First days of school

It is only the second day of my graduate program but work has begun in earnest. After a welcome dinner on Sunday night, 18 graduate students and 6 faculty members prepared for the first day of class on Monday morning. Thus far, a typical day is as follows:

7:00 - Wake up to a chilly forty-degree morning and prepare my pack for the day.

7:30 - Breakfast and prepare a sandwich for a field lunch.

8:15 - Teton Science School practices a "hands-to-work" system where all those living on campus (faculty included) share cleaning duties. For both breakfast and dinner, five students/faculty are assigned cleaning activities. Other duties throughout the year will include shoveling (last year Wyoming received 500 inches of snow!) and cleaning other areas of campus. We usually have thirty to forty minutes to clean the dining room before morning class begins at 9:00.

9:00 - Quick instructions and briefing about the day.

10:00 - Head out into the field for some naturalist instruction. Today we learned about the different vegetation communities in Jackson - Sage Brush, Conifers, Aspens, and Ravarian areas. We spent the morning and afternoon exploring, sketching, and discovering the vegetation that lives on our campus.

3:00 - Afternoon lecture (today it was about Leave No Trace camping and 5-E lesson plans.)

6:00 -Dinner!

7:00 - Evening program. Tonight we were introduced to the Murie Museum on campus and the various stuffed specimens we will be working with. We also began sketching various tracks and natural species accounts.

9:00 - Break for the evening.

Although the pace is fast the lessons are interesting and interactive. We have received two assignments: lesson planning and naturalist sketching and I am looking forward to completing both of them. Our teachers of doing a wonderful job giving us the tools we need to gain a better understanding of our greater ecosystem and how to personalize that information for students.

Attached are some pictures of the interior of my cabin, the Teton moutains from my window, and my first nature sketches.