Week 8: Famous Last Words

This past week has been a whirlwind- between a massive midterm and studying for my 2 for this week, time flew by.  I had rounds (I’m an RA) Thursday night which went pretty late so I slept in Friday and got a lot of work done.  Besides excessive studying, I got to plan more wedding stuff which is nice.  We have a venue pretty much nailed down and are just waiting for final details to be worked out.  My writing for this class this week hasn’t been anything too special- it was mostly in the form of comments and such, but it was cool to see other people’s storybooks.  There were some really creative ideas out there- I am so impressed by the class! Once I get through this week, I will have a little bit of room to breathe since I will be able to work more on projects and hopefully get ahead on this class and not have exams in the immediate future.  Enrollment starts soon and that’s a bit crazy- I have really enjoyed this class and may take Mythlore with Professor Gibbs as well.  Hopefully I will be able to actually do classwork when she opens the class the week before because for this semester, I was in the middle of biochemistry and RA training when the class was opened so I was too busy to work on it.  Anyways, I’m hoping to get some good feedback on my second storybook story so that I can modify it and maybe even get my third story done before the next round of exams come.  This class has more work than I anticipated, but I enjoy the flexibility and option to work ahead/do extra credit when other classes get crazy and take away time from this class.  Have a good week everyone!

Cute puppies brighten my day so hopefully this cutie will brighten yours :)

(personal photo, April 2013)

Week 8: Reading Diary- Self Assessment

I feel like my reading diaries have been okay so far.  I always look over the reading diary instructions every week to make sure that I do them correctly and haven’t forgotten anything.  Of course, it’s always possible I overlook something, but I’m fairly sure they adhere to the instructions provided.  All my reading diaries are about the same length.  Towards the beginning, the author’s note was pretty short but then they got longer as the semester progressed.  I don’t have any tips for other students- they are all doing great jobs! My posts are pretty short but always meet the minimum number of words.  I do include images and have not done any quotes- that’s a great idea though!  I feel like I’m putting in good effort and I always do the reading, but I am simply not very creative so my posts are not too interesting. I’ve been really impressed by my classmates’ posts though.  For this reason, I’m trying to pour in extra time into my storybook.  For this class, I remember some of the reading such as the main points, but not all of it.  I remember more from Narayan than from Buck.  For my other classes, most of the information is put into lecture slides and I focus more on that than textbook reading.  As for reading strategies, it helps to have a summary to go off of first (which you have provided) which helps me keep track of the context and what to look for.  That’s been very helpful and helps me make sure that I understand the major plot points even if I don’t remember all of the small details.   On another note, the summaries provide me big events and sometimes I choose to capitalize on the details for my storytelling post because they are just that- small, barely mentioned points in the story that have a lot of room for creativity.