Reading Diary A: Public Domain Ramayana

5. Thataka - Rama does really well for his first battle.  He slays Thataka and gets magical weapons.

Rama and Lakshmana battle the rakshasas

Image from Images and PDE Epics Blog

6. Bhagiratha and Ganga - I do love a good geneaology.  Boy does Sagara have an interesting family tree.  Somehow one of his wives has 60,000 sons!  If someone had twins every 9 months, it would take 22,485 years to have all 60,000 kids.  Of course, Sagara reigned for 30,000 years so there is plenty of time to spare.  If the oldest son could grow 6 inches of beard hair every year, he could have a beard 3.4 kilometers long by the time the youngest was born!  It sounds like Feodor Vassilyev is going to be put out of business.  When the 60,000 sons get burnt to ashes along with all their beards, it takes five generations (and 62,000+ years) to bring down the River Ganga to send them off to heaven.  Bhagiratha son of Dilipa son of Anshuman son of Asamanja son of Sagara finally does the trick.

Imagine a 3.4km beard

Image from Aaron Morton

14. Manthara and Kaikeyi - Here is where things turn sour.  Up to this point, Rama has smashed in the heads of rakshasas and won the hand of the fair Sita.  Just when he is about to rule the kingdom, Manthara messes things up.  Manthara is described as an ugly hunchbacked woman.  I tend to picture her as the wicked witch from Snow White, except without an apple.

Witch from Snow White

Image from Joe Penniston

19. Dasharatha's Karma - Dasharatha is having a really bad time.  He lost his son, and now we are told a story from his youth when he accidentally kills a young boy.  In Orange is the New Black, Yoga Jones does something similar.  She shoots what she thinks is a deer eating her marijuana plants but is actually a little kid.  Jones ends up in prison and Dasharatha looses his son and dies in sorrow.  If only they had both taken a gun safety class.

Week 1 Review

I was excited to see Galileo's World Exhibit on the Friday announcements.  I heard about this exhibit about a year and a half ago when I wandered up to the top floor of the Library.  I was pleasantly surprised to see their wonderful collection of rare and old books.  I saw one of Galileo's notebooks and an original print of a bird from one of Darwin's books.  I probably spent an hour talking to the librarian and admiring the collection.

Galileo

Image from OU Lynx

Famous Last Words: Week 1

I was pleased how my map story turned out this week.  I originally attempted to retell a fable, but I could not find a story that I enjoyed retelling.  The map story gave me license to be creative and ridiculous.  It was a lot of fun being able to build on a story that I already developed, and the constraint of the map gave me direction.  I have a couple other characters in my back pocket that I am excited to write about this semester.

This week was a good first week of school.  Because of my online classes, I only have to attend lecture for 3 hours each afternoon, except Friday when I have no class.  The free time in the morning and the lack of lectures will give me more time to be productive.  With my extra time, I have enjoyed getting outside in the morning.  There is a Frisbee golf course in a park right next to my apartment so I started playing with my roommates.  I was terrible at the beginning, but I am already seeing improvement.  By the end of the semester, with the power of a Growth Mindset, I might be actually be proficient at the game.  In my introduction, I wrote about how I love to ride my bike.  This week, I put about 56 miles on my bicycle.  I also went to the Norman Farm Market, and I got to make a pot of chicken tikka masala.

Recently I watched an excellent TED video that reminded me of the Growth Mindset.  Matt Cutts talks about the power of trying something new for 30 days.  As my challenge, I am going to attempt to take a photo every day for the next month.

I took this photo of a mushroom at the Frisbee golf course during a morning round.  It might make a good setting for a future story.

Mushroom on the Frisbee Golf Course

Original Image

Tech Tip: Blogger Template

I changed the my blog template from the default to something a little more interesting.  I just chose a simple template and changed the background to an image.  I'll stick with this theme until I find something even better.  Enjoy!

Week 1 Curation

Before this assignment, my bookmarks were a disorganized mess that I rarely used.  It was simple to create a folder for my bookmarks, and it already seems like it will be more useful (which is not difficult considering I rarely use bookmarks).  I generally have good offline curation skills, but I am terrible at sharing and using online tools.  I suppose all the warnings I received about posting online content led me to disengage from Internet communities.  For instance, despite taking thousands of photos in Europe last semester, I haven't posted any photos from my trips since March to Facebook or anywhere else online.  While I have a Twitter and Pinterest, I have no tweets and only a couple pins.  Even my Flickr is very outdated.  Hopefully writing blog posts on a regular basis will get me in the habit of using online tools.

Time to Use the Online Bookshelf

Image by Juhan Sonin

Growth Mindset

This was the first time that I have heard about the Growth Mindset, but this attitude is something that I've noticed for a while.  People who are excited about the prospect of learning for its own sake are more successful learners.  In my own academic pursuits, I am often in the Growth Mindset.  I enjoy a challenge, and I seek to learn new things all the time.  Many people think that they don't have a particular talent and they can never be good at a particular task.  I prefer to think that there is nothing I am inherently bad at, I just haven't refined my skill yet.  This way of thinking is very exciting because everything is an opportunity to grow as a person.  I can also relate to the Giant Hairball of School.  School often becomes drudgery and I work only to get the grade.  However, I find that the motivation of grades helps me to push through the boring bits and allows me to get experience that I might not have been able to gain on my own.

I particularly like the reading and writing challenges in the list of Growth Mindset Challenges.  I like how it puts the Growth Mindset into practice by changing the learning environment and embracing differences.

Question Everything!

Image from Growth Mindset Memes Blog

Storybook Favorites

The first project I looked at was Karma for Kids.  I chose it because I liked the alliterative title and because I was interested in what approach the author would take to explain Karma to kids.  The author does a good job of explaining Karma through the character in the narrative.  Each of the characters were realistic and although the story was divided into sections, each part led right into the next without being disjointed.

I chose the The Magic Map project for its title -- another alliteration and I really like maps.  I like the concept of a treasure hunt.  The setting changes as one clue leads to the next, each section introducing a new character.  I also thought that the map itself gave the story a mystical and ancient feeling, and the motif enhanced the sense of mystery.  Unfortunately, the language seemed clunky; each sentence did not flow into the next.  Additionally, although I enjoyed the mix of the ancient and modern world, the GPS coordinates, a modern invention, on an ancient map seemed unrealistic and tore me out of the story.  Finally, the "cliffhanger" at the end just seemed like a lazy conclusion that left the story with no resolution.  While the execution could be improved, I really enjoyed the underlying concepts.

The final story I read was Onboard the Spaceship Pushpaka.  As a science-fiction story about space travel, this was one that I had to read.  My first impression is that the author did a good job finding quality images.  I also thought that the concept of traveling between different moons helped section the narrative into parts.

For the storybook project, it is useful to divide the story into distinct scenes while still using common motifs and themes to bind the story together.  While it is important to retell Indian epics, it must be done in a way so that it does not feel out of place.  Karma for Kids and Onboard the Spaceship Pushpaka both use one character to retell the Indian story while The Magic Map tells the stories through multiple characters and the story itself.  I liked how the character in The Magic Map participated in the story instead of just listening to a retelling.  These three tales are completely different and show just how many options there are for writing a storybook project.

Map of India from Magic Map Storybook

Original Source: Wikimedia Commons