Feelgood Friday feature

How's this for an inspirational story? A professor suffering from terminal cancer insisted on giving his current students their last lecture, even though he'd be hospitalized, so he did it via Skype, hospital gown, tubes and all. Hard not to be moved moved by Prof. Kielhorn's dedication to his students and his teaching.

At 79, Kielhorn was just one class short of finishing 45 years of teaching without missing a single day.With his perfect attendance at risk, Kielhorn reminded his oncologist at Good Shepherd Medical Center in Longview, Texas: "I have class tomorrow at 3 o'clock." That's when his daughter, Martha Croft, and granddaughter, Courtney Bellamy, came up with a plan and started making arrangements for Kielhorn to give his last class via teleconference from the hospital. "Either we were going to break him out or they were going to bring the Skype in," Croft said with a laugh.

45 years of teaching without missing a single class?  So much for university professors not giving a damn about students and/or teaching. That kind of devotion to university education is incredible, and something to aspire to. I for one already can't claim that distinction, so hats off to you, sir!

Hunter-gatherer higher education

I recently discussed the call for paleoecologists and ecologists should make explicit effort to integrate their results and interpretations, and how Paleolithic archaeologists and anthropologists working with hunter-gatherers can, in a way, be considered as having made good strides in a similar direction. Since that post, I've been reflecting about my own training (received and given, since I teach a hunter-gatherer class every other year), and I realized that all the coursework I ever took on foragers was taught by archaeologists (Jim Savelle at McGill, Curtis Marean at ASU), which made me wonder if we can really speak of such good integration between the subfields of anthropology when it comes to foragers.

With that in mind, I figured I'd do a little informal polling of my readership to see whether my experience is normal or an aberration (in the nicest sense of the word, of course!). So, if you're an anthropologist, what kind of anthropologist did you get your hunter-gatherer education from? Feel free to add any comment if the options below are too constraining.