Steve Llano

After teaching online now for over half of a semester, I've noticed something seriously missing from the online educational experience.

A campus is an extremely important element of college pedagogy. We don't consider everything that it does for us when we are there.

It's August. I'm in that mode of excitement mixed with anxiety as I start to prepare to teach. This often involves gathering up a lot of scraps of paper, things I've saved into MS OneNote and Google Keep, and reviewing the notes I took at the end of last term.

The horrific mass shootings of the past couple of days are about to enter the well-known cycle of public discourse meant to account for their existence. People have to talk about these events to make sense of them, to account for why they happened, and to make sense of them—that is, to make sure they do not disrupt the normal order of the country. As usual, video games and the internet are taking a lot of the blame. But something is different this time.

A trip to New York city is incomplete without experiencing the rich amount of American history that is on offer. The museums, the monuments, parks, statues, and historical sites is overwhelming. But top of most tourists' lists is a trip to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. The story of the United States is so deeply integrated with these two national parks that actually visiting them can really make all the difference in your view of the United States.