Students will learn about the impact of World War I on the American Home Front including health care reform

This class is not about where in the world to seek the perfect career and happiness. Rather, it is about seeking in yourself ? your values, desires, choices, and habits ? which would prepare you for a fulfilling career and lasting happiness. You will be asked to discuss your current challenges and to try to work with them using the tools discussed in the class. These exercises help you to make conscious effort to negotiate with life challenges, uncover your passions and dreams, improve interpersonal relationships, and live a fuller life.

South Asia is linguistically very diverse with 4 major language families and a very large number of languages. The linguistic diversity partially tracks the
movements of the peoples who live in South Asia and looking at the languages of this area provides a window into the cultures, histories, and literatures of the subcontinent. My plan is to start with an overview of the major language families and then spend each meeting looking at one language - its distintinctive linguistic properties and what historical and cultural forces have shaped this language.

Early childhood education has been making the news. . Education professionals, politicians, and businesses have identified early childhood education as important to the well-being of children and our country?s interests. In this seminar, we?ll explore current issues related to the education of young children in the United States today.

Reading a story in one sitting can be a powerful experience. Flash fiction (stories under 1,000 words) uses minimal space to maximal effect. In this course, we will look at writing by masters of the form, reading critically to study how the authors create character, scene, and conflict, in just a few words. We will learn techniques for generating ideas and write our own pieces of flash fiction, using revision methods to condense and polish our writing so that every word matters.

This seminar will explore the biology and behavior of the domestic cat from an evolutionary and ecological perspective. Students will be introduced to the evolution of mammals and wild cats. The seminar will explore the domestication process and how this shaped the current behavior and biology of the domestic cat and how cat ancestry left its marks on this companion animal. The positive and negative health impacts of domestic cats will be discussed. The seminar will conclude with a discussion of feral cats, their impacts on wildlife, and their management.

This Faculty First-Year Seminar interrogates the representation of race and gender in American cinema. Engaging historical, literary, and filmic texts, this course examines major historical transformations that have shaped the development, performance, and portrayal of identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It focuses on the interlocking relationships and representations of whites and blacks, as well as the sexes.

This course provides students with entry points to understand the complexities of gender and sexuality diversity, to critically examine the social construction of identities, and to consider what it might mean to queer understandings of gender and sexuality. Drawing on work from the fields of anti-oppression education and queer theory, the course exposes students to concepts that serve to identify, name, and explain social inequalities related to gender and sexuality diversity.

The rise of human civilization is marked by the development of ever more advanced materials: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. How will future historians refer to our time? The Silicon Age, or Perhaps the Age of Polymers? Polymers encompass a broad spectrum of our world from the mundane, such as plastics for packaging, to the cutting edge, such as the wings of advanced aircraft, or flexible electronic devices. The DNA that encodes the blueprints for life, and the proteins that build our bodies, are also polymers.

Randomness and uncertainty exist in our daily lives as well as in every scientific investigation. This course helps students better understand randomness and uncertainty and gives them tools to make more informed decisions under uncertain situations.
We will discuss that our intuition is often wrong when assessing uncertain situations, leading us to make wrong decisions. We will provide real life examples where even professionals have misjudged chances and probabilities.