Monday, October 12

Today is Monday of Week 8, which is a Review Week. Here is a link to Week 8, and I hope you will enjoy this chance to look back on your work so far and look ahead to the second half of the semester! For those of you finishing up assignments during the grace period this morning, here is a link to Week 7.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Review Week. With no new reading or storytelling, this week is a good opportunity to work ahead of the deadlines. If you finish up the Week 8 Review posts today (there are three of them), then you can finish up the rest of the Week 8 assignments (feedback, comments, project) before the weekend. And if you can do that, then you can get a head start on Week 9 and maybe be on track to finish the class early.

Project Stack. This week is probably the busiest week of the semester for me with lots of new Portfolio and Storybook stories, so thank you in advance for your patience as I make my way through the huge stack. You can always check the stack to make sure I received your project. Today I'll be working on the projects people turned in last week.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Blog stream. Here's a cool Wikipedia Trail which Megan did, ending up with one of my favorite writers on learning and education: From Study Skills to Lev Vygotsky (famous for his "zone of proximal development"). And that's proof positive about the power of extra credit: Megan actually finished up the class this weekend through a combination of working ahead and extra credit like this blog post... so, congratulations on being done, Megan!

Twitter stream. You know I am a fan of tiny fiction, so I wanted to share this collection via LitHub which has links to the stories in the article: 11 Very Short Stories.

Something lovely on campus via OU's Daphne LaDue: 

Plus something lovely from India: Vishnu in his Narasimha (Man-Lion) avatar.

100-Word Stories. This is a story about another of Vishnu's avatars: Varaha, the Boar avatar. Shiva and Vishnu:

Laura Gibbs · 132. Shiva and Vishnu

A great item from JSTOR for Indigenous People's Day (see below): Celebrating Indigenous Peoples and Cultures.

Storybook. In honor of Indigenous People's Day, I wanted to feature this wonderful Storybook of Choctaw legends from last year's Myth-Folklore class: Dark Legends of the Chahta Yakni.

For more information about these maps, see the NPR article: The Map Of Native American Tribes You've Never Seen Before:

And a video from Cherokee Storyteller, Robert Lewis, about the first fire.

October 12: Indigenous People's Day. You can find out more about the holiday at Wikipedia. The Smithsonian has some ideas for celebrating, and here is a photo of some beautiful art at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian: "We Were Always Here," monumental cedar poles carved in 2012 by Rick Bartow (Mad River Band of Wiyot).

And for your listening pleasure, a performance by R. Carlos Nakai, a flute player of the Navajo/Ute peoples.

Check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day, or click here for past announcements.