I'm An Old (and had to look up what Percy Jackson was) but I learnt about Greco-Roman (and Irish, Norse, Indian, Egyptian, and African (and many others) mythology- you're never going to believe this-- through library books and my teacher.
Mythology was a passion of my Latin teacher when I was in school. When I told him I wanted more books about this, he didn't teach whatever he was going to teach that day, and spent a lot of time telling us about ancient Greco-Roman gods and mythology. We were all very excited and asked for more.
He gave us some book titles to look up in the library and said if we were really interested, we would write a short essay on what mythologies we were most interested in.
He then went to the headmaster with all the essays and told her that we were all really enjoying the mythology and wanted do a class on it. Headmaster was like 'cool. Go design it. Start next semester.'
So he started a Comparative Religion and Mythology class for us, though most of the emphasis was on mythology. I signed up for it.
(He later told me that I was one of the reasons the headmaster greenlit the class-- because I was known as a 'bad' kid who rarely showed up for class, and this was one of the few things I showed any interest in. He told me that the headmaster greenlit the class hoping that I would go to some of my other classes since I was already at the school for Mythology, anyway. And I did attend this class regularly, and her scheme probably worked as I did skip a little less often).
There was too much to cover, even though it was a pretty long class. The teacher gave us resources (books and library catalogue numbers to take to the local librarians) to continue researching on the various mythologies that we developed a passion in.
He had an open-door policy for his lunch-break that if we wanted to come in and talk to him about religion or mythology, we could-- but the only rule was that we had to discover something on our own in our research to talk about. Couldn't be something we already covered in class or the main texts we were looking at. So we would all spend time in the library looking through the books and checking out piles of them to come in and chat with him about.
And, if you managed to find a tidbit of knowledge he did NOT know about mythology, we would get a prize. (He had a prize box in the back of his cabinet like Lego figurines and sweets and dumb toys that kids think are fun.)
That is how I learnt about Mythology when I was a kid. And I ended up focussing a lot on Mythology and Folklore for my BA, and nearly went into a specialised MA programme, but decided to go a different direction for the rest of my education-- though I still managed to bring it into my work when I could. But I still have a great love and passion for it. And it was definitely reignited when I went to Greece in February and I've been reading up on Greco-Roman myth again since then.
Even the kid who is trying the hardest to escape school will still have something they want to learn.
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
kaledo-art
vaporwave
areudirty
discoholicmusic
ellievsbear
