Intensity at the Cherry Hill Academic Intensive
Three weeks is a long time for me to be silent. But this time I've just been BUSY.
Last weekend Cherry Hill Seminary held an Academic Intensive. About 30 classroom hours over the four days, plus three weeks of pre-gathering homework and another ten days of post-gathering homework. For a total of 45 hours or more, one credit-hour of Master's Degree level work.
At last year's intensive, I was a student. Worked my ass off, or at least I thought I did. Lots of new vocabulary, several new encounters with structured communication and sentence stems.
This year I was one of five teachers. An amazing experience, a whole order of magnitude more work for me than last year. I'm still processing everything I learned from doing it. Here are some highlights:
The amazing joy of "teaching" in a classroom of colleagues. Where the Teacher doesn't have all the answers, and isn't expected to have all the answers. Where the sum total of knowledge shared is greater than the sum of the knowledge each of us might have thought to "teach."
The delight of getting to meet the well-rounded, beautiful, loving, articulate people behind the different styles of communicating on line. This one seemed much more "in focus" in person; that one's terse writing hadn't revealed a wonderfully wicked sense of humor; this other one was much more energetic in person; that other one much more compassionate and tender than I had seen on the website ... and so on, and on.
None of us share a whole body of beliefs or practices; some of us use words like "faith" and some of us don't; some of us speak of our religious practice in terms of Deity and some of us don't. We challenged each other to speak more clearly about these things, but we didn't challenge each other's beliefs or practices. No one took the position that any one form of practice or belief is intrinsically better than any other.
I have a page of action items now that it's over. And a huge sense of gratitude for the work everyone did. Can't wait to see what shows up in the post-gathering comments on the website.
Next year we're planning to meet in the same location, and to have a good deal more space. I'm feeling eager already.
Last weekend Cherry Hill Seminary held an Academic Intensive. About 30 classroom hours over the four days, plus three weeks of pre-gathering homework and another ten days of post-gathering homework. For a total of 45 hours or more, one credit-hour of Master's Degree level work.
At last year's intensive, I was a student. Worked my ass off, or at least I thought I did. Lots of new vocabulary, several new encounters with structured communication and sentence stems.
This year I was one of five teachers. An amazing experience, a whole order of magnitude more work for me than last year. I'm still processing everything I learned from doing it. Here are some highlights:
The amazing joy of "teaching" in a classroom of colleagues. Where the Teacher doesn't have all the answers, and isn't expected to have all the answers. Where the sum total of knowledge shared is greater than the sum of the knowledge each of us might have thought to "teach."
The delight of getting to meet the well-rounded, beautiful, loving, articulate people behind the different styles of communicating on line. This one seemed much more "in focus" in person; that one's terse writing hadn't revealed a wonderfully wicked sense of humor; this other one was much more energetic in person; that other one much more compassionate and tender than I had seen on the website ... and so on, and on.
None of us share a whole body of beliefs or practices; some of us use words like "faith" and some of us don't; some of us speak of our religious practice in terms of Deity and some of us don't. We challenged each other to speak more clearly about these things, but we didn't challenge each other's beliefs or practices. No one took the position that any one form of practice or belief is intrinsically better than any other.
I have a page of action items now that it's over. And a huge sense of gratitude for the work everyone did. Can't wait to see what shows up in the post-gathering comments on the website.
Next year we're planning to meet in the same location, and to have a good deal more space. I'm feeling eager already.