It's day two of the summer Experienced Teacher Institute, "Coming of Age: The Culture and Literature of Youth in America." Participants are reading and discussing selections from Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood by Steven Mintz. Mintz's history of childhood in America presents and challenges the following five myths: The notion of childhood as …
Crimean Subbotnik
In the early days of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin instituted Subbotniks, or Saturdays devoting to volunteering and furthering of the public good. In that grand tradition, led by our fearless professors, we the students of Colorado College devoted this Monday afternoon to a Subbotnik worthy of the name. (The name itself comes from the …
Conquering Fortresses, Breaking Language Barriers, and Rocking Cafeteria Dance Parties
Crimea has been drawing vastly different groups of people to its beautiful shores for millennia. A small peninsula jutting off the southern tip of Ukraine, Crimea sits at the top of the Black Sea. Visitors to this beautiful area can still visit ruins left by Ancient Greek travelers and the vestiges of the Silk Road. …
The End
Class is over, Robbie and Henrik have left, and I'm stuck in that odd limbo between finishing everything that I had to do and departing tomorrow. It's been a good time for introspection, reminiscence and gathering my thoughts on the block and the semester. I've learned and grown so much, studying abroad. This class was …
Sample Journal Entry
We've been doing a lot of writing in Jordan, but instead of formal papers, our professors have opted to require journal entries. The idea is that we can get at the same sort of analytical ideas that papers would without spending time editing or paying close attention to footnotes. Between all of the travel and …
The Best Intro to a Block Ever
The Amman portion of the Mediterranean Semester is run through an educational program called Amideast and it was at this school where our class met at 9 Monday morning. We took our bags and boarded our bus to Wadi Rum, a vast desert controlled by tribes and famous for its red color and really big …
Wadi Rum
I’m typing this in a Bedouin style tent in Wadi Rum, a desert in Jordan. (I’ll post it the next time I get wifi. [Which is in a hotel near Petra, the next stop on our travels.]) This class is off to an exciting start! I flew into Jordan from Paris yesterday with my friend …
Laughing Club: Fake it Till You Make It (a wrap-up of PY281, Personality)
I’m pretty sure the people walking past Tutt Science this morning thought my class was going crazy. There we were, standing in the quad in front of the science building, maniacally laughing as we playfully charged each other, our mouths open to a roar and our eyes squeezed together. We were pretending to be tigers …
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The Myers-Briggs Personality Test
Yesterday our entire class took the Myers-Briggs personality test. I found out that I am an INFP, which means that my primary way of dealing with the world is Introverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving. I was actually very impressed at how accurate the results seemed to me. Perhaps it is the horoscope effect (where all predictions …
Let Freedom Ring! (And if you make it to the end of this post, you will be rewarded with a video of pigeons playing ping-pong.)
“Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!” Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, spoken almost 50 years ago, still inspire me today. But what if freedom couldn’t ring anywhere? What if freedom simply didn’t exist, at least not in the sense that King meant it or that we envision it? For B.F. Skinner, a …
