October 24, 2008

Last Sunday, a dozen RMS students and faculty summited nearby Mount Sherman, one of Colorado’s “fourteeners” (peaks higher than 14,000’). We all got at 7:00 am for cereal and bagels, made sack lunches, and set out at about 8:00 am for the half hour drive. We got to the parking area and scrambled up a rock field until we reached the ridge that we would follow for the next 1,000 feet to the summit. It was brutally windy up there, and we needed more insulating and wind layers. We finally got up to just below 14,000 feet and were able to see Leadville, South Park, and some of the Sawatch Mountain Range. 

We continued for another one hundred feet to the summit and congratulated each other. Then we broke for lunch and took pictures. All members of the Barnes Family were wearing orange jackets and began taking "family pictures."  Merrill Clerkin, also sporting her bright orange puffy, was invited to take a "family picture" as she matched. In a couple of moments, it was agreed that all of the students would take a turn wearing Merrill's orange puffy for a "family picture" with the Barnes’. It was hilarious.

In addition to climbing Sherman, other activities have kept us busy in the run-up to Parents' Weekend. On Monday, we had a full-fledged poker tournament with the winner taking home the title of “best poker player at HMI”.  It was very exciting, but inconclusive as to who won. On Wednesday, while some chose to head to town for “Colorado Core” (an intense abdominal muscle workout) where David Henre had us doing all kinds of crazy and challenging exercises, many of us chose to stay on campus for story and naptime in the library. Finally, Friday ushered in its usual suite of tutoring, nature art journals, and recycling.  During nature art journals, we worked on completing our journal covers on which some of us collaged with old, tattered maps while others used ribbon and pastel drawings.  At tutoring, we were helping with everything from reading stories to solving math problems.  And, recycling was the usual gig -- getting all of HMI's paper, plastic, and glass sorted out and off to the recycling center so  HMI could be spick and span for Parent's Weekend.

Classes have been exciting, with quizzes in nearly every subject and big homework loads. In English, we are exploring the themes of the West and the power of creative writing and working hard to get our poems ready for Parent’s Weekend. In history, the Constitution has been our focus, along with the birth of a new nation. We discussed how the divergent viewpoints of the founding fathers shaped our nation. In Practices and Principles class we are reading about people’s relationship to the land. And, in science, we continued to explore geology and geologic functions such as divergent and convergent plates.

This update features Spanish class. Spanish class this week was awesome, as always. Every class begins with "Que hay de nuevo?" or "What's new?”  This is code for:  “What's the gossip?". Chewie, our Spanish teacher, wants to know everything, and we generally tell her, although some new couples need prodding. On Saturday, in the advanced class, we gave our second oral presentations of the semester. These presentations were about the immigration policies of George W. Bush, John McCain and Barack Obama. We were all knowledgeable about our politicians and comfortable describing details and answering questions in Spanish without a script. Using games, we reviewed grammar rules, such as when to use the preposition por and when to use para to say “for," the different ways of saying “to take” or “to get," and the uses of the preterit and imperfect tenses. These games involved running to opposite sides of the room and racing to grab the paper with the right phrase on it. Of course, they also included competitiveness, laughing, and prizes. For review for our test, we played jeopardy. On Tuesday, Chewie and Katie gave us the lyrics a song called "Mayonesa," with some of the words left out. We listened to the song and tried to fill in the blanks. By the third time we had mostly figured it out, and then we got up and danced. Some of us tried dancing salsa, which was pretty fun!  Since then, at random times throughout the day people can often be heard breaking into "Ma-yo-nesa!"

By: Merrill Clerkin, Ben Breckenridge, and Jeannie Bartlett