Wednesday, September 25

Today is Wednesday of Week 6. Here is a link to the Week 6 assignments. For some of you this is a Reading day, and some of you might also be doing your Story assignment already. Have fun with that — and yes, there's a Story Lab option again this week!

Class Procedures and Reminders

Project Stack. If you turned in something before noon on Sunday, you should have comments back from me now, and today I'll keep working on the Sunday afternoon assignments. As always, you can check the stack anytime to make sure I received your email.

Click for curiosity. As you are doing the reading today, you may run into links or images that get your attention, names or places you are curious about, words you don't know etc. etc. My advice is to pursue that curiosity; the answers you seek might be just one click away. And if you keep on clicking, you could end up with a nice Wikipedia Trail for extra credit.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Blog Stream. I thought this was so cool: Hannah made a chart of Sindbad's voyages to show the pattern overall, along with specific details from voyage to voyage. Those of you who read the Sindbad unit might want to take a look!

Twitter Stream. Yesterday was National Punctuation Day, so there were a lot of funny cartoons at Twitter, like this one by Debbie Ridpath Ohi. I should probably make a visit to the Exclamation Point Abuse Support Center!

Story of the Day. And for today's "why" story, here's one about why the groundhog has such a short tail: How the Groundhog Lost His Tail.

Indian Epics Today. And here is the god Yama back again, the Hindu god of death and also of dharma (justice), because he is the divine father of the eldest of the Pandava brothers, Yudhishthira. More about Yama. Below is a depiction of Yama by Devdutt Pattanaik from his article Land of Yama.

India Video. Yama appears in this Epified video with his twin sister Yami: The Greatest Twins.

Storybooks. The counterpart of Yama in the Greek tradition is Hades, and here's a Hades Storybook from last year: Hades' Iliad.

Proverbs. Meanwhile, on the subject of twins, here's a fun proverb from China: It is not economical to go to bed early to save the candles if the result is twins.

H.E.A.R.T.. This time of the semester can be pretty stressful, so here is some advice from Grant Snider: Never stop hoping!

Mindset Cats. And the mindset cat urges you to be patient: It takes work to build a masterpiece.

Writing Video. It's National Comic Book Day today, so I wanted to share this video: How Comic Books Can Make Kids (and Adults) Smarter.

Event on Campus. Flu shots are available today at Walker Tower today, 10AM-4PM; see the schedule for other days and locations:

September 25: Bill of Rights. Today marks the date in 1789 when Congress proposed the Bill of Rights, i.e. the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution (they were finally ratified in 1791). How many of the amendments can you name? You can read more about the Bill of Rights in this Wikipedia article, with a specific list of the amendments here. Here's a video from Annenberg Classroom:

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