Welcome to the teaching mythology podcast. I’m your host Lesli from Education is Powerful. Come with me as we explore mythology through a modern-day lens.
Welcome, welcome, everyone. I want to start this first podcast with a little introduction about me, and really my why story of why I wanted to start this podcast. So, my name is Lesli, I have been in education for 15 years, and I taught for 13 of those years in high schools across several states.
But when I very first started I worked in a school for youth in custody, and when I walked in the first day, I remember, it is a veteran teacher telling me that I really shouldn’t teach difficult texts and I shouldn’t teach old texts and I shouldn’t teach Shakespeare and I shouldn’t teach mythology and I should really just stick to short novels or informational texts because that was what our kids needed, and I trusted her and I believed her because I did, and I was miserable. Students were miserable, and there was very little learning actually happening.
So about halfway through my first year, I thought, “I don’t know if I can do this teaching thing, and if I’m not going to do this well then I’m going to teach whatever the heck I want.” So I introduced my class to a little book called The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan.
To prepare kids for reading the novel, I did a little background PowerPoint on the Greek gods. Now, this was a simple little PowerPoint at the time, but I just wanted to introduce them to the characters that they were going to see in the novel. Because Riordan does a great job of dropping these gods and goddesses into the story. And they’re real people. And so if you know, characteristics of the gods, you can pick out who they are in the novel.
And I’ll never forget the fate for one of the first goddesses that we run into and I believe it’s a chapter two, and they’re sitting on a bench, you know one’s knitting one’s cutting the thread one’s pulling the thread out, like, you know, which means she’s reading the lifeline because I had done the intro I stopped and I said, “Oh, Who do you think these are?” and my students got it.
For the first time, they were introduced to a world where they had no background knowledge, but they could figure out what was going on. And from that moment I had them. They fell in love with mythology, and they love The Lightning Thief, at the end of the novel even wanted me to teach Sea of Monsters and just abandon my plans for the whole year, but I didn’t feel like I could do that.
The next year, I had a lot of the same students and it was kind of the unique nature of this school. I had new students but I had about half my class that was the same. And they said, “We need to read Sea of Monsters this year.” And I said, “But the other class, like these other students, haven’t read Lightning Thief.” And they did little book talks so that the other students could kind of catch up on the storyline.
Because the second year I taught to Sea of Monsters, and so many of these students went on to read the entire Percy Jackson series and moved into the Roman series, I’d opened up this whole world of mythology for them.
After that, I taught mythology, every year, and I started to branch out into Egyptian and Norse and I would look for mythologies that were the cultures that my students came from.
I’ll never forget, I had a student who was Navajo, I decided to tell the Navajo creation myth, and some of the other stories, and he was a nonspeaker in my class. And we did this little Navajo mythology day, and he brightened up, looked at me for the first time. And then I couldn’t get the kid to be quiet the whole rest of the year, he was such a chatterbox. And it was just so great and it was because of mythology.
So I have such a special place in my heart for mythology and the way that we can connect with kids, and really reach students for not traditional readers, because there’s something special about mythology and special about myths that kind of reaches down deep into our soul, that we respond to.
So if we flash forward. The last school that I was at. I was so fortunate to be able to teach semester-long World Mythology classes, and I would divide these classes into half classical which I kind of defined as Greek Norse and Egyptian and we did the hero’s journey. The second semester we would focus on world myths and world cultures and I was able to introduce them to mythology systems throughout the world so that they had never even heard of.
My last semester before I left that year I had taught nine courses of mythology for the first semester and five for the second semester. It was an incredibly popular class. My classes were full, I think I had 39 desks in my room and they were full every semester. It ended up being that I would end up having about half of the senior class, who would end up taking mythology senior year. It was wonderful.
And when I’m transferred to a new position. It was a good transfer for me I was going to be able to get a raise. But I knew that I was going to have to give up teaching mythology and that I would never get to teach it again. It was kind of a unicorn class I built this program, and it had expanded so much, and I knew that it was a once-in-a-lifetime gig, it was hard for me to leave.
The year after I left sections were cut. The year after that, even fewer students signed up. Year after that, fewer students signed up. I think that the school is now down to one class per semester of mythology.
It breaks my heart and breaks my heart so much to know that so many students aren’t signing up for this class and aren’t able to take it.
When I talked to the teachers because I’m still friends with them about what was happening. There aren’t teachers who really want to teach it, they don’t feel comfortable teaching the myths, and they don’t know all the myths and they don’t know all the gods. And it’s really overwhelming for them to learn it all. Now I had learned it over the course of, you know, 15 years, they were trying to learn all at once to replace my program.
They really struggled with how much background knowledge the students came in with because of rewired in and other writers and this resurgence of mythology that’s happening in our culture. Students know when you pronounce something wrong, they usually know it, or they are not shy about piping up and saying, Hey, that’s not the story I’ve heard, or that’s not who Hercules mother is. And I was comfortable with that and I had a response to that and I’m going to talk about how we dealt with those things and the variety, like variations in the myths, but these are experienced teachers but they’re new to mythology and that’s not a comfortable place to be.
They also felt like the resources were kind of archaic and even though I left all my resources with them. They didn’t have me to explain how I use them.
So I kind of have two major reasons why I wanted to start the podcast.
The first reason is I want to help teachers who are teaching mythology. If I had my way, we would have mythology courses in every high school in the world.
That’s how important I think it is. So I want to help new teachers, I want to give background to the myths, I want to talk about how I taught them is, and I want, really want, to look at these myths through a modern perspective because every time I would teach the myths my students were different, I was different, and the world was different. And we would look at them very differently. So they were always growing and changing.
I also have a little bit of a selfish reason for the podcast, in that it gives me a chance to talk about these myths and talk about them inside love and to continue to learn more, and really be a teacher in a mythology class again, even though it’s a different format.
So every two weeks, I’m going to publish new episodes, and I’m going to follow, sort of a progression that I see through a mythology course. And so I really recommend watching the episodes, or watching, listening to the episodes in order so that you don’t miss kind of an important factor.
In each episode, I’m going to do a short summary of the myth. This is not a retelling. There are amazing podcasts out there. Some that I’m going to refer to because I use them in my own class, that do amazing professional retellings of the myths, and they have characters and some even have multiple speakers and they’re beautiful. That’s not what this is about. This is about me giving you a summary. So we have talking points, and then we’re going to talk, discuss the myths. We will talk about their meanings, their themes, how we can look at these myths through a modern-day lens, and give you ideas of how I taught them.
So I hope you’ll join me. And in two weeks, we’re going to be talking about the lesson that I gave on the first day of every semester that I taught the mythology class, and it really helped, hook the kids, and bring us all on the same level, and I feel like it taught a lot about tolerance, and it helped us have a common vocabulary.
Thanks for joining me today on teaching mythology. Don’t forget to rate review and subscribe and I’ll see you next time.
I’d love to connect with you! Join me over at …
Teaching Mythology Facebook Group
I’d also love to send you my FREEBIE and keep you updated on all the goings on.
Click HERE to get a free poster of the Greek God Family Tree.
