I really enjoyed reading the story of Cupid and Psyche. There were times when I found it
difficult to fully understand what was happening, but the notes really
helped. The notes were really
helpful. If there weren’t any
notes, I would have thought that the Beauty was the girl that was kidnapped and
that the Beast was Lucius. I still
think it applies to them, especially since Lucius was turned into a donkey and
the girl was a prisoner.
I would’ve liked to know beforehand why the girl was
kidnapped on the day of her wedding and why Lucius was turned into a
donkey. If I were the girl and
just kidnapped before my wedding, the last thing I would want to hear would be
a fairy tale told by some old woman that helped kidnap me.
I also read some more of Aesop's Fables (Jacobs) and really enjoyed
those as well. I really like
reading fables; they’re short and to the point, and the moral is always very
clear. Even though it’s not just
one story, but several, I really like how it’s broken up. It makes me feel like the reading isn’t
as long, which works better for my ADD brain. The notes at the beginning were helpful as well because it
set up what each section was about.
One thing I was confused about is the part that was in parenthesis. The story would say something like, Crane 49. The Cat and Venus (Perry 50). What does Perry 50
mean? I didn’t see anything in
the notes. It’s not something that
bothered me or anything like that, I was just curious.
Overall, I would say these two sections were what I was
expecting from this class. I
really like this unit so far, and I’m excited to read more.
Hi Liz, I just left a note on your story suggesting that you do Aesop reading for next week too - you learned something important this week that will be a big help in future weeks: if you know you prefer short, individual stories to the long narrative type of reading, then definitely pick that type of reading to begin with! (Most of the options are short, individual stories; the Cupid and Psyche one is unusual that way.)
ReplyDeleteAbout Perry: he was a professor of Classics in the 20th century who came up with a system for numbering all the fables in their different versions; both Jacobs and Perry were scholars who worked on the fables, as opposed to the just-for-fun book that is the other Aesop unit, where there is no information about the sources of the stories. Perry indexed almost 600 fables from ancient Greece and Rome, so his numbers go up to around 585 if I remember correctly. That's a lot of fables! :-)