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June 7, 2014

Course Redesign Update: June 7 - the reading diary idea takes shape

My big achievement for today was getting a start on the big task of explaining to students how the reading diaries will work; this was prompted by a back-and-forth with my buddy Justin over at Google+, so I've embedded that post here too. The result is a page at my class wiki where I've explained How the Reading Diaries Work.

I'll be tinkering with that a lot, but now with that in place, I'll feel more confident about writing up my own reading diaries as I do the proofreading for the rest of the summer. You can see my own reading diaries here. It's not easy to pick my favorite stories each time, but it's a good exercise. I hope I can convey to students that the main goal of the note-taking is indeed to focus in on favorites. I know that not every story in every selection will please every student... but I do hope very much that every student can find a few stories during each reading session that they really like, stories they really enjoy and want to remember.

Here's that Google+ discussion with Justin:




In terms of regular work, I added images to the two remaining units from Ovid's Metamorphoses: Ovid II and Ovid III (I already had worked on Ovid I). For a few of the stories I had trouble finding good images (poor Myrrha and Cinyras, for example), but in other cases, like Niobe, I had trouble even deciding just what images to include. Here's the death of Niobe's children as imagined by the 17th-century painter Johann Konig: