Friday, October 14 - Sunday, October 16

HAPPY WEEKEND! You have reached the end of Week 8! The Week 8 Read and Respond assignment (blog commenting) is available now, and the remaining Week 8 assignments are due on Friday or on Saturday or Sunday - please make sure you get started on those assignments soon. Have a great weekend!

Flexible Storybook Schedule. I'd like to call everybody's attention to the information here about the alternate Storybook schedule. Right now, about one-quarter of the class is either one, two or three weeks off the regular schedule. Being on an alternate schedule is not a problem; you only start to run into real problems if you get four weeks off schedule, and if you become more than five weeks off schedule, things get really serious (you cannot turn in any more Storybook assignments if you are more than five weeks off schedule). So, as the workload gets heavier in your other classes, remember that you can indeed miss a Storybook assignment and go on an alternate schedule; if you have any questions about that, let me know.

Writing - Revising. For those of you on the regular Storybook schedule, you will be adding your second story to your Storybook for Week 8. The pattern of the last four weeks - writing, then revising - will repeat for the next six weeks of the semester. In Week 8, Week 10, and Week 12, you will be adding new stories to your Storybook. In Week 9, Week 11, and Week 13, you will be revising, along with some final revision assignments to complete your project in Week 14 and Week 15. I know that for many of you having to do all this revising is something unfamiliar, since in many university courses there is not a lot of emphasis on revising. By including revision - lots of revision - as part of the writing process, I hope everybody will wind up with something they can be really proud of by the end of the semester!

Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in this week. My goal this week is to return comments to you before the weekend for any assignment submitted before 8AM on Friday. If you want to check to make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.

Friday Events. An announcement from Mary Stanfield in Myth-Folklore (you can contact her via her Ning profile page): GLBTF, a group for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and LGBT-friendly students at OU, is having an Open Mic Night for Coming Out Week at 8PM on Friday at Second Wind Coffee House (564 Buchanan Avenue) - We'd love to have anyone come out and listen, or share their experiences with coming out/having a loved one come out. Find out more about other events happening on Friday at the Campus Calendar online.

Festival of Sukkot. The Jewish Festival of Sukkot, known as "Feast of the Booths" or "Feast of the Tabernacles" in English, is going on at this time; the week-long festival began this year at sundown on October 12. The word Sukkot in Hebrew is the plural form of the word Sukkah, which means a booth or hut. During the festival, people build special huts in which to celebrate the holiday. You can read more about the Festival of Sukkot at Wikipedia, which is also the source for the image of a festival booth below: