Music is blaring from the kitchen where Colin, Heidi, and Tot are baking chocolate chip cookies (with broken up chocolate bars because the Irish apparently don’t believe in chocolate chips). Today we had our first “class.” It wasn’t too bad; I’m still not in the school mindset, thought. This afternoon Elise and I went to a coffee shop in Greystones called Nosh Coffee. We studied for a couple of hours.

Tonight our site group (Aric, Mary, Alix, Ben, and me) met to write our paper on Newgrange. The requirement for a site paper is as follows:
1) History of the site
2) Historical significance – How does it answer the question: Who were the Irish?
3) Significance for modern Ireland – What does it mean to the Irish today?
4) Personal (collectively as a group) reaction to the site (thoughts, etc.)

Needless to say that we took the liberty of adding a little bit of humor to our paper for Vance Maloney, who has probably read hundreds of student papers on the site. This is a sample of our paper on the significance for modern Ireland:

For modern Irish culture, Newgrange and its builders are significant because it shows how long people have inhabited the island of Ireland. The passage graves of the Boyne valley symbolize the timelessness of the Irish culture. Newgrange itself says “Wassup, wassup!?!” to the Irish people, a calling for them to remember their Neolithic heritage. This reverberates off the burial mounds in the valley. The significance of Newgrange has been best explained by one anonymous Irish teen: “Newgrange represents how Ireland used to be, but no one goes to worship there anymore.” The student went on to say that Newgrange had important implications to the pride of the Irish. The site is a major tourist attraction, and the triple-spiral has become a recognizable symbol of Ireland here and abroad.