Monday, September 25

Today is Monday. Week 5 is now over... and Week 6 has begun. You will be reading more Middle Eastern and Indian stories in Myth-Folklore, and in Indian Epics you will be starting the Mahabharata! You can find the week's assignments at the Class Calendar.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Project Stack. As usual, the stack is gigantic on Monday; I will start today by responding to the assignments from Friday. While you are waiting on comments back from me about your Project assignment, you can check the stack to make sure I received your email.

Extra Credit. If you are looking for a motivating extra credit option, try the growth mindset option: for example, you can make your own growth mindset backronym! Find out more in the extra credit section of this week's assignments. And remember: you can do extra credit anytime during the week; no need to wait for the end of the week.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Class Twitter. From yesterday's Twitter @OnlineMythIndia, here is some National Punctuation Day humor. Yeah, Boromir needs some punctuation help. :-)

Words from India. I loved to play this game as a kid: PARCHEESI. There will be a dice game of great importance in the Mahabharata, as you can see in this illustration:

Storybook Archive. This project is from the Myth-Folklore class: Italian Fairy Tales. In this Storybook, Marco — an Italian living in the United States — chooses his favorite Italian fairy tales to tell to his little daughter, hoping to share with her the enchanted stories he heard when he was a little boy in Italy.

Free Book Online: Today's free book is The Folklore of Plants by T. F. Thiselton Dyer. See the Freebookapalooza blog for links and the table of contents. This is a fun book: Love-Charms, Dream-Plants, Plants in Demonology, etc.

Story of the Day. Today's story is from the Buddhist Jataka tales of India: The Poisoned Dice. It's another dicing story from India (see the origins of "parcheesi" above).

Video: The video for today is How to Use a Semicolon. Borowmir might find this helpful (see above).

Growth Mindset: Today's growth mindset cat was inspired by a student blog post: I want to know more. You can find out more at the Growth Mindset blog.

Event on Campus: Jonathan Shames will be giving a piano recital at 8PM in the Sharp Concert Hall (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

September 25: Banned Books Week. Celebrate the freedom to read! You can find lots of resources at the BannedBooksWeek.org website, at the American Library Association, and at the #BannedBooksWeek hashtag at Twitter.

Check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day, or click here for past announcements.