From Here To India- My Epics of India Course Blog

       For this week I decided to do the Story Lab over Language. There were eight videos in the playlist that I was supposed to watch and I'll be recording my thoughts here.      The first video talks about how languages evolved. The Earth was less populated and as people moved their languages changed until we developed the languages you see today. Languages can be divided into different families. This was a very short video but it gave me a lot to think about, like how language may have come about.     The second video, also very short, describes how the English language that we speak came about. First, the Celts were being occupied by the Romans, and they protected the Celts. Then the Roman Empire fell and the Germanic tribes took over with their Anglo-Saxon language. This is referred to now as Old English. Eventually through various conquests the English adopted words from French and Latin. This grew and expanded the language into wha...

For this week, I decided to do a story lab, and for my story lab I decided to watch the Ted Talk videos about A New Theory of Human Intelligence, and Copyright is Brain Damage.      In A New Theory of Human Intelligence , the speaker begins with showing two different reports. One may think that they are two entirely different students, but it is revealed that they are in fact the same student, years apart. He explains the theory of the twice-exceptional student, who has lots of strengths but also unique challenges as well. In order to discover how many kids are falling through the cracks, he suggests looking at the Four C Model: Capacity, Competence, Commitment, Creativity. He talks about competence and the I.Q. test. Many people surprisingly over-perform and under-perfom based on that test score! I thought that it was very surprising, it clearly shows that the I.Q. test does not give you the complete picture of a person's ability.      Finally, I watch...

      For my story lab this week I decided to watch the Crash Course mythology videos. The first video was entitled "What is Myth?".  I thought it was very interesting when it opened by talking about how myth involves things like psychology and science. It also talked about how there are different versions of myth, which I had learned about in my Classical Mythology course. For instance, just about everyone has a version of a great flood! It's also open to interpretations. Another interesting thing he mentioned was that in some cases, the line between myth and religion is blurry. The Bible has a version of the great flood story, and that book is a part of one of today's most wide-spread religions, Christianity. Towards the end of the video he defines myth for us and says that myth "Is a story, but a special kind of story, that has two primary characteristics: significance and staying power." I really like that definition of myth, and I think it's very re...

      For my Lab assignment this week I watched two videos, The Danger of a Single Story and Imaginary Friends and Real -World Consequences.      I really love the video about the Danger of a Single Story. I thought it was really eye-opening because in many ways I do allow a single story to become the only story. She made some very applicable examples. She talked about the images that were fed to us about Africa, images that I'd seen so many times. The example about Mexico was very personal to me, because I had planned to take a study abroad trip to Puebla for Spanish courses and my father managed to talk me out of it because he believed in the single story that terrible things happen to Americans there. We need to remember that stereotypes are not the full story and we need to keep an open mind.      Imaginary Friends and Real-World Consequences was also a great and interesting Ted Talk. As a huge Harry Potter fan, I was shocked when ...