week 10?

This afternoon is wonderfully sunny and warm- such a nice change from last week! I've decided not to do any homework on Sundays, and I've discovered its an amazing thing to have a guilt-free day to rest and do non-school related things, even though I do enjoy my schoolwork (for the most part). They gave us palm crosses at church today, to celebrate palm sunday. This afternoon my goal is to back up my files only cds, since Susan's computer quit working this week and I figure I should take the hint. Susan and I plan on going to a Seder Supper on Thursday at St. Alban's church, a commemoration of the Last Supper that uses the Jewish Passover traditions with Christian readings. It should be really cool! Jenny is taking off for sunny Texas on Wednesday, spending Easter there and partying with her med. school classmates.

The birds have started to come back. I heard crows on the way to school on Friday, and there've been few times when that sound has come as a bigger relief.

I came down with a cold this week, but it wasn't too bad and its starting to go away. Yesterday and Friday night I managed to get a first draft of my Rembrandt paper written, so I'll finish that up tomorrow and get started on my Scriptures paper Tuesday.

We continued to talk about Kant in philosophy this week. His system managed to remove the threat to science caused by Hume but it posed a serious threat to metaphysics, and therefore to ethics. He based his ethics on duty, he talked about categorical and hypothetical imperatives, the former being things that are determined by duty. His ideas did bring in some positive things, like the idea of respect. We also started talking about John Stuart Mill who wrote about utilitarianism. Unlike Kant, his philosophy was based on empirical knowledge, we have to always keep the consequences of actions in mind. We'll do more on him tomorrow.

Tuesday was a Student for a Day, day. There were probably about 7 kids there, who of which have already applied and had interviews so it looks promising for enrollment next year; they always get most of their applications over the summer. We're up to the 18th Century in art class, so we talked about Rococo a little bit and then moved on to neo-classicism, the academies in Europe, and Jacques-Louis David in particular.

There wasn't much for new material in Dr. Patrick's class, I think he was catering more to the parent and student visitors than to us... anyway it was good to get a bit of review for once instead of pouring yet more new information into our heads.

Prof. Blaedow surprised us all in the quiz this week by giving us sentences to translate from a few weeks ago... I had to dig to the dregs of my memory to remember what the latin word for barber was!

We had a busy music class- Brahms, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Liszt! We listened to a ton of music, and my list for what we need to know for our listening exam has gotten ridiculously long! We got our midterms back, so we're definitely on the final stretch now!

We continued to talk about Frederick Bueckner in Lit. class, and for next week we get to read a couple of essays by Wendell Berry, which should be beautiful.

We talked about Calvin in Scriptures. Being made in the image of God, the Nature of the Soul, Original Sin, Regeneration and Free Will...

Dr. Metelski taught us calculus in science class- he has no idea that most people get completely lost when he does this kind of thing. He has the best intentions- he said several times that he doesn't expect us to be able to do any calculus, he just doesn't want us to have any fear of it. I don't mind the review, but I felt kinda bad for the girls who've never done any calculus at all....

We've begun to do rhetoric in Trivium class, which will be more specifically focused on apologetics. Some of us read out assignments we wrote giving reasons for why we are Christians, and we talked about the way non-christians would hear them and what problems they would see in it. Its really great and challenging to do this, and also good to be reminded that apologetics isn't about winning an argument, its something you do for the sake of the other person.

We just found out last night that we're supposed to have a big section of Martin Buber's "I and Thou" read for philosophy tomorrow, but since I'm not working today it'll have to wait till our break tomorrow. In the evening we plan on having an essay editing/green beverages party in honour of St. Patrick's day, our lack of funds to allow us to go out, and our paper due tuesday. I'm actually really enjoying the lack of topic sentences and endnotes/references in this blog post. I only have 5 more weeks with my classmates, which makes me really really sad, but I'm trying not to think about it. For now, we're just taking things one day at a time, learning lots, writing lots, reading lots, talking lots, and laughing lots. (and sneezing lots, at the moment)

Happy Holy Week,

Starr