Our group had the fantastic task of carving
intricate Mayan symbols in
to rock hard stone. (Along
with the English and Ogham translations.) This time around we were very thankful for modern
tools! The dremel that James brought definitely saved us. There was still a lot of work involved though.
I made the mistake of claiming some artistic skill and bringing on myself the assignment of drawing the Mayan glyphs (and their Enlgish translation) onto the rock. It took a long while, but I felt so good when it was finished. (It's nice when my years of middle and high school art classes pay off once in a while.) I can say that I certainly gained a greater appreciation for the written system of the Mayans! And when it comes to learning outcomes, I feel like that copying experience was a tangible fulfillment of the goal to learn about different cultures (outcome 1) and to understand the differences in knowledge forms (outcome 3). In a throwback to our first unit, I learned how to use a dremel for this project in a very folk knowledge-learning way. I watched what the others did, and then I imitated! It wasn't as hard as I thought it might be (definitely not as scary as the prospect of pounding on a chisel and hoping the stone didn't crack)!
Aside from that, though, I feel like the biggest learning outcome we achieved through this project falls under outcome four, which includes developing the learning skill of collaboration. It was amazing to see how everyone made very different (and all important) contributions to the stone project. We had people do background research, provide materials and tools, bring food, host our meetings, give rides, translate, write on stone, and carve on stone. And it all came together in an awesome final product.
Haha, awesome Alicia! So easy a caveman could do it? Well, after reading your post, I don't think so! As difficult as writing on parchment must have been, can you imagine how impossible it would have been for monks to transcribe the Bible on stone?! I wonder how something like this would have effected society. When you really start to think about it, it's easy to tell that a medium through which we write can really have an effect on the importance of the texts that we read.
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