Monday, November 15

Today is Monday. Week 12 of the class is now over. Monday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Friday/Saturday/Sunday. Week 13 will begin tomorrow - and those assignments are available now if you want to get started. The Week 14 and Week 15 assignments are also available now, too!

NOTE: For the availability of the upcoming Internet assignments in Week 13 and Week 14, please read the notes below.

Week 13 Internet assignment: Storybook nominations. The Week 13 Internet assignment will be available starting tomorrow, Tuesday, when Week 13 begins. I hope you will find this a fun assignment: you will be nominating your favorite Storybooks from the semester. After everyone has turned in their nominations (the assignment is due by the end of Week 13, which is after Thanksgiving break), I'll prepare a ballot with the Storybooks that get the most nominations, and you'll be able to vote on the best ones - the voting is not for a grade, but just for fun, as a way to give the people who worked really hard on their Storybooks some well-deserved recognition.

Week 14 Internet assignment: Course evaluation. For the Week 14 Internet assignment, you will be completing a course evaluation online, much like the evaluation you used to fill out in the classroom for your regular classroom-based courses (depending on your College, almost all of the course evaluations are done online now). As soon as the online course evaluation form is made available by the College of Arts & Sciences, I will let you know. The Week 14 Internet assignment will not be something you can do until that online course evaluation becomes available; I'll keep you posted based on what I learn about when that will be and you should also be getting an email from the College of Arts & Sciences when the online form is available.

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. You can check the contents of the stack to make sure I received your assignment. I will be reading and replying to the assignments in the order they were turned in. If the points for your Storybook assignment(s) will give you the points you need to finish the class, send me a separate email so that I will know you are waiting on those final points.

November 15: Birthday of Johannes Secundus. As many of you know, I used to be a Latin professor, and one of my favorite Latin authors, Johannes (or Janus) Secundus, was born on November 15 in the year 1511. Yes, that's right: 1511 - not in ancient Roman times, but in Renaissance Europe. Johannes Secundus is what is called a "neo-Latin" poet, rather than a classical Roman writer. He is most famous for a series of poems he called Liber Basiorum in Latin, or The Book of Kisses. If any of you have studied Latin, you might enjoy taking a look at these delightful poems, which you can find online at The Latin Library. To learn more about Johannes Secundus and his all-too-short life (he died when he was just 24 years old), you can take a look at this Wikipedia article, which is also the source for this image: