Chinese New Year

From a Guest Editorial in the Duluth News-Tribune,
A bookworm’s case for new education strategy:

Mark Twain changed my life. I was an 18-year-old clerk at a grocery store with no map for my future when my college freshman composition teacher distributed a list from which to choose a novel for the end-of-the-year term paper.
Sunday, February, 17, 2008 - Duluth News Tribune - Opinion

• A random sampling of course syllabi nationwide, including at the University of Minnesota Duluth, revealed reading assignments consisting of essays, letters, short stories, poems and book excerpts — but seldom many whole books....
  
  And textbook companies are more than happy to accommodate such surveys, because they can re-shuffle the collections every three years into new and expensive anthologies that students must purchase, whereas they would earn nothing from students purchasing used novels.

  But instead of sweeping surveys, core courses should be based on five to seven representative books. In American Literature II, for example, teaching books like Twain’s “Innocents Abroad” and Nathanial Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter,” among others, would make for more meaningful experiences.

1. Last day to add courses.
2. Last day to use permission numbers.
3. Last day to withdraw from a course with a W appearing on the transcript.
4. Last day to change a grading option.
5. Last day to apply for a degree.

These and other reminders are explained on the CLA SAAC web page at:
http://www.d.umn.edu/~clasa/main/index.php
Finally, as you are thinking about the end of the second week, please be reminded that under no circumstances should you allow a non-registered student to remain in your class. Each semester we receive petitions from students to add classes long after the end of the second week, in some cases as late as the 14th week. Please know that in almost every case I deny these petitions.

It's SuperBowl Time ...

Martin J. Gannon's Metaphorical Analsis of The United States:

"Setting the Table For a Cultural Feast": Nutritional Anthropology
and
Basic Human Nutritional Needs
(slides)