Wednesday, September 8

Today is Wednesday of WEEK 3 of the class. If you have not turned in your Week 2 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit (the sooner you can get that turned in, the better). Wednesday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Tuesday.

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 before 5PM on Sunday, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned something in after 5PM on Sunday or on Monday or Tuesday, it 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. It usually takes me most of the week to return all the Storybook assignments; the sooner you turn it in, the sooner you will get comments back.

Storybook comments. When I send you back comments about your Storybook assignment, my comments will be inserted into your assignment and marked with ==> to make them easy to find. Please make sure you read the comments, let me know if you have any questions, and SAVE THE EMAILS. For each Storybook assignment I return to you, the comments will be something you need in order to complete the next assignment. So, make sure you read the comments and that you refer back to that email again later when you move on to the next week's Storybook task. (After Week 6, you will be able to work ahead on your Storybook without waiting for comments from me, but for the Storybook assignments in Weeks 2, 3, 4, and 5, you need to wait for my comments before you proceed to the next assignment.)

Working ahead. As always, I would urge you to try to work ahead this Wednesday - instead of waiting until Thursday to do the blog posts that will be due tomorrow, go ahead and do them today! There is no benefit to putting it off, and if you can get even just a day or two ahead of schedule, you will find this class so much easier to manage, I promise. If you are waiting to do the assignments based on the deadline, you are going to experience a lot of stress in this class - stress which you can easily avoid by working even just one or two days ahead of the deadline.

September 8: Star Trek begins. Yes, today is a great day in the history of television - it marks the broadcast of the first episode of the original Star Trek series in 1966, a series which ran for three seasons until June 3, 1969. My devotion to Star Trek began in 1972, when the show was in reruns and I was able to watch every afternoon when I came home from school (I was in third grade). I have never lost my love of that show and I can shamelessly confess to owning the complete original series on DVD. Of the original cast members, it is Leonard Nimoy, Mr. Spock, the one with pointy ears here in this cast photo from the original series, who also made an appearance in the excellent Star Trek movie that came out last summer.