Reflections on Week 4

We are in the computer lab, and everyone is blogging. I have asked the students to reflect on several things which happened this week.

After having unseasonably warm weather during the month of January, we have been in the deep freeze recently, and Tuesday night there was an ice storm which blanketed the area with several inches of hard, packed ice. You can walk right over the top of it without even making a dent! Some of the students who are from warm places and have never experienced snow might think this is snow, but it's not. The campus closed early on Tuesday and remained closed on Wednesday. I spent the day (1) making bean soup and (2) clearing my driveway. We had to whack at the ice to break it before we could shovel it (we even broke one of our shovels!), and each shovelful weighed a ton. I considered actually getting my bathroom scale out so I could weigh it, but I was too tired! We also used a pick-axe to break it up. That worked better than the blade of the snow-shovel. I felt like a coal miner, digging for white coal.

I assigned an oral presentation for this week. The students, working in pairs and threes, could choose from four projects, three of which were videos. In the past, I showed these videos to the whole class. Fridays were devoted to videos, and we all went over to Nonprint Media Services to watch them together. This semester, I did not have time each week to devote to the videos, so I assigned them as part of the oral project. I wonder which method is better!