Spring Break. For Spring Break, you will have the entire week of March 17-25 off as you can see on the Semester Calendar here. You will have your regular Week 9 assignments due this week up through Thursday. Then, I would encourage everybody to finish up the final Week 9 assignments this Friday, March 16 - but if you want to wait and do those final Week 9 assignments on the weekend after Spring Break, you can do that, too. The grace period for wrapping up Week 9 will be on Monday morning, March 26, after Spring Break.
Midterm Crunch. I know a lot of you are facing a midterm crunch and big assignments in your other classes this week. So, remember that things in this class are super-flexible. If you miss some assignments in this class, there is lots of extra credit you can do later on to make up any missing points. For your Storybook, if you miss a week, that is also not a big deal; you can be one week off the regular schedule and still end up with four stories in your Storybook - so, if you didn't manage to finish your Storybook for Week 8, don't worry. You can go on the "alternate schedule" and turn in your new story during/after Spring Break. Here's how the alternate schedule works.
Google account security. I would like to urge everyone to complete the Google Security Tech Tip so that you can be sure you have a procedure in place to recover your Google account in case you forget your password or something like that. Also, just to be on the safe side, I would urge you to save a local copy of your Google Site. Exactly how to do that depends on the browser you use, but in most browsers, the File menu has a Save option that lets you save the webpage you are viewing to your computer. Do that for each webpage in your site and you will have a local backup copy, just in case.
Storybook stack. As always on Monday, I will have a huge bunch of assignments in the Storybook stack waiting for me to look at. 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 9AM 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 replying to the assignments in the order they were turned in. During a "new story" week, it takes me quite a while to get through the stack, so I would urge everybody to check the stack to make sure your assignment is there.
Monday Events on Campus. There will be a performance of "By the Bog of Cats" (a modern-day story of Medea) by the Irish playwright Marina Carr at 8PM in the Lab Theatre in Old Science Hall, with additional performances on Tuesday and Wednesday (time/location/details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.
Sita Sings the Blues. The folks in Indian Epics have now finished up the Ramayana and next they will be moving on to the Mahabharata. There are many different versions of the Ramayana, of course, in many languages and styles - including a recent animated film by Nina Paley, called Sita Sings the Blues. You can see a trailer for the film at YouTube, or you can visit the Sita Sings the Blues website - and you can even view the movie online since Nina Paley (a personal hero of mine) has made the film freely available online. As she explains at the website: From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes.
