Sunday, February 9

Today is Sunday of Week 4. The Read and Respond assignment, along with the Internet assignment and Storybook assignment, are due today. So, if you have not finished those up already, now is the time.

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Storybook Stack. (repeat announcement) I don't update the Storybook stack as often on the weekends, but you can check there to make sure I received your assignment; I'll update it at least once or twice over the weekend.

Week 4 Responding. (repeat announcement) For the Read and Respond assignment, there are new groups this week! Plus, there is another extra credit responding option this week too. You'll find that information at the bottom of the regular assignment instructions.

Alternate Email Addresses. (repeat announcement) As the OU D2L and email outage showed on Wednesday, life can get complicated when email stops working. Since the folks at IT are not yet sure what caused the outage, I'm worried that we might have another one. So, it might come in handy if I had an alternate email address from each of you that I could use in case of a prolonged OU email outage. I've created a Google Form to collect the addresses. If you have a minute, please fill out the online form here: Alternate Email Address Form.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Writing Humor: A Quick Brown Fox. This famous sentence - A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog - is an example of a pangram containing all the letters of the English alphabet. And here it is in animated gif form:


Words to Watch: Today's words to watch out for are BOARD and BORED. Both very common words that have the same pronunciation but different meanings. For details, see this blog post.


Featured Storybook: Desperate Goddesses: Life on Mythological Lane. Izanami-no-Mikoto, the Japanese goddess of creation, has left the world of the living long behind, but she still watches over the desperate goddesses of Mythological Lane - Aphrodite, Pele, Ishtar, and Devi - and shares their stories with you.


FREE Kindle eBook: Hindu Tales from the Sanskrit by S. M. Mitra and Nancy Bell. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. This is a book intended for use in school, with questions to go along with the stories; for any of you who have children of your own or who work with young children, you might want to take a look at this one!


Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is A lion may be beholden to a mouse (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This is a proverb inspired by the Aesop's fable about the mouse who rescued the lion from the snare.


Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image shows Rama and Bharata, with Sita, Lakshmana, and Hanuman standing nearby. Notice Rama's sandals on the throne!


Image Resource: Some of you may have read about the Abused Goddesses campaign in India last year which sought to raise awareness of domestic violence. Below is the image of Saraswati, goddess of knowledge and the arts, shown as the victim of abuse.


Sunday Event on Campus: The OU Symphony will be giving a concert at 3PM in the Sharp Concert Hall (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

February 9: Paul Laurence Dunbar. Today marks the death in the year 1906 of the great African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dunbar was born a free man, in the state of Ohio, in the year 1872, but both of his parents had been slaves. His father served in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, a black regiment of the Union Army whose story is told in the film Glory. There is a special section of the Library of Congress website dedicated to Dunbar's poetry - it is definitely worth browsing through! The image below shows a poster advertising a public reading by Dunbar of his poetry (Ohio Historical Society):



Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.