Skip to main content

Week 13 Review: Home Stretch

Hi there! I don't know about anyone else in this class but I am busting my butt to finish these assignments up so I can get an A in the class. Staying in the holiday spirit, I am so thankful for the extra week (Week 15). Because of it, I don't have to cram a bunch of extra credit assignments into next week, but instead can work on mostly standard assignments. I also caught a previous assignment that I did, but didn't do the declaration for so that was a nice treat to start this week off with. I took the time to read through the announcements for the last seven days, and that has thankfully helped me understand how class is working over the next couple weeks and what finishing up looks like for me. As I was looking through said announcements, I was completely distracted by the blurb about St. Catherine. My full name is Catherine and I come from a Catholic family, but I had never heard of her in detail. So I spent quite a while reading about her on Wikipedia and found out that the "nickname" my grandfather uses for me, Aikaterina, isn't a nickname! It is the Greek/Russian version of Catherine, which makes sense considering my grandfather's family were Germans living in Russia before they immigrated to the United States. While I wasn't named after Saint Catherine, I was happy to gain some understanding about my grandfather and have a look into the past. If you want to read about Saint Catherine here is the link to her wiki page. The portrait I have included is the picture that Laura used on the announcements page. Saint Catherine is pictured with a wheel like one used to torture her. Spiked wheels such as these came to be known as Catherine Wheels.

I also really enjoyed the video about empathy from November 16th. I have always felt a lot of empathy and sympathy for others. While sometimes this can make my emotions overwhelming, I think it is really a gift. I think it helps me understand others and have an understanding of the world that I wouldn't have otherwise.


Bibliography
Caravaggio [Public domain]

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Feedback Strategies

Hello,  This week I learned more about feedback, and specifically ways to give better feedback. Here I would like to share with you some of the articles I read and what I found useful or interesting. "How To Give Students Specific Feedback That Actually Helps Them Learn" gave some general advice on what kinds of feedback should be given to help others. This included things that for the most part I had heard, such as making it goal oriented, actionable, and specific. Although this is good advice, it wasn't really things I hadn't heard before. Looking over at " Three Simple Frameworks for Feedback " I saw something that I wasn't really expecting. This article took some of the same ideas as "How To Give Students Specific Feedback That Actually Helps Them Learn" and provided specific tools (diagrams to be filled out, and phrases) that can help people put those ideas into action easily. I would definitely recommend taking a look at the ch...

Reading Notes: Lang European Fairy Tales II: Blue Beard

I am doing some week 15 assignments here during dead week to fill in some missing points. Because I read the first Lang unit last week and enjoyed it so much, I decided to read the second Lang unit this week. Of the stories that I read here are my notes over "Blue Beard" which I found quite exciting! Blue Beard was very rich, but considered ugly and terrifying for having a blue beard I would like to research to see if this is a reference to something else, because it is so strange  He also had had many wives previously and no one knew what happened to them  One of his neighbors had two daughters and he wanted to marry one of them  Neither of them wanted to marry him and kept playing him off on the other  To persuade them, Blue Beard invited the family and many others to one of his estates and they partied for a week After that, the younger sister decided he wasn't so bad and they were married  Blue Beard has to go away on business so he gives all...

Reading Notes: Persian Tales Part A

Hello!  This week I chose to read the Persian Tales unit and was not disappointed. Some of these fairy tales like “The Boy Who Became a Bulbul” and “The Wolf-Aunt” reminded me of the Brother’s Grim Fairytales in their more original forms. The others seemed a little more child friendly like we might expect of fairytales today. Thinking of my story for this week, any of them could make a fun base for writing, but I think that the ones that would be the best to work with would be “The Boy Who Became a Bulbul,” “Nim Tanak,” or “Muhammad Tirandaz, The Archer.” For “The Boy Who Became a Bulbul” I would make the circumstances of the boy’s death make more sense to a modern reader, not just based on a bet with his father that he willingly submits to. I would also want to somehow bring the boy back, maybe instead of the Bulbul growing out of the stalk, he does. Or maybe his father doesn’t kill him but hides him instead. Either way I would like for the boy to live. For “Nim T...