I recently finished rereading The Odyssey by Homer for a class for my teaching certification. I read it for the first time when I was a sophomore in high school, about eight years ago. I have always loved reading, especially challenging, "classic" books. However, I have a distinct memory of absolutely despising The Odyssey. I remember misinterpreting multiple parts of the story and being strongly opposed to sitting down to do the assigned readings. However, reading The Odyssey the second time around gave me a newfound appreciation for it. I saw it as a well-crafted and interesting story, not to mention well-written. This makes me wonder about high school reading assignments. Perhaps it was because it was assigned reading that I did not like it, but then again, it was an assignment this time around too. Perhaps I did not like The Odyssey the first time because I did not understand it.
This makes me question the idea of assigning challenging books to high school (or middle school) readers. For the eight years in between my first reading and second reading of The Odyssey, I had the mindset that this was a terrible book. Maybe I simply read it too young before my mind could comprehend such a complicated text. So, where does this leave me as an English teacher? Do I never assign my students challenging texts or do I accept the fact that they probably will not understand/appreciate the texts I assign? Or do I simply find some magical way to ensure that every single one of my students loves Homer?! Not an easy task...
1 comment:
Your description of your early reaction to the Odyssey interests me greatly, since I will be teaching it in my freshman classes during my "lead teaching" period this spring. I'm determined to make this unit captivating and comprehensible if I can. I'll have lots of reading aloud, and breaking the reading down in class. I will be choosing only certain portions of the story to teach, and focusing on one or two specific themes (I was thinking one essential question might be, "how do we define a hero?"). We might then talk about how one's perceptions of heroism change depending upon one's point of view. Most excitingly, I plan to incorporate some companion texts such as Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, which tells the story from Penelope's eyes. I'm still just brainstorming, so if you have any ideas about how your high school teacher could have made the Odyssey more fun for you please let me know! :)
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