community at quest

After a fairly unpleasant return from Seattle (all night bus rides with a 5 hour layover in Vancouver), I'm back at Quest and three days into my new class, Global Perspectives. My tutor, Mai, has a reputation for being brutally honest and a tough grader. She told us that to survive we had to remember that grades do not determine our value as a person, nor do they indicate how successful we'll be in later life. Then she showed us a graph of average happiness (in smiles/hour) of students over the course of the class. Yikes. I'll definitely be ready for Christmas Break when it comes. However, most students say that Global is the best class they've taken at Quest so far, so while I'm nervous, I'm also excited.

The theme of this week seems to be community. On Monday we had the traditional beginning-of-block community update, where everyone gathers in the Atrium and various student, staff, and faculty talk about opportunities and happenings at Quest. We've got so many fun holiday events coming up! I'm stoked because Christmas (or as I like to call it, the Season of Joy) is my absolute favorite time of year. Then yesterday we had community day. As class was wrapping up, a few members of the student body ran, screaming, banging pots and pans, and playing a PVC-pipe didgeridoo, all around the academic building, rounding people up for school-wide team building activities and discussions about how to improve Quest. I'm suck a sucker for that kind of thing.