Mythology was the main subject of our course for the past two weeks. My experience studying mythology versus creating my own myth was experimental for me. I had never written my own myth. Also, I haven't taken any mythology courses in my college education. This was very new to me. Myths are something that students might not consciously take into account everyday, unless they are viewing it on a screen. I think studying myths is important for students to learn so that they can understand multi-culturality. Understanding that stories are passed down from different and diverse cultures helps to bring in a lot of perspective into the children's minds.
After having to create my own myth for an assignment,I learned that myths are used as entertainment. They can teach morals as well, but their relevance loses its meaning as people grow older. Reading about mythology was interesting, some stories were silly, sexual or empowering.
Watching other presenters relate material to more advanced material was the most interesting. Connecting cartoon characters to philosophers character ideals surprised me. It suddenly made Freud relevant to psychological and social behaviors in textual representations. I will definitely make sure from now on that I make my lesson plan information relevant to modern day examples. It really made the lessons stick in my mind more than I would have just by taking notes. In my own classroom I would definitely slow it down a notch, fifteen minutes would be too fast for students to write down all the notes in their handwriting. For the lessons we had in class that week, I would have wanted to have taken better notes.
http://jessicafuentes64.wixsite.com/waterbuffalo
Here is the link to my myth website
Jessica,
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you that I would want to slow down the lessons of myths for students in my classes as well. Learning about these different myths in two days seemed a bit overwhelming, but all in all the experience in teaching a myth and having to learn about different myths was fun. It was nice to see that different myths characters and stories could be taught through different cartoon characters and their movies/shows. I really liked learning about the trickster and how he related to modern day characters like the joker, jack sparrow, and Bart Simpson it was very interesting for me to see it from that point of view and it definitely stuck in my head. I personally would love to teach myths with examples from modern day television and movie characters because I think it is an enjoyable experience not only for the teacher, but for the students as well. I also agree with you that after creating our own myths that they are used purely for entertainment purposes for they can be as bizarre as we want them to be. See you in class.