Hitting Our Stride: Orientation is over and classes are in full swing!

January 27, 2012

What’s new at OA?

At this point in the semester things are really beginning to settle down into a routine. We went through our orientation week, which saw students learning the way we run our intentional community at the Outdoor Academy. Students learned how to clean the kitchen, their dorm spaces, and the community area that they are in charge of cleaning each morning during chores. They’ve learned the path up to Morning Watch, the ridge we hike to every morning to begin our day in a space of contemplation and self-reflection. They’ve had work crews and gotten their “lumberjack clothes” and work boots dirty. They’ve learned some new games and songs and discovered Ashton’s delicious organic & local cuisine.

Also in this first week, we have had our first few community meetings. Community meeting is a weekly meeting on Monday night attended by the entire faculty and student body following a formal dinner. We sit in a large circle on the ground and discuss issues going on in our community, which may be brought up by students or faculty members. Our first community meetings have been lengthy discussions about what kind of culture we want to create for the semester. We decided, for example, that hateful language would not be tolerated in our community and that students as well as staff will enforce that decision. We discussed what it means to be a good and bad community member and that we all need to do our respective parts to maintain our community.

Following that first orientation week, we have now turned our focus to academics. Students are busy reading and completing assignments and are figuring out their routines, scheduling time to exercise and play music while still getting their work done on time. Teachers are diving into our lesson plans and setting up the framework for the way our classes will run this semester. When the weather allows (which has been often this week), we take our classes outside for discussions about taxonomy in Natural Science, travel narratives in English and Western Philosophy in World History.

We are so excited at how this semester is shaping up. It is great to see our students engaging with their course material in productive conversations.