Week 2 Read and Respond (blog comment) assignment. The Week 2 blog commenting assignment is NOT available yet; it will be available starting on Friday. The blog commenting assignment is the only assignment you cannot complete early, because people will still be adding posts to their blog today, Thursday. So, after midnight tonight, that is, at 12:01AM on FRIDAY, you can do that Read and Respond assignment; you have Friday, Saturday and Sunday to finish that assignment, where you will be reading some more blog posts at random from people in your assigned blog group. Make sure you check your groups; there has been a bit of shuffling based on class add/drops. You will probably see the same people you did last time, but check the group listing to make sure.
Storybook Stack. If you turned in a Storybook assignment before noon on Wednesday, you should have comments back from me; if you turned something in after noon on Wednesday, it might still be in the stack (you can check the contents of the stack here). If you want comments back on a Storybook assignment before the weekend, make sure to get it turned in by Friday at noon. My goal every week is to clear out the Storybook stack before the end of the day on Friday - and if you want comments back on Friday, make sure to get your Storybook assignment turned in either on Thursday or before noon on Friday.
Friday, September 3: Final day to drop with refund. Friday, September 3, 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. 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:
