Class Procedures and Reminders
Your announcements. If you are involved in any campus or local event that you would like me to include in the announcements, please let me know — I will be glad to do that! Send an email with details, along with a link to additional information online and/or a publicity poster. There is so much going on that does not show up in the OU Calendar, so I'm glad to know about any good events coming up that might be of interest to people in these classes!
Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. It often takes all week for me to get through the stack — but my goal is to clear it out by Friday, fingers crossed. If you turned in an assignment before Sunday at 6PM, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned something in on Sunday evening or on Monday or Tuesday, it is probably still in the stack, waiting for me to get to it. If you want to check to make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here. (With OU's ongoing email problems, it's a good idea to check!)
You really can call me Laura! (repeat announcement) As I mentioned before, you really can call me Laura. No need to be formal and call me Dr. Gibbs, and since I'm not a professor, that title is actually not correct (more about that here). In any case, since I'm on a first-name basis with all of you, please do the same and just call me Laura! :-)
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Alphanumeric Monogram. You can find all the letters of the English alphabet in this animated gif, and the numbers too! Here is a static version you can look at to try to find them all on your own. :-)
Indian Words in English: Today's Indian word in English is PUNCH, as in the drink. For details, see this blog post.
Featured Storybook: Creatures of Irish Lore. Seeking shelter from the rain, some American tourists stumble into an Irish pub where they hear first-hand stories about banshees, leprechauns, merrows and fairies too, of course.
FREE Kindle eBook: Fairy Tales from the Arabian Nights by E. Dixon. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. This book contains the voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, along with some lovely fairy tales such as "The King of Persia and the Princess of the Sea," plus many others.
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Books: the children of the brain (a saying of the Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift). Details at the Proverb Lab. You may know Jonathan Swift as the author of the satirical essay A Modest Proposal.
Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is Maricha and Subahu, and you can see Rama and Lakshmana confronting them. These demons are BIG!
Wednesday Event on Campus: Prof. Jason Houston will be giving a brown-bag talk at noon in Ellison 220: "Reading the Signs of History in Dante's Paradiso" (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.
September 10: Mary Wollstonecraft. Today marks the death of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797 (she was born in 1759). Mary Wollstonecraft was a great advocate for women's rights, and she is best known today for her 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, was also a writer and is still famous today for her novel Frankenstein. You can read more about Mary Wollstonecraft in this Wikipedia article, which is also the source for this portrait of Wollstonecraft by John Opie.
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.
