Dazed and Confused

In the midst of all the Republican presidential candidate candidates (yup, they are candidates to be the presidential candidate), SOPA, PIPA, Anonymous hackers group taking down the DOJ and a few other sites in response to the crackdown on MegaUpload, the Virgin Islands suffered a major economic blow on Wednesday. HOVENSA, a major oil refinery located on St. Croix, employs about 2,000 employees and offers a number of scholarships to students both for private high schools and college, announced that after a loss of over $1.3 billion over the last three years, it will be closing. It will retain 100 employees to run the former refinery as a glorified oil tank.

Why am I telling you this? Because this means not only loss of students to the University, but also of our basic fuel source here on island. Frightening.

In other news, all three sections of ENG 120 made it through their second week of me. They will spend the weekend revising their Diagnostic essays and turn them in to me either Monday or Tuesday, depending on when each section meets.

The Homophone activity was a definite success. Students came up with more homophones in small groups than they would have simply shouting them en masse as they came to each student's mind. We also had a chance to talk about the effect of the regional dialects on homophones in each section. I very, very nerdily announced that this is one of the aspects on which I'd like to focus my doctoral research (they were oh-so unimpressed...sighs).

Two weeks down, thirteen to go! Over the weekend I'll write more about what I'm planning via Blackboard Learn (bblearn) for the ENG 120 classes this semester.

Vote for Stephen Colbert!