#classics teacher

[greekmythcomix]

Ancient Greek Pottery Part 1: common shapes!

Our host is a painter from the terracotta hydria painted with 'Workshop of a Vase Painter, attributed to the Leningrad Painter, 480-460 BC, Banca Intesa Sanpaolo Collection.Drawings of pottery from my 2024 piece'Ancient Greek Pottery' - find it in full on GreekMythComix.com

[antonomase]

12 years old : "And Patroclus is Achilles' cousin, that's why he's angry when Hector kills him."

Me :

His "cousin", yeah...

[magistrascribens-blog]

The Writing Teacher

Having spent a lovely time on the Welsh coast, stuffing my face with Welsh cakes and rose, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and start writing again.

I used to write loads when I was younger but gradually stopped as I focused more and more on my degree. Sure, that degree was totally worth it - I love my job as a Latin teacher - but I don’t have any creative outlets now and I suck at knitting (I assume I do, based on that one time I tried as a 10 year old. I haven’t actually bought any yarn and I’m just doing terribly at knitting air right now).

As a teacher, I’m lucky enough to have 2 months off over the summer to make up for the wake up-work-sleep routine I have during term time. Sure, I have research to do and curricula to compose but undirected time is hideous for my mental health.

So every day, from 7am to 9am, I am going to write the story I’ve wanted to write for years. It’ll probably be trash but it’ll be my trash.

I’ll blog about the experience over the last 5 weeks of the summer and see how far I can get (I spent the first 3 weeks moping/eating/saying hello to cats).

The first task is to be up and at my desk by 7am tomorrow!

Love and welsh cakes,

Magistra x

[greekmythcomix]

[greekmythcomix]

New infographic/poster/thing: Ancient Greek Pottery

This is my last big project of the holidays as it’s Back To School on Monday!

More info and the full version on GreekMythComix.com

Have a great Back To School!

[greekmythcomix]

How I teach the Iliad in highschool:

I’ve taught the Iliad for over a decade, I’m literally a teacher, and I can even spell ‘Iliad’, and yet my first instinct when reading someone’s opinions about it is not to drop a comment explaining what it is, who ‘wrote’ it, and what that person’s intention truly was.

Agh. <the state of Twitter>

The first thing I do when I am teaching the Iliad is talk about what we know, what we think we know, and what we don’t know about Homer:

We know -

- 0

We think we know -

- the name Homer is a person, possibly male, possibly blind, possibly from Ionia, c.8th/9th C BCE.

- composed the Iliad and Odyssey and Hymns

We don’t know -

- if ‘Homer’ was a real person or a word meaning singer/teller of these stories

- which poem came first

- whether the more historical-sounding events of these stories actually happened, though there is evidence for a similar, much shorter, siege at Troy.

And then I get out a timeline, with suggested dates for the ‘Trojan war’ and Iliad and Odyssey’s estimated composition date and point out the 500ish years between those dates. And then I ask my class to name an event that happened 500 years ago.

They normally can’t or they say ‘Camelot’, because my students are 13-15yo and I’ve sprung this on them. Then I point out the Spanish Armada and Qu. Elizabeth I and Shakespeare were around then. And then I ask how they know about these things, and we talk about historical record.

And how if you don’t have historical record to know the past, you’re relying on shared memory, and how that’s communicated through oral tradition, and how oral tradition can serve a second purpose of entertainment, and how entertainment needs exciting characteristics.

And we list the features of the epic poems of the Iliad and Odyssey: gods, monsters, heroes, massive wars, duels to the death, detailed descriptions of what armour everyone is wearing as they put it on. (Kind of like a Marvel movie in fact.)

And then we look at how long the poems are and think about how they might have been communicated: over several days, when people would have had time to listen, so at a long festival perhaps, when they’re not working. As a diversion.

And then I tell them my old and possibly a bit tortured simile of ‘The Pearl of Myth’:

(Here’s a video of The Pearl of Myth with me talking it through in a calming voice: https://youtu.be/YEqFIibMEyo?sub_confirmation=1

And after all that, I hand a student at the front a secret sentence written on a piece of paper, and ask them to whisper it to the person next to them, and for that person to whisper it to the next, and so on. You’ve all played that game.

And of course the sentence is always rather different at the end than it was at the start, especially if it had Proper nouns in it (which tend to come out mangled). And someone’s often purposely changed it, ‘to be funny’.

And we talk about how this is a very loose metaphor for how stories and memory can change over time, and even historical record if it’s not copied correctly (I used to sidebar them about how and why Boudicca used to be known as ‘Boadicea’ but they just know the former now, because Horrible Histories exists and is awesome)

And after all that, I remind them that what we’re about to read has been translated from Ancient Greek, which was not exactly the language it was first written down in, and now we’re reading it in English.

And that’s how my teenaged students know NOT TO TAKE THE ILIAD AS FACT.

(And then we read the Iliad)

[greekmythcomix]

[greekmythcomix]

New Comic: ✨Where did ‘Proscription’ come from?✨

CW: it’s stickmen, but it’s still Roman History, even if it’s simplified. There is b&w gore.

I teach Ancient History: Fall of the Roman Republic, at A Level, and thought it would be handy to have a quick explanation of the origins of this political tactic, currently being used against specific protest organisations.