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. This Wednesday I will probably be away from my desk in the late morning and early afternoon. 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.
Storybook Stack. I'm still making my way through the stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. I've read all the Week 1 assignments, and most of the early Week 2 and Week 3 assignment people have turned in. If you turned in an assignment before 5 PM on Monday, you should have comments back from me. If you turned in an assignment after 5 PM on Monday or during the day on Tuesday, it is probably still in the stack. If you want to check to make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here. Remember: save the emails I send you back about your Storybook assignments. My comments are marked with ==> in the body of the email, and you will need those comments when you go on to the next week's assignment.
Friday September 4: Final day to drop with refund. Friday, September 4, will be the final day to drop a class and get a full refund. So, if you are finding out that this class does not fit into your schedule after all, or that the workload is too demanding, you can still drop the class and get a refund. The Week 2 assignments will give you a sense of what the regular weekly assignments will be like for the rest of the semester, so you will have a good basis on which to make your decision. If you have any questions about the class you'd like to ask before you make your decision, let me know!
September 2: Death of J. R. R. Tolkien. Today, September 2, marks the death in 1973 of the great English author, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who is best known for creating the marvelous fantasy world of Middle Earth, in which he set his novel The Hobbit and the trilogy known as Lord of the Rings. I first encountered Tolkien when my fourth-grade teacher read The Hobbit to us in class, and I spent all of junior high reading and re-reading The Lord of the Rings. The recent films by Peter Jackson brought a whole new audience to these books, and I am very curious what the forthcoming films by Guillermo del Toro based on The Hobbit will be like! You can read about Tolkien's life and career in this Wikipedia article, which is also the source for this drawing that shows Tolkien's own design for the covers of The Lord of the Rings trilogy:
