Every spring, I find joy in tracking whale migrations, particularly the right whales moving from the Carolinas into New England. There’s a pleasure in following whales during what tends to be a turbulent time in the academic year, when we balance the chaos of finals season with making summer plans. By comparison, whale watching feels straightforward: it’s refreshing to know that you’re looking for a spout or a fin, and to be able to devote your entire attention to such details.<\/p>\n
As an avid student of environmental literature, whale watching brings me back to the multifaceted pleasures of scholarship\u2013while I love Moby-Dick for its detailed descriptions of right whales, it’s a lot easier to share this fascination with my family when we’re all hoping to spot a whale than it is to read them a conference paper. I like whale watching because it reminds me of the rich payoff of helping students see the value of their learning outside of a grade. Even if the whales never appear and all we get is an expanse of water and a sunburn, for a moment, we are probing at the same mystery. The whales are beautiful, but the experience is so much richer when we get a glimpse of something we weren’t guaranteed to see. And in a time when questions about the ‘use’ of a university education abound, having the opportunity to look out at the sea and know what I am looking for is both a privilege and a gift…<\/p>\n
Keep reading here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every spring, I find joy in tracking whale migrations, particularly the right whales moving from the Carolinas into New England. There’s a pleasure in following whales during what tends to be a turbulent time in the academic year, when we balance the chaos of finals season with making summer plans. By comparison, whale watching feels Continue reading.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4628,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/facultyhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/facultyhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/facultyhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/facultyhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4628"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/facultyhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/facultyhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":598,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/facultyhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions\/598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/facultyhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/facultyhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/facultyhub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}