LAKE GEORGE, Colo.
It’s a silly old expression, but Professor Eric Leonard says it’s true: The best geologist is the one who has seen the most rocks.
Which is why, on a crisp fall morning, Leonard was driving a van full of sleeping bags and sleepy-eyed Colorado College freshmen into the mountains around Pikes Peak, where the history of the Earth is writ large in giant slabs of igneous rock jutting up from the ground.
The overnight trip, and another lasting four nights a week later in Rocky Mountain National Park, offer the kind of intense, hands-on learning that the typical college lecture course rarely has.
But at Colorado College it is common because of an unusual, 35-year-old system of teaching.
Typically, full-time college students take four or five courses simultaneously, over two or three terms per year. Colorado College is one of just a handful of places where students take one course at a time, giving it their full attention for three and a half weeks. They’ll spend most of the day in class or on extended field trips like this one. Then, after a long weekend, they move on to the next course.
On the Colorado Springs campus of about 2,000 undergraduates, you won’t see the typical college scene of students walking across the quad between classes. There’s no “between.”
