Saturday, January 19, 2013

The Final Stop on My Northwestern Tour

Today, I helped Jimmy teach his day-long class on the smart grid to the group of ten students in his Energy course at BGI.  It's an interesting system, and I have no idea whether any other business schools are arranged this way or not.  Each class meets once a week, but then once a month they have an "intensive," where the entire student body goes together to this retreat in the woods and spends an entire weekend on day-long editions of their courses, as well as eating and socializing together.  It seems a wonderful bonding experience, and no doubt gives a lot of coherence to these cohorts of students.  Tonight, the students (and many of the faculty) will party together into the late hours of the night.

In between sessions, I explored the trails of the campus.  They snake through hundreds of acres of Northwest rain forest, around streams and bogs and ponds, with little classrooms embedded within them: a floating classroom that can be paddled across a lake, an elevated classroom raised up with the trees.  I enjoyed teaching, and I enjoyed my quiet time, drawing to the end of an intensive trip, just taking some bits of my weekend that will otherwise fail to be.

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