9/10/19 Shannon Brewi PD 7

9/10/19

Shannon Brewi PD 7

Aim: How can we demonstrate the symbolic and metaphorical meaning of an
individual’s personal apocalypse through Cormac McCarthy’s example in The Road?

Notes:

• We continued watching the TEDTalk about how the Internet contributes to folklore by

Lynne McNeill.

• McNeill relates the saying, “If you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number

of typewriters, they will eventually come up with the collective works of Shakespeare” to

the Internet. She says that most people believe this statement was proven wrong

considering that almost everyone in the world has access to the Internet, yet instead of

taking advantage of their endless possibilities and creating something great, they waste

their time making memes.

• However, folklore doesn’t focus on the cultural influence of only the rare talents. Instead,

it focuses on the culture that everyone is capable of creating, such as stick
figures and paper airplanes.

• She emphasizes that folklore is the culture of everyday people.
• In the past, folklore was never formally recorded, so it was difficult to fully grasp and

understand the culture of a society at a given time. But now, with the Internet, folklore is

inadvertently archived, giving people in the future the ability to thoroughly understand our

culture.

• Therefore, making and sharing memes is participating in the documentation of current

folklore. McNeill argues that spending time on the Internet is in fact not a waste.

• It can be helpful to study in the future, as the Internet not only captures news stories,

but also how the public responds to them.

• People may think that memes are unimportant, but McNeill asserts that if something is

staying in circulation, it is important and should be documented.

• Therefore, the Internet is a worthwhile part of our folklore culture.
• Dejon shared to the class that the video made him realize that everyone in the room

could be considered a folklorist due to using the Internet. He also connected old viral
YouTube videos, like the Annoying Orange, to folklore.

• Iandra related the video to an article that claims that our generation is culturally illiterate.

She hopes that McNeill’s claim will prove that our generation is culturally literate in our own

way, and even encourage people our age to use the Internet to become more culturally

literate in a traditional way.

• Shannon added that regional and generational dialects are recorded on the Internet, as

well.

• Ms. Fusaro introduced that we have a Google Drive folder with the purpose of being

filled with folklore by the students in our class. The one from last year is mostly filled with

mythology-themed memes.

• She assigned our summer reading project, which is to make a book cover for a prequel

of The Road and present it, giving an explanation of our design and what we think happened.

She then gave us the rest of the period to discuss our project ideas with our teams.

Student Reflection:

We discussed folklore as a continuation of our lesson yesterday where we defined and discerned categories of literature. It’s important to know the differences between types of literature, such as legends and fairy tales for example, as we will be learning about them throughout the year. Since folklore is one category that we are less familiar with, we discussed it in depth to highlight the extent to which we come across folklore every day, and to realize that we are active participants in current folklore. For instance, the simple act of going on the Internet is basically like walking through a virtual modern museum. Additionally, we learned how we will further explore and analyze the book we read over the summer, The Road. We will create a project to display the conclusions we drew from the book and compare our unique interpretations with the rest of the class.