Today is Monday. Week 4 of the class is now over. Monday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Friday/Saturday/Sunday. Week 5 will begin tomorrow - and those assignments are available now if you want to get started. The Week 6 assignments are also available now, too! (Week 7 will be available tomorrow, on Tuesday.)
You really can call me Laura! Although I sign my emails to you all as Laura, some of you still feel like you need to call me Professor or Dr. or something fancy. No need for that at all, really! Since I'm on a first-name basis with all of you, please feel free to just call me Laura. :-)
Storybook Coverpages. I'll be updating the list of Storybook Coverpages for Myth-Folklore, World Literature and Indian Epics on Monday afternoon. You can continue to experiment with your Coverpage design all semester long, and you will be updating your Coverpage each time you add a new story. Here is the only requirement: DO NOT CHANGE THE ADDRESS of your Coverpage! You can make all the changes you want to the design and contents of the page, but it is vital that the name of the file, and thus the webpage address, remain the same as the address you are giving me now. The link on the class webpage needs to remain good for the rest of the semester - and I'll send around a note later today when I am done updating the list of Coverpages so that you can all check to make sure I have linked to your coverpage correctly.
Storybook stack. As always on Monday, I will have a huge bunch of assignments in the Storybook stack that were turned in over the weekend or on Monday morning. This is especially true today, since so few people turned in the Week 4 Storybook early. The first thing I will do on Monday morning when I get to work is to update the list of items in the Storybook stack. So, after 8 a.m. or so on Monday, you will be able to check the contents of the stack to make sure I received your assignment. I will be reading and reply to the assignments in the order they were turned in, beginning with the assignments turned in on Friday or Saturday.
Presidents' Day 2009. Today, February 16, is the holiday now called Presidents' Day. As a holiday, it has an interesting history. America's first president, George Washington, was born on February 22 in 1732, and his birthday was an unofficial celebration even during the years of his presidency; it was made a nationwide federal holiday in 1885. In 1971, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act re-assigned Washington's Birthday to "the third Monday of February," which is why it falls on February 16 in 2009. Oddly enough, this means that the Washington's Birthday holiday will NEVER happen on Washington's birthday, since February 22 can never be the third Monday in the month. Abraham Lincoln, meanwhile, was born on February 12 in 1809, and the first unofficial public celebration of his birthday as a holiday took place in 1874, but it was never recognized as an independent federal holiday as Washington's Birthday was. So, the holiday formerly called Washington's Birthday (which could never actually fall on the day of Washington's birth) is now usually called Presidents' Day, honoring both Washington and Lincoln as having been born in the month of February.
