informative email (from 8/23)

I know, I'm horribly tardy putting up this info. I've just been really busy with school starting and such. But enough about me, because this is Nathan's blog! :D So here is a general summary (because that's how he asked me to do it) of what Nathan said in a nice long email he sent us on the 23rd .

He has five "real" classes, along with five other things (intramurals, an orientation type class, and a couple others - all except intramurals start later in the semester, I think). His total credit hours, including the "extras" is 18.5 - so it's a heavy load. Thankfully, he was able to get transfer credit for English 1 because he took two semesters of community college English during his senior year. He's hoping to also get credit for Physics because he took an AP class and the AP test....but he wasn't sure about that yet.

• Basic Chinese class is "rather boring" since he's had quite a bit of Chinese, but that he's able to help out the other students in the class.
• Calculus II is "easy review" (he took that at community college during his senior year as well).
• Engineering is fascinating him (he went into lots of technical details that I didn't understand very well - but the gist is that they're doing model rocket stuff).
• Behavioral Science takes the most reading. He's the "section marcher" for that class (which means he calls the room to attention when the instructor walks in - and he helps with passing things out sometimes.
• Chemistry is his hardest class, because he has to re-memorize lots of stuff (he took it in 9th grade I think, so it's been a while).
• In Intramurals he's signed up for rugby - not his favorite, but he didn't have a choice. [I just really really hope he doesn't get hurt - rugby is much worse than football!]

The doolies (freshman) have to do lots of memorization of trivia, facts, etc. They have a small book called the "Contrails" that they will have completely memorized by the end of the year. [If you google "Contrails" and "USAFA," I bet you could find out more about it if you wanted to.] In addition to that, each week they are sent a "Probook" - 2 pages of knowledge that they have to know. Then each Monday they take a written test over it. It includes things like long quotes, airplanes and some of their specifications, and lots of other stuff. Lastly, every day the doolies have to know 3 menu items from each meal, summaries of 3 current news articles, and about five other things. As Nathan said, "Never a dull moment."

Despite all that, he likes the academic year better than basic! Rather than having "beatings" (cadre telling them to do push-ups or flutterkicks just because) like they did during basic, the doolies now only have scheduled training sessions. Around campus, the doolies do have to do certain [what I'll call silly] things like run on the outer marble strips in the courtyard, but the upperclassmen don't bother them too much. Nathan really enjoys being able to go places on his own (he couldn't do that during basic!). During the weekends, there's hardly any military stuff they have to do - it's basically free time for them.

That's basically all he had in that email.....he also asked us to pray that he would have wisdom on how much time to spend on school and military training. Thankfully, his cough he had during basic was finally gone by then.

I will hopefully post about Family Weekend (last weekend) later this evening or tomorrow.