Under the Block Plan, students take a 4½ day 'block break' every four weeks throughout the academic year (longer for Christmas & New Year).
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In the Tracks of Edward Abbey
“Head north six miles past Elaterite Butte to Big Water Spring,” I read aloud from my tattered copy of Edward Abbey’s classic book, “Desert Solitaire.” Three friends followed my instructions and traced lines with their fingers on the maps scattered on a table in Tutt Library’s map room.
Checking the mapWe had been inspired by vivid descriptions in Abbey’s book of a remote area in Utah’s Canyonlands known as The Maze, an area Abbey compared to the Grand Canyon. We were determined to explore it for ourselves on our block break, and, with maps and the vague instructions gleaned from “Desert Solitaire,” we took off from Colorado Springs to our destination, the Maze Overlook.
Southwest Native Peoples: In Class and on Block Break
Rob on block break My first block class of senior year, Native Peoples of the Southwest, was an anthropology course. We explored the many Native American cultures of the southwest, past and present. We met each day and discussed Native peoples’ religion and culture, lifestyle and tradition, identity and sense of place. Each week, we watched films about the issues discussed during class. We contemplated questions regarding the Anglo-American representation of native peoples, their formation of identity and their close connection to landscape.
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Write about beauty, then hike it
Libby's outdoor orientation group on the Mt. Sneffels saddleI am in a writing block, so for 3-1/2 weeks I am a writer. In class we talk about writing, we read about writing, and we write about writing. “Write about beauty, but don’t be cliché,” is our first assignment. I am stumped. The words lovely, glamour, pulchritude, charm, and grace come to mind because they are in my thesaurus. Nothing strikes me that doesn’t sound dumb, so I hand in something that is dumb.
For 3-1/2 weeks I write. And I play soccer, go hiking, hang out. On the weekends I camp or I party or I do nothing at all, and before I realize it, it is the last night of the block and my final story is far from complete.
The library is teeming with procrastinators like me. I drink coffee. I write. I sweat. I drink Pepsi. I revise. By class, I have managed to crank out 18 pages of something fairly close to good. I think about high school, when papers were never more than five pages long and we had months to do them. It is amazing, I think, how well we adapt.
On Wednesday at noon I turn in my paper and suddenly feel 50 pounds lighter. I skip down the hall. It is block break and I am free.
I am leading a freshman outdoor orientation trip to the San Juan Mountains. I am initially skeptical of our group, because this year’s acceptance rate was half that of my class. These kids are too smart, I think. They must be nerds.
More information, resources, and related links
For more than 12 years, the Center for Service and Learning and the student organization BreakOut have taken advantage of the Block Plan to organize community service trips for students, faculty, and staff during block and spring breaks.
BreakOut participants travel together to communities throughout the country, where they contribute to one or more projects in progress.