Water, water everywhere

Its officially day C2 here, and all I know about "here" is that its somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This means that today its the second day of the "normal" at sea schedule including all 3 classes. Tomorrow will be C3, Wednesday C4, etc etc etc. I already have a midterm on C7 and by the time we get to Barcelona we'll be almost halfway done with the 22 days making up the in class portion of the work. The rest of the hours required to meet the demands of a 3 credit course are made up of things like out of class projects and teacher led field trips (faculty directed practica aka FDPs) in the countries we visit. The global studies core course is pretty boring, but I love my Poverty and Politics of Development class and am looking forward to the rest of the course. As for my third course? Well, the professor who had designed the course and prepared the syllabus had a death in his family and was unable to sail this summer. A retired teacher on the short term "Maymester" voyage was teaching an engineering based class on water sanitation so UVA made him an offer to stay on for another 2 months and cover my class. I was a little worried going in since I'm not much of an engineer and I heard not so great things about the class he just finished, and when he opened class by asking if we wanted the bad news now or later I wasn't feeling much better. I wish I had a transcript of his exact words but what he said went a little something like this:

 

"Well I clearly wasn't expecting to be here this summer, and since I haven't been home since finishing the last trip I didnt have a chance to prepare much in addition to what the previous professor has left me. Which is nothing. So there will be no notes. No powerpoints. No tests. I tried to get them to let me pull together some FDPs for us to do but it was apparently too late, so there wont be any of those either. The bad news is that we're just going to wing it."

 

Remember that time I was thinking about dropping the class? Nope? Me either. Aside from advising us not to say too much about the little variations we were making to the syllabus so as to assure we still get the 3 credits its been determined to deserve (so keep quiet!) he actually led a great class and somehow pulled together enough work to keep us from feeling too guilty for our good fortune. I'll still have a project to do in at least a few of the ports where we land, but it will probably be a little better than I expected. He ended today’s class by saying, “Well we killed one more- 21 to go!”

 

On another note the girls, 2 guys in my hall and I got up at 05:45 to watch the sunrise only to realize that although we didnt switch our clocks overnight (like the night before we did and we will again tonight) the fact that we're still moving means the sun comes up earlier than it did yesterday. Needless to say, an early morning trek up to the top deck and an hour spent hanging out with friends wasn't exactly what we were planning, but no real complaints either. Maybe tomorrow we'll make it in time-- I've heard it should be about 05:00!