{"id":102992,"date":"2016-09-02T12:08:32","date_gmt":"2016-09-02T16:08:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=102992"},"modified":"2026-01-12T15:15:43","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T20:15:43","slug":"video-denis-sweet-explains-why-he-sent-his-student-to-the-trees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2016\/09\/02\/video-denis-sweet-explains-why-he-sent-his-student-to-the-trees\/","title":{"rendered":"Video: Professor Denis Sweet explains why he sent his students to the trees"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On Tuesday morning, Day 2 of Orientation for the Class of 2020, we caught up with Professor Emeritus of German Denis Sweet, back teaching a First-Year Seminar this fall.<\/p>\n<p>In the previous 24 hours, Bates&#8217; newest students had already experienced myriad college firsts: Moving in, meeting roommates, eating in Commons, climbing Mount David, and waking up in a new place. But Tuesday morning provided a whopper: Their very first Bates class, a meeting of their First-Year Seminar.<\/p>\n<p>When we saw Sweet, he&#8217;d just told his students to find a tree and \u201cexperience\u201d it blindfolded: \u201cHug it, hold it, taste it, touch it, listen to it.\u201d Not readily seeing the connection between that exercise and the topic of his course \u2014 exploring various cultures\u2019 apocalyptic scenarios \u2014 we asked Denis why the trees, and here&#8217;s what he said:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Denis Sweet explains how to learn to look inside\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/181208340?dnt=1&amp;app_id=122963\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sending his First Year Seminar students out to &#8220;experience&#8221; a tree starts them on the path of figuring out &#8220;what it is that they think about.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":102995,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,14],"tags":[10873,6683],"class_list":["post-102992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-faculty-staff","tag-first-year-seminar","tag-orientation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102992"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":171649,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102992\/revisions\/171649"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}