Online Education Review

I've taken quite a few online classes in my four years here and, honestly, I prefer them to in person classes. I like being able to work (for the most part) at my own pace. I don't have to be in a classroom at a certain time for a certain amount of time every single week. I can get to online classwork when I get to it. I personally think self-paced classes are the best, but I don't think it's necessary for students to have "full" control where everything is due by the last day of class. Lengthy and flexible deadlines makes for less stressed-out students.

One of the things I don't like about online classes are discussion posts. These assignments are meant to get you to engage with other students and the instructor (since you never actually meet up) as well as further your knowledge about whatever you learned that week. However, I mostly just find these assignments to be tedious wastes of my time. I hardly ever learn anything new from my classmates and I don't feel like I contribute much to others either. We're all just filling up the post with enough words to meet the occasional word requirement and seeming like we're saying something significant when we're really not.

Another sort of bad thing about most online classes is that I usually don't retain much of the information like I do in regular courses. I feel like this is due to a lack of reinforcement of the knowledge from the textbook that you get by attending a lecture. Instructors try to make up for this deficit with discussion posts, but I've already stated how pointless I think they are. However, this isn't entirely a bad thing because if you're taking a class about something that you're never going to use in your real life then it doesn't matter if you remember the material. As long as you can make a decent grade in the class and get that credit you need then you're good. This doesn't really apply to our Mythology and Folklore class, though, because you aren't learning new information so much as you are actually engaging with the material (the units we read) and doing things with it (rewriting stories, commenting on people's projects, etc.).

If I could design my own online course I would set it up in 4 big, self-paced units. All work in each unit would be due at the end of each quarter of the semester. There would be no pointless discussion posts. Students could engage with the material at their own pace and not have to worry about getting everything done by a midnight deadline on Friday or Sunday like is usually the case. Depending on the subject of the course, I would probably have quizzes and one test in each unit. All tests would only be over the content in a single unit, though the 2nd and 4th tests would be called the midterm and the (non-comprehensive) final. I'm still a student so right now I care more about how much less stressful non-comprehensive finals are than how much a student remembers about all the material in the course. As I get older, this feeling might change.

I am pro online class! (Pixabay)

Gen. Ed. Review

Since I'm a senior, my education here is nearly complete so I can speak from a lot of experience. If I had to pick one word to describe my Gen. Ed. experience here at OU it would be "thorough". Not only have I taken many Gen. Ed. courses but these courses have come from many different subjects. I've taken English classes like Fiction and Expository Writing. I've taken Spanish classes (3 semesters). I've a taken journalism class, an Information Science class, Chemistry (2 semesters), Zoology, Physics, Business Calculus, Intro to Native American studies, History of the American Musical Theatre and this class, Mythology and Folklore (and probably even more that I can't think of off the top of my head). Basically, I've done a little bit of everything. My education has been very well-rounded and I like that. It's cool to be very proficient in one subject. In fact, I know a lot about psychology, which is my major. However, I think it's even cooler to also know a little bit of everything. I can talk to you about Broadway musicals or tell you how to say something in Spanish (most of the time) or discuss how hormones work or explain to you what Title IX really means or tell you about fascinating psychology experiments or psychological phenomena.

I think my Humanities classes have probably been my favorite classes to take outside of my major. Mythology and Folklore has definitely been one of my very favorites. I also really enjoyed History of the American Musical Theatre. I got to watch several shows throughout the semester and lots of clips of shows. I loved my Fiction class during my very first semester at OU. My professor was British, I loved it any time she said "Harry Potter," and I really liked all the stories we read. I wouldn't change anything about the Gen. Ed. program if I could. I think it allows students to get a broad base of knowledge in a wide range of subjects. Overall, I've been very happy with my college education as a whole.

I can't believe I'm going to graduate soon! (Wikimedia Commons)

Week 12 Storytelling: Riddle Me This

On my way back from town, I met my neighbor Tom as he was tending his field of wheat.

"How as your journey?" he asked with sweat running down his forehead. I myself was perspiring quite a bit as I had traveled far on this unusually hot day.

"It was long and tiring," I confessed, "and rather peculiar as well."

"Peculiar how?" Tom asked intrigued.

"As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives," I explained.

Harbor in St. Ives, Cornwall
(Geof Sheppard)

"Seven wives? Why, that's an ungodly amount. Not just in the holy sense, but what man would want to have seven wives to provide for and listen to?" Tom joked.

"It gets even stranger," I told him. "Each wife had seven sacks. Each sack had seven cats. Each cat had seven kits."

"Kits, cats, sacks, wives. This must have been the oddest procession. How did each woman carry seven sacks, each with seven cats in it and each of their seven kits? That seems quite impossible," Tom exclaimed.

"Yes, it was the oddest sight, indeed. The cats and kits were all rather small actually, much smaller than your average cat and kitten. I suppose that helped some. There were bags hanging all over these women, though. It was like they were pack mules, all trailing one another as if in some strange parade."

"This will make a good story to tell the other folk in the village," Tom said shaking his head.

"Oh, I intend to," I told him. "In fact, I'm going to make a riddle out of it. Let's see if you can figure it out."

"Let's see if we can all figure it out," Tom replied, climbing over his fence. We headed into the heart of the village and gathered everyone together to hear my ingenious riddle. Once everyone was settled and quite, I began.

"As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had seven sacks. Each sack had seven cats. Each cat had seven kits. Kits, cats, sacks, wives. How many were there going to St. Ives?"

There was silence while everyone pondered the question on their own, but soon they were working as a group trying to solve it.

"Well seven cats in a bag with seven kits each makes 49 right?" one man asked.

"No, you dolt," his wife scolded him. "There are 49 kits plus the 7 cats which makes 56 in one sack."

"If there are 7 sacks of 56 on a wife... what's 56 times 7?" the baker wondered.

"392," answered his boy, who he'd sent to university through his hard labor.

"If that's how many are on each of the 7 wives... what's 392 time 7?" the butcher chimed in. It took the boy a little while longer to come up with the sum this time.

"2744," he finally answered. "Plus the 7 wives makes 2751!"

"That's wrong," I said, shaking my head.

"You forgot the man!" someone said. "It's 2752!"

"That's still incorrect," I informed them smugly, enjoying my little game. They started through the whole problem again, this one yelling at that one for not counting right. I thought the whole village would get into a row if I didn't stop them and give them the answer.

"Alright, alright!" I called over the roar of the crowd, bringing them back to attention. "I'll tell you the answer."

The silence was so deep you might have been able to hear the feet of the man and his wives somewhere far down the road.

"The answer is one," I said, very satisfied with myself that I had tricked them all. "I was the one going to St. Ives. I met them on the road but they were going to other direction." The whole crowd laughed at how silly they had been and then began to ask questions about the man and all his wives and cats. Every time someone from my village met someone not from the village, they would tell them the St. Ives riddle. It was of the most well-known riddles, but very few get the answer right on the first try.

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Author's Note: This story is built around the riddle As I Was Going to St. Ives from the Nursery Rhyme Book edited by Andrew Lang (1897). The riddle the narrator tells in my story is the exact same as the riddle in the book. I just added a story around the riddle and gave the answer to the riddle because one isn't given in the book. There has always been a dispute, though, about what the "real" answer is. Some people count up only all the people, some include the cats, some even include the sacks for some odd reason. Personally, I think "one" is the right answer because many riddles try to distract you with extraneous information when the answer is actually really simple.

College Writing Review

This post has special significance to me because I am a senior. I have four years of college writing under my belt from many different disciplines, even other languages! Here is a list of just a few classes I can think of off the top of my head that were writing intensive or where a written assignment was a big part of the class: Expository Writing, Fiction, Research Methods II, Intermediate Spanish, Women and Sports, and Mythology and Folklore. I'm sure I could think of more if I thought really hard.

But from these classes, I recognize three different "types" of writing: essay writing, scientific writing, and creative writing. Of all the classes I have taken, Expository Writing most helped my essay writing. I took this class my very semester here at OU and I'm SO glad I did. I saw huge improvements in my essays after just one semester. It is amazing how far your writing can come in a few months when you have an excellent instructor with a relatively small number of students to attend to. This was the last composition class I will probably take in my life and I'm so much the better for it.

Research Methods II is a psychology class (and I'm a psych major) that teaches you the basics of how to conduct research in psychology. Since I want to conduct research in graduate school, this class was an important one for me to take. At the end, you got to design and run your own experiment then (where it was most helpful to my scientific writing skills) write a research paper and present a poster to the class. I worked really hard on my research paper (it is probably still the longest one I have written to this day) and I ended up winning first prize in my class for my experiment. This was definitely one of my favorite writing experiences here at OU.

Finally, I come to my favorite class this semester: Mythology and Folklore! Obviously, the style of writing this class has helped me with most is creative writing. I've gotten a lot of positive feedback about my writing and it has honestly blown me away. Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to be an author, but I didn't think I would be any good at it. This class has been a major confidence booster and I've learned a lot about myself as a writer and what my strengths and weaknesses are. I hope to continue to read literature that I love and write stories that other people like once this class is over.

Overall, I've had wonderful writing instruction here at OU and I think my writing has improved significantly in four years (even more so than it did in four years of high school). I owe many thanks to the awesome instructors who guided me and taught me how to be a better writer, including the instructor for this course, Laura Gibbs!

Writing with a pen, the way I like to write when I write for myself
(Wikipedia)

Reading Diary A: Nursery Rhymes

Here are my favorites from the Nursery Rhymes reading unit:

Tales: There were two particularly funny nursery rhymes in this section. One is about Punch and Judy. Basically, Punch punched Judy in the eye over a pie. I don't know why I thought that was so funny, but I did. Maybe because it's early in the morning. The other one is about Taffy, a thief. The narrator goes over to Taffy's house and he's never there, but Taffy keeps coming back to his house to steal stuff. He finally catches Taffy at home in bed and flings a poker at his head. Yes, I probably laughed too much at this one. This also had the rhyme about the fat man from Bombay that I used to write my first retelling this semester! :)

Taffy the thief on the prowl
(L. Leslie Brooke)

Songs, Part 1: This section included some classics and favorites of mine. I'm pretty sure most people have heard the rhyme about Little Bo-Peep who lost her sheep. There was also a longer, different version of London bridge is falling down. My favorite was probably Sing a Song of Sixpence because I sang a song with lyrics from this rhyme when I was in choir in high school. It brought back a bunch of old memories that I hadn't thought about in a long time. Near the end was a nursery rhyme I recognized from the movie Ted, "I love my sixpence, my pretty little sixpence." The rhyme isn't as creepy as Mark Walburg made it sound.

Riddles: I love a good riddle and most of these stumped me. I got one of them, though, about a bunch of legs with the answer being a man threw a stool at a dog for stealing hit leg of mutton. I've heard the St. Ives riddle before and I'm pretty sure the answer is one man is going to St. Ives, the narrator. The point of some riddles is to make you think really hard in the wrong direction and the answer is actually really simple; I think the St. Ives riddle is one of these. I kinda got the last one right, too. I thought they might all be the names of one girl.