{"id":744,"date":"2008-12-03T14:36:23","date_gmt":"2008-12-03T14:36:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wabash.edu\/alumni\/2008\/12\/03\/bill-placher-teaching-while-learning\/"},"modified":"2008-12-03T14:36:23","modified_gmt":"2008-12-03T14:36:23","slug":"bill-placher-teaching-while-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/alumninews\/2008\/12\/03\/bill-placher-teaching-while-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Placher &#8211; Teaching While Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.wabash.edu\/www2images\/placher2.jpg\" hspace=\"1\" align=\"left\" \/>That&#8217;s student Bill Placher, left, giving his Commencement address at graduation in 1970. If you haven&#8217;t read his address, I heartily recommend you do that (click <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wabash.edu\/news\/docs\/Commencment.pdf\">here<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;ll be astounded at the clarity of thought, the uniqueness, and the ability to see things on a different level than most human beings. To my thinking, we could have saved several years and just given him a PhD right then and there.<\/p>\n<p>The other photo is Bill in the classroom some 35 years later. I think you can see in the photos the ability to grasp more, observe more, and then carefully communicate exactly what he wanted one to know.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.wabash.edu\/www2images\/placher%201.jpg\" align=\"left\" \/>The pessimist will say his voice has fallen silent. The optimist will say his voice is now amplified by the many who came to know him.<\/p>\n<p>As Bill said in 1970: &#8220;But perhaps we&#8217;ll learn that there are more things to admire in men than to despise;&#8230;we will act more honorably than we expected we would; perhaps we&#8217;ll have a lot more fun along the way. It wouldn&#8217;t be a bad life.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That&#8217;s student Bill Placher, left, giving his Commencement address at graduation in 1970. If you haven&#8217;t read his address, I heartily recommend you do that (click here). You&#8217;ll be astounded at the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"w_featured_image_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/alumninews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/alumninews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/alumninews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/alumninews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/alumninews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/alumninews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/alumninews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/alumninews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/alumninews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}