Wednesday, March 23

Today is Wednesday of WEEK 9 of the class. If you have not turned in your Week 8 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit. Wednesday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Tuesday.

Storybook Stack. There are still MANY Storybook assignments in the stack and I am making my way through them in the order that they were turned in. If you turned something in before noon on Sunday, you should have comments back from me already. If you turned something in after noon on Sunday or on Monday or Tuesday, it is probably still in the stack. If you want to check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.

Grading. For those of you who did not see the Tuesday announcements, check there for information about the number of points remaining the semester so that you can plan out your strategy for the rest of the semester for this class.

Fall 2011 enrollment. (repeat announcement) For those of you who will enrolling for next semester, I wanted to give you a chance to reserve a place in one of the online classes that I teach, if you are interested. Please see Monday's announcements for more information.

March 23: Akira Kurosawa. March 23 marks the birthday in the year 1910 of the great Japanese film director, Akira Kurosawa! You can read about his long career and many cinematic achievements in this Wikipedia article. His most famous film is probably The Seven Samurai. Of all of Kurosawa's films, my personal favorite is Dersu Uzala, a story set in Siberia around the year 1900, when Russian mapmakers rely on the skills of a native Nanai tribal member, Dersu Uzala, to survive the harsh Siberian climate. It's a fantastic movie, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1975. Highly recommended!

Here is the YouTube trailer: