Leaving

Today my family and I will fly from Dulles Airport, near Washington, DC, to Fort Lauderdale.  Tomorrow we'll shop--as I gather faculty and staff customarily do at the port of departure--for items we want to have with us on the voyage but don't want to bring on the plane: toiletries, snacks, etc.  I'm very much hoping that we'll also have a moment to visit what sounds like an extraordinary exhibition of works from the Uffizi in Florence--http://www.moafl.org/exhibits/botticelli.html 
Tomorrow night there's a reception at a hotel not far from the ship: there faculty and staff will meet for the first time.

Then on Tuesday morning we'll get to work.  We'll have a session to prepare everyone for leading and participating in discussions of the assigned "common reading," Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, and then a second session in which we'll discuss preparations for Dominica, the first port that will be a subject of lectures in Global Studies, of faculty-directed practica, of pre-port briefings--that is, of many of the academic resources we can bring to bear on our travels.  These opening sessions are a bit more specific--a bit more content-driven--than I gather these typical orientation sessions usually are.  I'm betting that by getting to work on genuine and challenging activities we'll come together more productively than if we undertook 'team-building' exercises independent of our coming tasks.  We'll see.

Tuesday around mid-day we'll begin heading for the ship.  There will be some time to unpack before faculty/staff orientation continues with further sessions.

One key focus of faculty/staff orientation is to get the two entities--the academic side and the student life side, in particular--to think of their work as closely connected.  I think if we can persuade students that their learning and their social lives on the voyage can be tightly and happily interwoven, we'll have gone a long way towards making the voyage a success.  That message can only be communicated persuasively if it is enacted by those of us who are responsible for it.

I hear a sound of a Wii from down the hall, the last time, I think, I'll hear that sound for some time.