This week Luis Guillermo Benites visited HMI to give a talk to the students about the extreme mountaineering adventures he has been on in his life. He explained the immense amount of work that it took to accomplish a goal of summiting the famed Seven Peaks, the highest mountains of each of the seven continents. Alongside this accomplishment he also formed a career out of his childhood dream of becoming a professional mountaineering guide. In order to achieve this goal, he had to conquer his extreme allergies and asthma, that for the beginning years of his life, limited his exposure to the outdoors. He inspired the students of HMI to be very conscious of the goals that we create for ourselves and refrain from abandoning them, to keep pushing ourselves and moving toward our ambitions.
After returning from expedition two weeks ago, our academic routine has begun to feel normal as we delve into many different interesting subjects and assignments in each of our classes. We are learning about different forms of education and the writing American History in our History class, focusing on the flaws and biases in each of the systems. Our math classes are unique from the courses at our sending schools, but many of us are practicing working together in small groups to solve complex problems relating to our math curriculum at home. In English we are reading Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, who touches on the Laguna Pueblo culture and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in veterans. We also just finished our analytical essay on the literary devices in a passage from Red by Terry Tempest Williams in our English class. Practice and Principals is focusing on discussing and hearing different viewpoints regarding what humans relationship with nature should be and how we achieve this. Those who take Spanish learned the song “Vivir Mi Vida” by Marc Anthony, covered different grammar tenses, and wrote a short essay about a memorable moment from expedition. In our Natural Science course that focuses on ecology, we learned about why we have winter and different weather patterns. One very interesting thing that we learned and practiced this week took place in science class when we learned the different causes for why it snowed the previous night in Leadville and then we practiced explaining it by acting as meteorologist and presenting to the class.
This weekend was very fun because HMI got to participate in the Leadville
This week on campus was alive with discussion about our community and how we’ve integrated over the course of the first month of our semester together. On Monday, during flex block, we all met in Stuen Hall to voice our “pluses and deltas,” or positives and areas for improvement, regarding our language, inclusivity, and overall group dynamic. The conversation was student-led, which facilitated a powerful and productive conversation about communicating more often and more effectively with one another. We established group norms like respecting peoples’ identities and backgrounds in an effort to create a more accepting community, as well as being receptive to feedback from peers.