Welcome - And Welcome Back!

After nearly a week of new and returning student orientation, classes got underway today.

As one might imagine, there have been lots of meetings in preparation for the first day of academic classes - community meetings, student meetings, house meetings, Ministry and Counsel meetings, advising meetings, and other meetings this blogger doesn't know happened. Students have begun their chore rotation, work study, and meal planning (with the interesting and respectful discussion around vegetarianism and veganism already underway).

The meetings were punctuated by activities that included bowling for returning students, a group "Goblins, Giants and Wizards" game (loosely based on "Rock, Paper, Scissors"), a scavenger hunt that included a trip to the "big swing," and the compost pile, and Capture the Flag.


Some students dug up potatoes during Tuesday's first work study, while others worked in the kitchen.

The first meeting of the geometry class discussed some of the basic definitions of Euclid's geometry:

A point is that which has no part...a line is breathless length...the ends of lines are points...straight line is a line in which all points lie evenly on itself.

(Some of the raw ingredients that make everything else possible.)

One of the writing classes had an engaging discussion about different types of arguments and various appeals to reason, emotion and faith.

Discussion was punctuated by a brief ode to (from?) Keats: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know," and Darien and Connor were charged with finding copies of the Quaker Peace Testimony on campus before tomorrow's class.

As the school takes a "technology sabbath" on Wednesdays, TMS blogger doesn't think that posting the Peace Testimony here means letting the cat out of the bag (or Skunk or Hipster in Bliss):

"We utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatsoever; and this is our testimony to the whole world. The spirit of Christ, by which we are guided, is not changeable, so as once to command us from a thing as evil and again to move unto it; and we do certainly know, and so testify to the world, that the spirit of Christ, which leads us into all Truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ, nor for the kingdoms of this world."

Welcome and welcome back, everyone!