danaleeling

On Monday I introduced latitude and longitude. For some students this is review, but for a surprising number there is simply no prior knowledge. They have heard of the equator as a word and concept, along with the north and south poles, but beyond that there is no familiarity with latitude and longitude. Bringing the concepts home onto campus no student is certain which way latitude and longitude run in the classroom. The few who ventured to answer suggested that some run up and down, some run right and left. No one realized that they form a two dimensional horizontal grid in the classroom, nor which runs which way. The location of the prime meridian was also unknown, although once I mentioned the name Greenwich a couple students recognized the term. I did not get the impression that anyone knew that Greenwich was a neighborhood in London, England. Wednesday was set up so that in case of rain we would watch one of the Men of Rock videos, probably the second in the series. In case of g...

 The unit on food started with a visit to the Island Food Community of Pohnpei where I covered the CHEEF benefits of local foods: Culture, Health, Environment, Economic, and Food Security. Then the state director of agriculture honored the class with an impromptu introduction to the work and services of the division of agriculture. The work they are doing under his leadership is phenomenal.  Higan landed during this time frame. This term no machete work is being done, and the Haruki cemetery has not been cleaned since September 2019. Higan spring 2020 occurred just after school shut down on March 16 due to the pandemic coronavirus. Haruki is an overgrown jungle at this point, and the Hoshino Noritake memorial stone was deeply buried in the grass. There was an marginally humorous scene with Smeagol clawing through meter tall paddle grass under a blazing tropical sun going, "Where is the stone?" and the class watching their senile old professor sure that he was completely unhi...

Last week a student approached me and asked me to help them find a file their instructor had posted for them to read. I had the student show me what was happening on their device. The student navigated to Files in Canvas and we could both see that the files were posted and visible to the student. "What's the problem?" I asked. The files are there and you can see them. The student then clicked on one of the files. The file names were visible, but because the file was in an unpublished module, the file is inaccessible to the students. When the student accessed the Modules the student saw the following. Puzzled, I told the student I would follow up on the matter later and that for now they should approach their instructor for assistance.  A check later revealed that while the individual files are published (the link symbol at the left above means the item is a file), the modules themselves remain unpublished. This is a design feature of Canvas: you can get a module ready for...