The Random Thoughts of Louis Schmier

As I glided through the brisk 45 degree morning, expecting to meet Jack Frost at any moment–first day of walking sweats–I thinking about what a strange two weeks I have had with the classes and individual students. Successes and failures, satisfactions and disappointments, achievements and defeats, fulfillments and emptiness, pleasures and pain had come in [...]

I was at Miami of Ohio this weekend attending the marvelously exciting Lilly Conference on excellence of teaching in higher education getting sutffed with both food for my tummy and food for thought. I was walking the very cold pre-dawn campus Saturday already electrified by the exciting sessions I had attended, renewal of old friendships, [...]

I’ll say that I truly believe that the real miracle of the classroom–what I think is far more exciting then the transmission and ingestion some facts–is not a concern with some axionms, facts, statistics, or principles. It’s not a great essay or project or grade in an of themselves. It is the growth of character [...]

Somewhere in the Talmud, there is something that goes, “I have learned a lot from my teachers and more from my colleagues. But I have learned the most from my students.” How true. I just received such a profound lesson from a student who wrote an anonymous letter which I found a few minutes ago [...]

It is a nice early, cool, inviting morning. I hardly broke a sweat. As I was pouring my cup of coffee, I looked at the button that was lying on the counter and it reminded me of a small event at the Student Union that happened yesterday afternoon. It’s Homecoming Weekend at VSU. And there’s [...]

I went out walking early today with something of a “morning after the day before” spiritual hangover. We of the Jewish faith have just finished an eight day period of self-examination and self-reflection called the Days of Awe. For a little over a week, we are asked to recognize that the precise hardware of the [...]