01.30 - Samson (from The Bible)

I was not in school today so a substitute lead today's class.

In class today, everyone was reading a series of stories about Samson from The Bible and responding to some processing questions to focus this reading. We will work with this more tomorrow.

Handouts:
Samson reading and questions.


Homework:

If you did not do so in class, finish responding to the Samson processing questions.

01.29 - Intro to World Myths & Legends

In the first part of class today, we finished the full value contract that we started last class.

I then handed out an introduction to world mythologies/legends activity in which people worked with a partner to try and see how many people could correctly sort and identify. These materials are available here:

World Mythologies Map
World Myth Match Exercise

We will review responses to this activity next class to see which partner group got the most correct.

At the end of class, I spoke a bit about how we will be approaching our discussion of world myths.
While we will be talking about myths and legends as stories it is important to remember that for some people these stories are real and deeply meaningful. What we call myths are often simply old religions that have fallen out of common practice. We will also be looking at stories from religions that are currently practiced (like Christianity and Hinduism) and we want to remain respectful of people's views towards these stories. Our purpose in this class is to look at what these stories tell us about cultures around the world and to help us become more familiar with the stories that form the cultural background in different places across the world.

01.28 - Learning Environments and Full Value Contract

At the beginning of class today, I reviewed how to find information on the class site.

Next, we reviewed the responses the perspectives that people had gained from their interviews with three other people for the Learning Environments worksheet. We then did a concentric circles discussion in which people talked with various partners to complete this sheet.


Everyone then had time to respond to the question on the back of this handout and we discussed these responses as a class. From here I introduced the Full Value Contract which we will be using to frame our work in the class. The guiding instructions for the full value contract were as follows:


Keeping in mind the perspectives gained from our discussions of ideal learning environments, what are some common values we can agree to adopt to make this the best class possible this semester.


We began work on this full value contract at the end of class and will finish this work tomorrow.




Homework:


If you did not finish your response to the question on the Learning Environments sheet or your notes on the discussions you had with people, do so for homework.

01.27 - Course Introduction

At the beginning of class today, we went over the course brief which describes the basic goals and expectations in our class and we reviewed how to use the class site. A recap of how to use the class site is available below.

After reviewing this information we began work with a series of questions regarding learning environments. In class we reviewed these questions and then set it up as homework that everyone would ask three of the questions to three different people (one question to each person) and record their responses. For this activity we are using the following handout:

Learning Environments

We will continue working with these questions tomorrow.

Homework:

Ask three different people any three of the questions on the Learning Environments sheet (one person per question) and record their responses.