Day 7: One week in—let the storms begin

1/22 ok, it really wasn’t that bad. Today was colloquy like usual. We’ve been here a week, we’re starting to get the hang of things. However, every one of us awoke this morning with a feeling of dread. Thursday is paper assigning day. This year things are done differently however. Every year for the past 12+ years students have received their papers on Thursday around noonsish and every year they’ve been due Monday morning (probably before their TA’s woke up). This year we’re trying something new. We get the papers Thursday same time. They’re due on Saturday at midnight. This means no Sunday, and no all-nighters. Want to hear our reactions though? No crying or mourning or weeping or gnashing of teeth. I’m so thankful. It may make my Friday/Saturday horrible, but I now have the whole day on Sunday to rest and relax before plunging headlong into the next week. What a wonderful gift they have given us.

So back to my Thursday. I was uber productive knowing that my paper would be assigned after colloquy. I finished my assigned reading for the day, which was by far the most vulgar thing I’ve ever read (Lysistrata by Aristophanes), while my friends were all in their discussion time. They did the same, and after a short break for lunch we commandeered Daniel’s single (room), and spent the entirety of the afternoon discussing the assigned topic.

“With appropriate and specific references to this week’s assignments (readings and museums), explore the interplay/interaction between the needs of the state and those of the individual in Greek and Roman cultures. What do your sources suggest about how these cultures understood, valued, and attempted to balance these needs and interests?”

With a short break for dinner (which seems to get increasingly better—though the stew was my favorite still) we returned to the room and literally spent the entire day pondering the rights of the individual. Sometime shortly before midnight we broke for 7.5 hours of rest before resuming our obsession with this topic.