"Fall Break"

After class today, "Fall Break" began here at EIU. I put it in quotation marks because for us HA students, it's not a real holiday weekend--because it's only one day: Friday, and we always get Fridays off. So for us, it's just another weekend. Actually, we realized that we haven't really had any weekends lately, nor will we have any for the rest of October. There's always something we need to do over the weekend, and for the next three weeks, we have Tilford Dudley presentations on Sunday. This weekend we'll also have to set up the T-Dud exhibit on Saturday. No rest for the weary! Unfortunately there's also been some grumbling amongst the students--people are kind of forming into cliques and griping about the other cliques. It's like high school all over again! :-) Thankfully I do not belong to any one particular clique--I try to maintain good relations with all, but I'm afraid it could get ugly between some of the others later this semester or for sure next semester. I'll keep you posted on the drama.

I just kind of need a break from everyone and everything, so tomorrow I'm going to go by myself up to Monticello for the Piatt County Historic Barn Tour! Yay--that will be a fun "Fall Break" activity. I'm sure I'll see some pretty leaves, and it made the Piatt County Museum board happy to think that I would come up to support their biggest activity of the year.

This morning for Historic Preservation, we had a guest speaker from the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency come speak to us. She talked really fast, and she talked for the whole two-and-a-half hours, so it was kind of like an overload of information, but it was really interesting. After class I did some research at the library for a while, and then it was off to work with Dr. Hardeman. We graded three papers in three hours :-) They were three scary papers too--oh dear. It's a 3000-level course, so you'd expect people to at least be able to write in complete sentences and spell correctly (especially with spell check!), but no--that would be asking too much of these students. We didn't get any more Boston Tea Parties today, but there was some equally disturbing mis-information. At one point Dr. Hardeman wanted to take a break and walk to the Union to buy us some cookies, so we walked across campus. I guess that today was, according to a select group of EIU students, National "Come Out" Day. (It's actually National Autism Awareness Day, so I believe these students were a little confused.) The students had a microphone set up with speakers in the middle of campus, and they were walking around asking people if they had any secrets they wanted to make known. I try not to be judgemental, but it was quite obvious that these students were trying to promote, shall we say, alternative lifestyles. It's times like that, or when I walk through a suffocating cloud of cigarette smoke that I wish for the good ol' days at BYU :-)