1981

What good is Facebook? Well, it’s a good place to ask my classmates for news.

Chicagoan Justine Cassell wrote that she is “spending the academic year on sabbatical at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, writing a book about young people online” and wants “everybody to know that it’s a lie that Northern California is warm. At the very least in Chicago it’s warm inside the houses.”

I got a great series of notes from Facebook “friend” and classmate Rahn Fleming: “I’m the director of the learning center at Champlain Valley Union High School in Hinesburg, Vermont. We have a staff of six adults—all professionals who are retired or displaced by local layoffs—who tutor high schoolers at all levels and in all subjects. We keep some from flunking out, assist others in getting top scores on AP exams and support the kids in the middle who are so often overlooked.”

Rahn has two sons, Konnor (almost 16) and Ryan (14), and Coach Rahn wrote me that he was “late out the door this morning” trying to get 14 wrestlers on the scale to check weight before a meet. Ryan wrestles for his father, while Konnor has the lead in the school’s production of Mulan. Rahn also coaches football—both boys play—and baseball and is a nationally certified personal trainer. Rahn’s favorite client to date is an 88-year-old great-grandmother from Budapest, who’s taught Rahn to say “Good job” in Hungarian: “Jo Munka.” He tells her that a lot.

Jeff Tepper e-mailed to say that he’s the geology department chair at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. “We’re a five-person department,” Jeff commented, “and I teach the ‘hard rock’ courses (mineralogy, petrology, geochemistry) plus a mythology and geology seminar. One of the perks of the job is field trips, most of which seem to involve active volcanoes—Hawaii last year, Galapagos this year, maybe Iceland next year.” Jeff’s son Nate is a student at Tacoma Community College.

Jeff’s geomythology course sounds darn interesting. “It’s a freshman seminar,” he wrote, “and satisfies a part of our curriculum that’s supposed to foster creative inquiry on the part of the students (and presumably faculty too). We read selections from the Bible (e.g., Garden of Eden, Sodom and Gomorrah), some ancient Greek and Near Eastern tales (Hesiod’s Battle of the Titans, Plato’s Atlantis, Gilgamesh), plus some Pacific Northwest Indian legends and try to decide whether they are garbled accounts of actual events. I also take them out in the field so that they can see what kind of evidence is left behind by tsunamis, floods, lahars and so on.” Look up lahar, classmates. It’s a great word, and the definition that I found uses the even cooler word “pyroclastic.”

And lastly this news from Peter W. Sulli- van: “Greetings from India! A lot has happened during the past three years. In 2006 I met, mar- ried and moved to India with the woman of my dreams; in 2007 I had surgery in Singapore to remove a benign brain tumor; and in 2008 my wife gave birth to our daughter Maeve Brophy Sullivan. I’ve spent the past 18 years living overseas—in Egypt, Thailand, the Philippines, Israel and India—as a lawyer for the U.S. Agency for International Development. This summer my family and I will return to the States for a while. I’ll be eligible to retire from USAID when I turn 50 this fall and so other changes may be around the corner.” We hope to have more about Peter’s journey in the class newsletter.

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