Top Twelve Moments in Folklore Class!

"Have you heard of the funky chicken?"~Professor Rudy

Recently, my teacher mentioned that she had a few favorite moments from the times we have shared together in folklore class. We haven't been together quite long enough to form a high context group with specific folklore items among us, but we have become comfortable enough with each other to be able to share some funny and interesting moments together. Her comment inspired me to make my own list of my most memorable moments in our folklore class.

1. The day we studied folklore songs and listened to a tape recording of "Babes in the Woods," and made fun of it after class to such an extent that I couldn't think of any other song all day. Aaraaaargh!

2. The day someone mentioned there being a Seinfield episode all about bad Indian proverbs, causing me to spend several fruitless hours searching through their archives in hopes of finding it.

3. The day we listened to taped sleepover stories in class, after which I confirmed my childhood suspicion that these stories were not only too often nasty and untrue, but could be incessantly repetitive and tedious.

4. The day we watched almost all of the Disney version of Johnny Appleseed! I had never seen it before, but became an instant fan.

5. The day we watched some of American Tongues, a video about various American dialects of English, and one which I had already seen in English Language 322 that semester. It's a great video, and I really enjoyed seeing it twice to pick up on things that I had missed the first time.

6. The food presentation days were very fun; I can't pretend to have the necessary skills to rank our groups, but I will say that I was very impressed with the Potato, Peanuts, and Pineapple groups; I learned more about the food group from their brief, colorful, outlined presentation than I learned from any of the food groups we had to read about in the book. Packaging truly does make a difference! (As does the letter "P," it would seem - my own group, Peaches, also did quite well, I think)

7. The day we watched a movie about home movies: I've always loved looking back at our old home movies from the 1950s, and wish that Mom and Dad would have made some of us as kids. Oh well, we still have plenty of pictures and room on our digital cameras for movies. There's something really neat about seeing the way a regular American family lived some 50 years ago. It's like time travel!

8. The day we all came up with short family stories, wrote inventive titles on the board, and told a select few by popular class request. I wrote "Lost" for my title, but I think now I could have been a little more creative - maybe something more like "Possible encounter with one of the 3 Nephites!" The stories that were told were pretty fun, though. My favorite was that of a boy who wrote "Mom and the elephant" (interestingly enough, there was another story called "Mom and the kangaroo" - we never did find out what it was): Apparently his family went on a vacation to the other side of the world, where they rode elephants. While they were standing on the ground, however, a guide stood behind the boy's mother and made gestures for the elephant to put his trunk between her legs and lift her up. She didn't notice until she was in the air screaming!

9. This happened on many days: I will always remember my teacher asking for a tall volunteer to put the projector cord over the whiteboard so she won't have to write around it. I'll also always remember her writing the phrases "Folklore = the study of tradition," "Esoteric/Exoteric factor," and "Twin laws" on the white board. She also always made a very useful list of our reading and writing assignments for next day's class on one end of the board.

10. The day I purposely changed where I sat to see if and how it would affect the way other people sat: THREE PEOPLE MOVED, folks, thus proving my hypothesis that change brings tension and consistency provides stability...or something like that. It was just a fun little experiment.

11. The day our professor taught us what the "funky chicken" was. If you don't already know, I'm sorry. It's confidential BYU folklore. Look it up in Special Collections if you must pry.

12. The day we had to stand and sing the Cougar Fight song in class, even if the only words we knew were "Rah, rah, rah-rah-rah!" To this day, I'm not quite sure what that was all about, except to demonstrate the ignorance of the majority regarding supposedly universally "BYU" traditions.