Reflections on the Folklore Project

"The first time I pulled an all-nighter in college was when I had to finish my folklore project for this class." ~Jill Rudy, our professor

Today the biggest assignment we will have in our American Folklore class is due: the folklore project, a collection of 10-12 folklore items in relation to a theme of our choice, and a 6-8 page cover essay analyzing and synthesizing our findings. As you can imagine, I have been rather close to the computer as of late. In addition to writing and compiling the project with a nice cover page, table of contents, and autobiographical sketch, we had to present our projects to the class. I took brief notes on the presentations, as I was interested in seeing what my classmates had chosen to study. Here's a quick run-through of the topics presented on by our class:

Americans living overseas
September 11 experiences
Experiences in a freshman dorm at BYU
Old wives' tales about cures
Stories about a secret gold mine in Utah
Versions of a story called "Taily-po"
Folklore among "World of Warcraft" players (Surprisingly very convincing and interesting approach - he even connected it to the American experience!)
Breakfast-making traditions (My friend sitting next to me did this one)
Experiences in high school
Experiences at the Jerusalem Center
Roommate horror stories (I want to read this project!)
Wisdom teeth removal stories (Another attention-grabbing one...)
Halloween costumes (My friend on the other side of me did this one)
Football traditions (Another surprisingly interesting one)
Folklore associated with the Spirit of Ricks
Engagement stories (Done by a guy! A married guy!)
Songs...(It was a rather...um...broad project)
Small town lore (This one was funny, since it turned out that two girls in the class were from the same small town being discussed: It's a small world, after all!)
American LDS Wedding Traditions (It wasn't until this moment that I realized the girl who was presenting it was married)

And finally, there was my project - Variations on Hand Actions for Latter-day Saint Primary Children's Songs. I raced through my presentation, but had a nice PowerPoint slide and got to cover a lot of what I wanted to. The project itself was surprisingly enjoyable, until it came to the last days of doing nothing but sitting in front of a computer, typing everything up. I had fun interviewing people and learned several things which surprised me in the process: First of all, there was so much variety in the actions! Everyone had small differences in their version of the basic actions, and a few people did things I never would have imagined, like coming up with a new verse to a song with complete actions.

Second, people seemed fine talking to me or even with the tape recorder present, but many got skittish when I suggested filming their actions with the camera. I ended up only videotaping four people, and two of them were related to me, so I kind of forced them into it. And I didn't even show any videos to the class - I just watched them to get material for the cover paper. I used the tape recorder for all my other interviews, and took as many notes as I could, although I had to keep talking or else they would become nervous again and stop talking... Isn't it ironic how people stop talking when you actually want them to talk, and vice versa... Ok. Never mind.

Third, a lot of people had very firm opinions about when hand actions should and should not be used, and the appropriateness of sign language, and so on. Before conducting the project, I didn't really consider what kind of opinion I had myself, or if it was even necessary for me to have one on such a relatively unimportant issue, but as I encountered so many different, firmly founded viewpoints, I soon became aware of what I did and did not like, and the issue ended up becoming important to me as well. I am a big fan of Primary song actions, and hope we always have them. I would even like to expand the number of songs with actions; that "Follow the Prophet" one would really benefit from having actions to sort out all the different verses.