Today is Thursday of WEEK 6 of the class. If you have not turned in your Week 5 Storybook assignment yet, you may turn that in by noon today at the latest for partial credit. For those of you in Myth-Folklore or World Lit, Thursday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Wednesday.
Friday drop deadline. This Friday, February 27, is the last day to drop the class with an automatic grade of W on your transcript. For more information, see yesterday's announcements.
Commenting on Storybooks. 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.
Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. If you turned something in on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday, your assignment may 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. Please make sure you get any assignments turned in before noon on Friday if you want comments back from me before the weekend. Today, Thursday, before noon is your last chance to turn in a late Week 5 Storybook assignment for partial credit.
Defiance. As I mentioned in the announcements yesterday, I played hooky for my birthday and went to the movies - and the movie I saw was Defiance, a film about the Bielski brothers and the Jewish partisans who hid in the forests of eastern Poland during World War II, fighting the Nazis and keeping a whole community of Jews together for the duration of the war. It stars Daniel Craig, Liev Schrieber and Jamie Bell, and is directed by Edward Zwick (who directed Glory, one of my top 10 movies of all time). So, if you haven't seen Defiance yet and you want to see Daniel Craig as a real-life hero, not just James Bond, I highly recommend it!
