by Dale Lattanzio

The past couple of days here on campus have been extremely busy. With beloved CEI interns leaving, analytical essays, and research projects it has been quite an emotional academic experience for many of us students. In research many of the groups are nearing the end of their data collection and we are beginning to see the results and meaning to our experiments. With our practice in scientific writing and anthropology we have written a scientific results portion and an analytical essay on the effects of tourism in the Caribbean. Although exhausted, the energy this morning at morning exercise was through the roof. Today on run track we ran interval sprints, and then on the way back to campus we did buddy sprints as a group while chanting each other’s names for encouragement. Its truly an incredible experience to have a group of students of all sorts of athletic backgrounds pushing each other in preparation for the half marathon or four mile super swim. Today was one of my favorite morning exercises and I’m looking forward to working with the group before the long exercise.

by Sam Jensen

As we began the last academic week before Parents Weekend, a rainstorm hit us. We continued with the week as normal, however we began the day differently. Instead of our usual training for either our half-marathon or 4-mile swim, we switched tracks. I am normally training for the half-marathon, so I was attempting the swim track for today. Not going to lie, it was extremely difficult trying a track we aren’t training for, but it was fun to experience something new! We had 3-hour research block in the morning. My lionfish and lobster displacement group spend the time discussing two scientific writings and having debates about them. Although the scientific papers might not have been something we all wanted to spend the whole period doing, we had so much fun getting heated in the debates and playing different roles, even when we did not agree. My research groups always has fun no matter what we do, whether its cast netting, scuba diving, lab checks, or just class work and lectures. That is one thing that I love about going to school here is the way that even things that might not be fun, like math class and taking notes, are somehow made fun by the people who you are learning from and learning with. We all headed off to lunch, and after lunch all 48 of us had another 3-hour class of Human Eco. We had prepared presentations for the rest of the class and advisors on our Human Eco Change Bomb projects. The presentations lasted all class, and we were able to learn about what our classmates are doing in their projects.  After our presentations, we had exploration time. Because of the storm and the Tourism Essay everyone is working on, most people stayed on campus. Daylight savings has thrown things off a little for me though, now at the end of exploration time, its dark out! Dinner followed exploration, and a night art class followed dinner. During this class, we voted on curators for the final art show. We also decided on what jobs people would have in order to prepare as a class. We went to study hours after this night class, personally I worked on my tourism essay. It was a pretty normal Monday here at the Island School, and everyone is excited for the week ahead.