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Lorena took this picture in a mall parking lot, waiting for the stores to open. We are down in Arizona visiting Christian, waiting for our friends to get here from Chula Vista, and wondering why everyone does not want to live in Arizona with its fabulous weather, unique culture–heavily influenced by Mexico and Mexican food, and lots of things to do and see. I know we might think differently in the heat of summer in a few months, but right now it is very, very nice.
Thanks to Bonnie and Kiwi for holding down the fort for us back home.
This morning is Christian’s last required class for his PhD. He still needs to pass his comprehensive exams and write and defend his dissertation, but this is a seminal moment. His mindset right now is that he never wants to ever take another class, but part of that might be the whole “senioritis” thing. If he had been on a normal trajectory, this would be the last year of his undergraduate degree. Still, the sentiment resonates with me. I have often heard that after a certain point, classes just get in the way of learning things and really they are as much a mechanism for keeping track of who can get good grades on their homework, papers, and tests as they are mechanisms for learning. In as much as those measures actually measure learning, even imperfectly, that is a good thing, but there is a “sell-by” date on their usefulness for people who progress pass the fundamentals of a discipline.