Visit to Campus

Abstract

Tim, a lanky student in my spring “Latin American Cultures” class, wrote something so beautiful that I had to do something about it. In response to my request on the first day of class for a description of something interesting that the students had recently learned, this is what Tim wrote about the monarch butterfly’s migration every year from central Mexico to the United States and back again:

It has been proven time and time again that each generation of monarch butterfly, when migrating in the cold season, returns to the exact same spots, the exact locations that their ancestors travelled to, down to the exact trees. Genetic testing and alterations of the trees themselves have no effect on these simple beautiful fluttering wonders.