It is past time for faithful readers of this blog to get a report from someone besides the teacher.  You will hear from every student in the program before we are finished, but for now here are some excerpts--selected by the writers themselves--from the extensive daily journals we have been keeping.  As the teacher I am encouraging the boys to lean more toward the intellectual and the reflective in these entries, but right now what's most important is for every writer to be himself on the page. Here are the genuine voices of four students who, when they wrote the entries, had been in England for less than 36 hours.
     From Michael Warren:  "As I continue to immerse myself in Oxford, Shakespeare, and these [journal] entries,  I believe that they will keep flowing with increasing ease while I doscover more and more about the city, its history, and everything else that will cross my path in the near future."
     From Maxwell Barnes:  "We went as a group to the Oxford Natural History Museum, which, as far as museums go, was quite natural in its feel and atmosphere.  We gazed at taxidermy, tarantulas, and tiki heads shrunken down into a necklace ornament.  The wifi there did not work, so my humorous Snapchat stories would have to wait for another time.  My legs got sore faster today for some reason; I noticed it on my way back to All Souls College to give our tour to the other guys, but alas, it was closed.  Darn."
     From Charles Hargrove: "I had spent about  32 hours and 45 minutes awake.  Counting backwards from 100 to get to sleep took me until 97.  My roommate returned to the room a few minutes later.  Even through the banging of the doors and things falling on the floor, my sleep was uninterrupted.  I woke up to the horrific sound of a pigeon.  The bird continued to blast its sound through the morning air incessantly for about five minutes.  The noise was so deafening that shutting the one window would not have blocked out the sound.  If I had had a gun, I would have shot the bird even though I was inside the city limits of Oxford and in a country without a positive thought on guns."
     From Dawson Duckworth:  "As children, boys love to view wildlife and exotic animals.  On the second day of our trip, this passion was reignited.  The group went to the Pitt-Rivers Museum a few blocks down from where we are staying.  All the other [exhibits] had been in castles or palaces or colleges so far, and the artifacts directly related to the building.  But at the Pitt-Rivers they didn't.  I hadn't expected to see prehistoric dinosaur bones or statues of Aristotle or Darwin as soon as I walked in.  I was pleasantly surprised and felt the little kid passion for animals begin to rise inside me."

     Today we took a major trip to Wimbledon and Central London.  The photographs below will explain very well where we spent our time in the city: