Friday, October 21

HAPPY FRIDAY! You have reached the end of Week 9, and the blog commenting assignment for this week is available now, with stories to read this week; I hope you will enjoy them and find good inspiration for your own writing. Here is a link to the class calendar; maybe you will want to start in on the Week 10 assignments today too ... especially if you want to finish up the class before Thanksgiving. :-)

Class Procedures and Reminders

Project Stack. Yesterday, I finished replying to all the assignments turned in on Sunday. Today I'll finish all the Week 8 assignments that people turned in on Monday, along with as much of the rest of the stack as I can. Meanwhile, you can check the stack to make sure I received your assignment.

Diigo links. I had a great back-and-forth with the Diigo developers about the new interface (see yesterday's announcements), and they've fixed some of the problems, but some links are still not working well, especially in Chrome. If you are having trouble with any Diigo links for browsing the class readings, just let me know and I'll get you a corrected link!

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Pause. The weekend is a great time to find your Pause Button.

Names. Oklahoma, for example, is a Choctaw name. Find out more at the State Names Map.

Words from Mythology. Yes, the "atlas" that is a book of maps really is connected to the Greek god: ATLAS.

Featured Storybook. This project is from the Myth-Folklore class: Nature Tales of the Cherokee. Victoria is a little girl who wants to hear stories about princesses. Her grandmother, though, decides to tell her the stories of her people, the Cherokee, and instead of being princess stories, these are stories about the world of nature.

Free Book Online: The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. See the Freebookapalooza blog for links and the table of contents. There's also a free audiobook version you can listen to!

Words of Wisdom: Today's saying is A drop of honey catches more flies than a vat of vinegar (a Latin proverb). Find out more at the Proverb Lab. You might know this as an English proverb, but it was a saying in Latin too! Here's the Latin: Guttula mellis plus capit muscarum quam dolium aceti.

Today's Video: The Biology of Positivity. Even though it's just a short video, there's lots of good advice here:

Growth Mindset: Today's growth mindset cat has made some mistakes, which means it's time to learn from those mistakes ...and then move on. You can find out more at the Growth Mindset blog.

Event on Campus: There are free showings of Ghostbusters at 6PM, 9PM and midnight in Meacham (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

October 21: Jack Kerouac. Today marks the death in 1969 of the Beat author Jack Kerouac; you can read more about Kerouac's life and career in this Wikipedia article. He is most famous for his novel On the Road, which he wrote in a burst of inspiration in April in 1951. So that he could type without slowing down to change the paper in the typewriter, he taped pieces of paper together in a continuous roll of paper that was 120 feet long. The actual scroll has been preserved, as you can see here:

Check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day.