The Box

Finals week ends tomorrow, and thus it seems like a good time to induce in a bit of reminiscing about the Past Semester.  All in all a good semester—far too much administrative busywork, and a teaching schedule that had me teaching 4 days a week (instead of my normal 2) meant that I felt rather rushed many days.  Blog posting suffered as a result (alas, poor blog; thou hast been neglected.  But, weep not for the blog.  It, like Adonais, is made one with Nature. (No, I don’t know that that means either, but Lily is currently writing a paper of Wordsworth and so I am thinking about Romantic Poets.))  On the upside, one class went rather well and one went decently.  [Only one really bad part in a lecture and just one botched answer to a student asking a question after class. So, that is still below my threshold of failure indicating the need to retire.]  My tutorial went well, and some great independent study students this semester.  Plus, many unbelievably interesting conversations with unbelievably interesting students.  I really like my job, mostly because I really like my students.

One book from the semester still needs to be reviewed:

Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

The quick conclusion:  The Box is really cool.  (The item “The Box” is what is really cool, not the book The Box.)  Truth be told, I, like everyone else, had never really given The Box much thought before reading this book.  But, now after reading a history of it, I am pretty convinced that it deserves mention as one of the truly great inventions of the 20^th century.  A standardized shipping container which can be easily loaded onto ships, trains and trucks has revolutionized the ability to transport goods from one place to another.  Why can we get goods so cheaply from other countries?  Why can we transport goods so easily across the country?  Why is international shipping so fast?  The Box.  All Hail The Box.  Really.  If you have never been thankful for The Box, now, at this Blessed time of Year when One gives gifts to others in order to celebrate the Greatest Gift Ever, would be a good time to Give Thanks for The Box (and all the other things for which one is thankful too for that matter).

As for the book named after this wonderful invention, well, it was OK.  The Box is cool; the book The Box erred on the side of tediousness.  After all, even though the item is great and amazing, that doesn’t mean every detail about the rival shipping companies who developed The Box and the battles among unions of workers at the ports and so on is equally amazing.  On balance, I thought the book was good, but I have yet to meet a student from the class in which I assigned the book who liked the book at all.  Alas.  However, Fairness dictates that I note that the students in this class had just finished the book on Pirates before starting this book, so I suppose any other book was doomed to be a disappointment after a book on Pirates.

Pirates and The Box---hmm, there is a great novel in there somewhere.

And thus ends a semester.  It’s a strange end for a Fall Semester, though.  As I have noted here before, normally I find Spring semester to be terribly bittersweet as students with whom I like to talk graduate, but the end of Fall semester has not traditionally been tinged with any such thing.  With the increasing number of December grads we are seeing here, that is changing.  This semester there are a couple of students graduating whom I am really going to miss.