Only at St. Martin's

After this posting, the SMU students majoring in engineering may never speak to me again. On the other hand, most of them don't anyway, since they spend all their time in a small building in the far corner of campus, plotting their takeover of the world, for all we know. As hard as they work at their studies, they'd probably run the world very well.

On the other hand, since most of them are taking 20 or more credits this semester, reading blogs is probably not high on their agendas.

Yesterday I was sitting alone at lunch. Mentor A had left to go shopping, leaving me to read as much as I could of the current American history assignment. I wasn't paying too much attention to anything outside the book until voices were raised at the nearby table full of future engineers. When I finally focused on what was going on, I realized they were shouting, laughing, and arguing about stories from the Old Testament. They were enjoying the discussion, too.

That tendency to discuss everything, spiritual and material, no matter what the students' major, isn't the only unusual thing about St. Martin's. While we admittedly have some people on campus -- both students and staff -- who focus mostly on their social lives, most of the students are interested in being good at what they're studying. To me this is a huge contrast to the public colleges and universities I've attended or worked for.

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In case you're wondering just what I'm up to between meals in the university's cafeteria, here's the current list:

I'm reading a lot of Shakespeare's Henriad and trying to synthesize the information into a senior thesis while polishing the paper that needs to go to the Death Panel before I present it at a conference in Oregon in November as I simultaneously study for the first mid-term exam in American history while I start reading Hegel and reviewing Book II of Plato's Republic before I create a PowerPoint presentation based on the ethics and imagery of "Jersey Shore" as I read and journal about two important Victorian essays. How is your weekend going?