Saturday, April 26

Today is Saturday of Week 14. I hope you are having a nice weekend! If you did not finish up the end-of-week assignments on Friday, you need to do that today or tomorrow, Sunday.

Class Procedures and Reminders:

LAST WEEKEND. This is the last weekend of class (see below), which means those of you who do your schoolwork mostly on the weekend should try to finish up the class now if you can! All the assignments are available (except for the Week 15 responding assignment), so hopefully you can get everything, or almost everything, wrapped up this weekend.

Week 15 Schedule. (repeat announcement) For those of you who will still be doing classwork during Week 15, please be aware that it is on a different schedule. The final deadline for Week 15 assignments is Friday, May 2, at noon. There is no weekend time for Week 15 because that would run into final exams. As a result, your Week 14 Storybook assignment must be turned in by Monday noon, April 28, at the latest — I cannot accept late Storybooks for Week 14 because that would not give me time to get comments back to you for your Week 15 assignment. So, please take note: there can be no late Week 14 Storybook assignments.

Storybook stack. I cleared out the Storybook stack on Friday, including all the assignments that were turned in on Friday. I'll update the contents of the stack over the weekend, and if you are turning in a Week 14 Storybook assignment, make sure you do that this weekend (see schedule note above).

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Language Resource: The Great Language Game. Test your ability to recognize the sounds of different world languages with this fun game!

Indian Words in English: Today's Indian word in English is ARYAN, which is a Sanskrit word meaning "noble" or "honorable." For details, see this blog post.

Featured Storybook: The Husbands of Draupadi. Casey's Storybook uses five different social media storytelling styles to tell the stories of Draupadi and her five husbands:

FREE Kindle eBook: The Real Mother Goose by Blanche Fisher Wright. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. You will recognize many of the nursery rhymes in this book, but there will be many that are completely new to you I suspect!

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is There’s a many a slip between cup and lip (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. In other words: life is full of surprises! :-)

Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is Ganesha, the elephant-headed god.

Saturday Event on Campus: The OU Symphony Concerto Gala will take place at 8PM in the Sharp Concet Hall (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

April 26: Jet Li. Today, April 26, is the birthday of Jet Li, a Chinese martial arts master and film star, who was born in 1963. Happy Birthday, Jet Li! You can read more about Jet Li's life and career in this Wikipedia article. Jet Li has made some wonderful movies with mythological and legendary themes. For children and adults alike, there is The Forbidden Kingdom, in which he plays the Monkey King (Jackie Chan costars in that one). My favorite of his films is Hero, directed by Yimou Zhang, in which Jet Li plays a mysterious character - hero or traitor? It all depends on which version of the story you believe. Both these films are great examples of mythological legends made into adventurous and visually dazzling movies.




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