Winter Quarter: "7AM"- Jacqueline Taïeb

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In winter quarter, I worked with Professor Roger Soder to discover what it means to sustain, cultivate, and understand a Free Society and a more thoughtful public. This was a particularly poignant class, not only because of the applicability of nearly every subject (discussing rewiring the educational system to "Shooting and Elephant" and the father/son relationship of Lord Chesterfield to Janis Joplin's Me and Bobby McGee), but because of the timing. February 25th, 2022, we all walked into class in total silence in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine. Outside of class, we were surrounded by peers following two extremes. The first set were making jokes about avoiding the draft or if they would get to bring Vitali to continue "the college experience" overseas. The others were either crying or completely blank in the eyes, haunted at this "new normal" and the threat of global war. However, we had all been reading chapters and philosophies on the destruction and reconstitution of society. Our brains were darting back and forth between big picture and small picture thoughts, sprinting through tangible historical examples, all of them incredibly sobering. Soder gave us the space to decide how we wanted to resolve our anxieties and structure the class. We weren't so much testing our knowledge and its real world applicability--we were beyond textbooks and grades-- but we were exploring our humanity, this sensation of a generous spirit, and it was profound.