Semester 32: Campus Life

As you can tell from our recent lack of communication, we are in the thick of it!  We’ve been quite busy these past few weeks, from normal school work to prepping for SATs and AP tests.

Way back when, on Sunday, April 27^th, we all drove down to Colorado Springs to take a tour of Colorado College.  We attended an information session, met an HMI Trustee who is the Director of Admissions, explored the campus a bit, and, best of all for us growing teenagers, ate a delicious all-you-can-eat brunch at the dining hall.  We’ve learned that from now on, we have to eat on every campus we visit.  Food is, after all, one of the most important aspects of (college) life!  Not to mention that a number of HMI alumni currently attending CC came to chat with us and tell us about their lives and experiences at college. We also went on a campus tour where we learned about CC’s block schedule, academics, and student life, and we got to see a dorm room and classroom.  We really enjoyed CC and thought it was a great school. While it isn’t for all of us, we are certain that there will be some Semester 32 alumni who attend!

What would have been a relatively standard week of academics the following week was overshadowed by SATs which were to come on Saturday. While our workload was relatively routine at HMI, SAT studying took up a lot of time for the majority of us! All of the studying led up to a Saturday morning at Salida High School. It turned out to be a beautiful day, so of course we were not excited to spend it by sitting inside. But after everyone finished the test, we all had the opportunity to explore the town. We weren’t sure what to expect, but we found Salida to be quite pleasant—a lot ofinteresting shops, a riverside park, and warm weather made for a great time and a perfect end to a stressful week.

Following the SATs, we arrived back on campus in plenty of time for an HMI Prom, organized by our student representatives. The theme was “Kentucky Derby,” seeing as the race had been run that day! While most of us hadn’t heard the results, we still enjoyed dressing up in Derby-appropriate attire (from jockeys, to horses, to spectators with fancy hats). The boys’ cabins enjoyed lovely tanning-on-the-porch sessions pre-prom while the girls’ cabins applied make-up and put on dresses. Appetizers were served before everyone congregated out on the lawn to take pictures with Mt. Massive in the background. As the sun set, we made our way to Who’s Hall where Coco had an awesome mix of music playing. The night was one to be remembered; smiles were everywhere and some pretty awesome dance moves were laid down!

Sadly, we are starting to wrap things up for the semester (and we can barely believe it as it feels like we are in full swing)!  In most of our classes, we learned about our final projects and units. We’ve just completed our unit on food in P&P which was really interesting! We read articles for and against factory farms, local farms, organic farms, processed foods, among other food-related topics. Our final project is our PEEP, or personal environmental ethics project,  which we look forward to sharing with the class on our last day. In English, we just finished reading Into the Wild and had an in-class debate about the main character’s adventuring style. While we were assigned sides to debate, it was enlightening to hear our friends’ well-thought-out arguments and perspectives. Now we’re working on our individual final portfolios that include some of our own writings from throughout the semester. Science is closing with a final unit about glaciers that ties into our unit on rocks. Our field class just had the chance to look at and around nearby Twin Lakes for cirques, moraines, and hanging valleys as evidence of long-ago glacier presence!  We’ve all been working hard on our final projects for our math classes—some of us had the chance to participate in a “casino day” where we showcased probability games we had created.  While we’re not necessarily looking forward to all of it coming to a close, we do get a lot of creative freedom for our projects, which makes them more fun to create, share, and learn from!

We have some fun to report from this weekend, too, so we’ll be back again soon to share more.