Burke Blog for Epics of India

"Arjuna! Arjuna! Arjuna!" the chants from the crowd resounding throughout the arena.  Arjuna smiled slightly, then loosed another flurry of arrows, dropping all the targets released.  During each shot, the only thing he remembered was his trainer Drona's advice, "See only the head, not the body."  Eager to show even greater prowess, he hopped on his horse and galloped throughout the arena, hitting target after target without fail, prompting even more cheers from the crowd.  Finally, the time came for the greatest exhibition, and an iron boar was loosed into the arena.  To any witness, the next five arrows that Arjuna released were faster than the wind itself, and all hit the boar straight in the mouth, as if they were but a single arrow.  The boar dropped dead, and the arena rang with the mightiest cheers anyone present had ever heard. Arena, from  pinterest As Arjuna reveled in his glory, not all were pleased for the great prince.  Duryodh...

For the second part of the reading, my favorite story was Granny's Blackie.  I thought that as a story for children it was excellent, with the main lesson being that at some point in our lives we must grow up and take responsibility.  Blackie, the elephant, seeing Granny is getting exhausted from all her work to support them, takes it upon himself to earn the money for Granny and get a job.  The secondary message in this story comes when Blackie completes the job and is offered less pay then promised, and he holds firm until the man pays him his just wages.  He also resists all the temptations of fun he used to give into and stays steadfast in his resolve to be responsible, and as the story states, continues on doing the same in the future.  This story, while probably not what I will write a story about this week, nevertheless was my favorite story out of all the part B jatakas.  Black Elephant, from  pexels Bibliography: Granny's Blackie , Ja...

This week the story that caught my attention most of all the ones we read was How the Turtle Saved His Own Life .  This story was fascinating to me because it reminded me of the Brer Rabbit stories I read as a child, which were some of my favorites.  The Turtle using reverse psychology in order to trick his captors into giving him the best available "death" which in fact freed him always made me laugh, and I want to be able to modernize this laugh in my own writing this week.  To do so, the first thing would be to expand on this dialogue, make it longer, and make the turtle more sarcastic and humorous, like Brer Rabbit.  This will allow me to put some more modern commentary in the story.  Another potential twist I could add would be to put the story in a tech world, something to do with robots or the like, to give it a new setting I don't believe the story has been done in yet.  This could be done for most of the other stories this week, but because of the ...

The last week before spring break was very stressful, because all of my exams were that week for my grad classes, making for a lot of stressed studying.  Optimization and Optimal Control was an especially hard exam to study for, due to the theoretical nature of the course, with very few examples, but luckily the exam was identical to the study guide, so the exam went very well, and is worth 40% of my grade, so now I am feeling better about the course as a whole.  The Control Theory exam also went fairly well, I do not have my grade back yet but I believe my performance was strong and the professor is a fairly easy grader so all should be fine.  The extra week in this class for spring break was perfect, because it allowed me to push back most of the assignments until this week to give me time to focus on studying.  It also allowed me to give the best performance in all my classes by giving the best performance on both the exams and on my writing in here.  The ext...

I have loved the addition of the Calendar feature to Canvas, it has helped my time management in all my courses.  I have actually created a macro allowing the canvas calendar to be exported to my desktop calendar, so every time I log into Canvas it updates the desktop, allowing me to keep on top of all courses, and make sure that my calendar is always up to date.  So in conclusion, the Canvas Calendar has been a good thing for my overall time-keeping and schedule management. 

For this week's learning challenge, I used the read out loud option, and here are my thoughts on the subjects, as per the notes I took  Personally, I think it slows me down too much in my reading, and actually lowers my comprehension of the text, because I tended to not remember previous information because too much time passed between when I first read it and when I recalled it It also lead to me being distracted more easily, because I needed to keep my train of thought as well as speech working together, so instead of becoming immersed in my head, I ended up staying too much in the real world, meaning that events in the real world threw off my focus.   It did enable me to look at form more easily, and think of how I would write stuff in order to make it more enjoyable for a reader.   For final thoughts, I think I much prefer reading silently, it allows me to be fully immersed in the story rather than be constantly distracted.  Reading, from...

This week, I created the acronym L.E.A.R.N.S., for Living and Experiencing Achieves Remarkable New Success.  I created this acronym in order to document how by just being open to our experiences in our everyday life, we can move forwards and learn through paying attention and having takeaways.  I thought of this through the lessons of the Lockheed Martin Skunk works, who created the single greatest aircraft in history, the SR-71 Blackbird, just by taking the lessons the whole team had learned throughout their career in order to create this masterpiece, pictured below SR-71 Blackbird, from  Wikipedia