Many students at LCC think Wednesday is the best day of the school week.
I personally love Wednesdays because they provide me with a chance to sleep in an extra hour, but I also love beginning my day with Divine Service at chapel with my classmates, professors, faculty, and other Lutherans from Casper. Also, Wednesday is music day. The only classes on Wednesday are music electives, which means if you aren’t in music, you get a day off; and if you are in music, you can finally focus on music instead of your other classes. I am in both choir and orchestra but don’t take any private music lessons, which means I’m done with classes around 1:30 every Wednesday afternoon.
“Music day” or “homework day”?
However, if I’m being honest, although I call Wednesday “Music Day,” after 1:30 it actually turns into “Homework Day.” This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Nor does it have to mean sitting in my room for hours doing nothing but reading books, taking notes, and working on assignments for the rest of the week. I have many ways for keeping Wednesday an active and exciting day. Sometimes this means going for a walk or calling a family member before I get started on homework. Other days, I take the opportunity to cook a large meal so I can freeze leftovers or bake a batch of cookies so I have a dessert to pack in my lunch. While I do these activities, I frequently work on school assignments. Depending on the week, I might practice a recitation for literature or memorize theological themes for an upcoming quiz. Working on these assignments while doing other activities I enjoy, like baking or cooking, is both more efficient and more enjoyable.
…”philosophy day”?
There are days when I don’t have time to go on a walk or work in the kitchen, though, and those Wednesdays are the most fun of all. On those Wednesdays, some of my college friends and I meet at a coffee shop and work on homework together. Specifically, we work on our philosophy homework. I don’t mean that we sit there and silently commiserate — participation is much more active than that! We read our assignments aloud to each other and work together to answer our study questions. Each of us experience times of confusion, but usually one of the others will understand. If none of us fully understand, we can usually put together the smaller pieces that we do understand and find the answer we’re looking for. Does all this mean we sometimes sit in a coffee shop reading Aristotle and Aquinas out loud? Yes, it does. I frequently wonder if the other customers notice, and if they do, what their thoughts are!
Real-life philosophy day
At the end of the day, I don’t care what the other people in the coffee shop think. In my opinion, the fact that my friends and I read Aristotle together — even if it is just for school — is amazing. We have a lot more fun doing it together, and I think we understand it better, too. The first time we ever got together to do this, we were reading Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics. At that point we were reading what he had to say about friendship, and that inspired some really good conversation among the four of us. I still would have enjoyed that section if I was reading it alone in my bedroom, but it was so much better talking about how we’d seen Aristotle’s principles play out in our own relationships. Admittedly, we do get distracted on occasion and talk about things other than philosophy, but that just goes to show that homework connects with, rather than competes against, real life experiences.
