Caitlyn's Corner

Image: Celtic Knot For some extra reading, I continued reading in the Celtic Fairy Tales Unit .  As I discussed in last week's extra reading, I am loving these tales and the fact that some come from my ancestors makes me want to hang onto every word.  My favorite part about reading these stories is the names.  Gaelic names have always held a special place in my heart because of my mom.  My mom named me Caitlyn because she loves Gaelic names, but she changed up the spelling from the traditional "Caitlin," so that I'd be a little more unique. T  I think my favorite story from the second half of the unit is Beth Gellert . This story is really beautiful, but what I love about it most is all of the names in it.  I nerded out and looked up the pronunciation for each name because the spellings are always crazy when it comes to Celtic names.  I think it would be fun to rewrite this story, but find a way to keep the names in.  I feel like the names r...

Continuing the Eskimo Folk Tales Unit, I'm discovering that these people have a very interesting and creative sense of imagination.  My favorite story that I read from this section was The Eagle and the White Whale .  This story tells of a family of brothers and sisters.  The brothers complain that the sisters have not found husbands yet, so one of the brothers sends them off to a white whale and an eagle.  After some time, they all missed each other so the brothers first saved the sister with the eagle.  Then they shot the eagle down when it came to retrieve his bride.  Next, they went for the sister with the white whale.  They made a whale hunting boat and when the sister escapes the white whale and reaches her brothers, they use their boat to out run the whale and reach the land on the other side.  This story really caught my attention, because I kept expecting something to go terribly wrong and one or both sisters would be lost.  I think ...

Last semester, I had a homework assignment for my Phonology class over Greenlandic Eskimo .  While doing this assignment, I had to do a little research for background information on the language, including some facts about the speakers.  During this research, I found that these people have a beautiful culture and I really wanted to learn more, but never really got the chance.  That's why I decided to check out the  Eskimo Folk Tales  unit.  The little background information at the top of the unit page explained where these stories came from and the dialect that the recorder spoke,  Kalaallisut , was the one my previous assignment was over.  Reading these stories helped me feel like I was experiencing and understanding another huge part of their culture.  I only with that I had studied enough of the Greenlandic Eskimo language last semester so that I could experience these stories in their original language.   Image info My ...

Image info This little picture just spoke to me this week.  I have been having a rough time with getting back into the rhythm of classes after Spring Break and I keep feeling like I am all out of my groove of school.  Seeing this graphic in the announcements this week helped me keep a positive attitude.  I will get the hang of things again, it may take me a couple more days, though. I also really enjoyed the Chad Gadya video.  This folk song is really fascinating and I really liked learning more about it in the Wikipedia article , too.  This song has such a rich history and goes back hundreds of years.  I really encourage everyone to listen to it and then checkout the article to learn more about it.

This last week was pretty rough in terms of classwork.  I found it was extremely difficult to get back into the swing of things with my classes, especially my Morphology class.  Any extended break makes coming back to classes so hard, but there is something about Spring Break that takes it to an entirely different level.  I had a huge paper due for one of my classes on Thursday and I definitely struggled to get started on it before Wednesday rolled around.  For my Morphology class, we were supposed to have homework due on Thursday, as well, but our professor got stuck in an airport Monday night due to a nasty storm, so Tuesday's lecture was cancelled and the homework was postponed to this coming Tuesday.  Instead of taking advantage of the much needed extra time to work on this homework assignment, I procrastinated the work and am now drowning in Morphology problems.  One of my classmates emailed me last night, though, and he is in the same position as me....

This week I decided to learn more about The Pomodoro Technique  from the Growth Mindset challenges.  This technique is used to help block time spent working on a task or project. First you pick your project.  I decided that I would use this technique for getting several assignments done for this class. Next, you set a timer for 25 minutes.  The technique got the name from the Italian word, pomodoro, for 'tomato' because you traditionally do this technique with a tomato shaped timer.  I don't have one, so I just used the timer feature on Google. (You can find my Tech Tip here for explaining how to use this feature). After you set the timer, you work on the task uninterrupted until the timer goes off.  When you here the timer go off, you put a check mark on your page to mark that one section has passed. (I put a sticky note on my laptop and marked this since all of my work was online today) Now, you take a short break, maybe refresh your coffee, resp...

This poster is made with AutoMotivator Image is from flickr J.R.R. Tolkien has been my favorite writer for some time now, partly because I love his stories and partly because he dabbled in linguistics.  Throughout his stories, I have found amazing words of wisdom that have helped me in so many situations of my life.  This particular quote has helped me overcome some really big obstacles over the years.  Every time that I have felt like the earth is crushing me and the weight is too much, I think of these words and I remember that "even darkness must pass" and I know that I will be okay.