Power Down and Disconnected

Like addicts racing to get their overdue fix, my students raced to the computers this afternoon after having had to survive all day without power and without the internet. I’ll confess that I felt the same urge, but was able to restrain it. Until now.

We usually don’t have internet access during our immersions, but then it’s expected and students are not inside needing to refer to the study guides to figure out their assignments. At the beginning of the year I gave everyone paper copies of the study guides, but now there are just a core few who request them.

Fortunately, we had a couple of smart-phones so one student would look up the reading assignment and post the page numbers on the whiteboard. Fortunately, the reading assignments were out of the book.

We weren’t quite surviving without technology, but it was close, and students were getting innovative.

We’ve had storms every few days for the last couple of weeks, which is typical for Memphis at this time of year. Over the last few days a frontal system has just been pushing back and forth over us. When it pushes south we get a cold front with thunderstorms and rain, but clear skies afterward. When the front pushes north it gets warm and humid, and the sky goes overcast for most of the day.

Weather map for Wednesday, April 20th. The blue and red line passing through the southeastern U.S. show the mixed warm and cold fronts that have been oscillating past Memphis for days. Image from the National Weather Service.

This line of fronts marks the general location of the sub-polar low, which is moving north with the spring. But more on that tomorrow.

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