Right now, I'm attempting to teach The Odyssey to the most reluctant readers I've ever taught.
I came in at the beginning of the unit with a great plan. They would read short sections of The Odyssey at home and we would come in and do great and fun textual analysis activities and creative projects! A board game based on his adventures! A retelling of The Odyssey on the streets of Baltimore! I wanted students to see The Odyssey as a metaphor for the journey of life.
Instead, I'm finding that just helping them decipher a line like, "Poseidon set the world atremble" takes a few minutes. And after enough students are telling me, "I don't get it...", I'm finding I'm throwing my unit plan and reading plan to the side and doing things like recripocal reading and "read a sentence/summarize a sentence" activities in class.
The lesson from all this?
1) Don't give out a reading schedule if you're not sure how the kids will respond to, or "get", the book. I'll remember that next month with The Catcher in the Rye.
2) More reading strategies. More Cris Trovini stuff.
3) Stop rushing so much!
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3 comments:
Have you considered using a graphic novel format for the first few reading assignments? There was an artist named Gareth Hinds at NCTE who had just finished a beautiful version of the Odyssey. He has some pages online at his website:
http://www.garethhinds.com/odyssey.php
You could get them hooked on the story with the GN, and then transition them to the regular text.
It's been five or six years since I taught the Odyssey but I remember doing it in the context of "epic" movies (I think movies like "300" were coming out at the time) that many of my students had seen. I did a lot of summarizing, too.
That graphic novel idea is excellent, btw.
As my students would say, "I fell ya, bruh."
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