[ad_1]
When Vivian Folkenflik was a professor and lecturer at UC Irvine, she walked into lecture rooms with items of multicolored chalk. She believed that the assorted hues on the chalkboard would assist interact her undergraduate college students in sophisticated concepts.
“When you’ve got multicolored chalk, you might train college students something,” John H. Smith, emeritus professor at UC Irvine, recalled her typically saying, half in jest.
For greater than 30 years, Folkenflik taught hundreds of UC Irvine college students a core humanities course that weaved collectively historical past, literature and philosophy. She additionally mentored lots of extra graduate college students, lecturers and early-career professors.
Folkenflik’s life ended out of the blue on Oct. 28. She was struck by a pickup truck whereas she was crossing a avenue in Montclair, N.J., in accordance with her son, David Folkenflik. She was 83. Whereas confirming his mom’s sudden, tragic loss of life, he spoke of her accomplishments and the legacy she left in academia.
“She performed a very vital position within the progress of the humanities on the campus, and he or she did it not simply by way of the buildings and the establishments, however the individuals,” stated her son, Nationwide Public Radio’s media correspondent. “So many generations of cohorts of undergraduates and graduate college students and aspiring professors, and even the total school members, had been influenced by her insights, teaching and encouragement.
“Universities can look like impersonal locations at instances, however it’s individuals like Vivian who make them a respiration organism with a beating coronary heart,” he added.
Vivian Folkenflik was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1940 to a heart specialist and a college librarian who instilled in her a love of museums, music, literature, historical past, journey and Jackie Robinson.
After graduating from highschool at 16, she attended Radcliffe School in Massachusetts earlier than incomes her grasp’s diploma at Cornell College, concentrating on French literature.
That’s the place she met Robert Folkenflik, whom she would marry two years later. That they had two kids and, in 1975, moved to California, the place they made Laguna Seaside their residence for 45 years.
Within the Eighties, Folkenflik started instructing UC Irvine’s humanities’ core course to undergraduate college students. Smith, who was director of the course for a while, stated that — along with the affect she had on college students — Folkenflik helped different instructors who had been struggling to show the sophisticated curriculum.
“Vivian was devoted, completely devoted, to instructing essential pondering,” Smith stated.
However her relationship to her college students and the humanities took on a brand new that means following the loss of life of her daughter. Nora, 28, was driving her bike in Seattle one night time in 1995 when she was struck and killed by a drunk driver, Smith stated.
“She used the fabric and her college students in some ways to get by way of it … and he or she confirmed college students that this was not simply stuff that they had been studying for an examination, however that the humanities supplied us the sort of supplies that we may use to get us by way of the difficulties in life,” Smith recalled. For Folkenflik, Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey” helped her navigate the profound loss.
When she wasn’t instructing, Folkenflik and her husband liked to journey, watch movies, go to concert events, and stroll alongside Reef Level Seaside. “However she actually liked, liked mental pursuits,” stated her son, David. “She had a ferocious mind … and he or she preferred to seek out methods to attach with individuals. … To be in a dialog with Vivian is sort of to invariably come away amused, made to assume, and in addition affirmed in oneself, and he or she actually sought to try this.”
She retired in 2012 however continued to substitute train. Following her husband’s loss of life in 2019 after a battle with lymphoma, she moved to New Jersey, the place she was nearer to household. She handed the time at her grandchildren’s soccer video games, dance recitals and drama performances. She wrote poetry and studied the Talmud.
Folkenflik is survived by son David; daughter-in-law Jesse; sister Judith; and grandchildren Viola, Zella and Eliza.
[ad_2]
Source link
