Sunday, August 31

Today is Sunday of Week 2. The Read and Respond assignment, the Internet assignment, and the Storybook assignment are due today. So, if you have not finished those up already, now is the time!

Class Procedures and Reminders

Stack (repeat announcement). You can check the stack to make sure I received your assignment; I'll be updating the stack periodically throughout the long weekend. I got through everything turned in on Thursday and most of the Storybooks turned in on Friday. On Tuesday, I'll start responding to the assignments in the order they were turned in, starting with the ones from Friday.

For Myth-Folklore only. Thank you all for the great comments about the reading units via the Google Form last week! I've compiled those results and replied to specific comments here: Week 2 UnTextbook Report. You might find that useful when you make your reading choice for Week 3. Many people had said they might want to do the Jewish Fairy Tales unit, and I have now added notes to all the stories in that unit. Enjoy!

Monday: Labor Day. (repeat announcement) Monday is the Labor Day holiday. That means the Week 2 Friday/weekend assignments will have their grace period on Tuesday morning, rather than on Monday morning, and it also means Reading Diary A of Week 3 will be due on Tuesday... but Reading Diary B is also due on Tuesday as usual. So, please be careful with that: if you put everything off until Tuesday, you will have an awful lot to do.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Writing Humor: Oxford Comma. I do believe in the use of the Oxford comma in cases of ambiguity, like those strippers, JFK and Stalin. :-)

Mythology Words in English: Today's mythology word in English is NEMESIS, the Greek goddess of vengeance and retribution. For details, see this blog post.

Featured Storybook: Constellation Stories: Facts or Myths?. You will be surprised to learn that the characters in famous ancient Greek myths of the constellations were not humans at all, nor gods, but instead aliens from another planet!

FREE Kindle eBook: The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts by Abbie Farwell Brown. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. This book is the source for one of the reading units in Myth-Folklore next week!

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is The birth of a golden deer is impossible; nevertheless, Rama longed for the chase (a proverb from India). Details at the Proverb Lab. Everyone in Indian Epics knows the story that this proverb alludes to!

Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is Dasaratha's funeral. You can read more about this image at the Freer-Sackler Gallery website, which is part of the Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art.

August 31: Marina Tsvetaeva. Today marks the death in 1941 of the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva; it seems almost certain that she committed suicide, although rumors persist that her death was arranged by the Soviet NKVD. You can read about her tragic life and her remarkable poetry in this Wikipedia article, and you can find some of her poems in English at Wikisource. The image below shows Tsvetaeva in 1925, when she was 33 years old.

Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed, and you can check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day.