Tuesday, October 21

Today is Tuesday of WEEK 9 of the class. For those of you who are working ahead, Weeks 10 and 11 are also available! If you have not turned in your Week 8 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit.

Finishing the course early. As you can see on the Grading page for this class, you need 320 points to get a C in the class, 360 points to get a B, and 410 points for an A. It's fine with me if you decide to finish up the course with a grade of C or B, instead of going for an A. I know many of you are taking the course for the Gen. Ed. requirement, often on top of a very full course load along with work and other personal commitments. So, just remember that as soon as you get the points you need for the grade you want in the course, you are done! My only request is that when you finish your work for the course, please let me know, so that I can adjust the blog commenting and Storybook commenting assignments accordingly. If you are interested in finishing up the course ahead of schedule, start doing the extra credit assignments. Each point brings you that much closer to finish up the course ahead of schedule!

Storybook Stack. As usual at the beginning of the week, there are still LOTS of Storybook assignments in the stack. If you turned something in before 2PM on Sunday, you should have comments back from me already. If you turned something in later on Sunday or on Monday, it is probably still in the stack waiting for me to get to it. If you want to check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.

October 21: Jack Kerouac. Today, October 21, marks the death in 1969 of Jack Kerouac, the great American novelist of the "Beat" generation of writers. You can read more about Kerouac's life and career in this Wikipedia article. He is most famous for his novel On the Road, which he wrote in a burst of inspiration during the month of April in 1951. In order to keep pace with his writing style, he taped pieces of paper together in a continuous roll of paper that was 120 feet long which he could then feed into the typewriter without having to stop to put new pages into the typewriter. Just imagine what he could have done with a word processor, eh? The actual roll of paper has been preserved; here is the start of the novel at the top of the roll (click here for a larger view - and you can also see a display of the scroll rolled out):