So it begins

Week 1 is upon us. We find ourselves at the beginning of a new semester, a new year. Though my classification has not yet changed from junior to middler, I feel like an old hat at this online program. For a year now, I’ve been a member of cohort #2 of the Distributed Learning M.Div program. A year ago at this time, I was sweating the idea of trying to learn Greek, but then, we’re seminary students. We all sweat that class. Now a year later, I’m sweating Greek a little bit again as I take Matthew which Professor Shore assures us will have a healthy Greek component.

As a student who does the majority of my work online though, Luthernet feels very old hat. I had to laugh last night as I was looking through my week 1 assignments and one of them was to orientate ourselves (the students in the class) to online learning at Luther. My wife was sitting on the couch watching tv and asked me what I was snickering about as I clicked away at the laptop. “An assignment to orientate into online learning. I think I’ve pretty well got this down.” After 2 semesters and 3 classes in this format, I’m not too worried about the approach.

I’m also falling right back into the habit of contextual learning. We spend 10 hours a week working in a congregation, which is a wonderful way to apply the lessons that we learn in class right away. In a way, it feels like I’m already an intern, but not entirely. I still work full time, so I’m balancing work, class, and contextual work together, not to mention that I have two kids under 6, so I wear the dad hat right now too. However, with my wife working at the church where I do my contextual work, I spend a lot of time there. In fact I just spent half of my lunch hour there, prepping for confirmation class that begins…gulp…tonight. Here we go again.

Reading…writing…posting…teaching…working…dad-ing. Having just watched the movie Bolt with my kids about a week ago, I find the words of Rhino the hamster fitting at this point.

“LET IT BEGIN!!!!!LET IT BEGIN!!!!!!”