Monday, February 28

*** It looks there may (?) have been some trouble with OU email on Sunday night. I'll be updating the stack on Monday morning; check the contents of the stack and make sure I got your email. If not, please send it again. Thanks! ***

Today is Monday, and Week 6 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 7 will begin tomorrow - and those assignments are available now if you want to get started (all except for the Week 7 Internet assignment, which will be available Tuesday, and the Week 7 Responding assignment, which will be available Friday, as usual).

Grading. Now that we have finished Week 6 of the semester, there have been 180 points of required work. You can consult this chart to get an indication of how you are doing in the class overall: if you have around 165 points (155 points if your Storybook has not been graded yet), you are headed for an A; if you have around 145 points (135 points), you are headed for a B; if you have around 125 points (115 points), you are headed for a C; with less than 125, you are in danger of failing the class. There are still 9 weeks left in the semester, which gives you plenty of time to improve your grade: just make sure you budget time to do more of the assigned work and, if you do miss an assignment, make sure you complete some extra credit points to make up for it.

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. The first thing I will do on Monday morning when I get to work is to update the list of items in the Storybook stack. So, after 8 a.m. or so on Monday, you will be able to check the contents of the stack to make sure I received your assignment. I will be reading and reply to the assignments in the order they were turned in.

Storybook: Working ahead. In order to do the Week 7 Revision assignment, you will need to wait for comments back on your Week 6 Story assignment. Depending on just when you turned in your Week 6 assignment, you may have to wait until later in the week, even as late as Friday, in order to get comments back from me. If you want to work ahead on your Storybook, though, and everything is going well, with your Introduction in good shape and your storytelling plan clearly laid out - just move right ahead to the Week 8 assignment, adding the second story to your Storybook!

February 28: John Tenniel. Today, February 28, marks the birthday in the year 1820 of the great English illustrator, John Tenniel, who is most famous for his illustrations to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. You can read about Tenniel's life and career in this Wikipedia article. You can see many of his illustrations to the Alice books in the Wonderland unit for the Myth-Folklore class and the Looking-Glass unit for the World Literature class. Here, for example, is the illustration of Humpty-Dumpty the egg who sat on the wall ... just before he has his great fall! Ouch!