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February 14, 2003
January
Term: A Climate of Fun and Discovery
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Photo: Anne Keyser
Kimberley
Snow FP (foreground) and Anna Goltz ’06 at the site
of Lucy Stone’s childhood home in West Brookfield,
Massachusetts.
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The
coldest January in several years threatened citrus crops in Florida,
slowed barges on the Hudson River, and closed schools in Atlanta.
But it couldn’t freeze January Term activities for Mount
Holyoke students on and off campus.
Seven hardy students visited the birthplace of women’s rights
pioneer and MHC alumna Lucy Stone, class of 1839. The members
of the class Rhetoric for Leadership, which focused on speeches
by Frances Wright, Angelina Grimke, Lucy Stone, Sojourner Truth,
and Frances Willard, gathered at the foundation of the Stone farmhouse
in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, on January 16 to honor the
woman whose oratory paved the way for their education and political
rights. Despite snow, wind, and the roar of snowmobiles, they
read aloud from Stone’s speeches and listened to comments
by Stone biographer Joelle Million and members of the preservation
groups that bought the farmland last June.
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Photo: Fred LeBlanc
Students of Winter Fun and Survival 101 set up winter camping
tents behind Dickinson House. Indoors, the group drank hot
apple cider in front of a fire and read Jack London’s
“To Build a Fire.” Like the dog featured in
that short story, the group “knew that it was not
good to walk abroad in such fearful cold” and spent
the night inside. |
Winter weather was
an important component of the new course Winter Fun and Survival
101, which covered the outdoor arts of backcountry cooking, winter
camping, and cross-country skiing. “A lot of students from
different climates just don’t know what to do in cold weather
and snow,” said instructor Elizabeth Swanner ’03,
cochair of Mount Holyoke’s Outing Club. “Being from
Minnesota, I like to teach people that being outside in the winter
is really not such a horrible thing and can actually be quite
fun.”
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Photo: Fred LeBlanc
January Term students at work on their stained glass projects |
Weather-wary students
flocked to a host of indoor January Term activities, from lessons
in songwriting, sign language, and silversmithing, to tours of
Senegal and India, to community service events. Beth Robertson
’04 spent three weeks studying the arts of India with a
group organized by the University of Massachusetts’s Asian
Dance and Music Program. “I thought that attending
this arts tour would be a wonderful introduction to the country
which I so desire to study and understand,” said Robertson,
an anthropology and sociology major who is focusing her studies
on south Asia. Just back from the trip, which took her to eight
cities, Robertson is already making plans to study Hindi and return
to India for senior thesis research.
Credit-bearing classes also filled quickly this January. More
than seventy students enrolled in Public Relations 101, a Weissman
Center for Leadership course taught by Kevin McCaffrey, associate
director of communications. Two other Weissman Center courses
were also popular choices. Forty-nine students enrolled in The
Rhetoric of Grammar and Its Application to Writing, with Frank
Massey of the Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst. Eighteen students took Travel Writing with Laura Purdom,
MHC writer and author of four travel guidebooks. Jennifer Zala
’03, who would like to write about her travels after graduation,
focused her writing on the greenhouses at MHC and Smith and on
the best places for coconut soup. (India Palace has the best in
the valley, she says, “even though it is not on the menu.”)
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Photo: Fred LeBlanc
Songwriter
Erica Wheeler works with students in the J-Term class Writing
with a Sense of Place.
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A dozen students found
their way to the basement of Williston library for Archival Mysteries,
a new class that analyzed underrepresentation or “silences”
in the archives and the differences among particular kinds of
documents. Examining a scrapbook by Helen E. Cummings 1906, for
example, the students considered what socially acceptable options
women have had for documenting their lives. They discussed how
four pages devoted to Theodore Roosevelt and a mock ballot for
the national general election allowed Cummings a political voice
at a time when women lacked the right to vote. “It was a
way of speaking out—if only to herself,” said Peter
Carini, director of archives and special collections. Students
also looked at the scrapbook in relation to other methods of documentation,
such as quilting, and compared its point of view to that expressed
in an annual report from the same period by Mary Woolley. “We
discussed the purpose of these two documents—one a public
report and the other a private record—and how these purposes
affect them as historical sources,” said Carini, noting
that Woolley’s report downplays social life, while Cummings’s
scrapbook celebrates a very strong and complex campus social life.
The stage was home base for a number of performing arts students
this January. Five of them joined Associate Professor of Dance
Charles Flachs and his former professor Lida Nelson Smith in Modern
Dance Repertory, a two-week intensive January Term course focused
on restaging “Suspension,” a work (to be performed
at MHC February 27–March 1) choreographed by modern dance
pioneer May O’Donnell. Fourteen students participated in
a theatre practicum for Edward Bond’s The Tin Can People,
a play about nuclear holocaust currently being performed at the
College (see story on page three). It was the first four-credit
J-Term course offered by the theatre department and the first
to require that every company member contribute to every aspect
of the production, including sets, costumes, lights, props, and
sound. “For all of J-Term, my world was the production.
It was really wonderful to be able to give all my focus and energy
to it,” said Emily Ruddock ’03, who plays the role
of First Man.
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