John Wager: A Quick Biographical Sketch

Instructor: John Wager

I'm originally from near Rochester New York, but I grew up in North Florida, in a small town named "Starke." I moved to the Chicago area in 1970 after I got out of the Army. I now live in Forest Park. My daughter is now a junior, attending Columbia College in Chicago. She started as a freshman at my old college "Florida Atlantic University," which is near Ft. Lauderdale, about 2 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, so I an now discovering what it's like to be the parent of a college student as well as the teacher of college students. I'm not ready for this!

It was quite a shock going from Vietnam heat to Evanston winters, and going from war to graduate school at Northwestern.

It took ten years to finally get through, but I got my Ph.D. from Northwestern in 1980.

I've been teaching at Triton College since 1975--A whole lifetime for many of my students! Back in college, when I was considering changing majors from pre-med to something else, I remember thinking that a perfect job to me would be to teach some kind of interdisciplinary humanities courses at a college near an exciting, culturally rich city. I got my dream!

At Triton, I mostly teach philosophy courses like Intro Philosophy (PHL 101) and Ethics (PHL 103)-- Usually as a part of "The Undergraduate Center" packages of courses. I also teach World Religions (PHL 105), and other Humanities courses like Relationships I (HUM 101) or Humanities of Western Civ. (HUM 151).

For the last few years, I've also been teaching sections of "special topics" courses.

In PHL296, I've been teaching a seminar in the "Ethics of War and Violence" drawing on my background as a philosophy student in the Infantry.

In HUM296, I've been leading student trips to Europe over Spring Break. We've gone to France, Spain, Italy, Germany, England, Ireland, Scotland, and Greece so far, and we're planning more trips like this for the future. The next trip, in March 2006, will be to Ireland. (I know Ireland pretty well, having spent a large part of the last four summers there on my bicycle, exploring most of the country.) We also have a trip to Florence, Italy, planned, for two weeks in January, before the spring semester starts.

So how did I wind up being the department member in charge of developing "Web Pages?" Back when I was writing the book on Vietnam, I bought a computer that didn't work as advertised. So I took it apart and fiddled with it and got it to work the way it was supposed to. Since then, I've probably done more playing WITH computers than playing ON them.