On Mondays

Hey all!

This week started out the way it usually does, with an incredibly busy Monday. Mondays I have class on and off (mostly on) from 9:40 to 5:30, so it's always a full day. Luckily I like all of my classes, so I enjoy everything. This week in drawing we started working with crosshatching, which is somewhat therapeutic. The goal of the assignment was to create shapes that were pleasing to us, and fill it in with a gradient of light grey to black, using only crosshatching.

where I'm at right now- I have to fill in the whole page!

The other project I'm working on right now for that class is a "pairing" project. We had to draw a pair of something on a combination of white paper and black paper. On the white paper we can only use black charcoal and on the black paper we can only use white chalk. It's been a lot of work, but I'm almost done with mine- I was initially going to draw a pair of earrings hanging from my ears, but the shadows ended up making the earrings difficult to see. You can see my lips in the drawing, though, so I can argue I did a pair of lips. I've been amazed how much more confident I feel in my drawing abilities since I started this class.

One of my other classes on Monday is Spanish conversation. This week we've been presenting on our favorite songs, so I presented on Graceland by Paul Simon. It's a song I grew up listening to on car trips with my family, and I enjoyed getting to research it some more (for example, I learned that it wasn't originally going to talk about Graceland, and Elvis, and Simon just used "I'm going to Graceland" as a filler. Eventually he decided to visit the city, and afterwards he decided to keep that as the chorus of the song). I've also been introduced to other songs through the other presentations, which has been neat.

My other Monday class is environmental education. We've been doing a lot of interesting readings about place based education, which is the idea that education should be based in learning about place- students should utilize the area they live in order to learn and better understand concepts and their community. In order to implement this in our class, we have a practicum at a nearby site. I've explained this before, but I am at Tryon Creek State Park, just a few blocks from campus. This Saturday I visited the site again, this time to attend a talk by LC's own Liz Safran, an environmental studies and geology professor. She presented on the geomorphology of Tryon Creek. Similar to the programs for children that I've attended so far, we started out with a presentation in the classroom, then moved outside for a hike. The main difference was that this was a program for adults, and we got to go off-trail (something you only get to do in Tryon with special permission).

the view (off-trail) of Tryon! It was very flat and had lots of deciduous trees, making it feel more midwestern than other parts of the park (which I like, since I'm a fan of the midwest)

I learned a lot, and the audience was very engaged.

The rest of the week went by fairly smoothly. I had my classes as usual (my fourth class is colonial Latin American history, in which we learned about the Pueblo Indians in the current American Southwest), and watched "The Mission," a film about Jesuit missions on the Argentina/Brazil/Paraguay border. Tuesday I had an exciting ukulele orchestra practice, in which we decided to work on Taylor Swift's new album. This weekend I went downtown to get my hair cut, and did a lot of homework.

downtown is full of beautiful fall colors!

the view from the stop for the pioneer express (the shuttle downtown) next to my house

My birthday is this next week, and my classes continue! I'll write about it next week.

If you have any questions, please email me at rekidder@lclark.edu!

-Rebecca