Sunday, September 25, 2011

College 101 in 2011

Lunch with President Dan Hanson and Elaine Hanson

Lunch with President Dan Hanson and Elaine Hanson

This year's College 101 Class for Social Sciences and Language Arts picked up quickly where last year's fun concluded.

As last year's blog page for the class indicates, the class enjoyed Ellen Klages' visit and her book,
White Sands, Red Menace, which we read again this term.

We also visited the
John Neihardt Center--check out the links from last year, which include as well some of the quick projects the students undertook.

Last week after class, the class walked to PSC President Dan Hanson's house where Elaine Hanson greeted the students for lunch. The Hansons invite all the sections of College 101 to the house, getting to know all the freshman class.

On this past Friday, Dr. Dan Holtz joined the students to tell them a
bit about Willa Cather, for on 30 September, we and other interested students will take a bus to Red Cloud for a few hours of touring the area, led by a guide from the Willa Cather Foundation.

I will continue to update the photographs related to the
class's activities as the term progresses.

As part of Homecoming activities, a few of the students in the class took part in Powder Puff Football in the field behind TJ Majors.



Students in the class take part in numerous activities on campus, and I will try to highlight on this page some of their involvement, from Pep Band and Power Puff Football to, ah, Cheerleaders.






September 30 Excursion to Willa Cather Country


On Friday, 30 September, the class boarded a but here in Peru at 6:30 in the morning and made the three-hour journey to Red Cloud, NE, home of the Willa Cather Foundation.

After arriving at the foundation's headquarters at the beautifully restored Opera House, the group began its tour of areas in Red Cloud that featured in both Cather's life and literature, including the home in which Will Cather lived as a child.

As photographs from the visit indicate, our guide walked us
to a variety of sites, from the Red Cloud Depot to the old Catholic Church, from the house Cather stayed in when she visited from New York, to the Grace Church where the Cather family worshipped.

That afternoon, we boarded the bus and enjoyed a couple hours touring the countryside around Red Cloud and visited some of the sites of importance in Cather's novel, especially My Antonia.

We stopped, for example, at the farmstead of Annie Sadilek Pavelka, one of Cather's childhood friends, and the source for Antonia in the novel.

I enjoyed seeing the fields teeming with Mile and Sorghum and simply forgot to ask the bus driver to stop for a good photograph.

Andrea Hairston and Pan Morigan Visit Peru State College
I posted a blog page that offers links and information about Andrea and Pan's
activities during their two-day visit when they gave individual performances and then joined together for a presentation to College 101 students from my section and from the section devoted to Music and Art.




College 101 Special Projects

To conclude the semester, the class divided into four groups to create special projects
that experimented with various media:

One group offered a video (now available on You Tube) about Willa Cather and the class trip to Red Cloud.

Another group of students created a Face Book page that features Andrea Hairston and Pan Morigan.


The other two groups created projects connected in one way or another with Ellen Klages' novel, White Sands, Red Menace:




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