Mycenaeans & Tech

It’s the winter term, and for me and my students, that means ancient Greece.

This year, there’s a twist.  I decided at the beginning of the year that we were going online, and all primary source, all the time.

So in the three weeks between now and Christmas break, we’re reading as much of the Iliad as we can get through.  We’ll be reading this translation by Ian Johnston of British Columbia, which is distinguished as the first online translation.

Oh, and the art files.  I went through the first five books of the Iliad, and loaded them in sections into our class wiki (because I can’t be certain that the translation will be accessible through our filter).  And then I dug into my digital slide-shows of Greek art history from the last few years, and pulled out seventeen images — everything from Minoan snake goddesses to the walls of Troy to Mycenaean daggers — and plugged them into relevant places in the first five books, as accompaniments to the text.

Each image links to a research project page… Six questions, the image itself, and an opportunity for an essay.  Before the end of the term, they’ll take an art history quiz based on ten of the images: tell me what, when, where, and why significant.   It’ll be great.

There’s one other part of this that I think is both vital and cool.  This past Monday, we had a faculty meeting where we actually talked to one another, and it emerged during the meeting that we believe our students actually learn best — in academic, social, and ethical ways — when they’re performing for an audience.  So they’ll perform for an audience of each other, first of all.  Their research of each image will inform how I grade the quiz at the end of the first marking period of the winter term, and at the end of the term.  They’ll have to rely on each other, or do extra work to make up for specific failures.  By the end of the term, as well, they’ll have a library of 68 images that they understand… and based on that library, they’ll be able to talk, think, and find their way around a classical art gallery in any museum in the world.

I’m excited about the potentials here.  I’ll keep you all updated with progress reports, too.

Sunday Links: Homer the poet

The goal every Sunday is to find ten or more links that aren’t Wikipedia which do a reasonably good job of explaining a historical event.  Ideally, I try to find three images, three secondary sources, and three primary sources.  This week, we delve into Homer, the ancient Greek poet. This one is hard, because I have to maneuver around Homer Simpson, who is a much larger cultural hero on the Internet.

1.

Homer, in a 5th century BC bust

This is of course the classic image of Homer.  It comes from Ancient Greece.com, which seems to be a reasonably reputable site.  Comapring what’s written here with what I know about Homer, I don’t see any glaring factual errors.  The one complaint that I have with the site is that it seems to have been written by someone with a less-than-perfect command of the English language.  So far, so good.

2.Behold, another excellent link, this time a painting of Homer being crowned as a divinity by the muse of poetry, while all the great poets of succeeding centuries look on in approval and wonder.  Will students get this — that by 1827 AD, Homer’s reputation was such that people wrote odes and created art celebrating the achievements of a poet who’d live more than 2000 years ago?

Apotheosis of Homer

What else?

3. Since they’re copyrighted images, I don’t want to display their modern cartoons directly on my site, but Cartoonstock.com has some moderately funny images associated with Homer.  Some of them are even available for sale on mugs, t-shirts and suchlike.

That does it for images. What about secondary sources?

4. Mythography has a pretty good bio of him, and the English writing is reasonably good.

5. Yahoo.com has an education site with cliffs’ notes-style analyses of major works of literature; here’s the one for the Iliad, along with the information about the poet and his time.  Now even if my students don’t have time to read the whole poem, I can direct them to a summary… Hmmm.

6. Here’s a site that treats Homer as the nominal author of poems composed by the collective wisdom of Mycenaean Greece, and explains why that context is important.

Primary sources?

7. Here’s a gentleman on YouTube who has a fragment of ancient Greek music played on a lyre, attributed to Homer.

8. A sample of someone reading/singing the opening of the Iliad.

9. A translation into English of the Iliad by Walter Leaf, 1902.

10. Primary sources: Iliad, Odyssey and Homeric Hymns at Project Gutenberg.

Overall grade: A-.  Good access to primary and secondary sources about Homer, specifically, as well as to his texts.  I think that one would have a harder time convincing students that “homer” wasn’t a real person so much as the conflation of a thousand-year oral tradition in one person, but that’s not vital for eighth and ninth graders, anyway.

Consider checking out earlier blogs in this series on:

• Galileo and the Copernican Revolution
• Emperor Henry IV at Canossa
• The Roman Army

Addendum: Due to graduation, I didn’t post this until the Tuesday after, but I’ve backdated it to Sunday, so that it’s easy to find in the calendar view by clicking on Sundays.