We made it! It's been a crazy adventuresome pace, but you guys hung in there like champs. Thanks so much for that. Kudos to you for all of your hard work during this very quick semester.
So... what's left? A couple things...
Your final multimedia projects are due by Friday at midnight. You should play each other's scavenger hunts; they're going to be EPIC! You also need to e-mail me a two page response paper that reflects on making your project. This paper is fairly informal, but I want to know what you did, how you did it, and how it was working in your group. This is also the space to let me know if there were any slackers.
I'd also like one quick last blog post summarizing your experience with this online class! Say goodbye. Reflect on how it went. Wax philosophic.
I'll send you a wrap up e-mail in the next few days that responds to your work covering a couple bases to summarize things. I'll be posting all of your final grades in the next few days and over the weekend.
I'd like you all to fill out the student evaluations of the class on Blackboard so that I can be a better teacher; I always want to keep improving that as much as I can.
Finally, I'll leave you with this. I've been asking you to write, to compose, all semester, and I know that it's not easy, that it asks impossible things of you, and yet you've braved the storm, you've fought the good fight, you've finished the race. Old Bukowski says to leave it alone, but I'm your English professor, and I say press on, keep writing, and have fun along the way. Good luck with your future endeavors, whatever they may be! Thanks again for a surprisingly wonderful online semester.
so you want to be a writer?
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by Charles Bukowski
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if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.
don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.
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