Carl Sagan. A blast from the past, you’re going to tell me!

But not really.

As several commenters have pointed out after watching the video linked below, he’s more relevant than ever at this point. So go watch it yourself right now — before you do anything else! Watch it even if you have absolutely no interest in astronomy.

I can wait.

I’m still waiting…

All right, now that you’ve watched the video, you know what this is about. I just wish that I had had the opportunity to take Sagan’s senior seminar in critical thinking when I was an undergraduate at Harvard and he was a junior professor there, but he probably hadn’t even created the course yet and in any case Harvard unfortunately had had the bad judgment to deny him tenure just before my senior year, when he moved on to Cornell. (Harvard has long had the unfortunate habit of denying tenure to its own junior faculty, preferring to hire tenured professors from elsewhere. And they especially don’t like celebrities and popularizers.)

I love these 1998 and 1986 exams! They are so much better than the exams I took or created. But some of my most successful students would have detested them. I am inevitably reminded of the button I wore in the ’60s and ’70s:

Fortunately I was teaching at Lincoln-Sudbury at the time, even though our proposal to teach a critical thinking course was voted down 8–7 by the Math Department.

Categories: Teaching & Learning