Monday, April 28

Today is Monday. Week 14 is now over. 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. Week 15 is on a compressed schedule because the course ends on Friday; see below for details.

Class Procedures and Reminders:

WEEK 14 STORYBOOK: If you are turning in a Week 14 Storybook assignment, you need to do that on time - that is, by noon today, Monday. You cannot turn in a late Storybook assignment for Week 14. If you do not get your Storybook turned in by noon on Monday, you can turn it in instead as your Week 15 assignment - but if you want to turn in BOTH a Week 14 AND a Week 15 assignment, make sure you get the Week 14 assignment in on time, by noon Monday at the latest. You can see the Storybook assignments that I have in the stack here. See the announcement below for more information about the Week 15 schedule.

Week 15 schedule. (repeat announcement) The schedule for Week 15 is compressed because of finals. Instead of lasting for the whole week and the weekend, Week 15 will end at NOON on FRIDAY, May 2. All the Week 15 assignments are available at this time, with the exception of the Responding assignment (and that assignment will be available all day Thursday and on Friday morning).

Finishing the class. (repeat announcement) For those of you have not finished the class yet, you should have a plan in place for the assignments that you will complete in order to get the points you need, and I would urge you not to put any of those assignments off until the last minute. As you reach the points you need for your final grade in this class - 410 points for an A, 360 points for a B, 320 points for a C - let me know, and I'll record the letter grade for you there in the Desire2Learn Gradebook.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Writing Resource: Story Coaster. My favorite part of this wonderful poster by Grant Snider is the "tunnel of badly written love," ha ha. And watch out for the hole in the plot!

Words to Watch: Today's words to watch out for are TIDE and TIED. For details, see this blog post.


Featured Storybook: The Trickster of OU. The tricksters of ancient times, like Prometheus and Loki, seem to be at work on the OU campus in Sarah's Storybook for this semester:


FREE Kindle eBook: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. The biggest difference between the movie and the book is that, in the book, Oz is real, not just a dream!


Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Don't sell the bearskin before the bear is caught (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This is like not counting your chickens before they're hatched... but with a bear instead!


Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is Ganesha and Saraswati. Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom, is riding a peacock, as you can see:


Monday Event on Campus: Here's a fun use of Twitter: from 9PM - 10:30PM on Monday, there will be a "Traveling Treat Cart" in the Union; just tweet your location to @upbou and the cart will come to you! (details) Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

April 28: Terry Pratchett. Today is the birthday of Terry Pratchett, one of my own favorite authors. Happy Birthday, Terry Pratchett! Pratchett is best known for his Discworld fantasy series of novels. They are wonderful books - people debate about which is the best one to read to start with, but my feeling is that you can plunge in at random and enjoy yourself no matter where you begin; the first one that I read was Thief of Time - it's a marvelous book! Pratchett has been diagnosed with an early-onset form of Alzheimer's disease, and he has said that he would like the right to die before he becomes completely debilitated; you can read his thoughts about that here. He has also said that he still has a few books left in him that want to come out - let's hope so! His writing is a treasure.



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