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 tonight, 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. Make sure you check your groups; there has been a bit of shuffling based on class add/drops.
Storybook Stack. If you turned in a Storybook assignment before Wednesday, you should have comments back from me; if you turned something in 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. Assignments that come in after noon on Friday will appear in the stack on Monday.
My Thursday schedule. I try to schedule any appointments or out-of-office commitments during the week on Thursday which means I am usually away from my desk for at least part of the day on Thursday. If I am slower than usual to respond to an email, that is why - but don't worry: if you write me with a question or problem on Thursday, I will definitely get back to you by the end of the day; I just might be a little slower about that than usual.
Monday, January 31: Final day to drop with refund. Monday, January 31, 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. These 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.
January 27: Holocaust Remembrance Day. The day of January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, has been designated by the United Nations and many other countries as a day in remembrance of those who died in the Nazi Holocaust of World War II. The person I hold in my special remembrance for this day is Janusz Korczak (Wikipedia), a visionary educator of the 20th century, who organized the Jewish orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1942, the Nazis raided the orphanage and sent the children to the death camp at Treblinka. Although Korczak's Polish friends begged him to escape and hide with them for the rest of the war (Korczak was a famous radio celebrity in Poland before the war), he would not leave the children, and died together with them at Treblinka. This image from shows the Yad Vashem Memorial for Korczak and his children:
