Portfolio Index

The purpose of this portfolio index is to organize finalized stories that I've spent time revising from each week. As a former copy editor from the OU Daily as well as a few other places, I enjoy editing and revising copy to make it as perfect as it can possibly be.


Sisters Unite
Once there were three young girls: Ella, Kate, and Lee. They were from a rich family. Their dad was a lawyer, and their mom was the district attorney. Not only were they rich, but their parents didn't spend a lot of time with them due to their jobs. So at age sixteen, they were all very used to doing whatever they wanted and whenever they wanted. Unfortunately, they weren't intelligent. They went to school but spent most of the hours on their phones, never paying much attention to the teachers. The only special thing about the sisters was that each had her own special talent.     read more...

Hunt or Be Hunted
The king and his servants go out one morning, venturing into the woods. Guns in hand, the king was ready to catch a good bird. He always loved the sport of hunting. He had a room filled with taxidermy. He was so proud of everything he had hunted and shot down. In reality, most of his servants that went on his hunting trips were really the ones who shot and killed everything. But of course, being the king, credit was due to him.     read more...

The unforeseeable foggy future
On a rainy day in Brownmote Village, there were three vicious witches stirring up trouble. The first sister, Meg, was the brightest, but she never knew when to stop talking; the middle sister, Patty, always messed up the easiest spells, even turning her own dress into a pumpkin one time; the youngest sister, Serena, was by far the prettiest of them all, which isn’t saying much, and she was also the nicest of them all.     read more...

A Series of a Child of Ill Luck
There was a daughter borne to two beautiful actors. They had a scary birth, but overall they thought they had bore a healthy child. But when she was born, the doctor told them that she was a child of ill luck. At first they were scared, but then they remembered that it was just an old myth from Chinese culture. And it made sense because their doctor was Chinese. But they decided to ignore the doctor and continue on with life.     read more...

Fortunate Findings
Once there was a poor, poor village just outside the kingdom’s reach, and every morning Baker Paolo would put out a basket of burnt bread for the children to grab on their way to school. The children would take what they needed to fill the rest of their stomachs, never taking more than was filling, for they knew other children might come along who also needed it. The baker always looked forward to seeing the children's smiling faces in the morning, knowing he was at least putting some joy in the children's lives.     read more...

Famous Last Words: Make an Effort

I'm doing this blog post at the beginning of the week since the class announcements will be the same for Mon-Wed.

Source: OU Class Announcements

This meme really speaks to me as I have less than a month until graduation.
I have received many awards. I have been involved with a lot of things. I have accomplished a lot of things. But in the midst of all the hustle and bustle of trying to find a job, I forgot that I need to come back down to earth and be humble. I have lost that. The awards and achievements don't mean anything unless I use them to better myself and the people around me. I think a lot of people gain power and they get lost in what the power does to them. I like to be in control and be in a position of power. But I don't want to be in a position of power to take advantage of people. I believe that with power comes responsibility. And you must use that power for good. A lot of what is going on in today's society is people using their power not for the good of society. And it is not necessarily my place to say where people should direct their power toward, but I know this society and the world would be a much better place if people used their power for good. So, I want a job that I can use my power for good. I want a job in which I am seen as a role model. I want to be someone that everyone can invest time and energy into and trust.

So I have taken a second to sit down, breath and reevaluate my life and my hunt for a job.
I know that in everything I do, I must make a real effort to succeed. No one is going to hand me a job. And certainly no one is going to do it for me. I have to do it for myself, and I have to make the effort. 

Final Class Reflections: Improvements

For the final class reflections, I have copy and pasted the text from the original blog, and have made comments in red below each section. My own separate suggestions are in blue. 

Change Review Weeks to Planning Weeks. This is a really big change to the class, but one that I am really excited about. Right now, there is an Orientation Week in Week 1, and then Review Weeks in Week 8 and Week 15. What I am thinking, though, is that instead of reviewing, PLANNING would be more useful, especially in terms of getting people to plan their own time schedule for the class. The result would be Orientation Week in Week 1, then a Planning Week in Week 2 (focused on time management but also other kinds of plans you might make for the semester), so the regular reading and storytelling assignments would go from Week 3-8. Then there would be a Planning and Review Week in Week 9, with the remaining reading and storytelling weeks for the rest of the semester. The main goal here is to try to find a way for people to create and commit to their own schedules for the class instead of relying on the Canvas due dates (which are obviously not going to be convenient for everybody). If you have any other ideas about how to help people with managing their class schedule and time management in general, let me know!

I like this idea. I love planning, and I think this would have been great this semester. It would have helped me have a general scope of what I had left in this class. 

Expand the Story Planning Option. This was a fantastic idea that someone suggested in the midterm survey, and I actually implemented it partway through the semester (something that I rarely do, but it was such a good idea!). Next semester, I will have that story planning option available from the very start, plus I am going to expand on that idea to be useful for people doing Storybooks: in addition to using this option for planning a regular weekly story post, people who are doing Storybooks could use the planning option to plan the upcoming story for their Storybook. Did you try the story planning option this semester? Was it useful? What resources can I provide that would help people with the planning process? Any thoughts you have about that would be very helpful!

I never used the story planning option except once maybe, because I'm the type of person to sit down and get everything done, at least for this class, to just start writing. Yes, I am a planner, but for this class, a planning option wasn't really needed. But I'm sure other students would greatly benefit from it. 

Create more audio recordings. I don't have a professional-quality recording voice, but I like to record stories, and some students in the Indian Epics class have found the SoundCloud recordings helpful; those of you in Myth-Folklore can see how that works here: Vyasa and Ganesha. There are some units in the Myth-Folklore class that have audio from LibriVox, but I was thinking that I might record at least one story from each of the Myth-Folklore units so that there would be more audio available. Also, I was thinking that if there are any of you in the class who like to read out loud and would want to share recordings back with me, I could make that into one of the options for extra credit reading so that you could share your mp3 audio recordings, and I could put your recordings at SoundCloud to share with the class too. So, let me know what you think both about me creating some more audio and also about creating audio together as a class.

Again, I never used this option because I'm a visual learner. When I was in grade school I had a hard time focusing because some of the stories would be read using a recording, and I never could figure out how to pay attention and comprehend. But again, I think this would be useful for other students. 

Create writing tutorial videos. There are some writing areas that could benefit from a video presentation. For example, I could do some screencast videos working through the process of finding comma splices and fixing them, and also videos on how to write dialogue with correct use of quotation marks and punctuation. Since those are both complex writing topics, I was thinking that a step-by-step process could be helpful. If you've ever watched Lynda.com or Khan Academy videos, that's what I have in mind, although obviously my videos would not be as sophisticated in terms of production values. I think I could learn how to make something simple, though, that might be useful. If you are interested in something like this, let me know what writing topics you would like for me to focus on.

I like this idea. I'm not sure I would ever use it, but I like the idea for other students. Again, I'm more of a read-on-page learner rather than a video/audio learner. 

Create thematic reading units. Right now in both classes the readings are organized around selections from books so that in any given week you are reading selections from a specific book (or the whole book if the book is short). I was thinking, though, that it might be useful to build some thematic units, kind of like the way the thematic Storybook projects work. So, for example, in the Myth-Folklore class, I could create a week-long reading unit of "Ghost Stories" or "Trickster Stories," while in the Indian Epics class I could create a unit of "Love Stories" or "Dharma Stories," etc. If this is something you think would be good to do, please let me know what kinds of themes you think would be good choices!

YES! I love this idea. I think this would get me more excited for the units to come and it would actually help my brain organize the units since they go by themes instead of geographical location or countries. 

My own suggestions for this class:

I would suggest try to cut down the amount of text used to explain assignments. Sometimes I felt overwhelmed with beginning an assignment due to the amount of text was there. After reading through all of it, I realized that the assignment wasn't as difficult as the text made it out to be. I'm the type of person that like to read bullet points or lists of instructions. It helps me understand concepts better and I can read through it quicker. Maybe having shorter instructions but then using bolded text with questions if students get lost. 

For example: Word Count? 500

Don't know how to do a bibliography? Click here. (But again wherever the link leads, the text should be short, concise so that it doesn't take the student more time to read the instructions than to actually do the assignment.)

THAT'S ALL I HAVE. This is a great class. I've already recommended it to my friends! 

Reading Notes: Lang's European Fairy Tales I

These notes are from Lang's European Fairy Tales I unit. Story source: The Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang, illustrated by H. J. Ford (1889).

The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots
I have not read the original story of puss and boots, but I have seen the Puss in Boots from the Shrek movies. This is one of my favorite characters.
I think I would write a story in which I tell the history of how Puss in Boots came to be an adult. He would have grown up with a mother who was a seamstress. She fed him milk and spoiled him. Until one day she died, and Puss was all alone. What his mother didn't know was that he was teased in school a lot. And so he would wait after leaving the house to walk a different, more dangerous way to school because everything he usually walked with teased him. But after his mother died, he didn't know what to do anymore. He was so ashamed he hadn't told her that he was teased.
Fast forward 15 years, not in actual cat years, and he is all though. Thus the name, Puss in Boots.

Puss in boots. Source: Shrek. Wiki

The Dirty Shepherdess

I would change this story and make it two sons. It's always daughters who seem to be in a castle. For this story I would make it a father and his two sons. And the son that he kicks out isn't as smart or bright and intelligent as the other. The king doesn't think he can carry on the family name very well. So the youngest boy leaves and throws his crown on the dirt road as he leaves the castle. One into the poor village, he tries to find a job, but no one will give him one since they all know who he is. They remember him. He isn't very nice to them. When he comes to shop, he is rude and when he comes to eat, he never tips. So no one gives him a job.

Reading Notes: Italian Popular Tales, Part B

Reading Notes from Italian Popular Tales by Thomas Crane.

Reading Notes, Part B

The Language of Animals

Animals in a zoo. Source: Youtube

I would create a story in which a boy has been raised from birth in a zoo. His family are not gorillas. They are not monkeys. They are not anything you've heard before. They are giraffes. This boy can talk to the giraffes and his mother, Delila, has raised him as her own. This would be loosely based
off the reading but also off The Jungle Book. I would have everything be normal, until one night the zoo night guard comes by and thinks someone is trying to steal the animals, meanwhile is only the boy. They have never been caught before this. The boy runs away and hides as best he can, but because he doesn't understand how the real world works, he hides in a cage. The night guard calls the police and an entire investigation is started. The boy is scared. So he escapes as soon as he can with the help of his mother and her long neck. The boy runs as far away as he can. Then I would start to base the story off Elf, where he discovers the city and the fascinating things it has to offer him.

The Sexton's Nose

I would write a story about how a young man found a hundred dollar bill on the floor and had a small idea that he had been dreaming of every since he was small. He took the hundred dollar bill and invested it by gambling. He scored big. What can he say? He had great luck. He takes all his winnings, because where he lived and in the age he was in, he was allowed to gamble. So he takes all the money and becomes a millionaire by the time he is 22. But he doesn't live a normal life. He never grew up understanding how normal people live. He didn't understand the struggle. Story to be continued...

Reading Notes: Italian Popular Tales, Part A

Reading Notes from Italian Popular Tales by Thomas Crane.

Reading Notes, Part A

Zelinda and the Monster

This story reminds me of Psyche and Cupid because there are three sisters, two of whom are jealous of their sister. I think I would set this story in Mexico. There would be three triplet brothers and each of them would be married with kids. But they still live off daddy's money and none of them know how to work or the value of a dollar. So the boys are trying to raise their own kids but don't know how because they were never forced to understand.
One day the monster comes by all three boys' house. In this case, the monster is not an actual monster but a dealer. He is a liar. But he tricks people into thinking that they can play card tricks with him and if they win he will pay them money. Their wives tell their husbands not to give in and play this dirty game. But the first born man (only by 5 minutes) can't stand to say no. So he tells the monster that he will play one game, but that's it. Story to be continued.

The Fair Angiola

The Little Mermaid. Source: Giphy

Wow. Seven women in the original story. I would make them sisters. I would also have this story take place under the sea, like the little mermaid. Instead of a desire for jujubees, I would write about their desire for sea shells. But it's hard to find big round beautiful sea shells because they can't be found in their part of the reef. So some of them venture out to find them, but their father tells them it is too dangerous. The girls don't understand why they can't go beyond the reed, kind of like in Moana, and so Petria goes out one day past the reef, only to be caught in a fishing net. But thankfully a dolphin sees Petria and cuts her loose from the net of fish that is going up toward the fishing boat. Story to be continued. 

Reading Notes: Through the Looking-Glass, Part A

Reading Notes from Through the Looking-Glass, Part A from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, a sequel to Alice in Wonderland.

Looking-Glass House

First off, I've never read the sequel to Alice in Wonderland. So this is a first time for me. I think that Alice will be grown up and she will still be as curious as ever. She wonders into the mansion after school one day, and instead of being cautious, she starts looking around. Nothing really catches her eye. So just as she is about to leave, she sees something out of the corner of her eye. She jumps back and screams. But have no fear, it wasn't a person or even an animal. It was her own reflection inside this old mirror. As she looks more closely, she see's not only herself but other creatures that she remembers from her adventures with the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Diamonds (previous reading A) and the rabbit that she had followed around. So, as this mirror plays back memories, she cries. Then the mirror stops the memories and a face appears. The face tells her not to cry anymore. Alice is scared at first, but then musters up the courage to ask a question of this face in the mirror. She asks, "Why should I trust you? Who are you?" The face waits a moment, and then it replies, "My dear girl, I gave you these memories so you would look back on them and be happy. There comes a time when memories will fade, but for now you should remember everything in good light." Alice understands and continues talking to the mirror. 

illustration by John Tensile

Queen Alice

I would make Alice a Queen of Hearts, and she and the Queen of Diamonds would get into arguments over who had the most power. I would kind of play off the Wizard of Oz themes with the two queens, one good and one bad. But in the end, both queens learn how to get along together.