Friday drop deadline. Today, Friday, February 27, is the last day to drop the class with an automatic grade of W on your transcript. For more information, see Wednesday's announcements.
Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. I've read and replied to all the Week 5 assignments turned in on time, but if you turned in a late Week 5 assignment, or an early assignment for Week 6, 7 or 8, it may still be in the stack. My goal is to get comments back to everyone by the end of the day Friday for assignments turned in before Friday at noon. If you want to check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.
Commenting on Storybooks. (Repeat announcement.) Starting this week, Week 6, you will be commenting on people's writing at their Storybooks. Please provide as much detailed, specific feedback as possible! People will be writing and re-writing their Storybook pages all semester long, so specific feedback is really valuable. It's nice to get compliments, but it is also really good to get feedback about what things need to be fixed. So, please do not hesitate to say when something is confusing, or when something seems repetitious, or if you think something is important is missing. Let people know when they use words that you do not understand, or if there is background information you need - about geography, history, culture, anything at all. Every semester, students tell me that they wish they had received more actual feedback on their Storybooks, rather than just compliments. So definitely give compliments about things you like, but please try to provide detailed feedback about the actual writing, too. All writing can be improved - bad writing can become good, and good writing can become excellent - but writers need detailed, specific feedback from their readers to do that! Being able to give good feedback is a great skill to have, and it's a skill you can develop through practice, always making it your conscious goal to do the best job of giving feedback that you can on each Storybook you visit.
February 28: John Tenniel. Saturday, February 28, marks the birthday in the year 1820 of the great English illustrator, John Tenniel, who is most famous for his illustrations to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. You can read about Tenniel's life and career in this Wikipedia article. You can see many of his illustrations to the Alice books in the Wonderland unit for the Myth-Folklore class and the Looking-Glass unit for the World Literature class. Here, for example, is the illustration of Humpty-Dumpty the egg who sat on the wall ... just before he has his great fall! Ouch!
