Friday, September 10 - Sunday, September 12

HAPPY WEEKEND! This is the end of Week 3. The Week 3 Read and Respond assignment (blog commenting) is available now, and the remaining Week 3 assignments are due on Friday or, if you prefer, on Saturday or Sunday - please make sure you get started on those assignments soon.

Extra Credit. Some people have asked me about extra credit, so I wanted to remind everybody that you can use the extra credit any way you want. If you forget an assignment, do some extra credit to make it up. If you run out of time to finish an assignment, do extra credit to make it up. You can pile up the extra credit to use in case you forget something or run out of time in the future. You can pile up the extra credit in order to finish the class early. So, there are all kinds of reasons to do the extra credit assignments; offering extra credit options every week is one of ways I try to make this class flexible, since everybody has a lot of demands on their time, I know!

Week 3 blog posts. For the Responding assignment, you should be looking for the Week 3 essay and story - which means you may need to scroll down, because some people are working ahead. So, if you do not find somebody's Week 3 blog posts at the top of their blog, just scroll on down till you find what you are looking for. Also, one person - Marika - is enrolled in more than one of these classes this semester, so if you are reading his blog make sure you find the posts for the class that you are in together with her.

Storybook Stack. On Friday, I hope to be able to finish reading and responding to every Storybook assignment in the stack turned in before Friday at noon (contents of the stack). I don't do any grading over the weekend, which means that if you turn something in after noon on Friday, it will go into the stack. I'll start working through the stack first thing on Monday morning, in the order received. If you want comments back next week sooner rather than later, don't wait until Sunday to turn in your assignment! The earlier you turn in the assignment, the sooner you will get comments back.

Famous Last Words. Some of you have already discovered the Famous Last Words extra credit option. Given how crazy the semester gets for everybody, I highly recommend this as a nice way to just pause and reflect on how the semester is going for you. If your semester is like mine, every week flies by and you cannot even quite figure out where it went! By doing the Famous Last Words extra credit assignment, you can take a few minutes to just think about how the past week went for you and what you are expecting around the corner next week... while getting extra credit for it, too!

September 10: Eid-ul-Fitr. The Eid-ul-Fitr ("Holiday of Breaking-the-fast") is a Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. You can read about this holiday at Wikipedia which provides an overview of the holiday and also gives information about the different ways the Eid is celebrated in countries all over the world. Because the holiday follows the lunar calendar, it falls on different days each year in the Gregorian calendar; you can read about the dates of the Eid here. The image below shows a family celebrating Eid in Tajikistan (image from Wikipedia):

Thursday, September 9

Today is Thursday 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 until noon today. 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.

My schedule today. Each week, I try to arrange all my out-of-office appointments and obligations on one day of the week and this week that day is Thursday. I will be unavailable during the afternoon today, but I will answer any emails at the end of the afternoon. So, if you have questions or need help with something, please be patient: I will get back to you by the end of the day today although I won't be as quick to respond as usual to your emails during the day.

Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. If you turned in a Week 2 Storybook on time, you should have comments back from me. The items left in the stack now are either late Week 2 assignments or early assignments for Week 3 and Week 4 (contents of the stack). If you want comments back before the weekend on a Week 3 or Week 4 assignment, make sure you turn that in by Friday at noon - I always do my best to read and reply to all the assignments turned in by Friday at noon before the weekend.

Week 3 Read and Respond assignment. The Week 3 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 please wait until midnight tonight when people should have finished their Week 3 blog posts, and then on Friday you can do the Read and Respond assignment.

Rosh Hashanah: New Year's Day. It's the first day of the Jewish New Year today, Rosh Hashanah (literally "Head of the Year" or "Top of the Year"). The festivities began at sunset on Wednesday and continue until sunset on Thursday. Like many religious holidays, this one is based on the lunar calendar, so it falls on a different day each year, depending on the cycle of moon. According to Jewish tradition, this is the day of the year on which God created man, and it is also the day of the year on which the Last Judgment will take place. One of the rituals on Rosh Hashanah is the blowing of the shofar, the ram's horn, to awaken the faithful before the coming judgment. You can read more about the holiday at Wikipedia, and below you can see the blowing of the shofar as shown here in an illuminated Hebrew manuscript:

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.

Tuesday, September 7

Today is Tuesday of WEEK 3 of the class, and I've re-arranged the Quiz area in Desire2Learn so Week 3 is on top. In Indian Epics, this week you will be finishing up Narayan's Ramayana, and in World Literature you will be reading New Testament parables. In Myth-Folklore, it's the Hebrew Bible, with a choice between the stories of Noah and Babel, or the stories of Samson and Daniel. If you have not turned in your Week 2 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit. (See note about that below.)

Storybook Stack. First thing on Tuesday morning, I will update the stack of Storybooks that people have turned in over the weekend, and I will be responding to them in the order that they were turned in. To check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here. For the Storybook assignments, you need to wait until you get comments back from me before you go on to the next assignment! I'll get back to you as soon as I can; with this four-day week, it will probably take me until Friday to get through all the Storybooks in the stack.

Late Storybooks. Each week, the Storybook assignment is the only assignment that can be turned in late for partial credit. Since I cannot get all the Storybooks graded and returned immediately, it is fine with me if you turn in the Storybook late. If you want full credit (10 points) you must turn the Storybook assignment in over the weekend (or during the Monday morning grace period). If you turn it in late, you can receive partial credit, as follows: turn it in on Monday after noon and you can receive up to 8 points credit max.; on Tuesday, you can receive up to 7 points of credit; on Wednesday you can receive up to 6 points of credit. If you turn the Storybook assignment in on Thursday before noon, you can receive up to 5 points of credit. No late Storybook assignments will be accepted after noon on Thursday.

Internet Assignment emails. I will be replying to your Internet assignment emails, but you don't have to wait on my reply before you go on to the Week 3 Internet assignment. So, please feel free to do that at your convenience; you don't need to wait on my reply to your Week 2 webpages. :-)

Tech Tip emails. Until I get through the Storybook stack, I won't be responding to all the Tech Tip emails people sent in over the weekend, but I'll get to that later in the week. Meanwhile, please feel free to go ahead and do more Tech Tips if you want. You certainly don't need to wait on my reply to your latest Tech Tip email for you to go ahead and do more of them.

September 7: Google's Birthday. On this day in the year 1998, Google was incorporated. You can read about the amazing history of this company here at a page listing some milestones in Google's 12-year history. Happy birthday, Google!

(image source)