Majel set up the Miro site. I wasn’t thrilled at this at first… we didn’t have a great deal of time, and I didn’t want to learn a new application in that time frame.

Credit where it’s due, Majel was right. Miro worked for Mrs. Dalloway, especially the way Majel set it up. I think that Majel is a more visual person than I am, and the way she set everything up made the chapters we did flow.

The learning curve for Miro was not that steep, frankly. Looking back at it, I’m not sure why I Was resistant, other than my “sheer cussed stubbornness”. (To borrow a phrase my grandmother used)

Even though I normally teach things like Voice and Diction or Public Speaking, I have had to teach texts to students, so I think in terms of context, historical background, and vocabulary. So, those are the things I focused on. In this regard, the work was not difficult, just a little time consuming. I felt that this historical context was important, because this novel takes place after WWI, but a novel set in the early 1920’s is going to have a very different feel from one set in the the 1930’s, or even one set in 1919.

I sometimes felt like I over-annotated in places, but anytime I looked at a word or phrase and thought to myself, “I’m not sure what this means”, I felt I had to include some kind of note. I mean, if I didn’t understand it, odds are students wouldn’t.

I admit, I thought about this as a way to annotate the work for a class. Because of the classes I Teach, I considered including performance tips. Let me explain. As a student, I have had assignments when I was given a long text — a short story or chapter of a novel– and told to edit the text down and recite what I Edited.

The two times I did this, I was given time limits, like your recitation could only last 5-7 minutes. You’ll see this kind of assignment in some advanced foreign language classes (I did it in French and Spanish) and in courses like Voice and Diction, Oral Interpretation of Written Texts, and maybe some acting courses.

Som at first, I considered adding performance notes keeping assignments like this in mind. I decided against it because I thought notes like that would be going a little too far for what we’re doing here.

As we continued, I was going to be our spokesperson when we presented, but then I got sick and ended up in the hospital, so the team had to deal with that, which I apologize for.