Oops. I lied. This is my last blog post. Sorry :( I thought we were done. I'm taking a break after this post for the summer. Below is my project.
I started my project by myself and my original question was "why do people believe in mythical things when peers and experts say that those things are false?" Then Nathan Beal asked to join me on my project and we decided to change our project to "what is myth?" and "how are myths and fairy tales important to modern-day culture?" We did several surveys of the class (to some very hurtful comments), and perservered to try and get an expert to answer us. We ended up doing a telephone interview with an expert from Harvard, and an email interview with another expert from Indiana University.
I believed that myth might be a hard topic to research, but when I looked for sources and other things, I found thousands upon thousands of websites and articles about myth and how fairy tales are important to childhood and our culture. I guessed that myth would be hard to define, as I didn't have any personal definition for myth at the time. I did end up finding exactly that.
Often I would find a site that would say that myth and fairy tales are bad for children and adults, and then, directly after that, I would read an article titled "In Defense of Fairy Tales" or some other website like that. I really didn't know what to expect about my second question, but I really liked it after my mom made a comment about how she wanted us to get a job that would make a difference in the world, not like a major in mythology. I told her then and there that my project was trying to prove the opposite.
It actually was a pretty interesting topic once I researched with Nathan long enough. We found a lot of sources and background information for this topic, and when I put the information into a video, it fit together really well.
I wish that we had more expert sources so that we could cut out some that were repetitive, but only two answered me, so I couldn't cut any.
I hoped that people would understand why some people believe in myths, as well as why we don't need just facts. I hope people understand that we need myths and fairy tales to understand our lives and who we are.
Me and Nathan interviewed a few people in our class and recorded it. We were going to include those in the video, but I cut them to save time and to try to not be repetitive. We also had tons of sources, sites and articles that we didn't use any quotes or information from.
I don't have any idea what I am going to do for my next research project.
-bookhouse4
