Planning the field trip.

We are currently in the planning stages of our trip to Mexico, assimilating the spanish language into our daily lives and trying to fill our brains with as much useful information as possible. Three staff and seven students are planning to be on the road for eighteen days. Our final desination is Cuatro Cienegas, Mexico, an ecological rarity and national biological reserve. We will be helping the research station there, and hopefully exposing ourselves to some of the many unique species and geological elements in the region.

It is particularly interesting to think about traveling into sunny Mexico as I look out the window and see blasting winds and swirls of snow. At school, we have been layered in record snowfalls over the past two months, and all of campus is in what seems a perpetual white. Even some of the winter-lovers are wearying of ice precipitation right now. Personally, I still love it.

Our adventure crawls closer at a less than crawling pace. The class in preparations for the trip has been moving well, although two snow days in as many weeks have put us off schedule. So far, we have studied the history of the war between the United States and Mexico, begun learning about the ecology of Cuatro Cienegas, practiced our spanish almost daily, and read the book Highwire Moon. We have been trying to watch El Norte in conjunction with the book, as they share themes, but those snow days have thrown us off. So far, we still have at least one sitting left. The good news, though, is that the students seem excited to finish the film. They want to know what happens next.

It is time for morning sing.

Jason