Syd's Thoughts

Since my final story for my project is over Robin Hood and Little John, I decided to go on a Wikipedia Trail and do some research.  This is the first website I came across:  Robin Hood and Little John - Wikipedia This gave me a really good starting point and from this page I learned that Robin Hood and many other child ballads were collected by Francis James Child.  Then I decided to look up Mr. Francis James Child:  Francis James Child - Wikipedia Mr. Child was actually American scholar who is best known for the Child Ballads. So, of course I looked the Child Ballads up:  Child Ballads - Wikipedia The Child Ballads are actually 305 ballads from Scottish and English authors. It is no wonder that most of our children stories that we hear today originated from this collection. Then I decided to go ahead and look up what exactly a ballad is:  Ballad - Wikipedia This website told me that ballads are typically 13 lines long and could go along with music because ...

Thank goodness this semester is almost over! I thought I would never finish. This semester has honestly been the hardest one for me since I have been at OU. I am not really sure why that is, but maybe because I have been getting promoted at work and have been taking 16 hours at the same time. I had some rocky points in this class and went a couple weeks while I was in Denver where I went without doing homework which really set me back.  I am so appreciative that this class has the flexibility that I am still able to recover and do well. This is why I think more classes need to be like this one at OU because sometimes things happen in our daily lives that professors don't consider. I really enjoyed doing the Robin Hood and Puss in Boots readings this week. For example, this past weekend has been another really tough time for me and I did not get everything I wanted to accomplish done. I won't bore you with the details, but I shed a lot of tears in the last couple of days and tha...

Since I missed my second reading for this week I decided to use the extra credit option to make up for it. I chose to do the reading over Lang I because it involved stories like "Puss in Boots" which I recognized from Shrek. I thought it would be neat to learn where the original came from and how it compares to the story I grew up with.  Puss in Boots originated in France which I had no idea of. The language is old and instead of saying donkey they say "ass". You can also tell how old the original is because it talks about things like the "mill". I thought it was interesting that Puss in Boots could talk to his master in English. This personification was very similar to Shrek. What was different in this story was that the cat was getting money so his master would not lose his home. In Shrek, Puss in Boots was just a good little thief.  Puss in Boots used his cleverness to trick the King and steal his clothes. This turned into a little trickster story which...

I decided to do this section for the reading today because it included stories like Cinderella (which is called aschenputtel) and Snow White.  This unit actually had 4 different units in different languages which is exactly like Europe with the many different places and cultures. I really enjoyed the Europe readings and this is probably one of my favorite units we have done this far. It had imagery, personification, magic, and lots of creativity.  I love fairytales, so I figured this would be a fun reading to do. Aschenputtel was very easy to read, but did contain some words that I was not familiar with like kirtle. This is definitely because of the European culture that these stories originated from.  These stories were also very fairy tale oriented which I did not mind. This Grimm unit really had it all when it came to stories which would make it really fun to write a story over. It had humor, romance, and the classics.  I will probably end up doing Part B for the ...