I had an amazing experience!  I had the chance to attend the OU-Arkansas women’s gymnastics meet at Lloyd Noble on Friday, January 31.  University of Oklahoma gymnast getting ready for floor exercise. I love OU’s women’s gymnastics, and I was really excited to see that now that we’re in the SEC, we would have a meet against the University of Arkansas where World Cup Floor Ex champion and Olympics alternate, Joscelyn Roberson, is competing.  I purchased great seats for myself, Shandell, and little 3-year-old Brielle and 7-year-old Monty, in order to see Joscelyn Roberson ..read more

 Myrtle Juanita Robertson was born July 16, 1924 at the Central State Hospital in Norman, Oklahoma.  Despite its name, Central State was no ordinary hospital. It was, in fact, the State of Oklahoma’s largest hospital for the mentally ill and the criminally insane. Her mother had been institutionalized after the death of her husband, but there are no remaining stories of why she was institutionalized, nor why her 11 children were all given up for adoption. Myrtle Juanita, who always went by “Juanita” did not realize that she was adopted until much later in life, and then, when she lea ..read more

 In July 2024, I had the chance to participate in an event at the National Academies of Science in Washington, D. C.   The topic was how best to clean up the orphan oil and gas wells that can pollute the air and groundwater, and thus improve the living conditions for many people, especially those who suffer from socio-economic hardship.   The building was a majestic example of intricate Art Nouveau with stained glass, wrought iron, and lovely nooks and hidden galleries where tributes to the nation’s most visionary scientists could be found.   I was excited and inspired to h ..read more

 Sharing my own thoughts and philosophy on teaching With the advent of ubiquitous AI tools, I’ve renewed my emphasis on connections to real-world experiences as a way to both learn and to communicate the attainment of knowledge, and demonstrating achievement of learning objectives. It is interesting to see how people use Large Language Model generative AI.  They may enter a prompt from the discussion board into AI to see what it delivers. It usually delivers information in the form of short lists, which are either bulleted or are bold-face in the topic or subject. When entire papers ..read more

 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was published in 1757, and it quickly became a cornerstone of Romanticism. The “sublime” is supposed to inspire awe but also shock, even horror.  “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully,  is  astonishment:  and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended,  with some degree of horror.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria incorporates the ideas of Friedrich Schelling, who privileged ..read more

 Over a three-year period, 1852 – 1855, French painter Rosa Bonheur filled a massive canvas, 8 feet tall and 17 feet wide, with a group of gorgeous white Lippizaner stallions, a dark black horse, and other brown horses, passionately in motion in a field surrounded by trees and bordered by a dirt road, ostensibly a horse market. Now, Bonheur’s The Horse Fair is housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  It is remarkable for a number of reasons.  First, it is by a woman artist, one who was classically trained, but who was not allowed in the studios for “life art ..read more

If it were not bad enough to combat essays purchased from Course Hero, GradeSaver, or one of the other paper mills that purchase student essays, now one has to worry about papers generated by large language models such as ChatGPT, Scribe, Google Gemini, CoPilot or others.  Generative AI tools are being developed for specific topics or domains, and the assumption is, at least from a student’s perspective, that the product will be well written and accurate, or at least well written and accurate enough to merit a passing grade.  As an instructor who develops, teaches, and grades courses ..read more

When Rochelle Owens’s play, Chucky’s Hunch, was first performed Off-Broadway in 1981, critics lauded what they expressed as a tour-de-force performance by the actor playing Chucky, and they took the plot at face value.  The play, which is a long dramatic monologue by an aging man triggered by the news that the second of his three ex-wives has won the lottery, takes the audience into a fascinating psychological odyssey.  On the face of it, the play is simply about the embittered rantings of a failed Abstract Expressionist artist whose grandiose plans took him nowhere except into penur ..read more

 The two poems that I have chosen deal with the basic question, does our technological progress represent true human progress. Susan Smith Nash’s poem, “The Nature of Poetics,” (https://marshhawkpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Marsh-Hawk-Review-fall-2021.pdf) explores the subjects of modern work aided by technology, traditional work aided by tools, and our possible disconnection as a society as the nature of work becomes more ephemeral. Nash uses Aristotelian analysis to search for her answers. This is a much different approach than the second poem. Carlos Hiraldo, in his work, “The ..read more

It’s hard to believe it has been almost 30 years since the long poem, “Black Chalk,” was published as a chapbook by Texture Press in Norman, Oklahoma. A companion video was filmed and produced in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, to be debuted at the Fred Jones Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Oklahoma.   Video: https://youtu.be/EdTdsfaessY?si=6aUtiW3-ptsXfsiD  The text: https://rochelleowens.net/poetrybooks.php?book=black_chalk  The poem consists of three interwoven threads. The first consists of the arrival of the Spaniards in North America and the brutality and m ..read more