I used to teach geology in Mississippi, and would encounter the occasional creationist student. Most were quiet and skeptical; a few were loud. One guy I remember well - He was argumentative in the way that he had a sharp and bright, but enclosed mind: energetic, persistent, and deeply invested in his conclusions. He was arguing with me in class one day about our discussion of Steno's laws of stratigraphy. The retorts were familiar - age cannot be known, assumptions compounded upon assumptions, the whole conversation resting on circular reasoning. I became a bit flustered and told him to go outside to the school parking lot. Out the classroom window was parking lot, bordered by a small road-cut exposure of the Prairie Bluff Formation, which trends roughly north-south through Mississippi (also late Cretaceous I think). I gave him no indication of what he would find there, but the Prairie Bluff has fossiliferous beds of oyster (and other) fossils. The next day he came back holding one of the oysters. He had the same dismissals, push backs, but there was also this uncertainty in him that persisted for the rest of the semester: a mind registering, against its resistance, that the world was larger and more interesting than his previous experience suggested. I’d like to think that there was some revelation, I’m not really sure there was, but that’s how I prefer to remember it. all down to an oyster fossil hundreds of miles from the sea - in a boring parking lot that people walk by every day.
Great story. I guess my cynical, futile view is that such a change, based on the evidence of the student's own eyes, was possible back in the old days (20 years ago). I no longer have optimism that that is the case now.
Another interesting read Richard. All those paleo coastlines I find fascinating. Makes me hungry for a plate of Ostrea. I had a hot tempered Korean girlfriend at in college that studied shell middens. I'm visiting my home state of PA from CA and I find the geology and outcrops much more satisfying here, simple, often a more ancient story and less chaotic.
Thanks! As is probably evident from most of my posts I'm prejudiced in favor of the Rockies - outcrops less eroded and buried by soils and covered by biological things than the East and (agreed) less chaotic than the far west.
I used to teach geology in Mississippi, and would encounter the occasional creationist student. Most were quiet and skeptical; a few were loud. One guy I remember well - He was argumentative in the way that he had a sharp and bright, but enclosed mind: energetic, persistent, and deeply invested in his conclusions. He was arguing with me in class one day about our discussion of Steno's laws of stratigraphy. The retorts were familiar - age cannot be known, assumptions compounded upon assumptions, the whole conversation resting on circular reasoning. I became a bit flustered and told him to go outside to the school parking lot. Out the classroom window was parking lot, bordered by a small road-cut exposure of the Prairie Bluff Formation, which trends roughly north-south through Mississippi (also late Cretaceous I think). I gave him no indication of what he would find there, but the Prairie Bluff has fossiliferous beds of oyster (and other) fossils. The next day he came back holding one of the oysters. He had the same dismissals, push backs, but there was also this uncertainty in him that persisted for the rest of the semester: a mind registering, against its resistance, that the world was larger and more interesting than his previous experience suggested. I’d like to think that there was some revelation, I’m not really sure there was, but that’s how I prefer to remember it. all down to an oyster fossil hundreds of miles from the sea - in a boring parking lot that people walk by every day.
Great story. I guess my cynical, futile view is that such a change, based on the evidence of the student's own eyes, was possible back in the old days (20 years ago). I no longer have optimism that that is the case now.
I enjoy your etymological wanderings! Do keep posting 😊
"camel-sparrow, for the size of ostriches which are 'usually' larger than sparrows". Not sure I'd like to meet a sparrow that WAS larger! 😁
For sure!
Another interesting read Richard. All those paleo coastlines I find fascinating. Makes me hungry for a plate of Ostrea. I had a hot tempered Korean girlfriend at in college that studied shell middens. I'm visiting my home state of PA from CA and I find the geology and outcrops much more satisfying here, simple, often a more ancient story and less chaotic.
Thanks! As is probably evident from most of my posts I'm prejudiced in favor of the Rockies - outcrops less eroded and buried by soils and covered by biological things than the East and (agreed) less chaotic than the far west.