The Fora: A Higher Education Community

My Brother's family lives in Tampa
My nephew and his family evacuated to the Swan and Dolphin resort in Disney. 
My brother and sister in law stayed and endured the storm, but lost power. They still didnt have power on Friday so they too suffered the hardship of evacuating to the Swan and Dolphin
It must be rough! 

Quote from: mythbuster on October 11, 2024, 04:56:38 PMThe problem I run into with dropping the lowest score is I see too many students blow though the freebie in the first week or two of class. They can't seem to grasp that planning as if you are NOT going to have zero is a better approach.

They'd probably skip a class or forget an assignment anyway.  Can't save them from themself.
It does help folks who just had a rough week or struggled with a particular topic or got sick.

Just got back from daughter's farm house, where I got to actually see the "dinosaur" she's been telling me about. She lives near an abandoned coal-fired power plant, and the nearby lake is home to all kinds of birds, including cranes, herons, snow geese, canada geese, et al.  As I was backing out from her house, I saw what looked like a small aircraft coming from the west; it went behind her house low enough that I couldn't see it, then emerged again, heading east about 10-15 feet off the ground. It's a blue heron, and darned if it doesn't look like those pictures of pterodactyls I remember from my grade school books! Norm the Wonder GSD had a big time barking and chasing it, until he got to the edge of the bean field that borders his yard.

Morning!

QBwH for monodrama. LB boxcar-reshoring.

I'm sad today because one of my daily check-ins on FB was an older fella who posted a daily LB thread. He, another older lady and myself would make little puns/wordplay about the solutions.

His daughter let us know he is on poor health and can't do the puzzles anymore. But it was his favorite hobby and we had a pretty solid little group.

Now it's fallen apart. I have tried to keep it going but it really was just the two of us.

:-(

So y'all don't get old or anything.

Today, I have a few straggling bits to mark, and I'd like to make some presentation progress. And a small bit of T4.

Quote from: kaysixteen on October 11, 2024, 06:54:46 PMWhat will be the consequences for his groupmates for his having blown off the group presentation?

Not really, especially since it didn't seem that he'd done his portion anyway. I will say that no one in that group really seemed ready or had a strong grasp of their topic. But that class has an interesting dynamic, given the high percentage of thoughtful, engaged, pleasant students. Usually they're in the minority, so the heavy lifting of discussion falls to me. But this class pretty much runs itself, and the few stragglers like Crying Student are conspicuous in contrast.

And I agree with the human upthread who said that sometimes it's tough to be sympathetic when students have a crisis every week. I have a generous makeup policy -- in addition to a dropped zero, I also allow students to request an alternate assignment in advance if they're going to miss for medical reasons. I don't even ask for a doctor's note. It helps those good students who do happen to get the October Crud. But students such as Crying Student who just can't get their lives together, well, they usually flake on those assignments too.

My parents' cat has recently begun building himself a "pillow fort" on their couch.  He can survey the room from a secure place there.  I knew that cats liked to hide, but I'd never heard of one actually building a hiding place like that.  I guess the family's long history of building things even rubs off on pets!

My cousin in the Tampa area is well.  He had evacuated to Orlando, and returned to find his home intact.

Good morning!

QB. Missed monodrama and nonrandom yesterday.

Happy solving!

QuoteScenes From Florida in Hurricane Milton's Wake
The storm made landfall Wednesday evening, devastating an area still recovering from Hurricane Helene, which tore through Florida's western coast two weeks ago.

In Photos and Video

See above for link to the shared/free article.