Friday drop deadline. This Friday, October 3, is the last day to drop the class with an automatic grade of W on your transcript. If you drop after Friday, you will end up with an F on your transcript (the only way to drop with a W after Friday is if you are passing the class when you drop, but if you were passing the class, you probably would not be dropping it, right?). So, for any of you in the class who are really having trouble keeping up, please take note of this deadline. With midterms coming up and more and more work being due in your other classes, you need to decide if you will be able to keep up with the workload in this class for the rest of the semester. If you have any questions about this, please make sure you contact me either on Wednesday or Thursday so I'll have time to answer your questions before the Friday deadline.
Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. If you turned in an assignment on or before Sunday, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned something in on Monday (including the wee hours of the morning on Monday) or on Tuesday, your assignment 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. Meanwhile, if you want to work ahead on the Week 6 Storybook assignment, please go right ahead - you don't need my comments back on your Week 5 assignment in order to get started on Week 6, adding your first story to the Storybook!
My Wednesday schedule. I do most of my work during regular business hours on Monday-Tuesday and Thursday-Friday, while scheduling my out-of-office commitments on Wednesdays. That means I may be a bit more slow to respond to your emails on Wednesday than on the other days of the week - but if you send me an email during the day on Wednesday, I'll definitely get back to you by the end of the day.
October 1: E.B. White. Today, October 1, marks the death in the year 1985 of the American author, E.B. White, the author of such marvelous children's books as Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web. You might also recognize his name as being the "White" in the famous guide to English composition, The Elements of Style, a book originally written by William Strunk in 1918, and substantially updated and edited by E.B. White in 1959, so that the book is often referred to as "Strunk & White." You can read more about E.B. White's biography in this Wikipedia article; meanwhile, here is a book cover for the Latin translation of Charlotte's Web into Latin: Tela Charlottae and, yes, as some of you are probably figuring out, I am a big fan of children's literature in Latin! :-)
