Short stories.

In this assignment we are suppose to Google short stories and take down the most interesting website.

          The first site I opened was Short stories to read . I liked it, because it was just a short list of titles. The titles are all so catchy that I would like to read them all. I took a pick and read the first story The four wives.  It was very educational, I recommend reading it. It is funny how much education and inspiration you can get from a few sentences.   The story is about a man who has four wives and he loves the fourth one the most and the first one the least, but the first one loves him the most and the fourth one loves him the least. In the story he is dieing, he is very afraid to die alone. None of the wives want to die with him except the first one because she loves him the most. The story teaches us that we all have four wives, the 4. is our body, which leaves us when we die. The 3. our possessions, status and wealth, when we die they all go to others. The 2. is your family and friends, and they can't follow us further than the grave. But the 1. one is your sole and it goes everywhere with you, if you are dead or alive.  It teaches us that we should respect our soul the most, we should cultivate and strengthen it now while we are alive and well, instead of doing it on our deathbed. 

           Here are many more short stories, at the classic reader.  These are all in alphabetical order, you can chose alphabetical order by authors or by titles.  There are so many stories in her that I can't decide what to read. There is more organisation in this website than in the other one. Some people like to have a lot to choose from and some people like the organisation. I really just find it hard to choose, when there is to much to choose from.

         

           Here is a site with only 20 stories, that is my kind of style. I always thing I am missing something so I'd rather read 20 short stories than being afraid to miss the good ones on a site with 1000 short stories. ( I know it doesn't make sense, I am kind of weird when it comes to stuff like that). But the site is american literature., and it has only 20 short stories for everybody to read.

         

          There is a one more site that I would like to put on here, I didn't find it on Google, but I find some of the stories very funny. These are many true short stories.  I't is kind of a project, called The virginity project. It is just a blog that one woman writes, she gets sent stories to her email and then she rewrites the stories (to an appropriate story) and puts them on her blog. Thousands of people read this blog. I like to read it when I don't have anything to do, it sometimes gets people to laugh. 

           You can also get short stories in sound and video form. There are often short stories on the radio, like radio one. I remember my father telling me about when he was a kid, there was no TV on the farm he lived on only one radio, every Thursday night there where short stories on the radio, the whole family would gather around the radio with mattresses, they would lie and listen together to the short stories.

         People also make movies out of short stories, here is a list of books and short stories that have been made into films.

Two very inspirational videos.

My impression of the videos.

The child driven education.

I thought this video was amazing. The way that children can learn without anyone teaching them is great. Like he said in the video, „children learn what they want to, if they like the subject they learn well. If they don´t know how to do something, they find out how to do it“.  I thougth it was a very nice experiment that the man did. Not just teaching us how fast children learn but just teaching children in those countrys.

Here you can see the video.

Jill Bolte Taylor‘s stroke of insight.

I liked this video because it showd me how a stroke works. It also showed how strong that woman is, she spent 8 years of her life learning again how to speak, walk and many more things. She lost the memory of 37 years of her life but still she stands up there and tells people her story about the morning of the stroke. Not just that she tells her story, she does it with humor.  It was an education to hear how a stroke works, and the stuff she did with the brain, and told us everything about brains.    Some people wouldn’t like listening to something like that, but she made it fun to learn about.

Here you can see the video.

Our first blogday.

This is an article that we had to read in English 503
 The new Literacy

It says that young people are writing more than any previous generation, ever, in history.
This is proved by the Stanford Study of Writing, directed by Professor Andrea Lunsford.
The study gives people who wonder whether Google is making us stupid and whether Facebook is frying our brains an awnser.
The study began in September 2001, when Lunsford invited a random sample of the freshman class to participate in the study.  She invited 243 students and 189 accepted. That is about 12 percent of that years class.
Students submitted all the work they did for their classes, and also submitted as much as they wanted of life writing (writing they did for their self, families, friends and the world at large.
The students submitted about 15,000 pieces of writing, including emails in 11 languages, blog postings, private journal entries and poetry. Only 62 percent of the writing was their schoolwork.
Lunsfords conclusion is; although today's kids are writing more than ever before in history, it may not look like the writing of yesterday. The focus of today's writing is more about instantaneous communication. It's also about audience.
Comparing the Stanford students writing with their peers from the mid-1980's, Lunsford found that the writing of today's students is about three times as long.
But the youth of today is more likely to make different kinds of errors than 20 years ago. The number one error 20 years ago was spelling. Today the number one error is using the wrong word.
That could be because young people are changing words and writing the different, like a text message language. With the more playful, inventive and spontaneous forms of writing available to them, are today's students losing the taste for more complex English ?



I liked this article, it shows that some people don't think the youth today is "stupid". It shows that the youth today can write and like writing. Even though they are not writing big novels about some Greek god or about the first world war, they are still writing.