Week 15: Last Last Words

So, here it is: the Fall semester is over for me as a student in this class. It was so much fun, and I was tempted to wait and write this last-last-words post on Friday as it is the last-last-day of class... but I know next week is going to be really hectic, so I thought it was better to wrap things up now. Every semester since my dad got sick, I'm never sure at the start of the semester if I will manage to get through it. At the same time, having assignments to do as a student in this class has been such a huge help in staying focused and having goals I actually CAN achieve, ha ha, which is very nice when so many things in my life right now feel pretty out of control. At least when it comes to this class, I can say I am DONE. Yay! Here are all the posts (!), plus some thoughts below about finishing up and looking ahead:

Cheezburger cat says: High five!

Brer Rabbit Storybook. I loved getting to work on Brer Rabbit for class this semester! The focus on the stories about Brer Rabbit and the Witch Rabbit worked out great I think. Narrowing down from the whole Joel Chandler Harris collection of stories into something that works as a Storybook was not an easy choice, but I am really glad with what I chose and how that turned out.

Writing new stories! I wrote seven stories this semester: a Twine nursery rhyme maze (that was so fun!), plus two African stories, two Jamaican stories, and two Brer Rabbit stories (in addition to the four stories in the Storybook). Several of those stories were chain tales, which just makes me remember how much I loved working on chain tales the last time I did the Myth-Folklore class!


Working on the Africa units. I managed to re-read all the Africa units except for the Congo one (and maybe I will do that one over break just to make it feel complete). I added notes to all the stories that didn't have notes, plus I changed the dialect Brer Rabbit and Jamaica stories into standardized spelling to make them easier to read. They are still in dialect, but no more eye-dialect getting in the way.


Tech Tip improvements. Thanks especially to help from Alby, I created a new set of Tech Tips related to "ethical ed tech," and I am going to fold some of those into the Tech Orientation assignment. In particular, I want people to think about their browser and search engine options right from the start of the semester, and also to add a word counter and spellcheck to their browser.


Progress Chart improvements. I am excited about having a new spreadsheet to offer which is more dynamic and useful than the current progress chart. Here's what it looks like for me as I finish up the class:

I felt like I was struggling midway through the semester, and seeing my progress charted this way would have made me feel better about that! I was doing better than I thought, even though I had a rough time of it in October when I was in Austin and missed out on some weeks.


NaNoWriMo. Although it is not directly related to this class, I know I would not have been able to do NaNoWriMo without all the good creative energy I enjoy by reading people's stories all week every week. Plus it was so cool that Cate was also doing NaNoWriMo also! By working on that project, I reconnected with my old interest in Sufi teaching stories, while getting to blend that together with Birbal and other storytelling traditions from India. It was way more fun than I ever imagined, and not really hard at all. I want to do a Brer Rabbit novel next November!


Ready for India. I'll be doing the India class in the Spring, and I've got my reading plan in mind: I am going to focus on the Vana Parva, i.e. the Book of the Forest, when the Pandavas are wandering in exile for twelve years. There is some amazing storytelling that goes on in the book. Since I did a Ramayana focus last time (I read the Thai Ramakien and did a Thai Hanuman project), having a Mahabharata focus is good, and the Vana Parva is big enough to give me reading work to do all semester long. Plus it's a natural for a Storybook project since the Pandavas get to hear stories from lots of different storytellers during that exile. I am SO EXCITED about this, and I already dedicated a bookshelf to the books I will be using for that.

Update: I had such a cool idea! For the Vana Parva, I will focus on the "Riddles at the Lake" as a Storybook project. I can use that story, plus other riddle stories from India, to create an Indian Riddle Book. That will build on my NaNoWriMo project, connect with the Vana Parva, and will be a totally cool way to learn about the riddle tradition in India. I found this super-helpful resource already: Indian Riddles by L. Sternbach.

Week 15: Growth Mindset and Measures

As I said in my Tortoise Tale from Cameroon, I am really worried about bad numbers in education. I don't like grades and I don't like testing, but I am not against measures of progress: I just want those measures to be meaningful and motivating.

So, when I created this new spreadsheet for repurposing the weekly points totals from Canvas,  I thought long and hard (and spent a few hours tinkering!) about just what numbers would be useful and, in particular, how to provide a kind of interpretation of the numbers for students who find numbers intimidating and/or confusing. Details here.

In terms of my "algorithm" for labeling, I ended up with four different text labels that get applied automatically to each week, and here are some thoughts about why I think these are labels that are helpful for promoting a growth mindset as students work through the course:

great! The idea here is to recognize a student who is working ahead, and the way I measure that is by comparing the average-points-per-week so far (a measure of participation overall) with average-points-required-per-week in order to get to the chosen goal. The label "great!" means that the student can actually put in less effort in the rest of the semester than they have put in so far. I decided that was the best possible measure of "working ahead" because it is dynamic, responding to all the weeks of the semester completed plus the weeks to come, as governed overall by the student's chosen goal.

on track: The idea here is to focus on the core assignments each week: can the student reach their goal by doing the core assignments for the rest of the semester? That's what I am calling "on track" in the sense that no extra credit is required. All the student needs to do to reach their goal is to focus on the core assignments each week.

do extra: This is a really important flag for students to have! The sooner they are alerted to the need to do some extra credit to make up for missing work, the better. This is not really a complex formula, but it is not obvious to students who are not used to my extra credit approach where one of the main functions of extra credit is to make it possible to make up missing work. They don't have to make it up right away, but at the same time it's important not to put that off too long either.

adjust goal: This is the measure I am most proud of. Basically, it is a message of failure in the sense that it is now literally impossible for the student to reach their current goal: even if they complete every single assignment and every single point of extra credit, they will not reach their goal. But here's the thing: they just need to adjust their goal! It's not the end of the world. So, presto, all they have to do is change their goal and see what that does to all the calculations. Yes, it's like the Canvas what-if feature, but in a way that actually works for my classes (the what-if grading feature in Canvas is a total fail for my classes).

So, for example, here's a student who is struggling at the start of the semester if their goal is to get an A. By Week 5, they are already in a deficit requiring some extra credit to get back on track:

But if they are okay with getting a grade of C (i.e. passing the class for Gen. Ed. credit), they're actually doing really well! Sure, they are missing assignments, but they are still on track to meet their goal of passing:

If they want to go for a grade of B, they are even on track for that as the chart shows:

So, in a dialogue with this student, I could suggest that they think about making their goal to get a B in the class. If they really want/need the A (some of my students are in GPA trouble; I hate the whole idea of a GPA, but it's a fact of college life...), they will have to up their game, going from an average of 20 points per week to 31 points per week. And the chart lets them play with that, adjusting their goal, seeing the results, both in numbers, and also in terms of some positive text labels. ALL the labels are positive: you're doing great and/or you are on track, or you can do some extra credit, or you can adjust your goal. Really, it's all good!

Meaningful. Motivating. That's why these are measures that make sense for my courses. I hope they will be useful to students too, and even if students themselves don't use the spreadsheet initially, I can use it to communicate with anyone who is struggling in order to start a conversation, and then put the chart in their hands so they can play with the numbers to see what happens.

So: fingers crossed! I think this is going to be really helpful to students who are struggling, giving them more control over the whole semester and all their options. I'm excited to see how it goes.

Week 15 Tech Tip: Progress Spreadsheet

So, inspired by the NaNoWriMo stats page, I have created what I hope will be a useful tool for next year's students. Instead of just the static progress chart that I have now, I want to encourage students to use a spreadsheet that they can interact with instead, using the weekly point totals that are easily accessible in Canvas to see how they are doing. This is what I came up with: Canvas Chart.

The idea is that you enter your goal up there in the first row, and then you enter your point totals week by week.

Then, it calculates the following:

total points: which is the same as the total in Canvas

points to goal: you cannot get this in Canvas because it depends on what your goal is, and clueless Canvas cannot let you state your own goal

average points per week so far: which is a way to measure your overall participation; this is a calculation Canvas could do but which it does not do (it's just total points divided by weeks)

future average needed for goal: this is a way to calculate the participation you need every week for the rest of the semester to reach your goal; Canvas could not calculate this even if it wanted to because Canvas doesn't know your goal (the formula is points to goal divided by remaining weeks)

auto-comment: then there is a kind of auto-comment, based on some formulas (I'll say something about how I came up with this system in a separate post, since my goal here is to help people maintain a forward-looking growth mindset):

• great! this is when your future average is less than your average so far; in other words, you can actually participate less in the coming weeks and still reach your goal
• on track: this is when the points to goal are less than or equal to the remaining regular assignments
• do extra: this is when the points to goal exceed the regular assignments remaining, but you can still get to your goal with extra credit
• adjust goal: this is when your points to goal are less than the remaining regular assignments plus all extra credit; in other words, you won't reach your current goal, so you need to put in a new goal

I also added a chart for people who like visuals.

The formulas all have if statements that mean each row's calculations don't activate until you enter points for that week. Here's a sample showing someone drifting into trouble by low participation as the semester begins: they start off "great!" but then drift into just being on-track and already by Week 6 they need to do some extra credit to make up work missed in those opening weeks:

I really hope this will be useful to students next semester. I always wanted to do something like this but wasn't sure what measures would be really useful. Doing NaNoWriMo helped me figure that out!

Week 14 Mindset: What I Learned from NaNoWriMo

I thought I would say a few words here about how the NaNoWriMo website really helped me take on a big writing challenge in November, keeping me on track until I reached my goal. The set-up was very useful and very motivating. I'm a big believer in tracking progress for growth, and that's the emphasis at NaNoWriMo also: forward progress, and watch your writing grow!

When you create a project at the NaNoWriMo site (and you can do other kinds of projects; it doesn't just have to be writing a novel in November), the site creates a stats page that tracks your progress. All you have to do is click on a little + button to update your word count:

There's a nifty graph that shows your project, comparing what it would take writing steady all month long along with your own progress. Since I am a very steady writer, I did not have a lot of ups and downs compared to the daily targets:

I also used a spreadsheet to keep track because the NaNoWriMo graph is pretty unforgiving. It just has the one steady-on track that you either follow or don't. There's not a lot of room for adjusting your goal as you go along (the goal is 50K for the challenge), and there's also not a way to readjust the trajectory chart if you want to give yourself a "reboot" partway through. That was not a problem for me, but if I had gotten way off track, I think I would have found it kind of daunting to be way off the trajectory line.

Anyway, I really felt supported at NaNoWriMo in terms of how it recorded my progress, plus the great community at Twitter too (the community at Twitter was fabulous!). So, that got me thinking about a Tech Tip I could do, creating some kind of progress tool in Excel for these classes! More about that in a separate post.

Week 14: NaNoWriMo DONE

For my Week 14 Famous Last Words, I am celebrating something I did over the holiday break: I finished my #NaNoWriMo novel. I hit 50,000 words while in the Austin airport! That seems appropriate: I have spent the last two and half years flying back and forth to Austin about 10 times a year to see my dad, and I know that airport inside-out. Recently, Delta added some new gates in a terminal extension, and it's actually fantastic for working: lots of table space where you can sit down and actually get work done, with room to have a mouse pad out, plus coffee of course.

So, on Friday coming home, I had about an hour to spare (I had gotten to the airport extra early expecting crowds, but there were none!), so I grabbed a breakfast taco from the wonderful Peached Tortilla, plus a coffee from Ruta Maya, and then I sat myself down and started writing... and before I realized it, I had hit 50,000 words.

WHOO-HOO! The way that works is you keep track of your word count at the NaNoWriMo site, and then when you hit the 50K for the November novel-writing challenge, you get a certificate, plus they decorate your avatar too. I didn't know about the avatar decoration; I thought that was really cool!

Then, when I got home, my husband had this coffee mug ready: that was such a sweet surprise! He ordered it when I started the NaNoWriMo... and hey, he knew that even if I didn't meet the NaNoWriMo challenge, there would be SOME kind of book in my future to celebrate (ha ha, brave man married to a writer!). But the time to celebrate turned out to be now... So, here is my new favorite coffee mug:

And I'll add a picture here of my other favorite coffee mug, also from husband... this one is because I use a fox avatar online. And... because life. :-)

Anyway, I am really proud of getting this book draft done, and I have a couple of weeks to keep working on it before I have to print out a copy and get it published at Lulu to give to my dad as a Christmas present. So, the next time I go back to Austin (which is in just a few weeks), I will have a book in hand to give him for Christmas. I hope he likes it! I sure have had fun writing it. It's reconnected me with so many of my old interests (Sufi teaching tales, plus stories of Aesop himself), along with a dose of India (Birbal and Tenali Raman)... so I am imagining lots of fun related projects in the future too.

Week 13: Famous Last Words

So......... I am done with my Brer Rabbit Storybook, and I am really happy how it has turned out. Plus it means I am almost done with this class; just a few little posts (10 points) over the next few weeks... all the heavy lifting is done.

Here's the "image row" that shows all four stories:

Writing the final story was easier than I thought: it had a very nice structure to follow, with the set-up, the first part of wolf's speech to the animals, the second part of his wolf's speech, and then the conclusion. With the plot all laid out like that, all I had to do was tell what happened and write the dialogue. It even came out right at 1000 words without any difficulty at all (Harris's original was also around 1000 words too). I was also really happy with Mammy-Bammy getting the wolf skin in the end; that tied in with Taily-Po and also with other witch lore and wolf lore too.

If I do write a Brer Rabbit book this summer, I am thinking this might be a good way to do it, finding three or four or five stories that fit together in a kind of group like this, so that the whole book would consist of maybe a dozen or so groups like that, so that the stories inside each group are connected in some way, but not worrying too much about the connections from one group and another. If I were to add one more story to this group, it would be the one about Brer Rabbit and Aunt Nancy (Anansi), with Nancy being the even scarier version of Mammy-Bammy: Brother Rabbit Doesn't Go to See Aunt Nancy.

This is the Storybook that I had planned out in the most detail from the start, and the plan worked out really well. It was maybe less exciting because I was not getting that thrill of surprises like I did with the Hanuman project last time, where I didn't figure out even until the very end that Pirakuan was going to be Hanuman's mother (Hanuman's Victory). But having this all planned out meant that I was able to make really good use of the research options for the Story Lab, doing lots of research so that I felt really confident when I went to work on each story.

And working on the Nasruddin project for NaNoWriMo has really convinced me that I can just set aside this sense of obligation to be doing scholarly work. It's hard to get rid of that feeling, since it's what I am supposedly trained for... but what these stories really need is to be told in ways that will be fun for people to read. What's the point of doing scholarly work on stories that have died? I'd rather have a chance to work on keeping the stories alive than writing commentaries on them after their demise.

So, I'm not sure what's ahead in the coming year (I wish my life were not so full of uncertainty, though that's just the way it is right now with my dad...), but somehow or other there will be a book: Nasruddin might turn into a book, or that book for Johns Hopkins (but the longer I wait to hear back from the editor, the more dubious that seems), and I am already excited to do NaNoWriMo again next fall with who-knows-what as my topic. Maybe that will be a time for Brer Rabbit to rise again! :-)

Week 13: Wikipedia Trail from Nasreddin to the Bari Emirate

Since I am doing my NaNoWriMo project on Nasreddin, I thought I would start there:

Nasreddin. This is a long article because Nasreddin really is a big deal, all over the Middle East, Central Asia, and in South Asia too! It says that the oldest Nasreddin story manuscript dates to the sixteenth century, though of course the stories are older than that. Anyway, that suits my purposes very nicely because I am combining Nasruddin with Birbal and Tenali Raman, both of whom also date to the sixteenth century. Not that I am striving to be historical, but I am still glad that it's not completely random to combine these three trickster figures.

In Arabic, Nasreddin is conflated with a folk hero named Joha or Juha, which led me to the Sicilian version:

Giufà. The conflation of local Sicilian legends with the Arabic legends about Juha probably took place during the period of Islamic rule of Sicily, which is where I went next:

Emirate of Sicily. The emirate, with its capital at Palermo, lasted from 831 (following the first Muslim incursions in 652) until 1091, when Christian Norman mercenaries conquered the last city held by Muslims on the island. Muslims were a majority of the population until the 13th century when they were forced either to convert or to leave in 1240.

And this led me to look up another Italian emirate:

Emirate of Bari. This was a Berber state on the Italian coast. I knew about Muslim Sicily, but this was new to me! It didn't last long, just  847 to 871, and Wikipedia says that was the longest episode of Muslim rule on the Italian mainland.

I also looked at this: Norman-Arab-Byzantine culture, which Wikipedia defines as follows: "the interaction of the Norman, Latin, Arab and Byzantine Greek cultures following the Norman conquest of Sicily and of Norman Africa from 1061 to around 1250." I didn't know anything at all about Norman Africa, so this was really interesting to read about! The article discusses science, the arts, and architecture; here's a church in Palermo built with Gothic walls and Islamic domes: San Giovanni degli Eremiti.

Muslim Arab Musicians 

at Court of Roger II in Sicily

(12th century)

Week 14: Tech Tip... Google Docs Word Count

I know some people like using Word, but I don't; I find Google Docs meets my needs for this class, and I'm thinking about writing up some Google Doc tips for next semester for people who want to learn how to use it (since Microsoft is not going to be free anymore after people graduate...).

So, one of the things I like about Google Docs is that it offers a word count tool that you can leave on while you are typing. So, when you choose Word Count from the tools menu, there's a box you can click to leave it turned on:

Then, the word count shows up down in the lower left-hand corner.

That's very handy if you are trying to meet a minimum or, like me usually, trying to stay under the maximum.

(About NaNoWriMo, I have to say that it is really fun not worrying about the maximum when I write; maybe I will end up editing it way down... but for now: I am writing a LOT every day, and that's the goal!)

Week 13: Growth Mindset / NaNoWriMo Cat

I am having so much fun doing National Novel Writing Month this year (my first time ever to do this!), so I made a NaNoWriMo cat as Cheezburger... you can make your own writing cat with this link: Cheezburger cat with pen and paper.

I am NaNoWriMo cat. 

I fill pages with my words!

I'm past the half-way point, so I am confident that I will reach 50,000 words by the end of the month. There will still be a long way to go before it's a book I'm ready to share, but I will have the first draft ready for my dad as a Christmas present (that was my original goal), and I am now feeling confident that it's going to be an actual book. Hopefully I will have a 50,000 word update when I go to write my famous last words for this class in December. :-)

Meanwhile, write on, people! Write and GROW.

Week 12: Famous Last Words... Fun with Twine

I might manage to do a couple of Wikipedia Trails later today (I really want to learn more about fetishes like the rabbit's foot after reading that great article by Bill Ellis), but just in case I don't get around to that, I thought I should write the Famous Last Words now. On the one hand, this week was awful; I've thrown my back out worse than ever before, so what I thought was going to be this really easy and carefree week has not been that at all (this has been the most weird and stressful semester, what with my dad and all that going on plus getting iritis, and then our cat died, and now this back thing...), but luckily I did lots of creative and fun things, which has got to be the best possible medicine for back and all the rest of it too.

The Nursery Rhyme Maze I made with Twine was a total blast, and I used that new Chapbook style to do it.

I learned so much by doing the rabbit's foot research for my new Storybook story. It's not the best story... but the rabbit's foot is pretty amazing stuff, and the Bill Ellis article showed me how I really can, and should, look at the conjure fetishes and the folktales as interrelated. Here's the new story: The Rabbit's Foot.

And........... NaNoWriMo! I kept up with my word count as of yesterday, and I should have no trouble hitting my word count today since I got up so damn early because my back hurt and I couldn't sleep... so it's just now 2PM which means I can spend the afternoon with Nasruddin and Birbal. One of my funniest discoveries there so far was the Osho (Rajneesh) was a fan of Nasruddin stories, and I downloaded two books of Nasruddin jokes from the Osho site. It's nice to have some good Hindu-Islam synergy going on in the midst of all this madness in Ayodhya right now.

So, I could write more here, but I think I will stop and go write for NaNoWriMo. I'll take a quick look at the Twitter #NaNoWriMo stream to see if I can find a cool graphic to use to end this post...oh yeah: here we go! If I can go write something now, I'll have my 10-day streak for November. Write on! :-)

Week 13 Tech Tip: Twine Style

For a storytelling experiment, I used Twine to create a Nursery Rhyme Maze, and the default black-background style just did not have the right feel. So, I tried out the Chapbook style, and I think it looks perfect. I wrote up a new Tech Tip for people who want to try out the other Twine styles!

Twine is one of the projects I support at Patreon. Chris Klimas has done such a genius job with this project, and he keeps on adding great new features along with great support and documentation too!

Story Lab: Storybook Research

In my last research post I wrote about finding an article by Bill Ellis, so I read that now and took notes; this is the single most useful article I've found for my Brer Rabbit project in general. It has so much good insight into folklore processes (at work in both fetishes and in storytelling), and it also gets at the cultural appropriation that makes working on the Brer Rabbit tradition so tricky: Disney (and others) took the rabbit, and the rabbit's foot got appropriated too!

Here are some notes I took on the article: it's given me so many good ideas and important themes to keep in mind.

Bill Ellis (2002). Why Is a Lucky Rabbit's Foot Lucky? Body Parts as Fetishes. Journal of Folklore Research, 39 (1), 51-84. Here it is online with OU Library proxy.

fetish from West African pidgin fetisso, from Portuguese feitico, where the term referred to veneration of saints' body parts

"the fetish is a physical object shaped to comprehend a spiritual or personal value that would be difficult to grasp otherwise"

"a narrative, like a fetish, may take on some characteristics of a living entity, providing a symbolic means for storytellers to approach and evenmodify the underlying social problem"

"fetish beliefs can be considered the material culture counterpart of a cognitive process that also leads to legend formation"

ELLIS DEFINES FETISH: "the fabrication, acquisition, and use of a material object invested with extraordinary spiritual forces, which thus becomes a metonym for an implied narrative and so a means of gaining control over complex social relationships"

he puts roots of the rabbit foot tradition "in the politically subversive tradition of African American conjure"

"the rabbit's foot can be interpreted as one of many traditions arising from the ambiguous social and political relationship between Black and White culture in the early twentieth century"

in early 20th century rabbit's foot had taken its place beside horseshoe, four-leafed clover and wishbone as iconic lucky charm

has testimony from Hyatt that even whites saw it as black tradition: rabbit must be "caught by a Negro after midnight in a Negro cemetery"

Puckett documented rabbit foot traditions in 1880s in New Orleans, certified for example as: "left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit killed in the full of the moon by a red-headed, cross-eyed nigger at 12 o'clock at night, riding a white mule"

he inventories other gravesite fetish beliefs and practices

he also discusses other animal body parts, esp. witch associations: "these animals are often considered to be a human in another form"

"we see the rabbit's foot as part of a broader agenda of Black folk magic: the use of power objects to help the bearer resist a status quo seen as ethnically bankrupt"

curious anecdote of a conjure bag in Uncle Tom's Cabin!

he has a lot on human body parts, commodification of rabbit's foot in early 20th century, with urbanization too (people couldn't go to rural graveyards to do the deed themselves)

Ellis argues "that the rabbit's foot is a metonymic echo of a ritual event in which an animal's body part is acquired as a substitute for a human body part, one that will invest its owner with enough charisma to challenge -- or maintain -- a disordered power structure"

on marketing: "if the charm is rooted primarily in African American folkmagic, its brisk consumption by Anglo Americans is a sign of its efficacy as a fetish."

intense: he contends it is a substitute lynching! "Perhaps Whites who appropriated and reinterpreted a Black fetish found a culturally accepted way of maintaining their hegemony. Certainly many Anglo borrowing from African Americans followed this pattern"

~ ~ ~

There is lots more I wanted to follow up on here, but I will just note for now that "graveyard rabbit" is definitely a thing: there is an Association of Graveyard Rabbits dedicated to documenting and preserving sacred grounds.

Story Lab: Storybook Research

The next Storybook story I am going to tell involves Brer Rabbit's lucky rabbit foot, so I thought I would do some research on that.

In the story, Brother Rabbit and His Famous Foot, Brer Wolf steals Brer Rabbit's lucky rabbit's foot. In the frame of the story, Uncle Remus has a rabbit's foot, and it falls out of his pocket: "It was the hind foot of a rabbit, and a very large one at that." Uncle Remus is concerned that it might fall in the fire: "Don't let it git in de embers; 'kaze ef dat ar rabbit foot git singe, I'm a goner, sho'!" Uncle Remus then explains that he uses it to ward off ghosts: "dat rabbit foot is fer ter keep off boogers. W'en I hatter run er'n's fer myse'f all times er night, en take nigh cuts thoo de woods, en 'cross by de buryin'-groun', hits monst'us handy fer ter have dat ar rabbit foot." He also explains that it's for good luck: "dish yer rabbit foot 'll gin you good luck."

According to Wikipedia, the rabbit's foot is considered a lucky charm in many different cultures. The article mentions hoodoo in particular, especially a rabbit's foot from a graveyard rabbit. That shows up in J.C. Harris too: A Plantation Witch.

It's possible that some of these beliefs resonate with witches who go abroad as rabbits, so taking the foot of the rabbit is a way to secure the witch's powers (compare a black-cat-bone used as an amulet).

This Scientific American blog brings in the idea of African fetishes: What Makes a Rabbit's Foot Lucky?

The owner of such a token manipulates existing ideology to empower himself. Ellis links the rabbit’s foot lore to African American magical traditions—where the rabbit is a familiar in Anglo traditions, the rabbit is a clever creature in the African tradition of B’rer Rabbit, who consistently employed wit, creativity, and intelligence to manage conflicts:

Bill Ellis (2002). Why Is a Lucky Rabbit's Foot Lucky? Body Parts as Fetishes. Journal of Folklore Research, 39 (1), 51-84. Here it is online with OU Library proxy.

Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Rabbit Foot Blues"

The Rabbit's Foot Company was a long-running minstrel company.

This showed up at the LuckyMojo.com site, ha ha.

Here's another rabbit foot memory from my childhood -- a 1950 roadside advertisement:
On curves ahead
Remember, sonny
That rabbit's foot
Didn't save
The bunny
Burma-Shave

Story (Twine): Nursery Rhyme Maze

This is sort of a story... but it's not exactly a story I wrote, but instead a story I made with Twine: it's a Nursery Rhyme Maze. You can click here to see a full-screen version.

Like in a maze, there is one exit, and there are various ways to get to that exit. You will start at The Lion and the Unicorn. If you are lucky... very lucky... you will exit the maze in a few clicks. There are also a lot of dead-ends, and when you get to a dead-end, you have to start over. And, hey, along the way you'll get to read some fun nursery rhymes! :-)

---

---

The Lion and the Unicorn
illustration by L. Leslie Brooke

If you're curious what the Twine screen looks like, here it is (screenshot). I used the Chapbook style, and the iframe version here in the blog is 450 pixels wide and 450 pixels high. This was the first time I used Chapbook, and it was really nice! You have to use HTML, but it's nothing complicated. I used br tags for the line breaks, and I also bolded the links.

SPOILERS. If you want to get out of the maze, you need to find the garden gate. The dog Blue Bell can take you there, or you can go through Mary Gray's house (there are lots of ways to get to her house!), or you might get some help from buttered cake. :-)

And here are the rhymes:

The Nursery Rhyme Book by Andrew Lang
Robin and Richard were two pretty men
Bessy Bell and Mary Gray
"Hie, hie," says Anthony
Mary had a pretty bird
Daffy-Down-Dilly
In the month of February
The lion and the unicorn were fighting for the crown
If all the world was apple-pie
Come, butter, come
There was a crooked man, and he went a crooked mile
I had a little nut-tree, nothing would it bear
Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy, and Bess
Little Tom Tucker
Three blind mice, see how they run!
Did you see my wife, did you see, did you see
Hush-a-bye, baby, on the tree top
To market, to market, to buy a plum-cake
Rock-a-bye, baby, thy cradle is green
Bat, bat (clap hands)
"Pussy-cat, pussy-cat
See-saw sacradown
Dear, dear! what can the matter be?
As Tommy Snooks and Bessy Brooks
Pussicat, wussicat, with a white foot
Dance to your daddy
Hey! diddle, diddle
Cushy cow, bonny, let down thy milk
As soft as silk, as white as milk
Little Boy Blue, come, blow your horn!
Baa, baa, black sheep

The Real Mother Goose illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright
Donkey, donkey, old and gray
On Saturday night
Hark, hark! the dogs do bark!

The Nursery Rhymes of England illustrated by W. B. Scott
Eggs, butter, bread
Clap hands, clap hands
I had a little dog, and his name was Blue Bell

Week 11: Famous Last Words

So, this is what happens when November starts on a Friday, and a weekend seems full of promise and opportunity... why not start something new...? Why not WRITE A NOVEL, ha ha. And yes, that's what I decided to do: I'm going to give NaNoWriMo a try! Students have done this in the past, and I've always felt kind of jealous. So now: I'm going to do it!

For those of you who don't know, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month, and it takes place every year in November, although the NaNoWriMo.org website supports writing adventures for all kinds of writers all during the year (I follow them at Twitter). The idea is to write 50,000 words in a month, and the website helps you keep track of your word count progress, awards badges as you move along, with encouraging messages and the opportunity to connect with NaNoWriMo events throughout the month.

Now, I'm not a novelist, but I got an idea for writing a book full of stories about Nasruddin (more about Nasruddin at Wikipedia) and Birbal (Birbal at Wikipedia), intertwining them, and even putting Nasruddin and Birbal together in some stories. It's kind of like a giant Storybook project. I've been a fan of Nasruddin and of Birbal for years, so I have heaps of books I can use with stories. I just have to find maybe an hour to write every day. Can I do that? Heck, I'll get up an hour early in the morning if I have to.

So, I got 2000 words done today, and it was totally fun. Of course, my whole day was totally fun; I was really ready for this weekend! Now we'll see if I can put in another good day tomorrow and build some momentum to carry me through next week:

One motivating thought here is that I could print out this book and give it to my dad for Christmas. He's been really ill (he has terminal lung cancer, and he's actually been on hospice care for almost two years now...), but I think he would get a kick out of these stories, and he will be interested to hear about this whole NaNoWriMo thing. I'll tell him about it when I go there for Thanksgiving, and it sure would be cool to be able to get this printed (like at Lulu or some other print-on-demand service) to give him a copy for Christmas.

I'm not ready to share the stories I wrote today, not yet anyway... but maybe for next week's Famous Last Words I'll have something to share; I should be at around 10,000 words or more by then!

And you know, I really needed this. October was pretty much a nightmare, but writing makes me happy, and so do Nasruddin and Birbal. Here's hoping for a WORDY November. :-)

Week 12 Tech Tip: Wikimedia Commons

To go along with the Flickr Tech Tip, I wrote a tip about uploading an image to Wikimedia Commons. They have some very friendly materials to alert people as to what you can, and cannot, upload. It's a bit more elaborate than uploading at Flickr because they prompt you for captions, specific information about the image provenance, etc. For this tip, I uploaded one of the J.A. Shepherd illustrations for a Joel Chandler story: Story of the Deluge. When I retire, I can imagine spending hours and hours uploading book illustrations to Wikimedia; that would be a kind of public service that I would enjoy very much.

And I just noticed that this makes 12 new ethical-ed-tech tips that I added for this semester. Whoo-hoo! That is a nice little collection, and all ready to go for next semester. And I'll pick some other theme to pursue for next semester. It really helped having a focus like this so that I ended up with a nice collection of tips by the time I was done. The Duck-Duck-Go one has been the most popular so far, and I am glad that it is useful to people.

Here's what my Wikimedia Commons page looks like, and this was really fun to do. I've edited Wikipedia article, but I've never uploaded a Wikimedia Commons file before. :-)

Week 11 Tech Tip: Flickr

I wrote up a new Tech Tip about sharing images at Flickr. I'm excited to have this in place because next semester, when people are sharing wonderful images from their travels, I can suggest to them that they share those images at Flickr so others can enjoy and use them too.

For my sample photo, I uploaded something from my travels: it's actually from inside the Atlanta Airport, where they have that fantastic sculpture exhibit on permanent display. Here is the Flickr page I made: Madora by Nicholas Mukomberanwa.

Extra Reading: Lang / Africa B

Here are my notes on the African stories from Andrew Lang's books, Part B:

Hassebu. This is a very satisfying Arabian-Nights-style story. Steere says he found it in an Arabic ms. of the Nights, but it is not in Lane's translation. I would like to find an English translation of a Nights version of this story. I also need to learn more about the Shahmaran!

The Heart of a Monkey. This is the famous story of the monkey and the crocodile, but this time with a shark instead! 

The Heart of a Monkey: The Washerman's Donkey. Then, to teach the shark a lesson, the monkey tells the story of the lion and the donkey and the rabbit, so we get to see a trickster rabbit taking the place of the trickster fox in Aesop!

Makoma. I wish I could find Lang's source for this story because it is really cool! Much of the Internet searching turns up its use in Hellboy! 

Week 12 Story: A Tortoise Tale from Cameroon

This is kind of a story and kind of a story lab I guess (since it's based on reading I did outside of class); it's something I wrote today for an anthology of "parables about education" that a friend of mine online is organizing. I thought it would be a good story to share here too because it features a trickster tortoise from Africa! If you read the stories from the Congo, Nigeria or South Africa, you saw the trickster tortoise there, and he also shows up in the Brer Rabbit stories. Plus, you might have seen other examples of greedy tricksters like in the Anansi stories from West Africa and from Jamaica. I've written two trickster turtle stories here at my blog too: Brer Rabbit and Brer Turtle Run a Race and Brer Rabbit Finds Brer Wolf Under a Rock (with Turtle coming to the rescue!).

As a new turtle contribution, I'm copying here the story I retold about a greedy trickster turtle and his mother. I wrote the story as a criticism of number-crunching in education; I don't think you can use numbers like test scores and grades to measure what people are learning, and I am really worried about what "big data" is doing to education now, surveilling students and teachers in the LMS to collect all the numbers, not just test scores and grades (more about that here if you are curious: Data-Mongering). So, this is a story about how misleading numbers can be, especially when you take them out of context. I am curious what you think!

Be Careful How You Count:

A Tortoise Tale from Cameroon

Tortoise was hungry. He was always hungry.

Tortoise lived with his mother. He would bring food to their house, and Tortoise's mother would cook the food. Then Tortoise would eat the food, and finally his mother would eat the food that was left.

Tortoise was always hungry, and his mother was always hungry too. 

(African spurred tortoise)

One day Tortoise went and fetched home seven baskets of greens. "Cook the greens, Mother!" said Tortoise. "And hurry up please! I am hungry. I am VERY hungry."

(liponda greens)

Mother Tortoise hustled and bustled and soon she brought the cooked greens out from the kitchen. There were now three baskets of greens, and she put them on the table where Tortoise was waiting. 

Tortoise shouted, "Where are the rest of them?" Tortoise then pounded his fist on the table. "I brought home seven baskets of greens. And I told you I was hungry! Bring me the other greens. NOW!"

"What other greens are you talking about, silly boy?" said Mother Tortoise.

Tortoise knew that his mother must have eaten the other four baskets of greens, and that made him angry. They argued back and forth and back and forth until Tortoise finally got so angry that he picked up a stone, hit her on the head, and killed her.

(a stone)

Tortoise then ate the three baskets of greens, and he was still hungry afterwards. "At least she won't be stealing my food any more," he thought to himself. 

The next day Tortoise went and brought home another seven baskets of greens. There was no more mother to cook for him, so Tortoise had to cook the greens himself. He put the seven baskets of greens in the pot, and when they were ready he took them out. 

There were three baskets of greens. 

So Tortoise began to yell at the pot. "You greedy pot!" he shouted. "How dare you eat my greens?"

But then Tortoise thought some more, and he understood what had happened: the cooked greens took up less space than the raw greens.

Tortoise had killed his mother for nothing. 

This made Tortoise feel so bad that he picked up the same stone, hit himself on the head, and died. 

The moral of the story: Not all baskets are the same. Be careful how you count.

~ ~ ~

This story is my retelling of a folktale from Cameroon as found in this book: Tortoise the Trickster and Other Folktales from Cameroon by Loreto Todd, published in 1979.

I added the part about Tortoise getting angry at the pot; the rest of the story is the same as the version in Todd's book, retold in my own words. Here is the moral of the story in the book: "That is why Tortoise died, because he had forgotten that a mother cannot steal from her own child." For my moral, I wanted to make the connection to the dangers of number-crunching in education, especially when people take the data out of context.

About Cameroon: Cameroon is located on the west coast of central Africa; it is sometimes classified as a central African nation, and sometimes as west Africa. You can learn more at Wikipedia.

About Tricksters. The name "trickster" emphasizes intelligence, but tricksters are also notable for being greedy, selfish, and cruel, as you can see in this story.

About Tortoise: There are stories about tortoise the trickster in many African cultures, and enslaved African storytellers brought those stories with them to the United States, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. If you would like to read some African American stories about the trickster turtle, you can find a selection here: African American turtle stories.

About Loreto Todd: Loreto Todd (born in 1942) is a linguist specializing in English pidgins and creoles. You can read more about her work here: Loreto Todd. She collected the stories told in Cameroonian Pidgin English, and then presented them in standard English in this book. It is a wonderful collection of folktales; highly recommended! It's out of print, but there are used copies at ABE and at Amazon. 

Week 10: Famous Last Words

I hadn't really realized how bad things had gotten until I finally got to take it easy this weekend... for the first time in I-can't-remember-when. I do know that this is the first time since back in August I am back to working ahead on this class, which was always my goal but one thing after another after another derailed me every weekend. Now, though, I am back on track being basically a full week ahead again. Which means I am ready to cope with whatever weirdness comes up in these next weeks.

I wrote a new story this week that I was really happy about: the "Judgement of Baboon" is a chain tale that I have been interested in for a long time, and the way it shows up in Bleek and Honey makes the story pretty confusing to read. So I thought about it really hard, and I came up with a telling of the story that I think is true to the original. Bleek had literally put a question mark at the end of the story because he couldn't figure out what was foolish about the baboon's judgment (I suspect he thought the whole story was foolish), so I decided to focus my retelling on that, thinking about it meant to make the baboon a judge in this dispute, and I am really happy with how it turned out: The Baboon's Judgment.

As a result of that story, I also did a Wikipedia Trail that was shattering; I always talk about how you never know what you will learn by following a Wikipedia Trail, but this was intense. It's one of those things where I feel like I should tell everybody about this because everybody has heard about the Nazi Holocaust, but they probably do not know about the Namaqua and Herero Genocide. I had not heard of it, and it's just by chance that the baboon story was a story collected in Namaqualand back in the middle of the 19th century. Just read this paragraph from Wikipedia... a genocide nightmare; this is from the Shark Island Concentration Camp article:

In 1906, research was conducted by the doctor Eugen Fischer on the skulls of dead prisoners and on prisoners with scurvy by Dr. Bofinger. In 2001 a number of these skulls were returned from German institutions to Namibia. The captured women were forced to boil heads of their dead inmates (some of whom may have been their relatives or acquaintances) and scrape remains of their skin and eyes with shards of glass, preparing them for examinations by German universities.

These are Herero prisoners of war, circa 1900; the photo comes from the German Federal Archives for German South West Africa: it is a postcard. Incredible.

So, that was intense to learn about, but I am glad I did, and I have so much more to learn about Africa. This is going to be a learning project that will literally take the rest of my life I suppose. And that's a good thought.

By being a student in Myth-Folklore this semester, I have managed to re-read almost all of the African units in class, making sure that all the story pages have notes (I just have Lang B and the Congo A-B to finish). That means I have added some of what I learned from all the reading this summer to the UnTextbook, so I am really happy about that.

I also figured out today just what I want to do for Indian Epics next semester! Last time I did the class, I read the Thai Ramakien, so that was the focus for all my reading and storytelling, etc. that semester. Since I had a Ramayana focus last time, I've decided to do a Mahabharata focus this time, but I really couldn't figure out how I wanted to do that... and then somehow I had a breakthrough idea this morning: I will do stories from the Aranya Parva. I probably got that idea from Devdutt Pattanaik's Aranyaka book that just came out... at least, that's the only thing I can think of that made me flash on the Mahabharata Aranya Parva as a focus. It's HUGE, which is good: about 600 pages in van Buitenen's translation, so that means it is enough for the whole 12 weeks of reading in class (50 pages of van Buitenen a week is definitely plenty of reading!), and then as "extra" I can also do readings from the old Ganguli translation, Dutt, plus Debroy, Menon, I might even splurge and buy those volumes in the Clay Mahabharata, looking at those sources for the chapters that are of most interest. I am SO EXCITED. As soon as I came up with that idea, I realized it would be a perfect way to spend the semester in terms of the reading, and it will be fun to create a Storybook with my favorite "forest" stories. 

So, I am having a blast with Brer Rabbit this semester... but now I am eager for next semester when I can plunge into the beautiful world of Mahabharata stories too. :-)