Week 8 Reading and Writing

Over the past seven weeks, there are several aspects of this class I've really enjoyed and found helpful. I love that this class allows me to learn at my own pace while thoughtfully restructuring and retelling the material I absorb. As far as the reading assignments go, the reading notes are very helpful when I do my retellings each week. They definitely help me engage and pay attention more when I do the actual readings. 

I think the most unique reading I've done was the stories from the Congo unit. Every story was dark and slightly disturbing, but fascinating, and I loved how they all incorporated local animals and traditions.

One story I really enjoyed retelling was the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, which I put a twist ending on. I was definitely challenged by my retelling of the beginning of the Arabian Nights tales, since those stories evolve into multiple layers, but I tried to simplify the retelling and do it creatively.  I've always had difficulty with creative writing (hence my career path in the much more literal and tangible world of news reporting), but I find these storytelling assignments are pushing me to think outside the box and grow in my creative writing capabilities. 

Along those lines, I also love creating my storybook. I'm getting to experiment with Wix, which I've never used before but I'm finding fairly user-friendly and quite aesthetically pleasing. I think there's definitely things I can tighten up and make smoother, both appearance-wise and writing-wise, as I go. However, I do consider that storybook my proudest accomplishment in this class — I'm really excited to see the final product and finish piecing together and perfecting the stories. 

I do look forward to learning and reading more, but especially to finishing that storybook. I'm grateful I can use storytelling days to do research and story planning as well, since it's helpful in my project work over the weekends (sometimes I do wish I had more time to plan there rather than read for two days). I'm also grateful for the student feedback system —sometimes it's a bit tedious to leave so many comments, but it helps realizing that hopefully those comments help improve other students' work or encourage them (as their comments help make me better!). 

Image information: Charon, ferryman of the Underworld. Courtesy of Hartwig HKD. Source: Flickr. I chose this image because I think it's one of the more striking pictures I've gotten to use. I like that it works with my storybook theme, and I think it's simple but haunting.