Teaching Mythology Episode 010 Transcript – How I Plan and Map Out My Mythology Units

 

[00:00:00] Well, I don’t know about you guys, but school is starting soon for us here

[00:00:19] . And I got a question a few weeks ago about how I plan for my mythology class and how I decide what to teach. So i thought i would go through today what i would [00:00:30] teach if i had two weeks if i had one month one quarter one semester And one year And the reason why i don’t organize my mythology class the way a lot of mythology books recommend

[00:00:43] the first thing I want to talk about is my. Philosophy, I guess you could say on what I decide to teach in my mythology class. I am a high school English teacher. And so at the end of the day, I want to teach students what they will find in other [00:01:00] literature. And because of the literary tradition that we have, this is going to be Greek and Roman mythology. And so the bulk. Of what I teach is usually Greek and Roman. I want them when they open up. Any book and it references. Minerva to know who that is.

[00:01:20] That is always the first thing that I emphasize.

[00:01:23] The second thing is that. I think kids need to know the Greek and Roman [00:01:30] gods. They need to be able to identify them in the myths and the references and literature about them.

[00:01:36] I’ve introduced the gods to students in a variety of ways.

[00:01:41] The most traditional way that I’ve done it is to give them a PowerPoint that does the Greek creation and the Olympian gods. All in one fell swoop. It does take two days. It’s quite a detailed PowerPoint, but it really helps me. To be able to tell a lot of [00:02:00] stories. As I’m going along because we don’t have time to read every single myth.

[00:02:05] So I can give them little nugget myths or short myths as I’m introducing them to the gods. The other way that I’ve done it is that I’ve had students create posters. For each of the gods. And they researched the God and they present it to the class in some way. Or we do a gallery walk where students take notes.

[00:02:27] This does mean that I have to trust that students [00:02:30] are going to get the information correct. So the posters are very structured. So that they don’t get things wrong.

[00:02:36] So once I teach all of the Greek gods and the Greek creation story. If I only had two weeks. I would teach one hero story. And one story that teaches a lesson because both of those are incredibly strong themes in Greek mythology. Now my favorite hero story to teach is Perseus. [00:03:00] I like it because there are a lot of gods that are involved. He travels across the earth. He meets the Oracle of Delphi. He goes to the underworld or the entrance of the underworld.

[00:03:11] He fights monsters. And so it is truly an epic hero story. It also gives me the chance to tell the story of Medusa. And one day I’ll talk about her in more depth, but I just think she is a tragically misunderstood mythical monster. [00:03:30] And so this is my way of teaching the myth of Medusa and teaching about kind of the double standards that Greek culture had towards women.

[00:03:39] And then if I were to teach one story that taught a lesson, I would choose the myth of Arachne. I think. Because spiders are so common in our everyday world. This idea that Arachne was such a great Weaver. Better than a Thena that Athena cursed her. To become a spider and [00:04:00] weave forever. Right. So it’s a great myth that teach a lesson that teaches a lesson.

[00:04:06] And it’s a myth that helps explain something in the natural world. Which is another theme that happens in Greek mythology. So they get a little sampling. Of a creation myth, the Greek gods, a hero story. And Arachne, a story that teaches a lesson. So that would be for two weeks. Now. Before I go on, I want to say the I.

[00:04:27] I have made a resource [00:04:30] for you. The link is in the show notes. It’ll also be. An entire blog post about this episode in my podcast. So that you can see this all laid out. You can download it. It’s going to be an active. Google. Doc that I’m going to continue to update. With the order that I would teach things in the resources I would use.

[00:04:53] And websites I would go to, to help support this just so you have somewhere to start with. So [00:05:00] if you want that, click the link in the show notes.

[00:05:02] K. If I have one month, I would still do those things. Except for before I taught Perseus. I would do a mini unit on the heroic journey. What’s great about the heroic journey. Is it transcends all cultures? So, this is something that students can really relate to, especially with our modern day world of hero movies and action movies and Marvel movies and Harry Potter and star wars [00:05:30] and all of those things. They are the heroic journey.

[00:05:33] I would also teach a little bit about the underworld if I had time. I have a project that I would have students do. Where they would take a reading. Of the underworld from various texts that I’ve collected, where it describes the underworld and they create a map of the underworld. So it’s a great way of interweaving, a lot of details and seeing if students can apply them.

[00:05:58] I once had a student explain. [00:06:00] Or say to me that this was the hardest assignment he ever did in high school. Which I think is really funny. Because it’s only two pages of texts and a map that I’ve already given them the base of. But it shows the students really have a hard time applying what they’re reading.

[00:06:17] Into concrete details. And placing it where it belongs. And because I drew my map based on the readings, they couldn’t cheat and Google a map of the underworld from the [00:06:30] internet. Because it wouldn’t match up. Because there are different versions of what the underworld looks like and where you enter it and how you enter it and what you pass by and weather.

[00:06:42] Where you meet Charon and where the Isle of the Blessed is. And so. They had to use my version and they really had to extrapolate where these places were and what was going on in various places in the underworld.

[00:06:56] And the last set of myths that I would teach if I had a [00:07:00] month in mythology would be to teach the love myths. Now for the Greeks and Romans the myth of Cupid and psyche is considered the greatest example. Of a love story and sacrifice. It’s also a pretty epic love story. And that you could even do. A little mini heroic journey on psyche. And she goes down to the underworld.

[00:07:23] And it’s beautiful. You also get to see the dark side of Aphrodite. [00:07:30] And there are some really great love lessons that I. And my students talk about. Based on this myth and a lot of fairytales are actually based in the myth. So one of the activities that we do. Is to figure out which fairytales we see in this story. And there’s three or four or five.

[00:07:49] If I had time, I would also teach the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus also goes down into the underworld to save Eurydice. And.[00:08:00]

[00:08:00] It’s a myth that is. So sad. But Orpheus and Eurydice’s love story is considered the greatest love story in Greek mythology. So there’s also correlations with. Stories in the Bible. That you can also bring in if you wanted to. So that would be if I had a month now, if I have a quarter. Now I would start to rearrange things a little bit.

[00:08:28] And I would [00:08:30] actually start with. World creation myths. And we would study creation myths from all over the world. And this is one way that I could bring in more world mythology and a little bit less classical mythology. And then I would move into actually the heroic journey.

[00:08:50] And I would read epic stories. So we would still read Perseus, but I would also include Gilgamesh. Beowulf, [00:09:00] and Odysseus. Now I never read the Odyssey in its entirety. In fact, in the history channel a few years ago, made a video called the clash of the gods. It’s a series of 10 videos where they retell the myths and.

[00:09:15] They ask questions like, could this have happened in history? Well, they have a two parter on the Odyssey. And so we actually ended up just watching that it took two class periods. But I [00:09:30] couldn’t devote the days and the weeks to reading just the Odyssey. We would have four stories of epic heroes.

[00:09:37] Perseus Gilgamesh, Beowulf and Odysseus. And then we would compare them. And students would usually at this point, write an essay about who was the greatest of these heroes. So I always try to include the traditional ELA standards research writing. Analysis, those sorts of things. So that’s one way that I [00:10:00] did it.

[00:10:00] The other thing that I would have brought in is we would have done the traditional heroic journey intro. But at the end of this, Unit of heroes, they would have done a project as a heroic journey project that I do. Where students find the heroic journey in books and movies that they love. So it was a nice way to wrap up.

[00:10:21] The mini unit on heroes. And to incorporate their monthly book project, because one of the ELA standards is that they read [00:10:30] texts. And so this is a way that they could incorporate a text or a movie or TV show and connect it with the heroic journey. And they would find the heroic journey and all 17 steps.

[00:10:43] Because I teach the full version from Joseph Campbell. And the archetypes in that. Text of their own choice.

[00:10:53] And then of course we would do then the Greek gods, the Greek creation. Myths that [00:11:00] teach a lesson. So we have Arachne, but I would bring in other myths t hat teach a lesson. There’s I have a whole series of them. We would do the underworld. I would probably, if I had time also teach underworld myths.

[00:11:13] Like Sisyphus. And myths about the Furries and those sorts of things. The people that they punish. And then we would move into the love myths.

[00:11:25] Now I taught a semester of mythology. And so the first quarter or [00:11:30] term was classical mythology. And the second quarter. Was world mythology.

[00:11:36] But I clumped classical mythology. In with Norse and Egyptian, if I could fit both of them in, within the quarter. It always kind of depended on when holidays fell and assemblies and those sorts of things. But I always tried. So when I taught a semester of mythology, I started with. The Greek creation.

[00:11:58] And the [00:12:00] Greek gods we would read. And then we would do the heroic journey as an intro. And begin reading the hero stories. And we would read Perseus.

[00:12:10] And Theseus and compare those two stories. We would also do Hercules and now I’m not a fan of Hercules, but I feel like I couldn’t ignore him in a semester class. So we would also read Hercules and I’ve done different. Different activities with Hercules. We’ve done a [00:12:30] comparison of Theseus, Perseus, and Hercules, and who was the greatest hero?

[00:12:35] We’ve done. Comic books out of Hercules’ 12 labors. They’ve written an essay or had a debate. One year we did an impromptu debate. I mean, not super impromptu, but just meaning that they only had one class period to prepare and then have the debate. So it was like a little mini debate. On whether or not Hercules really was a hero. That was exciting [00:13:00] because I thought every kid would say, yes, he’s a hero. But there were kids who agreed with me that he’s kind of like the worst person in Greek mythology ever. And we all question why we worship him. I’m going to do a series on heroes later on after I do the heroic journey here on the podcast, though, I’ll talk more about that then.

[00:13:18] Then we would do the love myths and myths that teach a lesson. And that would usually take up most of first quarter. I would introduce the Norse Gods and the [00:13:30] Norse creation. And we would read the Thor myths. We’d read Ragnarok. I liked to read. Freya’s, necklace. Odin losing his eye. And Loki.

[00:13:43] Kind of creating an, creating his monster. So those were the Norse Myths that I would teach. And then we would wrap up with the Egyptian gods, their creation story, and a few of their myths. I focus mostly on Osiris and Isis. [00:14:00] And the stories that kind of surround them. So ISIS getting RA’s secret name out of him.

[00:14:06] The battle between. Osiris and.

[00:14:10] Set. And him spreading Osiris, like cutting up. Osiris up into pieces and spreading his body and ISIS using her magic to restore him. The thing that’s interesting about the Egyptian mythology system is that they actually don’t have any myths about heroes or [00:14:30] gods. Together. And they called humans the cattle of the gods. So their mythology really doesn’t deal with humans at all. So we just talk about the gods there.

[00:14:41] And that would usually wrap up the first quarter. Now, sometimes the Egyptian mythology unit would span over first quarter and second quarter. And I was okay with that and I would just wrap up grades with the Norse mythology unit.

[00:14:53] Then we would move into world mythology and we would do. The creation myths [00:15:00] from across the world.

[00:15:01] Now because we had already done Greek Norse and Egyptian, I didn’t include those in these myths. And we would do comparisons and students would do creation myth projects, and we would write essays. And it was kind of a huge unit. And the big emphasis of this unit was look at how much we have in common with all of these myths, look at what all of these myths and all of these cultures have in common. So we were [00:15:30] constantly looking for similarities.

[00:15:31] I would also do Cinderella stories from around the world in this. Term. And I’m lucky that where I live, we have a county library system. And so you can get books from the library, from any of the libraries in the county. And I can check out. 30 books at a time. So I would go to four or five or six or seven libraries to the children’s [00:16:00] section and I would pull.

[00:16:02] Cinderella stories. From all the different cultures and we would, the kids would get into pairs. They’d. Read them. Oh, well first we would start with. Taking the Grimm fairy tale version. And looking at what archetypes are in that version. So that they were used to looking for these archetypes.

[00:16:23] In the other Cinderella stories. For some of my students, it was their favorite unit. They got to just. [00:16:30] Read. Out of picture books. For a couple days and they loved it. And for a lot of them, they were just shocked that this story. Shows up in all these different cultures and they’re fascinated by that and they want to learn more.

[00:16:45] The last thing that would happen is when I taught a semester, I never had time to really do the world myths. And I couldn’t do them justice. So instead of skimming them all and reading one here and one, [00:17:00] there. I decided that students would do what I called their theme park project and as teams.

[00:17:07] They would get into a mythological culture or a mythological system. Read their myths learn about their gods, learn their creation story, learn about their history and the land that they lived in and what everything was like. And then they would create a theme park. For that mythological system. And present them to the class. [00:17:30]

[00:17:30] This was a huge project that they worked on. It was project based learning. And it was a way for me to incorporate the writing and presentation standards in a real world situation. And we approached it as a sales pitch. So they were going to pitch to the class, their idea for a theme park and the class decided which theme park they were going.

[00:17:54] To fund. So I didn’t teach students to do a presentation, like a normal [00:18:00] presentation. I taught them how to do a sales pitch and then they wrote a rationale. And a summary, I guess, of their park. For me, that was their informational writing piece. And then they would have to cite the various myths that they read to include their research.

[00:18:17] So that’s generally how I wrapped up. A semester of mythology. Now if I could teach a whole year of mythology. One semester would be [00:18:30] classical mythology. One semester would be world mythology. We would also include a mythical monster encyclopedia project. I did that one year. And the students loved it and it certainly did not have enough time.

[00:18:46] To really flesh that out. And then this would give me the chance to spend. Two weeks on mythological cultures from around the world. And I would choose cultures from every continent. [00:19:00] We would do native American Mayan. Aztec, actually we would probably choose. Two or three, maybe four different tribes of native American, because they’re so different.

[00:19:12] We would do Japanese, Chinese, Indian. Celtic. I would love to do the king Arthur legends. Dogon. Zulu Aboriginal. And Polynesian myths. So, this is how I would arrange my [00:19:30] year of mythology.

[00:19:31] Now. The other option for way you can teach mythology is to teach it by theme. And then you would compare myths from all over the world. Hero wrote myths, which I do. But there are flood myths from all the world. So you would read four or five flood myths. You could read myths about female warriors. You could read myths about death. You could read love, myths.

[00:19:52] I mean, there, there are so many different themes you could do. Sky gods, you could do earth, gods, earth goddesses. You could [00:20:00] do. Animal gods. Right? There’s so many that you could do. But I don’t like to teach that way. Simply because students often don’t have enough background knowledge to really get into the stories and understand the symbolism.

[00:20:13] And the cultures behind the myths. I don’t think it allows you to really do a deep analysis of the myths. And instead, it just turns. Everything you read into a compare and contrast. It’s like one big Venn diagram for the unit and that’s not [00:20:30] engaging for students. It’s not super fun. So I do that a little bit. I do that when I teach multiple hero stories, I do that when we teach the love myths.

[00:20:38] I do it when we teach the world creation myths. But I can’t imagine. Every unit that I teach, being that. So that’s real quick, how I plan. My mythology class. So once again, check the show notes for the link for the Google doc. You’ll get access to it. It’s going to be a living [00:21:00] document. I’m going to keep adding to it.

[00:21:02] And growing this resource in this reference for all of you. If you have questions, please join the teaching mythology. Podcast Facebook group. You can make requests for what episode you want to see this episode was because of a request in the Facebook group, and I just want to help and support teachers. So I would love if you.

[00:21:26] Joined our conversation.[00:21:30]