Travelogue Chapter 5

It is now Thursday January 23, 2009, I am told. Being on a ship in the middle of an ocean, one looses the sense of the days of the week as there aree no points of reference like a newspaper, TV news or some other medium. The only reference one has is a one page news sheet called the Deans Memo which lays out the activities of the day. Otherwise, one day does look like the other and one has difficulty trying to remember what one did on any day. This is why I write this travelogue to fix in my memory the happenings of such a long voyage.

Shipboard life is broken between A and B days and courses are taught on one or the other. As there are not enough classes to accommodate all the courses, professors share the 10 room available. In the first two or three days the student have the possibility to listen in on the courses they chose to see if they want to persue the subjects and profs chosen. If they do not like one or the other they have the option of dropping courses and choosing others. However, the classes are kept small (35 as a rule) and students are not guaranteed if they drop one course that they will get into another. For us the passengers, we have the right to sit in on any course if there is room as the students get priorty. So far I have been able to sit in on the courses which interest me. Of course, as this is my Chinese period I am in on two chinese litterature and history courses as well as one on linguistics. I shall see if I stick with that. Brigitte and Emmett are also out sniffing courses which could interest them.

Emmett is in a strange situation. He is the first young person ever to be admitted into the special group maid up of adults on this programme. There are others his age on the ship but they are dependents of Profs and staff and have limited rights. Emmett, so far, has been accepted by the other adults as he quite at ease with adults. He also sits in the one room class set up for dependents. Here he works on his own studies assigned by his teaches back home in Montreal. He will have to learn to balance his position as he will not be able to attend all adult functions. But he has been given permssion to use the adult lounge on deck 7 where no students are allowed. As long as he does abuse of this he will probably be able to move from the students to the adults while doing his own work and attending classes that interest him.

One of the things I am still dealing with on this ship is the sense of déjà vu and the impression of time stopped. Here I am, 5 years after our first voyage in 2004 and when I look around the kids are the same age as 5 years ago. They even look like the students who were with us 5 years ago. It is almost as if time stopped for 5 years and these kids just stayed the same age, 18 to 20. I struggle not to ask some of them how they managed to stay so young in the last 5 years… I suppose for professors who teach have the same experience each September but for me, it has been 5 years since I was on a ship with 720 students of this age.

Life on board is settling down as people start to get their routines fixed and assignments have to be done. But the level of activity on the ship is actually what makes this kind of traveling fun. There is always something going on but as a Life Long Learner, as we older farts are called can do as we please and do not need to write exams, term paper or even take part in quizzes.

There are some 20 professors on ship teaching some 60 classes so the choice of subjects ranges over litterature, business, sciences, philosoph, sociology and law. Some classes are definetly underattended with only 5 or 10 students while other are up to the limit.. So during the day, at the break of classes, students pour into the passage ways on their way to their next classes or their cabins. There is a fairly well equipped computer lab with about 25 machines available to students. In addition, the ship has been wired for wireless connections in most part of the vessel and many of the students have their own laptops. Like any camputs, students can be found sitting around at all hours of the night studying, writing, listening to music or just chatting.

That’s it for today from the mid Atantic.