by Sam Jensen

Today we started the day off with some early morning yoga or waterpolo, depending on your choice. I chose yoga, a relaxing class taught by Brady in the presentation room. After the class, everyone felt relaxed, rejuvenated, and ready for the day. It was a Friday, the day we change caciques (leaders for the week), I had been a cacique for the previous week, and Brady invited the five of us to her apartment for a final breakfast as a group. We made omelet’s and coffee cake together, and wrote our passing on speech to the next student who we decide would make a great leader for the upcoming week. After that delicious treat of breakfast, we made our way to the community meeting. At these meetings we get together as a entire community and discuss things that will help benefit everyone as a whole. In this particular meeting, we did the cacique pass off and did a activity about different kinds of leaders, what kinds we personally are, and how we need a diversity of leaders in a group to be successful. We answered some questions, which put us in certain groups: the driver, the motivator, the annalist, and the relationship builder. We learned about the positive and negative aspects of each type of leader, and how without each type of leader a society can’t function. It was cool to see who else was in my leader group, and this knowledge helped me better understand the group dynamic. After the community meeting, we broke off into our research groups for a 2-hour research class. I am in the lobster displacement group. In this class period, we had a discussion about the scientific paper we were assigned to read, we had a short pop quiz, and we went to the wet lab to begin setting up our experiment. Lunch followed research, and human ecology followed lunch. In this class, we talked about different types of plants around us, and how they help out the eco-system. We then went around and tested different water sources around campus: the well, the cistern, and the ocean. We tested salinity, ph, temperature, and conductivity. It was interesting to see what levels of what was in the water we were drinking. We then broke off into groups of 3 and had one hour to make a water filter. We searched the school for materials. We went to the beach, the resource center, the farm, and around all the classrooms. We found bits and pieces of things to use, and we found that natural materials seemed to work better. After this, we tested the levels in our water and compared it to the other water we tested. After this class, we had exploration time. Most of us biked to sunset beach, a beautiful beach about a mile away. It was a perfect way to relax and hang out with our friends. Everyone met again at dinner circle, had dinner together, and then went to our night class. We don’t have night classes every night, but tonight ours was about the use of plastic and how it can affect so many natural ecosystems and animals. It was eye-opening and inspirational. Those two words can represent more than the night class though, it can represent our entire Island School experiences we’ve had in just these short 4 weeks.