The Mythic Warriors of 4th Hour

After this year, I've realized that my Mythology class needs some more work. For one thing, I spent way too much time on Greek mythology. I also failed to remember how many times the class got interrupted last year by testing, track, drama, etc...all that along with the fact that it is already difficult to keep students rolling the last few months of school. Because I didn't remember that, I ended up frustrated by the same interruptions and things took much longer than needed.

For next year, I think I'll work on developing smaller units of study based around themes (love, war, pride, etc.) with more project-based activities. I also need to find more visual media to interweave with the plays and short stories we read (which is tricky since mythology is scandalous enough on paper), although I did integrate more art this year. There also needs to be more cultural/historical context included with the mythologies that we study. For instance, I think there are benefits to knowing what everyday Greeks were like compared to the fantastic stories of gods and goddesses.

One of the challenges of being at a small school is planning quality learning experiences for four different courses each day (some teachers at rural schools have up to six classes to prep for). It's frustrating knowing that you aren't giving students your best but can't because there are only so many hours in the day. I definitely feel that this trimester, some of my classes are getting the short end of the stick. Hopefully with some time, planning, and collaboration I can fix that.

Despite all of the challenges, we had a fantastic time laughing as we read the plays, working on student-selected projects for Greek mythology, and competing in the Greek Olympics at the end. The Olympics consisted of five challenges: intuition, resourcefulness, strength, bravery, and intelligence. For the intuition challenge students played pin the eye on the cyclops. For resourcefulness, they made togas out of toilet paper. For strength, they competed in a discus (frisbee) throw. Bravery involved eating sour candy, and intelligence was a Jeopardy-style brain teaser test. As you can see in the pics below, we had a blast (and I take very blurry pictures). This has been a great, small class, and we've shared a lot of laughs along the way.

We are now engrossed in the weird world of Norse mythology.

Pin the eye on the cyclops

Prepping for a winning discus throw

She just sort of sat down

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