or, Why I Don’t Correct My Year 7 Set (on Day One).
It’s early September, and I’ve just taught my favourite lesson of the year. This will be my seventh year of teaching, and, for each year so far, I have asked my new Year 7s a very simple question:
“What do you know about the ancient world?”
It is a question that I ask before anything else – even before names – and it is a question that is deceptively simple. I ask it for reasons both social and pedagogical: to take the former first, you can almost immediately surmise the classroom dynamic for the coming year through the responses elicited. As for the latter: this single question is open-ended enough to draw out a whole spectrum of knowledge.
There is often an open disparity to begin with: there will always be a pupil who has memorised the genealogy of the Titans, and another who will gleefully reel off Odysseus’ adventures, and here you run the risk of such gusto daunting your more reserved or unsure pupils. But, by devoting a whole thirty-five minutes to this one question, those shier members of your set slowly ease into the class as you draw out dormant knowledge. By the end of the lesson, the common refrain is:
“I didn’t know that I knew that.”
It’s hardly surprising that these eleven year-olds have such a wealth of unexcavated knowledge, given our country (for better and worse) draws so much cultural capital from ancient Rome and Greece, but it’s a slow revelation that is no less of a joy for that fact.
Their answers are illuminating and eclectic: but I’m often as intrigued about where they have learnt about the classical world, as much as what they know. A few of them will have read the Asterix comics and the beautiful Marcia Williams comic-strip versions of the Iliad and Odyssey; more will have read the ubiquitous Percy Jackson series or Stephen Fry’s Mythos.
At this juncture, two points need to be made:
- Nearly all of these pupils’ awareness of the classical world comes through modern texts: I have yet to meet a new Year 7 pupil whose knowledge of the gods comes from a reading from Hesiod, rather than Percy Jackson.*
- Our pupils perform unconscious acts of reception every day in the classroom.
What does this mean? In the lesson that I have described above, a pupil will sometimes get a myth ‘wrong’ – by which I mean that they might not perfectly outline the ‘orthodox’, accepted version of that story. This is hardly surprising, and certainly uncontroversial; students will often confuse Arachne with Ariadne, or match up the ‘wrong’ monster with the ‘wrong’ hero.
For my part, however, I make an active choice not to correct my students should they make such a slip.
Why don’t I rectify a student’s apparent ‘mistake’? There are three reasons, each of greater or lesser importance:
- Confidence. I have approximately zero interest in dashing a student’s confidence on their first day in a seemingly enormous and terrifying school. There is no merit (pedagogically or otherwise) in correcting the first input of the timid pupil who has said nothing for the first twenty minutes of my lesson. My mantra in the first week of the new academic year (at least to the students) is that ‘the stakes are very low’: it’s important to keep all things in perspective.
- Peer correction. More often than not, one of their peers will suggest the ‘correct’ version. This is far more preferable to the teacher doing the same thing.
- Imagination. Simply put, these ‘alternative’ retellings are usually far more inventive and entertaining than the ‘orthodox’ narrative.
I will finish the lesson by projecting a picture of a Roman forum, and giving the students a few minutes to devise their own myth from the scene before them. As you can see below, it is a rather mundane scene – and yet, after half an hour of bouncing around Greece and Rome, students will imbue that mundanity with the mythological. Some will include the ‘classic’ monsters and heroes, gods and goddesses; some will involve figures from Norse, Egyptian or Mayan mythology; some will invent their own characters. This year’s lesson saw one group creating a scene moments before the eruption of Vesuvius: the seemingly ordinary forum was now populated with soothsayers, a disguised Ares and Odin’s ravens!
Traditionalists will doubtless raise an eyebrow at this arguably ‘loose’ approach to mythology and pedagogy; and yet classical reception is so often about redrawing what we consider to be the ‘orthodox’. Look at the catalogue of freshly interpreted myths in modern fiction – stretching back to Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad and the (chronically underrated) Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin – to see that the shackles around ideas of a ‘canonical version’ are being loosened.
Why can’t our pupils follow in the footprints of some of our greatest novelists – however unconsciously – by experimenting with and exploding these stories?
It’s a simple pedagogical strategy that is centered around the theme of encouragement; it’s a lesson that encourages engagement with the classical past; it’s a lesson that encourages imagination and the re-imagination of the classical past; and it’s a lesson that’s downright encouraging for new pupils.
A final thought: it’s striking how well this notion of ‘alternative retellings’ sits beside ideas of the oral tradition. It’s been long acknowledged that Homeric rhapsodes would alter their songs depending on their audience and their own experience; these singers would swap in or promote features of the poem that were somehow connected to local history. Ideas of ‘accuracy’, or fidelity to a source text, have been as unstable as our subject is old: my Year 7 set are merely the latest in a long line of storytellers uninhibited by deviation.
It is simultaneously fitting and ironic that, to ensure that our students take their place in this ancient tradition of storytelling, they must change both those myths and the tradition itself.
Their instinctive manipulation and recreation of these ancient stories is something to be cherished – not curtailed – and it’s on full display in that very first lesson: after the summer break, it’s the perfect reminder of why we teach.
* Please write in if you’ve had experiences otherwise!
