Monday, March 10

Today is Monday. Week 8 is now over, and the semester is now more than half over too! Monday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you did not finish any of the assignments that were due on Friday or over the weekend. The next week of class will begin tomorrow - and those assignments are available now if you want to get started!

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Spring Break. For Spring Break, you will have the entire week of March 15-23 off as you can see on the Semester Calendar here. You will have your regular Week 9 assignments due this week Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Then, I would encourage everybody to finish up the final Week 9 assignments this Friday, March 14 - but if you want to wait and do those final Week 9 assignments on the weekend after Spring Break, that will work too. The grace period for wrapping up Week 9 will be on Monday morning, March 24, after Spring Break.

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. 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.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Image Resource: I wanted to remind people today about the AMAZING image resources at Flickr, a site that makes it easy to search for Creative-Commons-licensed images.

Writing Humor: Snoopy the Author. Even Snoopy needs to revise!

Foreign Words in English: Today's foreign word in English is juggernaut from Sanskrit Jagannatha, World-Lord, an honorific title sometimes applied to Krishna, one of the avatars of the god Vishnu. For details, see this blog post.

Featured Storybook: The First American Heroes. In Nicholas's Storybook for this semester, you can explore the world of the "superheroes" in different Native American traditions, starting with the "Blood-Clot Boy" who is a hero to the Blackfoot Indians.

FREE Kindle eBook: Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion by Beatrice Clay. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. It includes the adventures of King Arthur along with many of his most famous knights, such as Lancelot, Tristram, and Gawain.

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Arthur himself had but his time (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. I chose this proverb in honor of the King Arthur week coming up in Myth-Folklore!

Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is the goddess Ganga fleeing from King Shantanu. Yes, today is the first of the Mahabharata images, and there will be a new Mahahbarata image every day for the rest of the semester!

Monday Event on Campus: As part of SGA's Week of Health events, there will be a free screening of the documentary "A Place at the Table," a film that explores food and social justice, in Meacham Auditorium at 7PM (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

March 10: Mikhail Bulgakov. Today, March 10, marks the anniversary of the death in 1940 of one of the most extraordinarily talented writers of the 20th century, and a personal favorite of mine, Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita - I won't even try to summarize the plot of this fabulous book (you can read a synopsis here at Wikipedia); I'll just mention that some of the characters include the Devil himself, a black cat named Behemoth, various and sundry witches, as well as Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ. Below you can see a statue of the cat Behemoth in the city of Kiev (which is now the capital of Ukraine), where Bulgakov was born in 1891.



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