Friday, February 27 - Sunday, March 1

HAPPY WEEKEND! You have reached the end of Week 6! The Week 6 Read and Respond assignment (blog commenting) is available now, and so is the Week 6 Internet assignment (Storybook commenting), along with the remaining Week 6 assignments that are due on Friday or on Saturday or Sunday - please make sure you get started on those assignments soon. Friday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Thursday.

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!

Thursday, February 26

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!

(image source)

Wednesday, February 25

Today is Wednesday of WEEK 6 of the class. If you have not turned in your Week 5 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit. Wednesday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Tuesday.

Friday drop deadline. This Friday, February 27, is the last day to drop the class with an automatic grade of W on your transcript. If you drop after Friday, you will end up with an F on your transcript (the only way to drop with a W after Friday is if you are passing the class when you drop, but if you were passing the class, you probably would not be dropping it, right?). So, for any of you in the class who are really having trouble keeping up, please take note of this deadline. With midterms coming up and more and more work being due in your other classes, you need to decide if you will be able to keep up with the workload in this class for the rest of the semester. If you have any questions about this, please make sure you contact me either on Wednesday or Thursday so I'll have time to answer your questions before the Friday deadline.

Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. If you turned in an assignment on or before Sunday at 9PM, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned something in on Sunday night or on Monday or Tuesday, your assignment is probably 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. Meanwhile, if you want to work ahead on the Week 6 Storybook assignment, please go right ahead - you don't need my comments back on your Week 5 assignment in order to get started on Week 6, adding your first story to the Storybook!

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. That means I may be a bit more slow to respond to your emails on Wednesday than on the other days of the week - and that is especially true today, since today is my birthday, and I am going to go to a movie matinee and out for dinner afterwards! 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 - it just might be very late today, more so than usual. :-)

February 25: Neil Jordan. I am proud to say that I share my birthday with the amazing Irish film director, Neil Jordan. You can read an article here in Wikipedia about his very prolific career in movie-making. There are so many of his films that I enjoy, but three of them really stand out - The Crying Game (for which Jordan won the Academy Award), Michael Collins and, most recently, Breakfast on Pluto. Happy birthday, Neil Jordan!

Tuesday, February 24

Today is Tuesday of WEEK 6 of the class. For those of you who are working ahead, Weeks 7 and 8 are also available! If you have not turned in your Week 5 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit.

Week 6 Internet assignment available NOW. Now that Week 6 has begun, the Week 6 Internet assignment is also available - this week, you'll be commenting not just on some Storybook coverpages, but also reading some Introductions. You'll find detailed instructions at the Week 6 Internet assignment page - just like last week, you have two assigned Storybooks to read, and you can pick two of your own choice. The important thing is that the Introduction MUST be available for you to read; so, if you want to do the Internet assignment now, please go right ahead - if someone's Introduction is not available yet, you can just pick someone else instead (most of the Introductions are available, but some are not).

Storybook Stack. As usual at the beginning of the week there are still LOTS of Storybook assignments in the stack. If you turned something in on Friday or Saturday or on Sunday morning, you should have comments back from me already. If you turned something in on Sunday afternoon or later, it is probably still in the stack. If you want to check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.

Desire2Learn. As I explained in the email I sent around on Monday, it turns out there are some software bugs in Desire2Learn that caused the problems last week, and not all of the problems have been fixed. So, please keep an eye on the Gradebook. If you notice a quiz or declaration that you took (you can see your attempts by checking on the Quizzes page; the old quizzes are down at the bottom), for which you do not have points in the Gradebook, let me know. Apparently some of the quiz scores have to be manually moved by yours truly over to the Gradebook even though that is supposed to be automatic. So, keep an eye on the Gradebook, and if you notice anything strange, please let me know.

February 24: Mardi Gras. Last Thursday, I mentioned the holiday of "Fat Thursday" which comes before Lent, and today is the more famous holiday of "Fat Tuesday," or Mardi Gras in French, a traditional time of celebration before the Lenten fast begins on Ash Wednesday. You can read about the holiday of Mardi Gras in Wikipedia and for a great mixture of Mardi Gras and mythology, I highly recommend the Brazilian film Black Orpheus, which is set in Rio during the extravagant Mardi Gras Carnival which is held there every year:

(image source)

Monday, February 23

Today is Monday, and Week 5 of the class is now over - and that means you have completed one-third of the semester. Wow! Week 6 will begin tomorrow - and those assignments are available now if you want to get started. The Week 7 assignments are also available now, too! (Week 8 will be available tomorrow.) Monday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Friday/Saturday/Sunday.

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. 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 and Saturday.

Images and webpages. For those of you who are interested in different ways to work with images and text on your webpages, you can find some basic tips here on Aligning Images and Text in Composer. Keep in mind that not everybody will have the same size monitor that you do, and they may choose to have their browser window larger or small than you do, so don't worry too much about trying to find the perfect alignment. Instead, you need to think in general layout terms that are flexible enough to look good at different widths. One thing you can do is to make sure that the images you are using have been cropped and sized so that they fit your page nicely. You might want to try this Technology Tip for Picnik.com, a FREE online service you can use for editing images. If you learn how to crop and resize images, you can easily make a coverpage for your Storybook like these wonderful coverpage with four equally sized images, one for each story in the Storybook: Clash of the Heroes and Medieval Heroes.

February 23: Maha Shivratri. This year, the festival of "The Great Night of Shiva" falls on February 23, the moonless day of the month (since the festival is based on the lunar calendar, it moves from year to year). You can read more about the Maha Shivratri festival at this Wikipedia article and at the MahaShivratri.og website. In particular, the festival marks the occasion of Shiva's great cosmic dance. You can read about the great dance of Shiva in this article online, Shiva, Lord of the Dance, which is also the source for the image below: