Leo Yoonsmith, Period 6, 1/7/23

 

• Literacy & Learning

• Write about your thoughts regarding any of the fiction or nonfiction covered in class.

• Reflect on any new information you have learned in English class by considering how that learning influences your critical perception.

• How is what you’re learning applied to any other classes/the world around you?

Throughout the Norse Mythology unit, we were able to see the myths from two different viewpoints; the original story, where we get the base tale that they used to explain different things, and the Neil Gaiman version, where he took the classic stories and added life to them. Of course, this is a lesser example, as the original stories are completely intact as far as we know, but it definitely had me thinking. How many different myths are inaccurate in findings? Also, how do we verify different sources? Looking into it more, although there are many ways to guarantee the historical authenticity of written documents (ie: dating the document with ai, finding dates or signs that have verifiability on the document, etc), there are extremely limited ways to verify the legitimacy of the story and if it was similar to the original, as even assuming that the story didn't change too much in its oral state, writers tend to exaggerate when copying down a story. It's kind of a game of telephone, where each writer has a chance to pass down something that they find more entertaining than the last.

This impacted the way I see things significantly. Of course, I was already aware of these flaws, but I never really paid attention to them. Now, I don't take stories or retakes for granted, as of course they could possibly be false sources. Reflecting back, I haven’t been very on top of the verification of the sources I use. From here on, I will put in significantly more effort into verifying the sources I use. Seemingly, contradictions pop up more often now (of course they were always there, but I never really paid much attention to them). As an avid reader, I definitely have took in some mythology that was far from the truth, maybe causing me to be uneducated in one of the meanings of the story. To summarize, one of the indirect takeaways from this unit was understanding the vigilance required to read about literature without misinformation.