Week 11 Famous Last Words: ELECTION!!!

 So after the super-weird super-stress of the past few weeks, what an incredible relief to FINALLY get the Biden news today. With this lovely video too:

America, I’m honored that you have chosen me to lead our great country.

The work ahead of us will be hard, but I promise you this: I will be a President for all Americans — whether you voted for me or not.

I will keep the faith that you have placed in me. pic.twitter.com/moA9qhmjn8

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) November 7, 2020

I got fooled into expecting the blue wave, so it was really stressful to go to bed on Tuesday, and then to get up not knowing... and then not knowing... and more not knowing, with Ann Coulter and Proud Boys on campus this week too. That was grim. Very grim.

So, there was no blue wave, but at least Biden has won, which means we have a community college instructor as First Lady (that is maybe the thing I am happiest about), and of course... Kamala Harris. Elizabeth Warren was my candidate, yes, but a future of Jill Biden and Kamala Harris sounds good to me.

Meanwhile, in the midst of all that uncertainty last week, I decided to do something that I felt very certain about: I resigned my job. 

The past three years have just about done me in: with my dad's illness, and then all the OU administration chaos, and now the pandemic... it's just clear that now is the time. And my boss was so great about all of it, and she even helped to adjust the seat distribution across the three classes in Spring so that it's less lopsided too.

And...... NaNoWriMo started. I should have written about that last weekend, but I just forgot! I'm doing Tiny Tales of the Mahabharata, plus wrapping up the Ramayana stories for that Tiny Tales book also. I've gotten a little off track in the past few days (ugh, too much stress!), but I can get back on track tomorrow, and surely next week is not going to be the rollercoaster of stress like last week. Although it seems like I've been saying that every week for more weeks than I can remember, ha ha.

Week 8 Progress

Looking back, I am really happy with my decision to do both classes. Previously, I used to do one class, alternating each time. That worked well, but of course I was always getting ideas I wanted to try for the OTHER class. This way, I got to write stories relating to both classes, and I think that engagement helped me do a better job participating in the class as a teacher too, since I've been thinking hard BOTH about Myth-Folklore stuff AND about Indian Epics stuff all semester long.

Looking forward, I've got both Storybook projects half-way done with two story pages at each project, so I just need to focus on bringing them to completion, and writing these posts today helped me plan that out.

I'm also excited about doing the anthology. I don't know how many students will be interested in that, and I'm a little worried about managing the graphics since that is something new for me at Pressbooks, but now I can get started on preparing for that, and hopefully I can do a good job of making that happen. There are some Pressbooks tips here, and I think the take-away is that doing the images for print is way more trouble than it's worth... but it looks like there could be an Appendix of images like the ones that Eden has been doing, with the text-as-graphic. If I do it as an Appendix, that can be a separate "item" in the Pressbook, which would make it easy to leave out of the Print-for-PDF export.

Okay, so now I am feeling confident even about that problem. Confident cat is ready for the second half of the semester to begin!

Confident Cat says:

I can do this.

(made with Cheezburger)

Week 8 Reading and Writing

I have had a great time reading this semester, and I've focused all my reading on the India side. Doing both classes at once makes that kind of weird, but it was an easy choice since I wanted/needed to do Ramayana reading for my 100-word Ramayana project. I listened to the audiobook of Devdutt's Sita and I read the book; I had read the book awhile ago, but I was way more in awe of it this time. The way he develops both the narrative structure and the themes is really brilliant, and I used this book as the jumping off point for acquiring different versions of the Ramayana in English to use for a future project with even more Ramayana legends. 

As for writing, I'm really happy with what I've been doing. For the Indian Epics project, I'm working on the 100-word stories, but I decided to do a Twine project for Myth-Folklore, and that's going to work out really nicely since it means working on each of those two projects feels really different.

I also wrote a traditional type of story for Week 2: Pygmalion and the Woman of Wax. I really prefer writing microfiction, but I don't want to get out practice with writing other kinds of stories too.

Going forward, the Ramayana Storybook is working great, and it will be easy to add the Hanuman and Rama pages. For the Myth-Folklore project, I want to do something complicated for the third story, writing an actual game about "outwitting Anansi" where I keep track of the points that someone scores based on their choices. I've never done a Twine game like that with keeping score, so that is something I'll need to plan out. In terms of the calendar, I'll work on the Ramayana project some more in Week 9 and Week 10 to finish that. 

Meanwhile, in Week 10 I'll do the Story Lab and teach myself how to do the Twine variables I'll need to build the game.

Then for Week 11, I'll collect the Anansi games I want to use and storyboard it without writing the Twine versions.

Then in Week 12, I'll turn it into an actual Twine game, learning some additional Twine tips as needed with the Story Lab that week.

Then in Week 13, I'll write up a little appendix for the project about how I used Twine to create the three different games.

With final revisions in Week 14 and Week 15 for each of the two projects. It will all fit really nicely!

Week 7 Famous Last Words: halfway there...

I got ahead on my class project last weekend, so that means there wasn't a lot to do this week, and I'm really glad I'm staying one week head: it's Week 6 right now, but I'm already finishing up Week 7 this morning. I did microfictions as my last writing for Week 7! The pork stew one did not come out so well but I kind of like the mango one: Anansi and the Mangoes.

Anyway, this summer I'm going to make myself a Canva expert; it's all so new to me. For this experiment, I learned how to use the transparency tool, and I'm sure that will come in useful as I keep learning more.

As you can see, I'm working on Anansi stories, and I'm more-or-less on track to publish the Sufi book later this month and the Anansi book in November. I don't know if I'll meet my target for finishing up the Ramayana stories this month so that I can start prepping that book for December 26, but that will be a nice Christmas present to myself if I can get that done.

And I'm telling myself that somehow I will find time to do NaNoWriMo in November with the Mahabharata project. School will be slowing down some, and I did NaNoWriMo last year... so surely I can at least try to do it this year. That would allow me to get the Mahabharata book done on Feb. 14 (Valentine's Day present, ha ha), which is the end of Week 4 of the Spring semester, plenty of time for using it as a Mahabharata reading option. Even more so if OU goes with the plan they floated about canceling Spring Break and starting the semester one week later.

So, I'm going to record Sufi stories and proofread Anansi and write Ramayana stories this weekend. I don't even want to think about OU politics or national politics: that all just makes me mad. 

Stories are better.

I really need a weekend of stories this weekend! Because if I think about politics, I realize we're fucked. I included the "we're-fucked" cat graphic in the announcements for Friday... and how freaky is that: I queued up those announcements before the news even came out about Trump getting the COVID! 

So, I'm going to go jump in at Twitter to do the #UngradingSlowChat for today but when I'm done with that: story-writing all day long. And I'm sure I'll feel better after I do that. :-)

Week 5 Famous Last Words... just counting the weeks

I basically finished all the Week 5 stuff this morning, so that felt good; the next couple of weeks are really busy with all the projects coming in (good busy, for sure, but still busy), so being ahead like this helps. I do classwork on the weekends, so I should be okay... but it feels good to be ahead no matter what.

And I put up the first stories for my Indian Epics Storybook; that was really fun. I included the weird legends about Vedavati, Princess Padma, and the even more weird stories about Sita being connected to Mandodari and Ravana; here's the page: Little Known Legends about Sita. And I also used this great story about Ravana falling in love with Sita's cooking! Larger view.

Then for the microfiction this week, I did a version of The Blue Jackal. I needed to find a better fake social media generator for the Tech Tip instructions, so I found Zeoob and used that to make the image for that story; I like how that generator worked. It's definitely an improvement on the (VERY) old generator that was on the page. Here's what the Zeoob editing screen looks like:

There was so much depressing stuff in the news this week that I don't even want to think about it (like Ruth Bader Ginsburg dying... I mean, it was a miracle she as able to keep going as long as she did, but still: heartbreaking). Although there was a good thing too: I got an invitation to do a course as part of the Digital Pedagogy Lab this summer, which I am very excited about. I hope they will like the proposal I submitted for a microfiction workshop. I also had a great talk with Dr. Chuck about the LMS data privacy thing we are supposed to do for Educause in October which, gulp, just a month from now. I probably need to work on that today to figure out what we'll do next, and also get #UngradingSlowChat ready for October too.

Which is why it is good to be ahead in this class. The next few weeks are going to be busy. Too busy. Let's just hope they are also not full of tragic news and contemptible politics........

For something happy to smile at: I learned about skateboarding dogs from this tweet; I couldn't find this exact same video to put at the Padlet but I found lots of other dogs on skateboards. All so adorable! Here's the one I saw at Twitter:

It’s Friday. Trust trial and error. We move. pic.twitter.com/DwF23tkJIU

— Archiebald Browne ッ (@archiebaldmoses) September 18, 2020

Week 4: Reading B / Ramayana

I'm carrying on reading Devdutt Pattanaik's Ramayana essays at his website, looking for stories beyond Valmiki's Ramayana that I might use.

Fake news: Was Sita the first victim? This is mostly about Valmiki, but the Uttara Kanda, which is controversial and rejected by some. I thought this moon symbolism was intriguing: "Though he belongs to the Suryavansh lineage, the solar dynasty, his name contains the word, Chandra or moon, to remind one — as per one folk tale – how his nobility gets eclipsed by the moon in the way he treats Sita." In Rama's defense, Pattanaik notes: "Ram never remarries! Although he is a king and is obliged to marry to perform royal rituals and produce royal heirs. This does indicate his absolute commitment for Sita." Hence, the famous "double" that he uses for Sita, the golden statue: "By placing next to him Sita’s golden image, gold being the symbol of purity, he establishes to the world that she is chaste in mind and spirit and, as far as he is concerned, she is pure."

Brahmins who rejected Ram. This is about Rama's brahma-hatya, the killing of a brahmin when he killed Ravana: "Ram had to do penance to wash away the stigma of brahma-hatya-paap before he sat on the throne of Ayodhya. Many pilgrim spots in India, such as Rameshwaram in the south and Rishikesh in the North, are associated with the penance of Ram." But some Ayodhya brahmins still rejected him and because Sarayupaareen brahmins, brahmins living on the other side of the Sarayu River... or else they are there as punishment for refusing to participate in the rituals that would cleanse Rama. Pattanaik points out that Rama is not alone: "God repeatedly kills brahmins: Ram kills Ravana, Krishna oversees the killing of Drona, Shiva beheads Daksha and Brahma." This is when those brahmins do not live up to their sacred duty; their caste is not enough. This comment about Shiva is fascinating: "Shiva is cleansed of brahma-hatya-paap in Kashi, which is why Kashi is such a popular pilgrim spot, but he remains a defiant god, choosing crematoriums to the sacrificial halls of brahmins."

Lustful Intentions. This also focuses on Valmiki's Ramayana, but a controversial moment, when Sita accuses Lakshmana of wanting to get rid of Rama so that he could have her. Commentators have used this to blame Sita, showing it as an example of her being irrational and thus to blame for her abduction: "One can’t help but wonder if this is the poet’s attempt to make her, rather than any oversight on the part of the brothers, responsible for her abduction. If only she had some faith in Laxman… If only she had not let her anxiety churn out such vile accusations…" Later, when they find the jewelry, Lakshmana insists that he recognizes only the anklets not the earrings, because he always looked down and saw only her feet, never her face. The story later goes to extremes to emphasize Sita's chastity: "A pure woman, a chaste woman, a woman who desires no one else but her husband is known as a Sati in the Hindu mythological world. This Sati is supposed to have magical powers, which includes her ability to withstand the heat of fire." Was Rama joking or serious when he said Shurpanakha should try Lakshmana? I never thought about that! And check out this great Mandodari legend: "Ravan’s wife, Mandodari, is considered a Sati, a holy woman, who remained chaste despite her demon-husband’s many shortcomings. In one folk version of the epic, one of Ravan’s chaste wife (Mandodari?) does looks upon Hanuman and as a result Ravan is no longer protected by the power of her chastity. This enables Ram to kill Ravan." And I need to find a citation for this legend of Draupadi and the fire (is it in the MB?): "Then of course there is Draupadi who is shared between the five Pandav brothers and not wanting to making anyone jealous goes to each brother one year at a time, passing through fire to ‘purify’ herself when the one year is over so she is a ‘virgin’ for the next husband." And I need to use this Punjabi folktale later for the Mahabharata book: "In Punjab there is a folktale that the Pandav brothers were expected to leave their footwear outside Draupadi’s bedchamber to indicate their presence inside. Once a dog stole Yudhishtira’s footwear and Arjun entered the bedroom embarrassing his wife and his brother. A furious Draupadi cursed the dog that henceforth he would copulate it public and be shamed before the world." ... this is a really useful essay; I need to bookmark this one to share with the class. Here is Devdutt's artwork for it showing Sita and Lakshmana:

Lakshman’s wife goes to sleep. Of course the Urmila-Nidra is a story I have to include! He includes a South Indian versions where Lakshmana must immediately go to sleep when they all return to Ayodhya so that Urmila can awaken. Here is Devdutt's art again:

This was Ravan too.  More about brahma-hatya: "on the hills of Rishikesh or in the temple of Rameshwaram, one hears the tale of how Ram atoned for the sin of killing Ravan." I never thought about it like this, but Ravana was Rama's guru: "Ram smiled, placed his bow on the ground and walked to where Ravan lay. Lakshman watched in astonishment as his divine brother knelt at Ravan’s feet. With palms joined, with extreme humility, Ram said, “Lord of Lanka, you abducted my wife, a terrible crime for which I have been forced to punish you. Now, you are no more my enemy. I bow to you and request you to share your wisdom with me. Please do that for if you die without doing so, all your wisdom will be lost forever to the world.”" (The story goes on at the article.) Even Valmiki notes Ravana's devotion to Shiva, and other legends develop it further: Rudra-Stotra, Rudra-Veena, Ravana carrying Kailash. Devdutt claims that Valmiki emphasizes this devotion only to further elaborate Ravana's hypocrisy and failure to live up to his potential: "Deluded, he gives only lip-service to Shiva. This pretender is therefore killed by Ram, who like Shiva, is another form of God."

Week 4: Reading A / Ramayana

 I'm carrying on with reading Devdutt Pattanaik's Ramayana essays and taking notes on them:

Ramayana when it Rains. This is about a 16th-century Malayalam Adhyatma Ramayana by Thunchaththu Ramanujan Ezhuthachan read during the month of Karkidakam during the rains. It's "Ramayana Month." This Ramayana features the Maya Sita! About the author, Ezhuthachan: " in his past life he was a gandharva who witnessed the Mahabharata war." There are more myths and legends at Wikipedia.

Unlimited Choice. Here Devdutt lists various legends not in Valmiki: the Urmila Nidra, the story of Sulochana, the Lakshmana-Rekha, and from the Mahabharata's Ramopakhyana: "Brahma tells a Gandharvi, Dundhubi, to be born as Manthara, “poison the mind of Kaikeyi so that Rama goes to the forest and kills Ravana”." He discusses the Jataka version, and also the version recently found in Kolkata (in the Vanhi Purana), where there is no sense of Rama-as-god. I definitely need to do the Hijra story:

The Hijra community has its own oral Ramayana. They say when Rama returned from Lanka, he found a group of hijras outside Ayodhya waiting for him. When questioned as to why they were living outside the city, they said, ‘While going, you told the men and women of Ayodhya who wanted to follow you to the forest to return home. But you said nothing to us hijras, who are neither men nor women. So we are waiting here for you, for your instructions, and maybe you will take us home with you.’ 

Ram and the Rooster. In stories from Odia, Rama learns about Sita's aduction from other birds. In Upendra Bhanja’s Baidehisa Bilasa and Ananga Narendra’s Ramlila, a rooster tells Rama about Ravana abducting Sita. Rama wants to give him a golden crown, but the rooster says it's bad enough to be chased for his meat; gold would be worse. He gets a crown of skin instead. In Balarama Das’s Dandi Ramayana, the rooster sarcastically asks for a crown (and Rama, mad at the mountains, strips them of their crown of trees); the rooster realizes immortality is what he really wants, so he runs after Rama, but it's too late; Rama is already gone. Another story has a crane: Sita's tears from from the sky and turned its feathers white: "Ram blesses the male crane that during the four months of the rainy season the female crane will feed it; he will have to do no work. The male crane feels everyone will make fun of him for eating his wife’s leftovers but Ram assures him that just as Sita is equal to Ram so is every wife equal to her husband and so eating her leftovers is nothing to be ashamed of."  In the Assamese Ramayana, a gander says Sita left Rama because she was bored in the forest; Rama gets angry, grabs the gander, which stretches its neck.

Ram and Rain. This is a piece about Tulsidas's Ramayana and the symbolism of the rain during the rainy season in Kishkinda.

How different are the Jain Ramayana and Jain Mahabharata from Hindu narrations? I'll want to come back to this one for the Mahabharata also. There are some points here that are more intriguing than others; here are the ones I want to learn more about:
"Sita was the daughter of Ravana and Mandodari who was found and raised by Janaka"
"Sita has a twin-brother, Bhamandala, who is abducted as an infant, and when he grows up becomes a king who meets, falls in love and tries to abduct Sita, but then turns into a monk when he realises she is his sister"
"Ram goes into forest exile as he feels sorry for Kaikeyi whose son wants to become a monk. With Ram leaving the palace, Bharat is forced to stay back and take care of the city and his mother"
Ravana "had a necklace with nine pearls that reflected his head nine times giving the impression he had ten heads"
"Lakshman kills Ravana as Ram prefers non-violence"
"When Sita steps into the fire to prove her chastity, the fire turns into a lake and she becomes a Jain monk" (wow!)

And in honor of that long-necked gander (NeedPix):

Storybook Plan: Beyond the Ramayana

My plan is a simple one: I want to do a collection of 100-word Ramayana stories, focusing on stories that are not in the Valmiki Ramayana. There are LOTS of these stories, and I've been collecting them for my Ramayana project at 100Words. Plus I already have some that I can use. I'll organize them by character, so here are some ones to keep in mind going forward:

Rama: Hanuman Seeks Rama's Ring, Baby Rama's Cosmic Form, Hanuman and the Kite, Rama and Hanuman in the Orchard, Rama and Ravana's Mother, Rama and the Devoted Crow, Rama and the Frog, Will Rama Renounce the World? ... plus Rama and the squirrel, 

Sita: Sita in the Kitchen... plus Lakshmana-Rekha, Maya-Sita, Sita lifts the bow

Hanuman: The Ramayanas of Valmiki and Hanuman, Hanuman and Surya, Shiva and the Dancing Monkey plus so much from Ramakien, etc.

Ravana: Ravana Rebukes Mandodari, Shiva and Nandi on Mount Kailash, Ravana and Ganesha... plus the veena, etc.

There are going to be so many more than I can even use! I'm looking forward to finding images to use with them; I can use some from the blog, like this one for Hanuman and Surya:

(Hanuman Langur monkey)

Comment Wall: Beyond the Ramayana

 Thank you in advance for your feedback!

Beyond the Ramayana
Lesser Known Folktales and Legends of
Rama, Sita, Hanuman, and Ravana

Week 3 Famous Last Words: Too. Much. Stress.

I was feeling pretty stressed and exhausted at the end of this week, and I have so much paperwork to take care of (there is finally a death certificate for my dad; it took over three weeks for that to get processed; long story)... but I decided to take today, Saturday, and just do some stuff for this class, and it was so soothing... I wrote about Valmiki for Indian Epics, and I did a Sufi microfiction for Myth-Folklore. I've never tried to do both classes at once before, but I think it's going to work fine, and I wrote up a plan for how I can do two projects and make that work also. I'll get to start on those projects next weekend, and that will feel really good too.

I hope that students in these classes will get that same sense of relief. For me, when I am feeling stressed and frustrated (which is pretty much all the time right now), being able to create something, to write a new story or create a new graphic, even just something small, makes me feel so much better. It's like when there are so many forces trying to crush the human spirit and even destroy human life, one way we can fight back is by using our powers of imagination and creativity to assert ourselves in the world, to say WE ARE HERE. This is our world, and you cannot take it away from us.

I also registered for my absentee ballot. That felt good too.

And probably my best feel-good moment of the week was this: at Twitter, I learned that someone used the Tiny Tales of India book in a podcast: Vidhi's Bollywood Jukebox. That was so amazing! She had heard about the book via Joel Veena, a musician (Indian slide guitar! wow!) whom I learned about from his collaboration with Maati Baani, and I learned about Maati Baani years ago from an online friend in Europe. So there it is: the beautiful power of the Internet to connect people together so that we can share and enjoy each other's creations across distances of time and space. Here's the podcast; I listened to the first half yesterday, and now I am going to just relax and enjoy the second half. Yay stories! Yay music!

Hey @OnlineMythIndia, check out the link to my latest radio show in which I read out stories from your book. https://t.co/JyJVr5QWW3
Thank you for writing these tiny tales ❤️ and thank you for recommending them @Joel_Veena

— Vidhi (@vidhiism) September 4, 2020

Week 3 Story: Legends of Valmiki

Author's Note. The oldest Sanskrit version of the Ramayana is attributed to the poet Valmiki, and he appears as a character in the story too (much like Vyasa, composer of the Mahabharata, also appears in that epic story). In addition to the events connected with Valmiki in the Ramayana, there are also legends about him. So, for this page, I decided to retell in 100-word form some of the stories about the poet Valmiki: one is from Narayan's Ramayana, and the others come from different sources. I was intrigued to see how Narada recurs from story to story! You can read more about both Valmiki and Narada at Wikipedia. I am curious what you think; my goal is to write a Ramayana composed all of 100-word episodes like this. :-)

~ ~ ~

Ratnakar the Robber

Ratnakar was a robber, supporting his family by theft and murder.

One day, Ratnakar had robbed a man and was about to kill him. 

"Stop!" said the man, who was the sage Narada in disguise. "Would your wife and children approve of this wicked deed?"

Ratnakar was surprised by this question and went to question his family.

"I support our family by robbery and murder," he told them. "Do you approve?"

"The crime is yours, not mine," said his wife.

Ratnakar's children said the same.

Ratnakar returned and set the man free, and then he renounced his life of crime.

~ ~ ~

Ratnakar Becomes Valmiki

After Ratnakar renounced his life of crime, he went into the depths of the forest to live a hermit's life. 

As he sat there, unmoving, deep in meditation, ants built an anthill around him. The anthill, "valmik"in Sanskrit, became his home. Plants wrapped their tendrils around him, and birds nested in his matted hair and beard. 

Meanwhile, he thought only of Brahman, the Cosmic Reality. "All is Brahman, all is God. All this Universe is Brahman, all that live and move and die." 

Years later, he awoke, enlightened, and emerged from the anthill.

That is how Ratnakar became Valmiki.

(Valmiki in the anthill)

~ ~ ~

Valmiki Becomes a Poet

Two cranes, devoted to one another, lived by a river near the sage Valmiki's hermitage.
One day as Valmiki watched the couple mating, a hunter shot an arrow from the bushes. One of the cranes fell to the ground, dead, and his mate screamed in grief as she gazed at her beloved's blood-spattered corpse.
In anger and sorrow for the birds, Valmiki cursed the hunter in verse:
O Hunter, because you killed one of these birds
In the midst of their love, you will be infamous forever.
This was the first poem in the world, and Valmiki the first poet.

(krauncha birds)

~ ~ ~

Valmiki Learns of Rama from Narada

The sage Narada once came to visit the sage Valmiki.

"I have an important question to ask you," said Valmiki.

"Ask!" replied Narada.

"Tell me who is the perfect man!" Valmiki said. "What man possesses strength and a sense of duty? Someone who is truthful and steadfast in his vows? Someone who is compassionate and wise, handsome and powerful, free from anger and envy but fearsome when he rouses to righteousness?"

"That rare person is Rama," replied Narada. "He was born in the lineage of Ikshvaku, the son of King Dasharatha..."

And Narada then told Valmiki the story of Rama.

~ ~ ~

The Ramayanas of Valmiki and Hanuman

Valmiki finally finished his Ramayana.

The goddesses and gods all praised his poem; Valmiki was proud.

But then Narada said, "Hanuman's is better."

Valmiki stared in disbelief.

"Go read it yourself! He lives in a banana orchard in the Himalayas, and he wrote his Ramayana on the banana-tree leaves."

Valmiki climbed the mountains to reach Hanuman's orchard, and there he read Hanuman's Ramayana on the leaves. 

"Hanuman's is better," Valmiki admitted, weeping.

Then Hanuman appeared. "Why are you weeping?" he asked.

Valmiki explained.

Hanuman grabbed the leaves and swallowed them.

"Now your Ramayana is the best," Hanuman told Valmiki, smiling.

~ ~ ~

Bibliography.

Ratnakar the Robber and Ratnakar Becomes Valmiki. Both of these stories appear in "Ratnakar, the Robber-Chief" by Shoshona Devi, in her book Indian Fables and Folklore. OpIndia has an interesting piece on this legend: Repeating this popular story about Maharishi Valmiki can land you in jail. The words on which Valmiki meditates come from the Chandogya Upanishad. In some versions Ratnakar is converted by Narada, in other versions by different holy men. There is also a variant where he chants "Ma Ra" which morphs into the chant "Rama" over time.

Valmiki Becomes a Poet. This is from the Bala Kanda of Valmiki's Ramayana. Here is a link to the Sanskrit of the verses that Valmiki spoke to the hunter; there's even audio you can listen to.

Valmiki Learns of Rama from Narada. This story is inspired by the version in the preface to The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version by R. K. Narayan.

The Ramayanas of Valmiki and Hanuman. I used the legend as told in Hanuman's Ramayan by Devdutt Pattanaik, with illustrations by Nancy Raj. Most versions have Hanuman writing his Ramayana into stones which he smashes or throws into the ocean in order to please Valmiki, but I like this version with the banana-tree leaves.

Week 3: Reading A / Ramayana

When doing this course as a student, I always have to figure out how to do the reading, since I've read both Narayan and the PDE options for the Ramayana. Last time I did the class, I focused on the Uttara Kanda, and the year before that I read the Thai Ramakien, etc.

This semester, I've decided it might be really useful to systematically explore Devdutt Pattanaik's archive of essays online at his site, Devdutt.com, and write about the Ramayana materials there (and then I can do the same for the Mahabharata materials and the Krishna materials later). Devdutt always collects so many great legends from beyond the Sanskrit versions of the epics, that's what I want to summarize and link to in my reading posts this semester.

So, I'll start with this link, and just see what I find! I'll comment on the articles in the order that I find them in the Google search: Ramayana site:devdutt.com

How do you tell a story like the Ramayana?

I find the idea that Valmiki might have written the Ramayana as a counter-Buddhist narrative: "Buddhism anchored itself on the narrative of a prince who walks away from family responsibilities to become a sage, while Ramayana speaks of a prince who is forced to leave his home to uphold family responsibility..."

I'm also impressed by this double move in response to Islam: the rise of the book AND the rise of Rama-as-God: "In these works, Ram is not just avatar of God; he is God..."

Here are some of the stories that take shape during this time; any one of these would make a good story to write about this week: "Lakshman-rekha, Lakshman’s wife Urmila, Shabari’s berries, Ratnakar’s transformation into Valmiki, Sita probably being Ravana’s daughter, Sita probably being a form of Kali, Hanuman being a form of Shiva, pilgrim spots associated with the Ramayana, Shiva being the true fountainhead of the tale that is passed on to Valmiki..."

And I really like how at the end here, Devdutt gives a sense of what he is trying to do when he tells Ramayana stories: "You try to show how Ramayana is not about an ideal king/hero/God, but is also about a wise queen/heroine/Goddess. It is not so much an exemplary tale as it is a cautionary one, about the burden of rules, and its toll on the love of a boy called Ram for a girl called Sita."

Bridging the many interpretations of the Ramayana across Southeast Asia and India: Buddhism.

This piece starts out with Rama in Thailand! quote "In those days, long before British Orientalists and the colonial divide-and-rule policy, no one distinguished between Buddhism and Hinduism. Ram was as much a hero for Buddhists of Southeast Asia as he was for the Hindus of South Asia." Including that iconic idea of Hanuman as the bridge, just as in the jataka! YES! "We see Hanuman stretching himself, from the edge of a broken bridge to the shores of Lanka, enabling Ram on his horse-driven chariot and Ram’s grand monkey army to cross the sea effortlessly. This story is not found in the Ramayana that Indians are familiar with. And it vaguely reminds us of the Jataka story in which monkeys escaped the king’s hunters by running across the back of the monkey-king who stretched himself between two trees." And I love this idea of the Indian ships' sails being the backdrop of the puppet theater tradition: "the ship’s cloth sails illuminated by lamps inspired the storytellers to create the art of shadow leather puppet theatre, which explains why shadow puppetry thrived along the Coromandel sea coasts and across most of Southeast Asia, as Ravan-chhaya in Odisha and Wayang in Indonesia." Devdutt mentions the stories of Suvarnamaccha and Benkaya too! Reading all this is really making me way to reread the Ramakien... I wish there were accessible English versions of Kakawin Ramayana and Hikayat Seri Rama, and I am very grateful to scholars like Devdutt who share information, even just general observations, about the Ramayanas of South Asia.

(I'm skipping the Ramayana-Mahabharata historical dating one to do later with the Mahabharata items)

Hanuman’s Ramayana.

I love this story, so maybe it is one I will retell for this week! Valmiki finishes his Ramayana, but then Narada tells Valmiki that Hanuman composed a Ramayana. There is not a lot of detail here at Devdutt's blog post, but I actually have this book on my bookshelf! Hanuman's Ramayana by Devdutt Pattanaik. So maybe for my B reading this week, I will read this book, write notes, and use that for this week's story.

Famous Last Words: Week 2... a lot can happen in 10 days

It felt really weird to see that my last post here was just 10 days ago because it feels like forever. So much happened. I added a story here on Thursday of Week 0 (early start to the classes), and that same night my father died. It was expected... but still: it was not expected at that moment; no one knew when the end would come and when I would get that phone call. But it was absolutely and completely peaceful, and also a hospice miracle. He was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer in October of 2017, and the oncologist did radiation therapy to reduce the tumor. They called it "palliative radiation," but it just about killed him; he went on hospice in January of 2018, and they gave him just a week or two to live.

But instead: he lived for another two and a half years. What was killing him, it turned out, was not the radiation (although that had really weakened him) or even the cancer... what was killing him was malnutrition, dehydration, and loneliness (he had been alone at home since my mother died in 2015).

So, thanks to Hospice, he managed to make his exit while being at home (he was not hospitalized even once during this whole ordeal), and without any pain either (which is definitely miraculous). This past Wednesday, August 26, would have been his 93rd birthday.

Anyway, it means the start of this school year is even more not-normal than usual. I feel really grateful that I have classes to distract me. There's a ton of paperwork and practical stuff to take care of, but all of that is going to be slow because of COVID. Yep. He died in Austin, and the funeral home explained that COVID has caused such a backlog that I might not get the death certificate for weeks. The lawyer said the same: all the court proceedings related to estate probate are backed up so that this is all going to take way longer than usual. 

And now, I thought I'd say something here about how this all relates to this class. 

For Christmas last year, I wanted to give him a nice present but I really couldn't think of anything to get him... so I wrote him a book! I used National Novel-Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) to write a book that I published at Lulu and took to him at Christmas. He loves jokes, so I made a collection of Nasruddin and Birbal stories for him; they are folktales that have a lot in common with jokes. Here's that book: Witty Tales of Nasruddin and Birbal.

Some of the stories were really short, and some were longer (a page or maybe two pages). By that point, he was getting confused, and reading the longer stories was hard for him, but he loves to read (and to write; he published his last book when he was 90! Science and Sociology), and the very short stories worked great. So I bought him some books of "drabbles" (100-word stories): mystery, science fiction, horror. I hadn't even realized how popular 100-word stories are! He really liked those: perfect for his attention span.

I also tried writing my own 100-word stories, and it was so much fun! My goal was to make a book of 100-word stories for my dad's birthday since he liked the Christmas present so much. Plus I just loved writing these tiny stories; I've never found a genre of writing that suited me so well.

Then the pandemic came, and I couldn't go to Austin anymore. I used to go to Austin every month or so, but for Spring Break, his hospice nurse told me it was too dangerous to come; I blogged about that here.

So, since I couldn't go to Austin anymore, I needed some way to connect with my dad at a distance. He's really deaf, which meant phone calls didn't work. So I started texting jokes every day to his caregivers, and they would show him the jokes on their phones, and I started writing LOTS of these 100-word stories. My goal was to create a book of 100-word stories every month during the summer (the last one being for his birthday in August).

So, that is what I did! The first one was the Nasruddin book; here's a picture his caregiver sent to me when he got that one back in June.

The very last one arrived about a week before he died. He was staying mostly in bed at that point, but he told his caregiver that he wanted to get out of bed and get dressed and go sit in his reading chair so she could take a picture to send to me of him with the book. So she sent me this picture; that's him with the Teaching Guide book that came at the end after the Nasruddin, India, and Aesop books.

So, that's the last picture I have of my dad, and it makes me feel really happy that we were connected through the summer books that I wrote for him. 

Both he and my mother loved to read, and they encouraged my love of books and reading in every way, and that has in turn defined my life. I'm grateful to both of them for that; a love of books and reading is probably the most important gift that they gave to me.

This turned out to be a longer post than I expected, but I felt like trying to write all this down... and now you can see how the 100-word story I wrote for my previous post at this blog is connected to my real life too (even though it took way more than 100 words to explain it...).

Topic Brainstorm: Indian Epics F20

I am really torn about what kind of focus to choose for a Storybook! Last year I did Ramayana microfiction, and the year before that I did Hanuman in the Thai Ramayana... so I'm thinking I should do something not Ramayana-related, but I'm really not sure. Anyway, here are the four ideas that really come to mind:

Hanuman Beyond-the-Ramayana. Yes, I never get tired of stories about Hanuman. There are lots of stories about Hanuman that are not part of the Valmiki Ramayana, so I was thinking it might be cool to do a project that focused exclusively on those Hanuman stories that are not in the Ramayana. I would rely on Lutgendorf's book for that. (These stories could easily come from my Hanuman microfiction project.)

Women of the Mahabharata. This is really appealing to me: there are so many great women characters, and in the same way that Chitra Divakaruni told the whole Mahabharata from Draupadi's point of view, I wonder if I could create a Storybook that gives a sense of the overall arc of the Mahabharata using just women characters. (These stories could easily come from my Mahabharata microfiction project.) I know I would want to write about Amba! I did a good index of the Ganguli Mahabharata I can use to try to stay organized, plus there's Macfie's index.

Tales of Krishna. I know that is kind of vague, but I'm going to be working on Krishna microfiction anyway, and there is always room for more Krishna stories in this class. In fact, that would be a big advantage of doing a Krishna project (I want to work my way through the Bhagavata Purana portions related to Krishna, or maybe the Harivamsha), making people more interested in Krishna so that by the time we get around to the Krishna weeks in class, people might be intrigued by that.

Tales of Ganesha. I included some Ganesha stories in the Tiny Tales of India book, and I wrote a fair number of Ganesha microfictions last semester... I could turn that into a cool Ganesha project. For that one, I might put a few microfictions on the page, and then tell one more story in more detail. In fact, that might be a cool approach for any kind of microfiction project, choosing four stories that interconnect somehow, and telling one of those stories in more detail!

(Valampuri Ganesha)

Time Strategies

Based on this summer, I know I'm going to have trouble managing my time this Fall. One of the main decisions I need to make is to LIMIT the time I spend reading news.

During the summer, it made sense to keep up with the news: COVID news, news about OU's Fall semester plans, etc. I wanted to be a well-informed participant in those discussions (even though, in the end, I don't think the OU administration really listened to what faculty, staff, or students were saying).

Now, though, the semester has started, and I really want to focus my time and efforts on making it a good semester in these classes. I built up a really good set of workflow/time strategies for my writing this summer, and now I hope I can continue that into the Fall.

My goal is going to be to spend one hour every day doing story-writing for the classes. I might make it my first thing to do in the morning... and, if that is not working out, then I might try getting up an hour earlier. Not my favorite thing to do, but it need be, I can do that.

Also, I didn't do any new reading for this assignment, but I'm going to bookmark some items in my Twitter feed, perhaps worth using? I'll ponder that later (I still haven't got a really good content management strategy for Twitter stuff lately; I need to do that!)

• 3 Reasons Students Procrastinate—and How to Help Them Stop
• Beat Procrastination Once and For All
• Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control)
• Procrastination Isn't a Time Management Problem, It's an Emotional Problem
• How to win the emotional battle of procrastination
• Inquire: Are We Born Procrastinators?
• Can Procrastination Be a Good Thing? (PBS video)

And here's a fun one from Debbie Ridpath-Ohi:

And this is also from Debbie: Just jump in and start writing! :-)

Technology Thoughts for the Fall

For this post, I'm taking a minute to look through the Tech Tips to figure out some thing I can/should/must do as the semester gets started. I never get around to doing everything I want to do there, but here are some quick thoughts:

• remove NEW labels from last semester's new tips
• MUST update the Blogger tips for the new interface
• update Twine to include the amazing pandemic twines
• more Canva tips? (use ungrading book quotes maybe?)
• do some more advance Google Sites tips
• maybe find some writing space with word counter (NaNoWriMo?)
• write up a Pressbooks section!
• more SoundCloud tips!

I really hope some students will want to join in on a book publishing experience with Pressbooks. I'll start weaving that into the class with the Story assignment in Week 2 (encouraging people to try 3 100-word stories if they want, for example, or 100- and 200- to get a sense of the difference in length), and then with the Microfictions option... plus I need to remember to update the Story Lab to emphasize that as an option too.

SO GLAD that I found Pressbooks. I hope it will help make this a better semester in this class, despite all the pandemic stress.

Assignments for Fall 2020... including something new

For this assignment, I'm not writing from a student perspective but from a teacher perspective, thinking about changes for this semester. I'm pretty happy with the assignment flow in the class, but I decided to tinker with the extra credit to reorganize it a bit, making it more clear and also making room for something new this semester. Right now the class works pretty much through the individual spaces, but I want to try to create a group space for sharing videos and graphics (I'll use a Padlet), so there's a new extra credit option for that.

So, here's how the extra credit array will look this semester:

Extra Reading OR Comments. [no change, but now either/or]
Extra Writing: Microfictions. [which will contain the old biofiction; I need to rework this whole area.]
Wikipedia Trail. [no change]
Tech Tip. [need to add/delete/update tips]
Mindset OR H.E.A.R.T. [I need to revise the instructions for this combination.]
Check-in and Connect. [new; see below]
Famous Last Words. [no change]
Back-up and Review. [no change]

And here are the things I need to do for the new Check-In/Connection item:

1. Create a Google Form with a stress check, maybe on a scale of 1 to 6: things are great, things are good, things are okay, some stress, a lot of stress, too much stress! I created that form for this assignment. With cats. :-)

2. Create a Padlet (I can repurpose that music one from last Spring), put it in Canvas, and write up some tips on adding graphics to Padlet and adding music videos.

3. Write up an instructions page for this extra credit option.

4. Make sure the Declarations and points all match up in Canvas by swapping out the HEART html and image file.

5. Update all the Weekly pages with the new array.

I might play with this some more, but I was thinking this could be something to make the stress check form more fun:

Here's the form:

Growth Mindset and the Power of P/NP

For the growth mindset post this semester, I want to write about something that happened last Spring, when OU allowed students to choose P/NP grading.

I thought that was GREAT, and I participated very actively in a movement at Twitter with the hashtag #PassFailNation to promote the adoption of P/NP grading at schools everywhere. Some schools even got rid of letter grading completely (a list of those schools if you are curious), although most schools took the route OU did: teachers recorded letter grades as usual, and then students had the option to transfer that to a P/NP option.

As a teacher, I can definitely see the value of having a threshold that constitutes passing a class for credit. There are some specific things that you must do and/or specific things that you must learn. You do/learn those things, and then you have passed the class, and that shows up on your transcript. That makes perfect sense, and it's easy to explain. If OU wanted me to create a single paragraph description of what it means to "pass" this class, I could do that, and that paragraph could even be included as part of the transcript. That paragraph would not show everything that a student did/learned in the class, but it would explain what they did in order to pass the class. Which is useful to know!

But A-B-C-D is just ridiculous. That doesn't tell anybody anything specific about what a student did; you cannot really conclude anything for certain based on looking at those letters on a transcript. It's just an arbitrary rating (usually based on averaging test scores, ugh) that then allows the university to rank students against each other. It's meaningless, and yet it dominates most students' lives and occupies a huge part of their intellectual attention and emotional energy throughout all the years of school. (And it's no fun for teachers either.)

Grades are all about rating and ranking and avoiding mistakes at all costs; that, in short, is why grades are not a good way to promote growth and real learning. P/NP works better: it allows the university to carry out the bureaucratic business of awarding credit for courses without getting in the way of growth and learning the way that grades do.

So, OU has not announced whether it will offer the P/NP option again this semester, but I hope that they will. Even better: I wish they would adopt P/NP grading for all Gen. Ed. classes all the time. People seem to think grades are necessary in major classes to rate/rank students in a major (I disagree... but hey, I just teach Gen. Ed.; that's all I have to worry about). Anyway, I was really glad about the P/NP option last Spring, and now I can hope for it to happen again.

Here's a graphic I made for a presentation on P/NP grading that I did at a (virtual) conference this summer; I say: take the red pill! alternate grading all the time... not just during the pandemic.

And if OU does adopt a P/NP policy for this Fall, I will gladly update this post with that information! Fingers crossed......

more at:

OKSummit.LauraGibbs.net

Introduction to the Pandemic Semester

So, I've been teaching at OU since 1999, and teaching online since 2002... but I have never faced a semester like the one that is about to begin. The summer has been filled with a lot of hard work trying to help people learn some new things about teaching online so they can feel more confident about that (a lot of schools are fully online this Fall, and I interact with lots of teachers at different schools using Twitter). Plus of course there has just been lots of just general worry and anxiety reading the news and wondering what is going to happen next.

I feel very lucky to still have my job (some schools have had layoffs), and also very lucky to be safely at home. I'm always glad to be teaching online, but this semester even more so, and I'm relieved that this class will not be requiring anybody to come to campus. Hopefully this class can be a chance for you to relax and get away from some of the stress of this semester... because it is definitely going to be stressful.

Each semester I enroll myself as a student in one of the two classes, but this semester I've decided to participate in both classes as a student: Indian Epics and Myth-Folklore. Since this semester feels completely weird right from the start, I thought I might as well try my own weird experience of taking both classes. I always have fun writing stories and doing a class project, so this semester I will be reading and writing stories and doing a project for each class!

I used reading and writing as a distraction this summer (I had some intense family stuff going on too, plus all the pandemic mess)... and I am really happy to have discovered my own writing niche: 100-word stories. I first started experimenting with microfiction over Winter Break last year, and then I included some microfiction options in the classes last Spring: people wrote so many great stories! Then when summer came, I made it my goal to write three little books of these 100-word stories, and I did it. You can see my three "Tiny Tales" books at my website (they are all free!), along with a guide I wrote for teachers, hoping that maybe these resources could be useful for writing teachers in both K-12 and college:
100Words.LauraGibbs.net

   

I even made audiobooks to go with the books, and that was really fun too. For example, here's the audiobook for the Tiny Tales from India:

Laura Gibbs · Tiny Tales from India

Since the stories are so short, each one takes under a minute to read, and that made the whole recording process less stressful. It's nothing fancy; I just recorded myself as I did the final proofreading for each book. I used my phone for that! Then I just uploaded the little audio files to SoundCloud: instant audiobook. (I am a fan of audiobooks; given a choice, I would rather listen to books than read.)

To make the actual books I used a fabulous service called Pressbooks, and I was thinking that maybe we could make a class anthology this semester, publishing a book together! I have got a great system for managing the book production for these 100-word stories (each story fits on a page, which makes the layout is super-easy), so if people want to experiment with this particular story format, I would be glad to collect the stories and publish them as a book. I'll try to get that set up early in the semester so that people will have time to think about that and see if they have any stories they want to contribute.

I know this is going to be a hard semester, but I am a true believer in the power of writing and connecting and sharing to help make the world a better place, so I hope that we can write and connect and share as a class this semester. :-)

When life gets complicated,

choose to create.

[Keetons]

Storybook Favorites... and thinking about new projects to come!

I'm glad to be back here blogging again... for this Storybook Favorites post, I decided to look back over some of the projects I did in the past for this class to help me figure out some priorities for this semester's projects! For the first time, I'm going to be doing both classes (this Fall is going to be so weird, which means: why not? I might as well give it a try!) ... and I want to try to blend my class projects with the Tiny Tales work I am doing, which means: Sufi stories, Anansi, Hanuman, Krishna, Ramayana and Mahabharata stuff. I'm not sure what that will mean in terms of my class projects, but there will be lots of stories going on.

So, last semester I did this "tiny tales" project with Ramayana stories: Big Epic, Tiny Stories: Microfiction from the Ramayana. I included stories about Hanuman, Rama, and Ravana, and I like how it turned out. The layout of the 100-word stories looked good! So maybe this time I could do something like that with stories about women of the Ramayana, or maybe a woman of the Epics so I could pick a couple of women from the Ramayana and a couple of women from the Mahabharata!

Another relevant project is this one I did a while ago about Hanuman: Hanuman in the Ramakien: Tales of the Monkey Warrior. Those were long stories (I hit the 1000-word maximum every time!), so maybe I could back through the Ramakien and take a different approach, focusing on teeny-tiny stories instead of the big stories.

And here's probably my favorite project I've done for Myth-Folklore (since I really do love chain tales so much!): Chain Tale Anthology: One Thing Leads to Another. Chain tales are obviously more fun when they are expanded, but I've also been able to include some chain tales in my "tiny tales" books too, so maybe I could do a fun project where I picked some chain tales and told them BOTH ways, once as a 100-word story, and then in a fuller version. If I am doing all tiny-tales for the Indian Epics project, then this chain tale project might be fun to do so that I could get some practice writing longer stories this semester too!