A day in the life of an MIT student

So, you might have been wondering: what is Heather doing with her days, besides working hard to meet program deadlines?

Well, here is one day last week:

Everyone in the program (47 students) received a secret card with a secret name of a theorist on it. We were instructed not to tell anyone who we were. We researched our theorist.

Then, we had a “Theorist Party” where we dressed up in our theorist garb if we wanted to. We were supposed to talk about our theories and try to form allies and groups of theorist with ideas similar to ours.

My theorist was Maxine Greene, an 87-year-old university teacher in New York. I found this great photo of her on the internet so came in a hat, scarf and a cigarette that I had borrowed from my roommate, as she was sitting back in a chair in the photo with a cigarette in her hand. Maxine Greene believes imagination and the arts should be integrated into education.

Everyone had a twin – we had to find our twin – someone with the same theorist if we could.

I had a lot of fun. We then tried to come up with a School of Thought that we thought our group of theorist belonged to.

We are now in week three of our first quarter. It is a lot of work but I am really enjoying myself as our workshops are fun and intriguing and we have a seminar once a week where we discuss what we are learning. I like my seminar leader, a liberal arts teacher at Evergreen.

The first week we were at a retreat center where I went kayaking during lunch.

I’ve also met some great people in the program and have formed a study group with four other women to divide up our work when we can.

Friday night I attended the arts walk in downtown Olympia with some new friends from the program – dancing and hanging out.

So, keep tuned to more updates from Olympia.