Class Notes---Why Monsquitoes Buzz in People's Ears
1. Today's Topic:
Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears--- West African Tale
text lesson plan class discussion guide
(1) Brief Introduction
It's a picture book by Verna Aardema and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon told in the form of a cumulative tale written for young children, which tells an African legend. In this origin story, the mosquito lies to a lizard, who puts sticks in his ears and ends up frightening another animal, which down a long line causes a panic. In the end, an owlet is killed and the owl is too sad to wake the sun until the animals hold court and find out who is responsible. The mosquito is eventually found out, but it hides in order to escape punishment. So now it constantly buzzes in people's ears to find out if everyone is still angry at it.
In a cumulative tale, sometimes also called a chain tale, action or dialogue repeats and builds up in some way as the tale progresses. With only the sparest of plots, these tales often depend upon repetition and rhythm for their effect, and can require a skilled storyteller to negotiate their tongue-twisting repetitions in performance. The climax is sometimes abrupt and sobering. The device often takes the form of a cumulative song or nursery rhyme. Many cumulative tales feature a series of animals or forces of nature each more powerful than the last.
(2) Summary
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Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears is the story of a mosquito who whispers a tall tale into the ear of an iguana. The iguana, not wanting to hear such nonsense, plugs his ears with sticks. The iguna fails to hear the python call to him. The python assumes that the iguana is angry with him and plotting some mischief. This causes the python to hide in a rabbit hole which disturbs the rabbit. This chain of events goes until a baby owl is killed as a result of the confusion. The King Lion tries to resolve the problem of who killed the baby owl, and the antics of the animals are then unraveled. The end of the story finds the animals angry with the mosquito, who was responsible for causing all of the chaos in the first place. To this day, the mosquito buzzes in people's ears as if to say "Zeee! Is everyone still angry with me?"
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(3) character list :
monsquito (tells iquana a lie) →
iquana (frights the python) →
python (scares the rabbit) →
rabbit (startles the crow) →
crow (alarm) →
monkey (kill an owlet) →
Mother Owl (don't wake the sun so that the day can come) →
Lion KIng (judge)
2. Complements:
(1) vocabulary
1. di (一分為二) ex: diversity/ divorce/ difference
(2) nursery rhyme: What Are little girls/boys made of?
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What are little girls made of?
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And everything nice (or all things nice)
That's what little girls are made of.
What are little boys made of?
What are little boys made of?
Snips and snails
And puppy-dogs' tails
That's what little boys are made of.
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The rhyme appears in many variant forms. For example, other versions may describe boys as being made of "snaps", "frogs", "snakes", or "slugs", rather than "snips" as above.
ex: The Powerpuff Girls
Sugar. Spice. And everything nice. These were the ingredients chosen to create the perfect little girls. But Professor Utonium accidentally added an extra ingredient to the concoction... Chemical X. Thus the Powerpuff Girls were born. Using their ultra-superpowers, Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup have dedicated their lives to fighting crime and the forces of evil.
(3) Twelve days of Christmas
The Twelve Days of Christmas, also known as Twelvetide, is a festive Christian season to celebrate the nativity of Jesus. In most Western Church traditions Christmas Day is the First Day of Christmas and the Twelve Days are 25 December – 5 January.
* after twelve days of Christmas is Epiphany. (主顯節)
* song → cumulative song
"The Twelve Days of Christmas" is an English Christmas carol that enumerates in the manner of a cumulative song a series of increasingly grand gifts given on each of the twelve days of Christmas. The song, published in England in 1780 without music as a chant or rhyme, is thought to be French in origin.
(4) Toni Morrison---- The bluest eye (美國非洲文學)
The Bluest Eye is a 1970 novel by American author Toni Morrison. The story is about a year in the life of a young black girl named Pecola who develops an inferiority complex due to her eye color and skin appearance. It is set in Lorain, Ohio, against the backdrop of America's Midwest during the years following the Great Depression. The point of view switches between the perspective of Claudia MacTeer, as a child and as an adult, and a third-person omniscient viewpoint. Because of the controversial nature of the book, which deals with racism, incest, and child molestation, there have been numerous attempts to ban it from schools and libraries.
* 台灣翻譯版有強烈台語歧視.....
→ flower marigold
(5) Beasts of the Southern Wild
Beasts of the Southern Wild is a 2012 American fantasy drama film directed by Benh Zeitlin and adapted by Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar from Alibar's one-act play Juicy and Delicious.
Hushpuppy, an intrepid six-year-old girl, lives with her father, Wink, in the Bathtub, a southern Delta community at the edge of the world. Wink's tough love prepares her for the unraveling of the universe; for a time when he's no longer there to protect her. When Wink contracts a mysterious illness, nature flies out of whack, temperatures rise, and the ice caps melt, unleashing an army of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. With the waters rising, the aurochs coming, and Wink's health fading, Hushpuppy goes in search of her lost mother.
The Lovely Bones is a 2002 novel by Alice Sebold. It is the story of a teenage girl who, after being raped and murdered, watches from her personal Heaven as her family and friends struggle to move on with their lives while she comes to terms with her own death.
The novel's title is taken from a quotation at the story's conclusion, when Susie ponders her friends' and family's newfound strength after her death:
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections — sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent — that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life.
* movie trailer
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