Class Procedures and Reminders:
Martin Luther King Day. (repeat announcement) As you may have already noticed in this class, no assignments are due on Friday or on Monday. (That is because I am personally a big fan of long weekends for people who have the option of arranging their schedule in that way!) So, there are no changes to the class schedule because of the Monday holiday. Week 2 begins on Tuesday, and the week always begins on Tuesday; to see again how that works, here is the Class Calendar for this semester.
My schedule today. Even though it is a holiday, I will be spending a half-day or so at my desk in order to return your proofreading assignments to you. So, that means I will also be checking and replying to emails if you have any questions, and you can also check the stack to make sure I have received any assignment(s) you may have sent me by email. My goal is to finish most or all of the proofreading assignments today so that I can begin reading and replying to your Storybook assignments on Tuesday when Week 2 begins! :-)
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Writing Resource: Storytelling Style: Third-Person Omniscient. I wanted to call your attention to this blog post which explains something about the typical "third-person" storytelling style that you will find in most of the readings you do for class. Although it might seem that third-person style is impersonal, just the opposite is true! Through the use of dialogue and the sharing of characters' inner thoughts, there is room for many "persons" in a third-person story. If you have not pondered those possibilities before, make sure you take a look at the extraordinary freedom that a third-person style can provide!
Foreign Words in English: Today's foreign word in English is yoga, which comes to us from Sanskrit! For details, see this blog post.
Featured Storybook: Creatures of Irish Lore. Seeking shelter from the rain, some American tourists stumble into an Irish pub where they hear first-hand stories about banshees, leprechauns, merrows and fairies too, of course, in this Storybook from last semester in the Myth-Folklore class.
FREE Kindle eBook: Legends of the Egyptian Gods by E. A. Wallis Budge. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. For those of you doing the Egypt unit in Myth-Folklore in Week 2, this book might be of special interest!
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is The moon does not withhold the light even from the cottage of a chandala (a Sanskrit proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. In Sanskrit, a chandala is a caste term, referring to someone of a lower caste whose job it is to dispose of corpses.
Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is the birth of Rama. As you can see, Rama is traditionally depicted as blue even when he was still just a baby.
Suggestion Box: You may have already noticed the anonymous Suggestion Box which appears in the blog sidebar here. Please feel free to use that to share with me your comments and suggestions about the class!
Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.
