Class Procedures and Reminders:
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. You can 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.
Week 13 Internet assignment. The Week 13 Internet assignment will be available starting tomorrow, Tuesday. I hope you will find this a fun assignment: you will be nominating your favorite Storybooks from the semester. After everyone has turned in their nominations (the assignment is due by the end of Week 13), I'll prepare a ballot with the Storybooks that get the most nominations and you'll be able to vote on the best ones - the voting is not for a grade, but just for fun, as a way to give the people who worked really hard on their Storybooks some well-deserved recognition. I'll then be able to announce the results before Thanksgiving break (see next announcement).
Thanksgiving Break. You will be getting a full week off for Thanksgiving in this class. Thanksgiving falls on November 28 this year, which means it is very late in the semester. So, you will have all the regular assignments this coming week, Week 13. Then, for Week 14, you will have your regular Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday assignments due on November 19-20-21, but the remaining Week 14 assignments are not due until after Thanksgiving, with the usual grace period on Monday, December 2. I'll post more information about that next week, but if you have any questions, please ask.
Week 14 Internet assignment. For the Week 14 Internet assignment, you will be completing a course evaluation online, but that means it will not be available until the College of Arts & Sciences has updated the eval.ou.edu site. I believe that will be happening on Monday, November 25, and you should be receiving an email from the College about that - and they may even be giving away iPads in a lottery for people who complete the evaluation; that's what they have done for the past few semesters. So, for those of you who are working ahead, you'll need to wait until November 25 until you can do that Week 14 Internet assignment.
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Featured Resource: Modern Renaissance Superhero Designs. The image below is just one of many superheroes re-imagined using famous works of art. For example, below is a re-vision of William-Adolphe Bouguereau's The Bather, but with Wonder Woman instead.
Featured Storybook: The Brahmazing Race. In this very creative TV adaptation from last semester, Team Dharma faces off against Team Asura!
FREE Kindle eBook: Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest by Katharine Berry Judson. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book, which is the source for the Southwestern unit in Myth-Folklore this week.
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is The roughest stone becomes smooth when it is much rolled (a Swiss proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. Of course you can use this as a metphor for any process - such as writing! - which takes time.
Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is Yudhishthira. This is a shadow puppet in the Wayang Purwa style of Javanese puppet theater.
Monday Event on Campus: There will be a Military Appreciation Cookout from 12PM to 2PM on the front lawn of Robertson Hall - first come, first served! (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.
Armistice Day. Today, November 11, is Armistice Day, "The Day of the Setting-Down-of-Arms," marking the end of hostilities on the Western Front of World War I on November 11 in 1918. November 11 is also the birthday of one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, Kurt Vonnegut. You can read about Vonnegut's life and career in this Wikipedia article. Here is a quote where Vonnegut talks about the fact that he was born on Armistice Day in 1922, just a few years after the end of World War I: "When I was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind." Sadly, Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007... but he left behind many wonderful stories for us to remember him by!
Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.
