Read and Respond blog comments. Now that everybody has had a chance to finish their blog posts for the week, the Read and Respond assignment for Week 1 is now available! I've put everybody into "blog groups" to get started (I'll be changing the groups every few weeks). To find out just what you need to do for this assignment and to see which group you are in, visit the Read and Respond assignment page.
Get ahead this weekend! This weekend is the absolute best time to get ahead in this class, before things really get busy in your other classes. If you can do all the Week 2 assignments this weekend, that will give you a cushion of extra time that will make the whole semester much easier for you in this class.
Early Bird extra credit. The Early Bird extra credit is the easiest extra credit you can get. To take these extra credit points, you don't have to do any extra work - you just have to be one week ahead of schedule. So, for example, if you finish the reading and blogging assignments for Week 2 this weekend, you get extra credit just for working ahead. Now is the time to take advantage of that, and you can then stay one week ahead for the rest of the semester.
My weekend schedule. I check email occasionally over the weekend, and I will do my best to respond promptly to any urgent problems or questions that come up. In general, though, any email that you send to me over the weekend will wait until Monday morning, when I get back to work. So, please be patient: if you do not get an answer from me during the weekend, I will get back to you promptly on Monday. If you turn in a Storybook assignment before noon on Friday (check the stack), I will get comments back to you sometime on Friday. Anything that comes in after noon on Friday will go into the stack on Monday morning.
Myth-Folklore: Week 2 Reading. This is an announcement that applies to the Myth-Folklore course only. Each week, you have a CHOICE of two reading units. You choose only one, and you do your storytelling and essay posts based on that unit. So, in Week 2, you do Egypt OR Gilgamesh. It means you will have blank spaces in the Gradebook for the quizzes about the other unit you did not choose, but that's okay - it's just a result of the fact that Desire2Learn doesn't understand the idea of students choosing things (pretty sad that such expensive software can't wrap its mind around the idea of a choice, eh?).
January 21: George Orwell. Today, January 21, marks the anniversary of the death of the English writer, George Orwell, in the year 1950. He is the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and also of Animal Farm, which are both amazing novels; in fact, they both are books that I make sure to re-read every few years or so, and I always notice something new each time. The image below is a poster advertising a movie version of Animal Farm from 1954:
