Friday, March 14

HAPPY FRIDAY! You have reached the end of Week 9... and Spring Break starts tomorrow! The Read and Respond assignment (blog commenting) is available now. Friday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you did not finish the assignments that were due on Thursday.

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Spring Break. I would advise everybody to finish the Week 9 assignments today before Spring Break so that you can totally enjoy the break without having to worry about deadlines; if you choose instead to wait to do those assignments, you can complete them during the break, with the usual grace period on Monday morning, March 24. For those of you who are traveling, I hope you have happy and safe travels!

Storybook stack. Because many people turned in late assignments this week, I will not be able to finish reading and replying to all the Storybooks on Friday, so I will have to finish on Saturday. If you turned in a Week 8 Storybook assignment on time, you should already have comments back from me. If you turned in a late assignment or an early Week 9 assignment, I will get that back to you either today or Saturday at the latest. Anything that comes in on Friday or during Spring Break will go in the stop of the stack for Monday morning, March 24, after the Break. You can check to make sure I have received your assignment by looking at the contents of the stack here.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Writer's Advice: Here is some advice from Antoine de Saint Exupery, author of The Little Prince and advocate of concise writing: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Writing Resource: Starter Elements. One of the most important functions of the comma in English is to set off starter words, phrases, and clauses that come before the main clause of a sentence. This page explains just how that works!

Foreign Words in English: Today's foreign word in English is serendipity, one of my favorite words, which comes to us from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka. For details, see this blog post.

Featured Storybook: The Thin Line Between Tragedy and Comedy. In this "choose-your-own-adventure" Storybook, you get to decide the fates of Romeo and Juliet. Can they escape the doom that Shakespeare imagined for them? And will that simply lead to another tragic ending, or perhaps to a happily-ever-after ending worthy of a comedy?

FREE Kindle eBook: The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. Howard Pyle was a wonderful writer and also a great artist, as you can see in the illustration below:

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Bees gather honey from every flower (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. You know the bees will be happy when spring arrives!

Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image shows Arjuna and Draupadi. If you look closely, you can see that Arjuna is shooting an arrow as part of the competition at Draupadi's swayamwara!

Friday Event on Campus: This is the last day of the Week of Health, with free FIT classes this morning at Huston Huffman (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

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