Largo al factotum - The CSU Fullerton Website of David Waller, Dept. of Liberal Studies
rows of lettuce in the community gardena bee on an orange blossomsnowy egreta yellow-orange flowerthe roostera small blue-violet flowerone of many turtlesa squash growing in the community gardena great blue heronsquirrelmore rows of lettuce
You can see all this and more on a casual walk through your campus arboretum. Photographs by me!

 

photo of journals carrying my recent and forthcoming papers: College Teaching, Music Educators Journal, and Teaching Philosophy Largo al factotum - square banner in Old English lettering with elephant

Hi. It's April, 2008, and, as usual, I'm updating this webpage.

I'm Dr. David Waller. I began college right here at Cal State Fullerton in 1984, so I have a twenty-four year history with this institution. My special interests are the same as those of the university itself, teaching and learning, and these are reflected in my most recent publications, which appear or are forthcoming in the journals pictured at left.

In addition, at the Lilly National Conference on College Teaching, held each year at Miami University in Ohio, I give what has become my annual presentation on strategies to encourage college students to read. This, it seems to me, is the fundamental issue in college education.
photo of journals and books
My earlier publications covered topics ranging from evolutionary biology to the examination of (unintentionally) racist assumptions in environmentalist writing. Pictured here are the journals and book in which they appeared; below are the most recent books and journal in which my articles have been cited. As you can see, my solution to the chicken-and-egg riddle is the cover story of the 2007 edition of this book on paradoxes.

 



photo of wall with five diplomasI'm a very curious person, and four years after I finished my Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, I started getting a hands-on education in two other areas that always interested me: music and art. Those are the smaller diplomas, from Santa Ana College and Fullerton College, respectively. While I began these classes for my own sake, they had a lasting impact on my own teaching and led to my inventing the magnetic Braille music jumble, pictured at right. It's a simple and fun way to encourage music students with visual impairments to learn Braille music notation. It has been tried out at the Braille Music Division of the Southern California Conservatory of Music, and I describe it in my article for Music Educators Journal.photo of Braille music tiles

 


my wimshurst machine creating a nice big spark
I acquired this Wimshurst machine for a
table-top demonstration of Franklin's
lightning rod in LBST 300.

LBST 300:This semester we will study the Founding Fathers to see how art, religion, and science were connected to the politics of the United States. The course focuses in particular on the influence of the European Enlightenment on people like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Elementary education students will find the readings useful in their careers, thematic plan students will find that the course gives an example of interdisciplinary study of a particular time and place, and all students will eventually see the relevance of the rest of the Liberal Studies curriculum (e.g., 302A and 302B) to contemporary American culture, politics, and education.

All of the books are now available at the Little Professor bookstore. For your convenience, I am posting my book order here.

LBST 300 Basics

LBST 300 Reading Notes (as they become available)

 

photo of Ward's book on Charles Willson Peale and two children's books about Peale, <em>The Joke's on George</em> and <em>Help for Mr. Peale</em>
Charles Willson Peale offers a good example of the value of both a Liberal Studies education and California's K-16 educational goals. He was a painter, inventor, and natural historian of the American Revolutionary era. He was very interested in public education and founded the country's first museum of natural history. We are reading Ward's college-level book on Peale, and there are children's books that can introduce Peale to the elementary school classroom. This is a perfect example of the unity of college and elementary-level education with respect to content.

LBST 300 Other Course Materials


 


LBST 303: A survey of developments in twentieth-century art and music, including film. We will augment our survey with five biographies or autobiographies of people involved in these developments (available, as are all my books, at Little Professor). Students who have taken this course have enjoyed these books so much that I wrote an article about the course for the journal College Teaching.

LBST 303 Basics

a treble clef with twelve pitches
In 303 this spring (2008) we put together this tone row while studying Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Click the tone row to hear our Webernesque composition.

 

Other Items

 

kahlo self-portrait
Frida Kahlo
Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird
(1940)

Studying Frida Kahlo's paintings with Liberal Studies students gave me the idea of making a similar self-portrait to do something productive with the experience of the four years I spent dealing with a rare illness and the unexciting web programming job I picked up to pay the medical bills. The portrait was inspired by themes in Kahlo's own works: addressing her medical problems, her use of hospital paraphernalia (in this case, my own MRI), the appearance of musical notation in one of her paintings (since my work is on the computer I can have actual music), and the deliberate confusion of her younger self with her current self--here, I've used my own elementary school photo to represent the fact that so many of my students want to teach elementary school, and all of my students are serious life-long learners. Click the thumbnail to bring up the portrait (it could take a while as it is a large Flash file). Using your mouse, find the trigeminal nerve, which runs alongside the brain and into the face; your cursor will become a hand when you have found the nerve. Pressing on the nerve causes electrical shocks of random severity. When you hit "the big one," a stark de Chirico-like landscape appears. Not the happiest picture in the world, but I got a lot out of designing and programming it, a genuine piece of multi-media twenty-first century art. Thanks, Liberal Studies students!

 thumbnail image of self-portrait showing young DW and lightning
D. Waller
Damocles, or
This Mortally Electric Coil
(2007)

Other Pieces by Dave

image of a box of red hotsdouble image of Frankenstein monstersmall black and white Rothko-like piece next to a lightswitch
This is pen and ink; it took several
weeks to finish.		My first silkscreen. I did it as a demonstration
for LBST 303 in the fall of 2006.
Frank and I have more than one thing in common.		Another of my inventions, the mini-Rothko,
made of inked clayboard.

 

image of charcoal drawing of Dave
D. Waller
Self-Portrait After Brain Surgery
(2002)
charcoal
Not looking too happy, but just had an incredibly interesting operation in which the surgeon used Teflon to mitigate the problems illustrated in the computer self-portrait above. I did this charcoal drawing in my first drawing class after getting out of the hospital.

Staring at yourself in the mirror and drawing what you see is an interesting way to spend an hour!

These art classes were very useful in the process of rehabilitating myself and getting my "smarts" back. Appropriately enough, the first sign of intellectual recovery was this paper on what I had learned about teaching by observing my own music and art teachers:

first page of David's paper, Pedagogical Pilgrim: What the Arts Taught Me About Philosophy

LBST 401: An interdisciplinary investigation into how we acquire knowledge of ourselves and others through biography and autobiography. We will read books, analyze songs, look at paintings, and watch films. My LBST 401 is one of the few courses on the history and theory of biography and autobiography offered in the United States, and might be the only one focused on comparing the two in terms of knowledge (if I want to know about a person, what is the difference between reading a biography and an autobiography? If I want to learn about myself, what is the difference between writing my own autobiography and reading a biography about me written by someone else?). The reading list looks long, but most of the books are short, and a couple of them we will not read in their entirety.

One biography you cannot buy at Little Professor is this short but famous one by Samuel Johnson: The Life of Savage

LBST 401 Basics

LBST 401 Reading Notes

LBST 401 Other Course Materials

Note: See the Blackboard site for philosopher Galen Strawson's article, "Against Narrativity," and for biologist David Gems' article, "Is More Life Always Better? The New Biology of Aging and the Meaning of Life."

The Life of Savage

If you want to use just 21 sheets of paper when printing out The Life of Savage, use "Booklet Printing." This screenshot will show you how: How to print a booklet.

After doing this for "Front side only," then flipping the paper over and running it through the printer again for "Back side only," you will end up with 21 sheets of paper that look something like this: Booklet pages before being put in order, folded, and stapled.