Starting School...

Orientation started on Wednesday for Michael, and he got a rude awakening: two tests to divide the class into teaching sections for their summer program. Math and microeconomics are the main subjects of the next month of study, so if you love to talk math or econ, I'm sure Michael would love to hear from you. And if you don't, then he'd love it even more! He'll have class pretty much every day from 9am - 5pm and is expecting about 3 hours of homework each night. It will be a pretty intense month!

Michael's class is slightly over 200, about half from the U.S. and half elsewhere. Everyone got 20 seconds to introduce themselves (without referring to professional credentials) to the whole class on Thursday. Michael told the story of knocking Dan and Angie's picture into Dan's groom's cake at their wedding...kind of a 'most embarrassing moment' story. Another guy sang, repeat: sang, "Unforgettable" by Nat King Cole to the class (as in, "we're unforgettable"). And his last name is Cole. Ugh. In my mind, he just created a most embarrassing moment! Avoid eye contact.

Michael has also learned that he is probably the most uninteresting of his classmates. Among his fellow classmates are the former Prime Minister of Tanzania (1995-2005), the principal dancer in the New York City Ballet, the Deputy Director General of the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, 3 members of the Mexican Congress, a member of the Danish Parliament, a person from the CIA, an advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, a member of Parliament from Thailand, an internal medicine physician, and the list goes on and on. I think it's clear now that I (Michael) definitely filled some "Wise County boy" quota Harvard had. :-)

Anna and I (Amy) also attended orientation on Friday for the family activities. Next week they have a 'paint your pottery' day and trip to the Aquarium planned for us. We're going to participate as much as we can, to get to know the other families. The ones we met on Friday were really nice people. We met a family from Nashville with 3 kids ages 3, 5, & 7.

Soon I'm going to blog about ego trips. But I'm too tired now.