Dr. Aguilar's talk took me back to those happy childhood days of the cold war. It's a sobering thought that the threat of nuclear annihilation is still with us. "Dr. Strangelove" is a film I sometimes show to my classes in those l-o-n-g 6 weeks at the end of the year when the standardized tests are over but we have to at least appear productively occupied. Some years they like it, but other years they hate it.

I was glad to gain more insight into modern Chinese life in Dr. deLisle's talk, since we, or at least I, tend to think everything ended with Mao. My students have sometimes asked whether China today is still Communist, so I was glad to hear Dr. deLisle's answer to this.

The Skype session I found more discouraging. I don't think my class of 15-year-olds would wait as patiently as we 22 teachers did while someone tried for 30 minutes to get the session up and running. The Egyptian speakers seemed understandably frustrated when we broke off the talk from our end just 10 minutes after finally getting things to work. Do people usually do this in such large groups? It was intriguing, though, to realize that we were actually speaking, almost in person, to people so far away.