Last class

Nice looking day, yes? (No.) We walked to the UW for the last Oceanography 102 class. This is "red square" looking west with Barnett Newman's "Broken Obelisk" against that grey sky. Our young enthusiastic pregnant instructor did her best to engage the kids in climate change issues involving the ocean. In the beginning of the quarter she had them record their carbon footprint (not too large for students ) and at the end think about how to reduce it. Here's one way to figure it out and you can see worldwide numbers. Of course Americans are totally off the chart.
Discussions of ways the oceans could participate in producing clean energy by using wind, wave, tides, thermal or currants were not too positive as all cost more than the dirty energy we now use.
It's so interesting to go to a class these days -all the lectures, including videos of them, are available to see online, and every other student in class has their laptop screen on them ( we sit in the back so can see who is watching a movie or a sports game! Have to say much less of this is going on than we've noticed before) but the instructors are encouraged by the university president to "flip their classrooms" using class time for dynamic face-to-face interaction with students , not just lecturing what they can see online. It took her awhile, but at the end there was much more participation. H went to most of the lectures, I only did some but always enjoy the energy on that campus! And we don't have to take the final on Friday! :-)