Academia

I've realized lately that the way I've described this semester has sort of made it sound like I do nothing academic. Here are some of the so far un-blogworthy details of my school life, to give you a better picture. Each week, students give a 5 minute solo oral presentation (mine last week was on flax. And they tell you to "try and spice things up"... an impossible assignment when your subject matter is as boring as flax) and we're in groups of 6 every week to give 10 min presentations which happen on Fridays. We have to write a scientific paper on each week's theme or big assignment, and we have to write a personal journal entry for each week (<for anyone who has taken Spanish at U-M, this assignment is reminiscent of the journals, except instead of bullshitting in Spanish, I am bullshitting in English, and the entries contain a little more than variations of "yo soy de Pittsburgh," and "me gusta nadar").
Also, I still have to go to lecture--some days we have as much as 5 hours of lecture in one day--but it's not like I have a class schedule or that you can be guaranteed to have class indoors any day of the week. We sort of get the run down of what we're doing 2 or 3 days at a time, and we don't usually have lecture more than 2 days in a row. I'd say we have 4 sit down in a classroom type lectures per week, on average.
For example, on Sunday of this week, Monday's schedule was written on the board:

"9-11 gardening with Ria, 12 lunch, 1:30 climate change lecture with Chris and roundtable discussion" 

so we got out of class at about 3:30 and have the rest of the day free. For meals, we're all signed up to be on kitchen duty 10 days of the semester in teams of 4, which means you do dishes at 8am, 1pm, and after dinner, which the 4 of you are responsible for cooking. A lot of the time staff members hang around to eat dinner with us, but for the most part, we're the only ones on campus after classes end. We were talking about this the other day: in a lot of ways, school here is like regressing to preschool:

• all of our classes are in the same room
• we call our teachers by their first names
• we have breaks for snacks
• we each have a cubby with our name on it
• after class, we play games in the grass (frisbee, soccer, volleyball)

But for the most part, learning is multimodal. We take a lot of trips during the week; yesterday we went to the Miranda shorebird center to observe the roosting grounds and make notes

This picture is not as cool as I wanted it to be, but that gray line in the middle is all feeding shorebirds, and it went on forever (I have wished so many times on this trip that my camera had a panorama feature)

And this trip ties into our theme of the week, which is shorebirds in the Hauraki Gulf.