All campuses have re-opened as of Tuesday, July 3rd, and many of us have learned a new vocabulary word, one which perhaps we didn’t even want to know: “derecho.”

Some interesting facts about Friday’s storm are available on NOAA’s website. Notable to me was the fact that a derecho struck in Ohio on July 4th, 1969, killing 18 people and overturning 100 boats. I had never heard of the phenomenon before last Friday’s storm . . .

On the upside, if you are teaching a summer section and wanted a relevant segue to discuss paragraph organization, you could compare derechos to tornados, contrast them to hurricanes, classify them as storms, and divide them into a strange category all of their own.

In any event, hope everyone is safe and well. Things seem back to normal on campus.

– Kristina Kunkel