A week with four kids in the house was a reminder that a lot of breakdowns come down to expectations. Seminary is no different. Whatever your new class looks like, follow the age-old advice and read the syllabus.

Reflections for Fall Break

Reflections for the final week of Fall 1

Most of us answer "how's it going?" with "just really busy." Busy may be your reality, but a lot of the scattered feeling comes from not looking ahead. Take a look at every week of the term, mark off what's coming, and make a plan.

Houghton Mifflin handed Dr. Seuss a 225-word vocabulary list and told him to write a children's book out of it. He complained that there were no adjectives, then went back to the list and wrote The Cat in the Hat. The constraints your classes put on you are doing something similar, and the instinct to want a bigger box is usually the wrong one.

I spent this week reading through the survey responses from our online students. The thing that stuck with me was not in the ratings but in the open-ended answers, where more students named some version of loneliness as the hardest part of studying online than named anything else. The reason you are doing this degree online is your life, your ministry, your family, your job, and that very thing that makes online education possible is the same thing that makes it hard.