by Quentin Lewis

Weeknotes: 8/20/23-8/26/23

weeknotes teaching museum books

This Week:

  • I spent a lot of time this week getting ready for the semester to start next week. I finalized my syllabus for MUST252: Introduction to North American Material Culture, and did some preparatory work for work study and other student work in the Museum.
  • I also spent some time putting up various exhibit panels for “Velocity & Position” and the Micronesia exhibit. They look great–thanks Dataflow!
  • I started biking again, and inaugurated it by taking Hazel to her daycare in our new bike trailer. She’s in Pre-Kindergarten now, and I’m so proud of and delighted by her.
  • Dominic and I finished reading “A Wizard of Earthsea” and almost immediately jumped right into “The Tombs of Atuan”. It’s a delight to share these works with him.

  • I mourned the passing of Dr. Francis McMann, one of the great teachers of my life. We called him “McMann”; woebetide anyone who called him Francis, let alone Frank!. He taught AP US History, AP Economics and Philosophy at Washington High School. Before I ever met him, I had heard that he was a strict teacher, a conservative, and a wise-ass. I was immediately taken with him when I sat down in his AP US History Class my junior year. He taught US history not as the chronicle of historical facts, but as the unfolding of economic and mercantile processes. It was the first time a teacher asked me to think about explanation rather than just memorize something, and I was hooked.
    McMann called himself a conservative (largely to troll the lefty students like me) but he was really more of a classical liberal. He been profoundly influenced by the supply-side revolutions of the Chicago School and Milton Freedman, and for him, markets were the great social levelers of the world and the primary force the spurred historical changes. As examples, he taught us that the Salem Witch Trials were really about competing property rights, rather than the standard story of religious fervor, and that the Civil War was about two visions of the US economy. He taught us about Keynesianism and marginal utility and Plato’s Republic and a whole lot more. I found this all fascinating and soaked it in, even as I continued my nascent leftward political and intellectual journey, but his insights and his way of thinking were profoundly important to me, and my own turn toward Marxism was really just about turning what McMann had taught me on its head.
    He was very funny. His lectures were peppered with jokes and snark and the occasional light teasing, particularly about the French nation and people, whom he delighted in razzing at any opportunity. During the 1996 Presidential election between Clinton and Bob Dole, we asked him who he thought would win, and said “My prediciton is that Clinton will win and Walter Mondale will be vindicated!”. Right around Christmas time, he made a big show of telling us all that Santa Claus was myth and when somebody asked him if he told that to his own kids, he pulled out a credit card, saying “From the moment they were little, my kids knew that THIS was Santa Claus”.
    He could also be kind of a jerk. He once split the class up into men and women, and had an impromptu boys against girls trivia contest where he was clearly putting his thumb on the scale for the boys. He also once assigned me a presentation on Richard Nixon and Vietnam, specifically because I had said how much I hated Nixon. But in the course of the presentation I began dropping expletives to the point where he had to ask me to tone it down. He still gave me a good grade, though!
    Even as I was suspicious or dismissive of some of his political and economic insights, I had such a profound respect for him, and I knew that he had a great respect for me. He was certainly supportive of me. He wrote me college rec letters and gave me an award based on a fictional economics professor who solves crimes.

    More than that, he was always happy to talk about anything I brought his way, whether it was the cantankerous critic Allan Bloom or the Posse Comitatus or anything else I was soaking up in those days. And he always responded with a frankly infectious enthusiasm and curiosity.
    Thanks for everything, McMann. It’s no exaggeration to say that his US history class was one of the driving forces that spurred me into the world of archaeology and made me the thinker, scholar and citizen that I am today.