Week 3 Blog Prompts

Students may choose any of these prompts for the week 3 blog. Write your responses as new blog posts on your group blog (link is to the right).

1) In most of our readings from the first two weeks, we are attempting to use literature to understand the lives and perspectives of people from the past. In the case of the Popol Vuh, we are attempting to understand the very distant past. To what extent do you think these texts can give us an understanding of what was most important to these people? To what extent do you think we can understand them, particularly in the case of the ancient Mayan people?

2) At the beginning of the film “Cracking the Maya Code,” the narrator poses a question: "Imagine explorers arriving to find our cities deserted. All of our books have perished in some unknown catastrophe. All that is left to speak for us are the written words we have carved in stone. The travelers could not make sense of our script. But if they could would the comprehend who we were?"

Consider this scenario with respect to the carved stones that appear in our society today—the Vietnam Memorial, Mt. Rushmore, the Lincoln memorial, artwork on campus, etc. Imagine that only a small handful of important books had survived, hidden away alongside these carved stones. How would our monuments and books speak for us? If they could understand our writing system, would future explorers be able to understand who we were? 

3) Write your own response to any of the text we have read so far this quarter.