Ideas

Sometimes, I come up with ideas for my survey class that I'm pretty proud of. I like the project where I have the students team up and design a logo for an assigned period we've studied. I like the ones where they research an assigned topic and then give a creative presentation to the class. I like playing Jeopardy! with review questions (although this works much better with a smaller class than with 60!).

But today, I struck what may be pedagogical gold: instead of showing a 30-minute supplemental video in class,  I let them go early and made watching the video on their own time (it's on YouTube) optional for extra credit. Granted, the ones who want the points will be e-mailing me their responses, so it's a bit more work for me. But I got to leave almost an hour earlier than usual! And since I have such a long drive home, I may have been even happier about it than my students were (and they were plenty happy).

On my drive home, the moon was huge and pumpkin-colored, with dark wisps of cloud fluttering across it in a way that made it look quintessentially Halloweenesque. Growing up in the Northwest, I remember being baffled by descriptions of the moon as red or even orange; the most I ever saw it was yellowish, or maybe slightly peachy. But in the Midwest, we definitely have that full-on harvest moon thing going. What about you Northwesters? Do you ever see the moon as orange or red, or am I just imagining a geographically paler moon from my youth?