I got to stay over night in Barkerville! That was neat, I didn’t even know that was an option. I and four classmates stayed in the King’s guest house. Apparently the only reason other groups hadn’t snatched it up was that it is haunted. It is an old creaky house, but as I told one of my peers, it isn’t haunted by a screaming child so I’ll sleep through it. I went in hoping I’d be able to make some instant coffee with boiled water from a pump. It turned out we had a coffee maker, creamer and sugar provided in our full kitchen. That’s not even glamping, that’s just a hotel stay. Still, I’m in my forties now, so I am not complaining. Also, I got to see the moon hanging over Barkerville at night:

We got to try a bunch of activities to enhance our “place based learning” (see: field trips.) Some of the stand-outs for me:
1. Blessing’s Grave
A story always helps a lesson have impact, and this story certainly has impact: murder, race relations, a manhunt, he said / she said detective work, much drama. It naturally invites imagination of what the area looked like back in the eighteen sixties, as well as how people used to live and how it related to the land. The site itself is quite small and remote, and it is just a grave (albeit a well maintained one,) so you would have to design and bring your own material. Also, many bugs.
2. Cemetery
I can’t remember which one but it wasn’t the Barkerville one, it was outside Wells. This was actually an art assignment, but it was our choice as to what we would attempt. My attempt was at minimalism. I found decent success with the graves but had a harder time with the trees. I appreciate now how great of a minimal representation the Christmas tree is of an evergreen. It was a good highlight of the wide array of options we have at any given location.
3. Wells School and Walking Path
We received a tour of the K-7 school in Wells, which meant our group of about forty made up more than half the population of the school while we were there. This was a great chance to learn about teaching in a small school, where there is only one class and the arrival or departure of a single family can wildly swing the number of kids in school. The advice I received aligned with what I kind of figured: keep students together, have events and activities, and make sure the students each have a grade appropriate activity in which they can engage. On this particular day we were treated to presentations that the students had put together on famous local figures.
The Wells walking path was very impressive and is a great accomplishment. The walking path was a community initiative that enriches the community, which is both logical and rare. I feel that people exist less and less as communities and more as a bunch of individuals who happen to live next to each other, at least in most of Canada. So, this was a civics lesson (though we didn’t go into great detail) as much as anything. The meadow lands along the path are beautiful and are not easy to access without such a path, making it a unique experience in botany and environmental science.
4. Listening Walk
A walk through an area where you maintain silence and focus on the sounds around you. It is a simple and easy to grasp concept which can be done anywhere, so it is easy to apply. The highlight for me was hearing a little ripping sound coming from a patch of grass. Upon inspection it was a little ground squirrel ripping up bits of grass for nesting, and it had giant tufts of grass sticking out the sides of its mouth. Also interesting was how effectively one building could block sound from the main street. I can see this as a good exercise to “unplug.”
5. Multi-planar surfaces and Linear Perspective
This was an activity of my own design. The architecture of Barkerville has a lot of window boxes and other features on the roofs. As a result it is easy to see multiple planes intersecting each other. I tried drawing one of the roofs and indicating the planes present, how they align, and which planes are parallel to each other. This doubled as both a math exercise and an art exercise as I could see where my window boxes didn’t align the way they should.
6. Tools
I didn’t put together an exercise for this but I did observe it. The old tyme tools are easy to understand, especially hand tools. I think there is a Minecraft tie-in there, how we acquire and use basic resources in the real world. As it is I think the way you get anything, and I mean anything, is to pay money for it. Money is the magic number that manifests existence. Taking a look at the older ways of doing things could break this outlook.

In closing we also gathered around a campfire, had some generously provided drinks and food, and talked about our time in the program. The social cohesion that has been built by the cohort and by the faculty was quite evident. If there is animosity between any two people then I am unaware of it and it is not evident. As I look at where we are, have been and are going I am delighted to see our community and to feel our community. This, more than anything else, is something I would like to bring into my classrooms.