Some of you may be interested to know why I so rarely blog. Others may wonder what my day is like at Bible school. I will now attempt to kill two birds with one stone, as it were, and satisfy everyone's curiosity. This is an outline of a typical school day at Bible school, with stories thrown in here and there. Please enjoy. I put a lot of time into it.
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I generally get up around 6:30. Mornings are usually the hardest time of my day, partially because that's when I want to be in bed the most and partly because my blankets are really warm and soft. Also, I have a tendency to stay up late working on one of the many projects and skills I have set as goals to work on (including, but not limited to, composing music, working on the school website, reading a book from my lengthy book list, and...um...sharpening my Minesweeper skills). Despite the hardship, however, I arouse myself as best I can, do my devotions, and get dressed just in time for the 7:30 deadline: work meeting.
Work meeting takes about fifteen minutes. We get assigned our morning jobs (things like cleaning the dorm, taking the trash, and random small jobs like raking leaves) and pray over the day. If we finish before the breakfast bell rings, I sometimes play the piano for a while.
After breakfast and chores, there are fifteen minutes before the nine o'clock meeting. There's not a lot to say about that time, other than that there is always a really good message and that, if it's Wednesday, I play the piano for the songs (Jane T. plays on Mondays, and the rest of the time it's usually either Mr. T. M., Craig, or Aunt Elaine).
Class is the next thing on the agenda, and boy do I have a thing or two to say about class! First of all, I really enjoy it, as I mentioned in a previous post. There is so much to learn, and, with this group, it's often easy to have a great time doing it.
My first class of any significant length was “A Harmony of the Four Gospels,” presented by Professor Dan. That class was just the first-year students together, and we had a lot of fun. The most memorable time of the whole class was when we had an SMD, or something like that: a Student Moderated Debate. We, the seven first-years, were given a couple questions on a sheet of paper and told to discuss them on our own. We were to debate on the meaning and symbolism of the parable of the ten virgins and on the meaning and application of the parable of the talents. Fifteen minutes was the time limit for the whole thing. Well, never having come to an agreement on the meaning of the oil, we didn't get very far with the application. We were enjoying ourselves so much that we didn't notice the time, and class was over before we were halfway through the discussion. We continued it on the way to – and throughout – our lunch.
Late in November, I finished my next class: Acts and the Epistles of Paul (aka Paul's Life and Letters). Mr. M. taught that class, and I enjoyed it (surprise!). The ENTIRE student body took this class at once!!! Well, almost the entire student body: we were never actually all there at once, due to sickness and traveling. Still, the vast, vast, vast majority of us usually made it. Which leads me to point out that the entire student body of the school numbers sixteen. Which leads me to point out that it's quality – not quantity – that counts.
Throughout the year, some of the students try to keep a record of the more humorous and/or interesting quotes. Interestingly, most of the ones I've written down have come from the A & E of P (P's L & L) class. For example, when Mr. M. was teaching us about the dead in Christ rising first (I Thes. 4:16), he described it thus: “There will be a great shout, the archangel will cry out, and the trumpet will sound, and pop poppity, pop pop pop, the dead in Christ will rise!” And when he was describing someone who was new at something (whether a biblical character or a former student I can't recall), he said he “had some green stuff behind the ears,” presumably meaning that he was green and a little wet behind the ears.
The last class we had before Christmas break was Beulahology (the study of Israel) under my very own cousin Craig. It was a fantastic class, and I now know so much more about the Holy Land. For example, the study of it is the chapstick of the soul.
Some background is needed here. When Ethan from RI (mentioned in just a couple paragraphs in more detail) was at the school for a weekend, he showed the guys a video of Andrea making an extemporaneous speech about lessons from Napoleon Dynamite. It's a tremendously humorous clip, and you should watch it some time; but the long of the short of it was that ND teaches the importance of chapstick, which can represent the chapstick of the soul. Now, Andrea was cut off before she could explain what the “chapstick of the soul” was, but Craig took the opportunity in his class to explain that it was the study of Beulah! I never would have guessed it. Of course, knowing the origin of the term, the guys all laughed uproariously. The girls tittered politely and looked with querying gazes to the other side of the room. We explained later.
Beulahology wasn't all fun and games, though. I really did learn a lot. I know what the Cardo is, and that there's a menorah there. I know that Petra was carved from rock and was the site of Indiana Jones: the Last Crusade. I know that En-Gedi means the Spring of the Wild Goats, and that it flows into the Dead Sea (but nothing flows out). I know the regions of the land, the major cities, and oh so much more! If only my teacher knew about my blog so he could see how much I know!
Back to the schedule...
After class and lunch comes afternoon work. That can be anything from raking leaves to chopping wood to installing sinks to making apple cider to painting trim to washing windows. My favorite assignment I've had yet this year was when Ben and I had to crawl around under the men's dorm installing a venting system for the dorm dryer. The aria “The People That Walked In Darkness” from Handel's Messiah went around in my head nearly the entire time.
Although crawling around with a headlamp in a two-foot tall room singing an oratorio was fun, the most memorable work time came another time. My friend Ethan from RI stayed an extra day after the youth weekend in early November, and he, Ben, Stephen, Andrew, and I were assigned to do a lot of leaf raking and hauling. Leaf raking is a fun job because you can work super hard for ten minutes and then goof off in the leaves for a bit before you get a nice quiet tractor ride up to the Designated Leaf Dumping Area; plus, you can talk while you work, and when you have a different friend than usual helping you, it makes the time even better. We whipped up several enormous piles of leaves by the apartment building and then got some awesome pictures and movies of ourselves jumping into them.
Then we moved to the lodge, and the fun only increased. The lodge is designed much like a two-story motel, with an outdoor staircase to the second level. We piled up a tremendous amount of fallen foliage near the stairs. Can you see where this is leading? Ethan was, I think, the first to jump off the staircase railing into the leaf pile. It was a perilous feat. Gritting my teeth with anxiety, I stood watching as he cautiously climbed the precipitous rail, evoking memories of an audacious Anne Shirley walking the ridgepole of the roof. I knew it wasn't 100% safe, but I also knew that Ethan wasn't stupid; or was he?
Suddenly, with a great cry, he vaulted himself into the air, cleared the hedge, and whoosh! Landed safe and sound in the pile. (Did you like my deceptive foreshadowing?) Stephen quickly followed, and then Ben, then Ethan again. Finally it was my turn. Now, for those of you who don't know, I would not exactly call myself an acrophobe, but I do have this...er...hesitation to throw myself from heights that are anything other than diminutive. I don't like rope swings, I (presumably) don't like sky-diving, and I don't like the idea of jumping off railings. I spent all of two minutes gathering my stupid nerve, but finally I took the plunge. To my relief (if not to my surprise), I didn't kill or even hurt myself. But to my embarrassment, I instinctively plugged my nose. I just lay in the pile of leaves laughing at myself for a minute or two. At least it made a good picture.
One of the easiest things to do during work time is radio. Fairwood has its own low-power radio station, and five guys a week get to sign up to run it for an hour of work time. It can be really enjoyable to sit and listen to classical music, turning on the microphone every so often to say, “Good afternoon, and thank you for listening. You just heard Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor, performed by Van Cliburn. Now we are going to listen to Isaac Stern play Humoresque no. 7 in G flat major, by Dvorák.” What is not so enjoyable is when you find that you left the microphone on during the song, and repeated those sentences over and over, practicing for when the song did end; and when you reach for the microphone switch to turn it on, you find that it was on in the first place and that you had been talking throughout much of a nine-minute piece of music. Not that that ever happened to me or anything...
Dinner generally comes after work, and after that is generally free time, which I generally use up by practicing the piano. The big exception to all these generalities is Thursday, when we have no dinner after work because there is no work. We have a few extra meetings in the early afternoon and then have an early dinner, followed by HOURS of free time. This time slot is when most of the students opt to go on the town trip to Keene to get whatever they need at Wal-Mart, Target, the bank, the grocery store, etc. This time slot is when I usually choose to remain at home and bask in the quietness and the lack of other things to do. I am the sort who is easily drawn out of reading or studying to sit around talking, and when there's no one to talk to it's so much easier to make progress on the things that are, in the long run, more productive.
With the exception of Thursdays, the only real variations of the schedule come in the evening. Monday evening we study; Tuesday we have sports; Wednesday we have “heart group,” Thursday we study, and Friday we relax and bask in the Sabbath peace.
The end.
