Friday, September 11 - Sunday, September 13

HAPPY WEEKEND! This is the end of Week 3. The Week 3 Read and Respond assignment (blog commenting) is available now, and the remaining Week 3 assignments are due on Friday or on Saturday or Sunday - please make sure you get started on those assignments soon.

Week 3 blog posts. For the Responding assignment, you should be looking for the Week 3 essay and story - which means you may need to scroll down, because some people are working ahead. So, if you do not find somebody's Week 3 blog posts at the top of their blog, just scroll on down till you find what you are looking for. Also, two people - Kathleen and Marjon - are enrolled in more than one of these classes this semester, so if you are reading their blogs make sure you find the posts for the class that you are in together with them.

Random blog assignments. As you saw over the past two weeks, the blog "read and respond" assignment has a random element to it, since you are assigned to people in your group at random - and it also means the people in your group are being assigned your blog at random... along with the added randomness that there is no way to predict who might miss that particular assignment in any given week. That means some weeks you may get lots of comments, and other weeks you may just have one or two comments. You'll also see that I sometimes leave comments on the blog posts - but my participation is also very much at random. So, if you feel like you did not get a lot of comments in one particular week, don't worry: the power of random will work its magic, and over the course of the semester you should end up receiving just about the same number of comments that you are leaving at other people's blogs.

Storybook Stack. On Friday, I should finish reading and responding to every Storybook assignment in the stack that is turned in before Friday at noon (contents of the stack). If you turn something in before Friday at noon, my goal is to get comments back for you before the weekend. I don't do any grading over the weekend, so if you turn something in after noon on Friday, it will go into the stack. I'll start working through the stack first thing on Monday morning, in the order received. So, if you want comments back next week sooner rather than later, don't wait until Sunday to turn in your assignment!

Famous Last Words. Some of you have already discovered the Famous Last Words extra credit option. Given how crazy the semester gets for everybody, I highly recommend this as a nice way to just pause and reflect on how the semester is going for you. If your semester is like mine, every week flies by and you cannot even quite figure out where it went! By doing the Famous Last Words extra credit assignment, you can take a few minutes to just think about how the past week went for you and what you are expecting around the corner next week... while getting extra credit for it, too! Also, if you are looking for even more extra credit points, here is information about the Grammar review quizzes which are available all semester long.

September 11. Friday is the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the year 2001. Many of you in the Myth-Folklore class may have looked at the Snopes.com Urban Legends website for urban legends to use as a Storybook project. One of the sections at Snopes.com is devoted to rumors and legends about 9/11 - you might be interested to take a look at it, and see what the patterns of legend and rumor tell you about the American experience in those days. One of those legends had to do with the secret codes supposedly contained in Microsoft Wingdings font, shown below - a legend that actually dates all the way back to the year 1992, when people were using Microsoft's "new 3.1 Windows operating system" (that's 17 years ago - ancient history in computer software years).