Read and Respond blog comments. Now that everybody has had a chance to finish their blog posts for the week, the Read and Respond assignment for Week 1 is now available! You have been assigned two blogs to read; for detailed instructions and links to your assigned blogs, visit the Read and Respond assignment page.
Working on the weekend. This course is designed so that you can do all your assignments by working only on the weekends. This weekend, for example, you would need to finish up the Week 1 assignments, and you would also need to do the reading, quizzes and blog posts for Week 2. You will then be free all week, Monday through Friday. Next weekend, you will finish up Week 2 and start on Week 3. The weekend after that, you will finish up Week 3 and start on Week 4, and so on. If you plan your schedule to do all your work on the weekends, you can manage to have absolutely nothing due for this class from Monday through Friday, leaving you free during those days to attend to your regular classes and other responsibilities. Plus, following this "weekend-only" strategy will earn you some Early Bird extra credit (see below).
Early Bird extra credit. The Early Bird extra credit is the easiest extra credit you can get. To take these extra credit points, you don't have to do any extra work - you just have to be one week ahead of schedule. If you are one week ahead on the reading-quizzes-blogging, you can take an extra point each week. If you are one week head on your Storybook assignments, you can take an extra point each week. You can do either or both of these Early Bird options for one or two points of extra credit every week - and while it may not seem like much, those points add up fast! Those extra points can help you to finish the class even earlier, or make up for some assignments you might miss along the way.
Labor Day Holiday. Because you have no assignments due on Monday, there is no special schedule for this class as a result of the Labor Day Holiday. For more about that, see Thursday's announcements.
August 30: Birthday of Mary Shelley. Saturday, August 30, marks the birthday in 1797 of the famous English writer, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who is best known for her novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818. I'm sure you are all familiar with Frankenstein and his monster; Prometheus, meanwhile, was the Greek Titan who created human beings out of clay (he is also famous for having stolen fire to give it as a gift to humanity). You can read more about Mary Shelley in this Wikipedia article, which is also the source for this portrait of Shelley painted in 1840 by Richard Rothwell:
