Oh Wow! Oh Wow! Oh Wow!

by | Sunday, October 30, 2011

Much has been written about Steve Jobs in the past few weeks since his passing but the best piece I have come across is the eulogy by his sister Mona Simpson. Mona Simpson is an author and professor of writing and delivered this eulogy on Oct. 16 at his memorial service at the Memorial Church of Stanford University. It must be read in it entirety (NYTimes: A sister’s eulogy for Steve Jobs) but the thing that stands out in this eulogy was just how Jobs was truly a person who understood the here-now-ness and enchantment of every moment. The feeling of wonder that is at the heart of creativity, of living life to its fullest.

Read the entire article for your self… (as one of my friends said, it is a “lump-in-throat kinda moving”) but what I want to highlight is how it ends.  Mona describes his last battle against ugliness, his final battle with cancer and says:

But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.
Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.
… Steve’s final words were: OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

Oh Wow! What a way to live. What a way to go.

Topics related to this post: Uncategorized

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Ambi-poetry: A mathematician reinterprets ambigrams

My friend Gaurav Bhatnagar (I had blogged about his new book, Get Smart: Math Concepts here), for some reason, known only to him, has decided to create a poetry-blog based around my ambigrams. Each posting consists of one ambigram (taken from my large collection of...

Impact of technology v.s. chewing gum on learning

Just got this from Tom Reeves at the CIMA conference, Twente University. Allen, K. L., Galvis, D., Katz, R. V. (2006). Evaluation of CDs and chewing gum in teaching dental anatomy. The New York state dental journal. 72(4): pp 30-33. Abstract: The purposes of this...

Curt becomes Bonk (and vice versa)

Curt Bonk is Professor of Instructional Systems Technology in the School of Education at Indiana University. Curt is one of the most fun academics I know. He is also a good friend. That's us at the COSN conference earlier this year. What I didn't remember was that...

Engineering education, past & future

Neeraj Buch and I were invited to talk to a group of engineering educators from India. This was a meeting organized by the College of Engineering and the Indo-US Collaboration for Engineering Education. The topic I spoke about was was Improving Engineering Education:...

Alien Games

A journal article on games and gender, that has been years in the making is finally going to see the light of day! The complete reference and abstract can be found below. Drop me an email if you would like a copy. Heeter, C., Egidio, R., Mishra, P., Winn, B., & Winn,...

Word cloud, redux

I guess I could not get enough of the Wordle application. So here are some more that I created since yesterday. Click on the thumbnails to see a larger picture:   Word map created from the all the words used in Mishra & Koehler 2006 (TCRecord article) &...

TPCK book covers

I finally received a copy of the Handbook of TPCK for educators (which I had blogged about previously here). It looks great! Matt and I have a key chapter (Introducing TPCK). I hadn't read this in a while, and after I got the book, I skimmed it... and it reads well....

Teacher as filmmaker: An update from down under

Back in 2007, I was second author on a paper titled Teacher as Filmmaker, in which we described an approach to teacher professional development that involved teachers creating short, evocative movies, which we called iVideos. You can read the paper and abstract...

Nerdview or being stuck in our worldview

I recently received a note from a graduate student as an unnamed university. This student wrote to me after having assigned the TPACK handbook chapter (co-authored with Matt Koehler) to a bunch of pre-service teachers, and suggested that the chapter was hard to read,...

2 Comments

  1. maxi

    This is so beautiful and moving. Who would have ever thought that Steve Jobs was such a romantic. Its also wonderful to know that he was driven by beauty and love.

    Reply
  2. Rahul

    Looking beyond everybody ia like seeing some glowing, unique thing at the end of his life-tunnel. It must be a transcendental experience for Steve Jobs ! Ms Simpson put it beautifully– “a climbing “. His breathlessness or heavy breathing just before death seemed to her as “steep path “! At times death is painfully beautiful. Great man-great death !!

    Reply

Leave a Reply to maxi Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *