AGE: The first few days

I've been in Ashland, Oregon for a few days now and it is unbelievably beautiful! The AGE house is on 81 acres at the top of a hill with a 360 degree panaramic view of the surrounding mountains and valleys. Here's a picture I took from my window yesterday morning:
And another one in a different direction in the evening:
The town of Ashland has a population of 20,000 people and is just a few miles from the campus (it's in the clouds in the first picture). Ashland is a really vibrant, outdoor-oriented town that reminds me of a small Burlington. Like Burlington, magazines regularly proclaim it one of the best outdoor adventure towns in the nation. The difference, though, is that the mountains get more snow while the town rarely gets below freezing. It's been 50 degrees all week and feeling more like April than January! Ashland is also home to Southern Oregon University and a world famous Shakespeare festival (which we take the students to in the spring).
The courses I'll be teaching this spring are modern American literature, website design, physics, and enviromental science. I'm really excited to teach these courses because it's nice to have some diversity in my curriculum. I basically make the courses from scratch so I get to pick my own texts. This spring we'll be reading many of my favorite books including Walden, Civil Disobedience, Cathedral, and The Solace of Open Spaces.
Since the head of schools is also named "Greg," we've quickly had to make up a nickname for me. I told them all the nicknames I've had, the most frequent one just being "Koman," but they admitted that they've already been referring to me as "GKo" ever since seeing this picture on my website:
Lise and Callie, two red geometry students from last year, decided to mock the way I dressed by wearing khaki pants, coral necklaces, and golf shirts with fish on them. Since they always called me "GKO," I made the caption for the picture on my website "The three GKO's." It looks like the nickname will live on because it's definitely sticking with the staff.
The students arrive tomorrow, so I'm frantically trying to get the rest of my materials together before classes start on Monday. This weekend we are hiking into the moutains to ski the slopes of Mount Ashland. We'll spend Saturday night in a cabin and then hike back out on Sunday. We have a snowmobile to carry all the gear, so it should be an easy hike.
Finally, AGE has two mottos. One is "the world is our classroom" and the other is "what did you learn at school today?" I particularly like the latter motto because it suggests why AGE's education might be superior to traditional education. In most classrooms you learn by being told. Here you learn from experience. Most educations tell you the facts about the Sistine Chapel. Maybe they show you a picture or two. AGE takes you to the Sistine Chapel.