Reflection from Week 10

[Taylor Napier-Runnels]

So last week I spent a lot of time working on my cultural presentation in addition to studying my learning objectives. My learning objectives went well and I am feeling confident about them, but the most interesting part of the week was learning about the poet Hafiz. He is considered to be one Iran's most beloved poets and his works are found in pretty much everyone's house. The cool thing that I found was that people use his poems as a sort of fortune teller or an oracle. There are even websites where you can have your fortune told by Hafiz's poems. Mona was telling us how this is a common game to play after a nice dinner at people's houses. Apparently people get really emotional about the poem that is chosen and how it relates to their life. Hafiz concentrates a lot on the theme of love which is pretty easy to relate to a lot of people's lives, which is part of his popularity. The only issue I have had with my project is the fact that there are so few substantial and credible facts about Hafiz's life. Apparently not much is known about his life and as a result there are a lot of myths and legends surrounding it. The same also goes for Hafiz's Diwan, his collection of poems, because collections can range from roughly 500 poems to almost 1000. Still, it has been an interesting project and I look forward to sharing what I have learned with the class. I am also excited to see what others are doing their presentations on.On a side note, I am still having trouble with figuring out the present tense stems of some of the verbs I am learning, but I found this helpful chart that gives a rough approximation as to how to figure out the present tense stem from the past tense stem. It has been pretty helpful so far and I'm thankful that Brian shared it with Becky and me in class.