COA students explore chemistry with professor Reuben Hudson at Hudson's Monroe, ME farm, wher...COA students explore chemistry with professor Reuben Hudson at Hudson's Monroe, ME farm, where the group has been self-isolating for a ten-week, three-credit "monster" course.

The idea began mostly as a joke at a College of the Atlantic faculty meeting earlier this year.

“When we were discussing how we were going to proceed with the fall term, and said, what are we supposed to do? Have students live in little pods at our houses?” says Reuben Hudson, who teaches chemistry.

Hudson says everyone laughed at the idea at first. But he says he then talked with his wife, Kit Hamley, a Ph.D. candidate in ecology who taught at COA last spring. And she says they looked outside at their sprawling property in Monroe, north of Belfast. It’s filled with trees, rolling hills and remnants of old mills and rock quarries.

“We’re on about 90 acres. And the cool thing is that two sides of it are river. It takes a 90 degree turn. We’re bordered on two sides by river, one side abuts our neighbor’s field, then the rest is this dead-end dirt road. So pretty remote, pretty private, and a good place to learn,” she says.

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