Group Project

As was mentioned during class, my group had the chapter on tradition. We therefore decided to do an "oral" presentation that would have us connecting with the audience in a way that we imagined many Native American speakers would connect with their audiences. We used the music to create the illusion of being at an oral presentation given by a native Tribes man. My story was one that we are all familiar with, spring defeating winter. It is a cyclical story that has an old man, Winter, traveling the globe until he stops in a place to build his lodge. There he stays making the world cold until a young man, Spring, comes along and he melts away, only to appear somewhere else. It is a constant story of the cyclical.

I hope that everyone found the presentation to be enjoyable and that you all learned a little something about the process of oral story telling.

Theories on Public Speaking

While reading Ong and his thoughts on the shift from oral to print based culture and the effect that this has had on our schooling shifting from a speech based program to a written one, I became curious as to whether or not such a shift would have on the people who were learning in such a way. In other words, could the shift from speaking to writing as the main form of learning be the reason that so many people are now afraid to speak publicly? Was Plato ever as nervous as I am when I get up to make a speach in front of class?

Most of my fear comes from a sense that others will know that I have messed up. Yet they cannot. As Ong says correction is simply a part of the written culture. If one is good enough, we cannot know that they have messed up at all when they are speaking. So why then do I feel this fear? Am I so pervaded by the literate culture that I cannot break away from the mold even when I am speaking to others? I should hope not, but it is interesting to wonder if the use of writing as the primary learning tool has in any way affected how most people in today's world view public speaking with so much fear.

Mother Tongues

I finally learned the origin of the term "mother tongue" today. I'd never really thought about it before, but it makes since. If you are a son and learn one language that your mother speaks to you at home and the other is learned at school, naturally you will remember the first as your mother's language. I'd just never thought of it that way.

Plato Turns His Back on Orality?

We are all aware that the great philosopher Plato once criticized the use of writing, arguing that to use this new technology was to turn ones back on the oral tradition, to allow minds to become weaker since they were no longer required to remember so much since all of the information could be written down. The problem was that in order for Plato to argue his point to as many people as possible, it was necessary for him to write his arguements. We must wonder then if Plato's arguement actually did more harm than good. How could people take seriously an arguement ment to disuade them from writing that was itself written? Could he have perhaps shifted even more people towards the literary side of the arguement?

ideas for presentation

I was thinking that I would either try to look at the connection between our perception of the world and the oral and print cultures. There are of course other possibilities but I think I want to try and look into this more. Kane seems to think that we see the world differently because we are a print culture. I want to know what others think on the subject and then I will try to make my own assessment.

Whew!

So finally got done with my memorization exercise, and I thought that I did pretty well. For the most part I just remember being scared and then having to go up in front of the class and being soo nervous that my voice rose a few octives, but then I simply fell into my own thoughts and was able to find the memory theatre that I had created and list off all the items that I had memorized. I even managed to do the whole thing backwards on my way back from class and was surprized at how easy it was. This was pretty much my favorite assignment to date because it taught me how to really remeber things and I feel pretty good about that.

Peter's Amazing Memory

I know that every one has probably already read this passage from Yates about Peter of Revena but it was so amazing to me that I had to put it in a blog.

"As a young man he started with one hundred thousand memorised places, but he has added many more since then. On his travels, he does not cease to make new places in some monasteryor church, remembering through them histories, or fables, or Lenten sermons. His memory of the Scriptures, of canon law, and many other matters is based on this method. He can repeat from memory the whole of the canon law, text and gloss...; two hundred speeches and sayings of Cicero; three hundred sayings of the philosophers; twenty thousand legal points" (Yates 113).

His memory must have been incredible to remember so many things. If what Yates says is true, just the fact that he can repeat the entirety of the canon law from memory is amazing. Here is a link to the canon law of today so you can get an idea of how big it is. There were probably some additions made since Peter memorized the whole thing, but I am willing to bet that it was still an incredible feet of memory.

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/_INDEX.HTM