennedy is a personalized learning coach at Asbury who taught Bradley’s daughter in Boulder and has known Bradley’s family for years. At Asbury, Kennedy’s role is to connect students’ learning to “authentic real-world experiences.”

The songs kids love teach them the tools of poetry—rhythm, rhyme, figurative language—without the intimidation that some students feel when approaching a more conventional work of literature."
—Adam Bradley

As Kennedy devised the fourth-grade poetry lesson plan with an Asbury literacy teacher, “we brainstormed and imagined ways we could integrate rap music and poetry in collaboration with our music teacher.”

Then they consulted Bradley.

Pop in the Classroom dovetails perfectly with those aims, Bradley said. The goal is to use the comfort students have with rap and popular music of all types as a way to open the door to literary studies, the practice of composition, the discipline of close reading—“all the things we want them to learn in the language arts.”

Bradley and his graduate and undergraduate students in the RAP Lab have developed lesson plans for younger students, and those plans were executed last month.

Josette Lorig, a PhD candidate in English and lab manager of the RAP Lab, records sounds in the "sample songs" exercise, in which kids made and recorded sounds such as chirping or clapping, and Lorig mixed the sounds into a song.

The Asbury students’ field trip to Boulder included a visit to Innisfree Poetry Bookstore and Café, where café co-owner Brian Buckley discussed Robert Frost’s poetry and the kids’ favorite words, which included “fiddlesticks,” “spatula” and “sopapilla.”

He also invited kids to the stage to recite their own poetry. Henley was one of the first to volunteer, reciting her poem about bullying, “Bullies Stand Down.”

The fourth graders then went to the RAP Lab on campus, where they absorbed five sections of poetic instruction:

“Funny figures,” which built students’ understanding of literary terms like alliteration, chiasmus and zeugma (see info box).
“Cooler than…,” which helped students learn about similes and metaphors.
“Rough drafts,” in which students listened to first drafts and final versions of popular songs, including “Out of the Woods” and “Take on Me,” by a-ha.
“Song-righting,” in which students tried to fill in the blanks of popular songs with key words missing.
“Sample songs,” during which kids made and recorded sounds such as chirping or clapping, and a RAP Lab member mixed the sounds into a song.

Judging by the fourth-graders’ reactions, the exercises were fun, and Bradley said that’s the idea. Teaching composition, revision and close reading in abstract terms can seem wooden and boring to kids.

Nelson Dialect, an Australian Hip Hop artist, poses with a group of Whittier Elementary School students in Boulder recently. Image courtesy of Nelson Dialect.

"Pop songs are laboratories for language,” Bradley says. “The songs kids love teach them the tools of poetry—rhythm, rhyme, figurative language—without the intimidation that some students feel when approaching a more conventional work of literature. I’m not saying that Ariana Grande should replace Shakespeare, but her songs can help us read Shakespeare—and everything else—better.”

In the final element of the program with Asbury, Nelson Dialect will perform at a school assembly and will do a freestyle rap, in which kids prompt him to create lyrics on the spot.

In an email interview, Dialect said his grandmother, who was a poet, fostered his interest in language. He started reading and writing poetry and rap lyrics when he was about 11. “As I discovered hip hop music through my older brother’s collection of albums, I was fascinated by the rhythm, storytelling and wordplay,” he said.

Like Bradley, Dialect thinks the effort can help the kids: “If we can encourage the students to enjoy writing, it can strengthen their confidence and comprehension of their day-to-day lives in a creative way beyond social media, text-messaging or essays, which can be routine and standardized.”

Bradley said he hopes the students will leave next month’s assembly with “a greater sense of wonder at the art that surrounds them—the music, the films, the things we take for granted in popular culture.”

The hope is that students will be “empowered” to know that when an idea floats into their minds, “they can grasp it, look at it from all angles, let it grow. . . They will understand themselves as capable of creation, and they will have the tools to observe the creative energies that are around them at all times.” (See video below with Bradley’s five tips on using language and music to express your creativity.)

Henley, the fourth grader, has gotten that message. She said she hopes next year’s fourth-grade class will be able to do the field trip, too. Her favorite part: “making rap and poems out of similes. And the sound room.”

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TtavnrWqlg]

Adam Bradley's Five Tips
on how to use language and music to express your creativity

Listen like a child
Speak in simile
Don’t throw out your demo tapes
Sing like you know the words even when you don’t
Enjoy the silence
(see video for explanation)

Literary devices in pop songs

Anadiplosis: “A figure of word repetition that links two phrases, clauses, lines, or stanzas by repeating the word at the end of the first one at the beginning of the second.”

“Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry” — Don McLean, “American Pie” (1971)

Chiasmus: “The repetition of a pair of sounds, words, phrases, or ideas in the reverse order, producing an abba structure”

“And if you can’t be with the one you love, honey, Love the one you’re with.” — Stephen Stills, “Love the One You’re With” (1970)

Zeugma: “The use of a single word, most often a noun or a verb, to govern multiple clauses, often with divergent contexts.”

“You took my heart and my keys and my patience” — Rihanna, “Work” (2016)

As they learn how writers revise their work and use literary devices, the students gear up for a school assembly led by an Australian rap star.

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New professor of Israel/Palestine studies to begin teaching

Anonymous — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 22:58:40 +0000

New professor of Israel/Palestine studies to begin teaching Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/13/2018 - 15:58

Sarah Schleifer

The relationship between Israel and Palestine is globally fraught, and the University of Colorado Boulder is presenting its students with a dispassionate academic analysis on the subject beginning this spring.

Hilary Falb Kalisman

Professor Hilary Falb Kalisman has been appointed as Endowed Professor of Israel/Palestine Studies in the Program in Jewish Studies at �� Boulder, a position that was launched in 2015 with an anonymous donation of $500,000 to the department. Kalisman will be the first tenured professor hired for this position, one of two of its kind in the nation, after a two-year search. Liora Halperin, a former assistant professor of Jewish studies at �� Boulder who is now at the University of Washington, was appointed to the position in 2015.

Professor David Shneer, the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair of Jewish History, emphasized the importance of this role for Jewish studies.

“There are plenty of Israel studies chairs and several Palestine studies professorships, but the Israel/Palestine professorship is groundbreaking for moving beyond nationalist approaches to the Middle East,” he says.

“Since �� pioneered the Israel/Palestine professorship model several years ago, other universities, such as University of Massachusetts, have replicated it. It is the way universities can foster deep intellectual engagement about Israel/Palestine.”

Kalisman, also an assistant professor of history at �� Boulder, has a PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley and a bachelor of arts in Middle East studies from Brown University.

“One of the things I think is so exciting about this idea is that I’m really charged with being able to present a broad, even-handed view” of the conflict, Kalisman says. “So, if you’re an undergraduate taking one of these classes, you’re going to have to learn multiple, diverse perspectives. And come to your own conclusions by the end of [the class]; or not, as the case may be.”

Before coming to �� Boulder, she was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and a visiting scholar at Brown, as well as a guest scholar at Tel Aviv University in The Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies.

If you’re an undergraduate taking one of these classes, you’re going to have to learn multiple, diverse perspectives. And come to your own conclusions by the end of [the class]; or not, as the case may be.”

On her approach to the position, she says, “My personal trajectory is one that’s trying to combine the often very opposed academic, and sometimes social, worlds of Israeli and Palestinian studies.”

Israel, established in 1948 in the aftermath of World War II, was preceded by British Mandate Palestine, founded in 1920. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 also outlined British support for a Jewish national home in Palestine, which was then written into the following mandate charter. Eventually, this led to the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.

In the following years, there were many military conflicts that culminated in the Six-Day War of 1967, during which Israel occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This occupation continues to today, and there have been many military conflicts since.

Kalisman says that one notable aspect of the Israel/Palestine professorship, especially for undergrads in her classes, is the broad perspective it will give them on the conflict and the different groups involved.

By combining Israel and Palestine studies, Kalisman says, students will get an education on the topic that wouldn’t typically be offered from a strictly Israel studies or Middle Eastern and Palestinian studies perspective.

Her current book project, Schooling the State: Education and Governance in the Modern Middle East, focuses on government-mandated education in the Middle East, the role it plays politically and “how it affects the different processes of state-building.”

“Education in Palestine is really part of a broader story about education in the Middle East,” she says. “It marks a funny zone that’s partially part of the government, but can also be a way of protesting against it.”

She notes, for example, that “teachers would be getting a paycheck from the government, while being arrested for being part of a rebellion against that same government.”

One of her classes this coming spring, “Modern Childhood in Israel/Palestine,” focuses on the impact of state-mandated education on both Israeli and Palestinian children by reading memoirs, and other primary and secondary sources, from both sides of the occupation.

The “parallel but intersecting” education systems of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine) and of the Mandate government—set out for Arab Palestinians via the Balfour declaration of 1917—she says, “influence one another.”

The two education systems, while existing at the same time, have their “different concerns, different personnel and different levels of control,” Kalisman explains. This duality highlights the need for a nuanced approach to the subject, she says.

The class will endeavor to answer questions regarding when Arab Palestinian and Israeli children become “objects of humanitarian intervention” or “political actors.”

In the future, Kalisman will teach a class on the Arab/Israeli conflict in which she says students will be required to grapple with different perspectives from “a real, academic angle,” and a class called “Jews in and of the Middle East.”

The latter course will try to “combine histories” of Jews who have been living in the Middle East for generations with those who arrived there as immigrants with the advent of political Zionism beginning in the 1940s.

This course will both trace those different interactions and combine Middle Eastern and Jewish history, tracing it all the way up to Mizrahim (Arab/Middle Eastern Jews) in Israel today.

Kalisman says practicing the deliberate consideration of both sides of an extremely involved conflict is “going to help make you a better global citizen. It’s going to make you more aware."

The fraught relationship between Israel and Palestine will get a dispassionate academic analysis on the subject beginning this spring at �� Boulder.

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There’s an art to helping students become citizens of the world

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 18:16:57 +0000

There’s an art to helping students become citizens of the world Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/28/2018 - 11:16

Jeff Thomas

First-Year Seminar taught by art professors aims to help students broaden their horizons even beyond the realm of art

Art has always taken our imaginations to unexplored places, and now two University of Colorado Boulder art professors are finding it can also encourage freshmen, through a first-year seminar, to actively explore the campus, community and, hopefully, the wide world of academia.

“You get them out of their shell, get them to feel a part of the fabric of the campus, and beyond the campus as part of the community,” said Brianne Cohen, assistant professor of art history. “How do they become citizens of the world? Art is a great way to think through that.”

Paul Ramirez Jonas, a visiting art professor from Hunter College and an internationally renowned public-space artist, speaks to a First Year Seminar on the �� Boulder campus this fall. At the top of the page is an image from Jonas' "Key to the City" project in Manhattan. Image courtesy of Paul Ramirez Jonas.

Many departments on the Boulder campus are involved with the First-Year Seminar series, which are courses designed to help freshman acclimate to the university. Almost none of the freshmen registered in the course are actually art majors.

Neither Cohen nor Yumi Janairo Roth, an associate professor in art practices, had taught the seminar before. However, both are involved in post-studio, public-space art at �� Boulder, Cohen as an art historian and Roth as an artist.

“I just said, ‘Hey, we should teach one together,’” Roth said. Both think it is the first time any �� Boulder studio art and art history professors have taught an entire course together.

The seminar, “Art, Public, Site: Imagining Place and Making Worlds,” is very much geared toward getting freshman to go to different places, engage with people in those places and learn from those experiences. The initial phase, mapping, was sometimes as simple as throwing darts at a campus map and then figuring out routes to get there.

The students were also excited in October when visiting Hunter College Art Professor Paul Ramirez Jonas, an internationally renowned public-space artist, dropped in for a week.

Jonas gave the freshmen students an assignment to investigate how people interacted with art in public spaces, such as sculpture parks, campus buildings and hospitals. He has been a groundbreaking artist in socially engaged art, including the “Key to the City” program that engaged more than 25,000 participants in New York to explore new spaces.

Everyone already knows public art and has experienced it. Their experience has probably been dismal, but there is familiarity and a basis to start from. Also, for non-art majors, it is so much easier to connect public art to other disciplines and concerns.”

“The assignment was basically to imagine yourself as an anthropologist doing fieldwork. What do they take for granted as a space? How does art operate? It was a good exercise at looking at spaces and how people interacted with those spaces,” Roth said.

“Then (in a class that Jonas attended) we did more brainstorming on what they might change. Get them to think about what’s on hand, and what they could do to disrupt conventional systems by manipulating that space.”

That brainstorming was an important step, as that is exactly what the art professors are trying to get the freshmen to do with experiencing their own place on the campus and in the community: Mapping the space they frequent, interacting in that space and then intervening by changing their own behavior to question and explore those interactions.

“It fits with the freshman experience. How do you fit in? How do you relate? How do you branch out more and more and have an impact on that social space,” Cohen said. “Paul did a wonderful job, and the students were really excited that an international artist was coming to talk to them personally.”

Jonas said that an illuminating part of the course came when students realized that an exchange that would change interaction did not have to be money or something else usually considered valuable: it could be a wave or even a “secret.”

“I think introducing students to art through public art is a sound idea,” Jonas said. “Everyone already knows public art and has experienced it. Their experience has probably been dismal, but there is familiarity and a basis to start from. Also, for non-art majors, it is so much easier to connect public art to other disciplines and concerns.”

And at least one of the first-year students was reconsidering branching out from her strategic communications major and including some form of art as a minor, or perhaps a double major.

“It was amazing and a valuable experience for freshmen as you are trying to get involved with something,” said Jordan Altergott of Denver, who now professes to be a big fan of Jonas. “To have him in such an intimate setting was phenomenal.”

First-Year Seminar taught by art professors aims to help students broaden their horizons even beyond the realm of art,

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�� Boulder pollster emphasizes need for rigor in political surveys

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 18:11:26 +0000

�� Boulder pollster emphasizes need for rigor in political surveys Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/28/2018 - 11:11

Sarah Schleifer

Carey Stapleton, PhD candidate at �� Boulder, was survey lead for the American Politics Research Lab’s Colorado Political Climate Survey

The nature of political polling is changing in the United States, and Carey Stapleton, a PhD student in American politics and methodology at the University of Colorado Boulder, is equipping his undergraduate Survey Design and Analysis class, to meet these changes head-on.

Carey Stapleton

The result of this class was the recently released Colorado Political Climate Survey. Through creating a class centered around surveys and polls from ��’s American Politics Research Lab (APRL), Stapleton is teaching his students not only to think critically about politics and survey design, but also how to analyze the data of a large-scale poll.

Stapleton, who has “a substantial background in survey design,” was approached two years ago by Professors Scott Adler, Anand Sokhey and David Brown to create a class in survey design and political polling.

“We all sat around and developed the syllabus for the course, and we finally started teaching it last fall.” He says the class has grown by a factor of three in two years, and is continuing to pick up speed.

Stapleton says the Colorado Political Climate Survey took a couple years to perfect. “We tried to get both information that's relevant to Colorado specifically, but also kind of how Coloradans feel about broader national issues.”

It’s why the poll features questions ranging from intent to vote in the gubernatorial election to opinions on sports gambling, recreational marijuana laws, and if “Dreamers” should be allowed to remain in the country.

In 33 pages packed with data and analysis, the survey “is designed to gauge the public’s political and partisan leanings,” and correctly predicted the outcomes of the gubernatorial and congressional races, but revealed inconsistencies in polling with issues on the ballot like Propositions 73, 74 and 112.

In this midterm election, pollsters stood poised to redefine the relevance and format of political polls and surveys after the stunning upset in the 2016 presidential election defied the predictions of many major polls.

I tell my students all the time, ‘I don't care what you think in this class. I care that we do science in the appropriate way so that we can get to the reality, rather than what we want to be true.’”

On the nature of polls and the argument that they might yield biased information, Stapleton argues, “We're not here to tell people what to think about the results. We do this to get this information out there.” His responsibility is to be an impartial arbiter of the reality that the poll is reporting, he says.

Stapleton argues that transparency is key among polls and pollsters, citing the intersection of science and politics as an area that should be free from biases. He observes: “I tell my students all the time, ‘I don't care what you think in this class. I care that we do science in the appropriate way so that we can get to the reality, rather than what we want to be true.’”

Undergrads “are just now learning to think things through and come to conclusions,” which is why making sure students analyze the reason certain conclusions are reached is critical.

In his own research, Stapleton focuses on the role anger plays in American politics: “Emotions are critically important to our daily lives, and one thing that politicians can do is use their own emotional projections to influence how the public feels.”

The prevalence of emotional manipulation in today’s politics only reinforces the importance of unbiased, science-based surveys, he says. According to Stapleton, the goal of a survey like APRL’s is to create a more nuanced view of politics among voters and his students.

“I think that's our goal ultimately,” he muses. “Do people leave your class with a better grasp of reality and the truth? My hope is they do. And then do they take that and apply it in the real world? My hope is they do.”

Through creating a class centered around surveys from ��’s American Politics Research Lab, grad student teaches his students not only to think critically about politics and survey design, but also how to analyze the data of a large-scale poll.

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Students make rhyme and reason of the Periodic Table

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 18:01:39 +0000

Students make rhyme and reason of the Periodic Table Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 11/27/2018 - 11:01

Sarah Schleifer

In ‘Poetic Table of the Elements,’ students of Danny Long combine art and science, old and new

Who could refrain, that had a periodic poem to write, and in that poem, courage to make an element known (apologies to Shakespeare).

From bottom left to right, Sara Nebreda Perez, Michael Gonzales, Gabe Raymondi, Julia Seko, Susan Guinn-Chipman and Arsen Bassenov work to typeset student poems by hand as part of Danny Long's class. At the top of the page, a poem is typeset; the text is backwards so that it will print correctly. Photos by Sarah Schleifer.

Students of Danny Long’s Radical Science Writing class (WRTG 3030) have the poem to write and the courage to make it happen, and the final project will be displayed on a giant Poetic Table of the Elements later this year in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Norlin Library.

Long’s students are getting a hands-on lesson in attention to detail with their latest project in which they compose, typeset and hand-print 118 poems for the elements of the Periodic Table.

The goal of the poem itself is to “teach a little kernel of information” about each element, whether that be the etymology of its name, discovery or function. “My students write about so many different things and yet never have we even talked about the periodic table as a form of writing, as a way of communicating science,” Long explains, citing it as an “untapped resource.”

With the help of Gregory Robl and Susan Guinn-Chipman of the Special Collections, Archives, and Preservation Department and Julia Seko of Scholarly Resource Development, students learned to handset and print the type using techniques that encourage “mindfulness,” as one of Long's students, Sara Nebreda Perez, observed.

“So much of what we do on campus anymore is intangible, and so maybe there’s something about just getting to sit down and create things by hand,” Long says of this project, which requires the slow and deliberate setting of tiny metal letters—upside down and backwards—into “furniture” that holds it in place to be printed.

These poem cards will be mounted onto a 5 ½-foot-tall x 10-foot-wide Poetic Table of the Elements and displayed at the University Libraries with the help of Andrew Violet of the Administration Department, with additional copies going to Special Collections and the staff and students involved. There are also plans to sell one copy to another institution through Vamp and Tramp booksellers.

Examples of student poems:

Ruthenium—44
By Ryan Henley
The Russian-named number 44,
A metal found in platinum ore.
Found sparsely in the Ural range,
I cost a hefty hunk of change.

Tin—50
By DiemMy Nguyen
Mix me with copper, you’ll surely get bronze.
Those so-called tin cans? Well, they are all cons.
I cry when I’m bent, but I am still strong.
Coat metals with me, and they will last long.

Manganese—25
By Jason DesVeaux
Alone I am weak,
but with others I shine:
To bodies, bones, and metals
I am divine.

Long, an instructor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at �� Boulder, says he likes incorporating creative projects into his science-writing class and that students also respond well to his self-proclaimed “radical” syllabus. Past projects of his include children’s books to teach first graders math and science.

Robl, who helps students set their type and print their poems, calls this project, which mixes science writing, poetry and traditional typesetting, “pretty radical on many levels for instruction for undergraduates” and, also, “just too cool.”

Long says some unexpected benefits of this project were the in-depth discussions he had with his students about grammar and punctuation. Talking about everything from the rhetorical effects of different punctuation to sentence structure while “focusing in on a really small piece of writing” was a productive way to look analytically at these mechanisms and “get a lot of punch out of it.”

He calls the Poetic Table assignment a good metaphor for the “radical” course name. The term “radical” is “often used to describe something that’s extreme, but it also comes from the Latin word meaning ‘root,’” Long says. In addition to describing something new and unusual, he notes, it also describes something old.

He agrees that it’s an apt way of looking at his class, which examines “the history of scientific communication and plays around with old forms of communication in slightly new ways.” The Poetic Table combines an old example of scientific communication that’s been developing over several centuries with a contemporary poetic twist.

“It’s been fun listening to the students explain to me why they wrote what they wrote.” Long quips that “usually it goes over my head because I’m not a scientist,” but says the amount of research and effort the students put into their poems is “encouraging and inspiring.”

Danny Long’s students are getting a hands-on lesson in attention to detail as they compose, typeset and hand-print 118 poems for the elements of the Periodic Table.

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New �� Boulder philosophy course tackles sports

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 04:40:03 +0000

New �� Boulder philosophy course tackles sports Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/26/2018 - 21:40

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Class tackles four hot-button topics: doping, collegiate athletics, sex and gender, and sports and politics

Ask fans in the stands or a star athlete on the sidelines about the connection between philosophy and sports, and it’s a fair bet that many would find the question puzzling.

Philosophy, after all, is seen by many as a kind of ultimate pursuit of the mind, while sports is deemed an expression of the body. As the late Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss pointed out in his groundbreaking 1969 book, Sport: A Philosophical Inquiry, every human society watch and participate in sports, yet the world’s greatest philosophers barely brushed against the subject, considering it vulgar.

Alex Wolf-Root, a PhD student in philosophy, is shown above in class and at the top of the page competing in the 2014 USA Cross Country National Championships. Photos courtesy of Alex Wolf-Root.

Alex Wolf-Root, a former collegiate track athlete pursuing a PhD in philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder, first got the idea to create a course melding philosophy and sports following a conversation with a co-worker about “Deflategate.” For non-sports fans, that was the media’s tag for a scandal in which the New England Patriots were found guilty of deliberating deflating footballs during the 2014-15 American Football Conference championship, allegedly to make it easier for star quarterback Tom Brady to throw the ball.

“Assuming the allegations were true, it raises some interesting philosophical questions,” says Wolf-Root, who is not a football fan.

That seed has now bloomed into a course, Philosophy and Sports (PHIL 2240), offered for the first time at �� Boulder for the fall 2018 semester. Most of Wolf-Root’s 32 students have never before taken a philosophy course, which is exactly what he was hoping for.

“I wanted to pull people into philosophy classes who would never otherwise do that, to practice the skills of philosophy and discuss interesting issues they otherwise wouldn’t discuss,” he says.

He deliberately dropped his students into the deep end during the first weeks of the course, examining such conceptual issues as the nature of sports, sportspersonship and cheating.

“The first unit is really about the metaphysics of sport,” he says, “though I never used the word ‘metaphysics.’”

From there, the class is designed to tackle four hot-button applied topics: doping, collegiate athletics, sex and gender, and sports and politics.

Wolf-Root has had strong feelings about doping in sport, though many of his views changed once he began to critically examine the issues. Regardless of his own views, he has sought to foster discussions that will help his students see shades of gray. For example, using caffeine isn’t considered doping, even though the drug has been shown to give endurance athletes a leg up. Likewise, many athletes use iron supplements to boost red-blood-cell counts and improve oxygen uptake.

“Talking about ‘unnatural’ enhancement is incredibly problematic,” he says. “What does it mean for something to be ‘natural’? Wearing clothes isn’t ‘natural.’”

Ultimately, it’s all about context, he argues, and what’s agreed upon within the sporting community.

The course examines two main questions pertaining to collegiate athletics: The connection, if any, between athletics and academics, and the exploitation of athletes in money-generating sports such as football and basketball.

Talking about ‘unnatural’ enhancement is incredibly problematic,” he says. “What does it mean for something to be ‘natural’? Wearing clothes isn’t ‘natural.’”

Wolf-Root is so troubled by some of those issues that he won’t watch big-time college athletics—men's basketball and football in the "Power Five" conferences (ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-12 and SEC). He sees big-time college athletes as “exploited free labor” and is dubious about the traditional arguments supporting athletic programs at colleges and universities.

“Supporters say (athletics) teaches values of teamwork, leadership and hard work,” he notes. “But not only is it not clear that big-time college athletics teaches that, there also are tons of other ways to learn those skills.”

Wolf-Root sees the value of connecting athletics with the modern university, but believes the current system is unjustifiable. That's not to say that he doesn't see a value of connecting athletics with the modern university, but rather that he sees the current system as unjustifiable.

Issues relating to gender in sports can be contentious. Sex and gender, he notes, are not the same thing, and neither is strictly binary; not even anatomical or chromosomal differences are always clear cut.

Binary approaches to athletics can lead to humiliating or invasive situations, as when South African runner Caster Semenya was forced to withdraw from competition until she underwent a “sex verification test.” She was later allowed to return to competition, though allegedly only after she underwent mandatory hormone therapy.

And determining what is an “unfair” advantage can get tricky, Wolf-Root says.

“People under six feet tall are more likely to be discriminated against in professional basketball, and most professional sprinters have an innate physical advantage because they have a higher proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers,” he notes. “That might be unfair, but is it necessarily problematic?”

He literally laughs at the idea that there has ever been a time when sports have been free from politics, noting that African-American baseball players were forced to play in separate leagues for decades and that the U.S. Department of Defense has spent millions of dollars to turn professional football games into a platform for its messaging.

When former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the National Anthem to bring attention to racial injustice, many Americans accused him of disrespecting the military. Meanwhile, former college and NFL quarterback Tim Tebow, who is white, was widely hailed for kneeling in prayer after scoring touchdowns.

“Kneeling is one of the more accepted ways of non-violent protest. It shows respect,” Wolf-Root says. “But people hate Kaepernick because he’s using his platform to put a spotlight on how racist our society is.”

Whatever his own opinions, Wolf-Root hopes that such discussions will help his students “cultivate critical-reasoning skills.”

“Education is not just about getting a job. It’s about helping students learn the skills to flourish and engage in the world around them, be it in work, life or politics. Even more broadly, it's about helping students figure out what matters to them, and what makes their lives have meaning and value," he says.

Alex Wolf-Root, a former collegiate track athlete pursuing a PhD in philosophy at �� Boulder, first got the idea to create a course melding philosophy and sports following a conversation about “Deflategate.”

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