ARISTOTLE?!

By Dr. Sue Fisher - instructor for Muse on the Loose and The Muse Reloosed at The Lukeion Project

ARISTOTLE?! This one word, spoken with an air of incredulity, is often the response I get when I tell people which authors we cover in my Greek literature class.

This is frequently followed up with, “How old are these students again?”

While the first question is one that I have come to expect, Aristotle, after all, is not often included in high school level courses, it is the second question that chafes.

The first reason for my bristling is very simple. How can you reasonably do a Greek literature survey and leave out Aristotle? The short answer is you can’t, no matter how difficult the content may be.

The suggestion of leaving out Aristotle because he is difficult reading, however, points to a deeper and more problematic trend in modern education: pigeon-holing students and shielding them from challenges.

My first real encounter with this mentality was when my older son was in public kindergarten. The principal of that school only allowed children his age to check out picture books from the school library. He dutifully brought them home, but they seldom got looked out. When I confronted the principal with the fact that he was already reading chapter books, she claimed that these were the books for his age level and that a person can always get something out of what they read. Luckily, we had an ally in the school librarian, beloved Becky who smuggled my son wonderful, challenging reading on the sly. The words of that principal have always stuck with me, though. She was right that someone can always get something out of what they read, but why can’t this go the other direction? 

The truth is it can.

In all the years I have been having high school students read Aristotle, I have never had a student not get something out of the reading. What students get tends to be widely varied and is reliant upon many factors. Interestingly enough, age isn’t one of them. Experience is probably the largest factor. Experience with philosophy certainly helps, as does experience with reading other complicated material. Sometimes this experience comes with age, sometimes it does not. But everyone must start somewhere, and for many students, this is their first encounter with truly challenging reading. Yes, some will complain; others will thrill to the challenge, but all come out proud of what they have accomplished. A few even become philosophy majors in college.

Learning to master difficult reading is a skill and one that takes practice. Every text is different, and mastery won’t necessarily come the first time something is read. I describe the process to my students with the analogy of painting walls in a house. Sometimes you will cover the wall with one coat of paint. Sometimes it will take a few coats for it to be fully covered. But some paint will always stick to that wall and that is just fine. Nobody should expect you to paint the Sistine Chapel the first time you pick up a brush.

In her book, Walking on Water, acclaimed author Madeleine L ’Engle recalls the benefits she gained from reading her parents books as a child. Some things went over her head the first time she read them because they were completely outside of her frame of reference, but many things stuck. Among these were concrete things like new topics, ideas, and vocabulary, but some things were more esoteric and potentially more important. Access to challenging reading gave her freedom, fostered creativity, and what may seem counter-intuitive, instilled in her an underlying confidence in her own abilities.

In keeping students from challenging reading, we run the risk of underestimating their abilities or worse, causing them to underestimate their own. If we can abandon the idea that students must understand something perfectly the first time they are exposed, we do them the greatest service. People are like goldfish, they will grow to the size of the tank you put them in. Let’s give them an aquarium, not a fishbowl. 

Why Study Shakespeare at All?

By Randee Baty, instructor for The Classical Bard: Shakespeare, at The Lukeion Project

Earlier in The Sassy Peripatetic, I discussed why I teach Shakespeare the way I teach it. That may raise the question, why teach Shakespeare at all?  There has been a group of voices lately calling for the banishment of this author from the high school classroom entirely. Who needs that kind of negativity? Instead of responding to such a foolish suggestion, let’s look, rather, at why we love and still teach Shakespeare 400 years after his death.

Shakespeare writes about the universal human experience. He eloquently and profoundly sums up the range of human emotion. If you’ve felt it, Shakespeare has described it. But can’t modern authors talk about the same things in contemporary settings? Sure, they can and they do. But you’ll find few authors that cover the wide range that Shakespeare covers. From young love (Romeo and Juliet) to mature love (Antony and Cleopatra), from patriotism (Coriolanus) to treachery (MacBeth), the feeling of being an outsider (Othello), the feeling of sheer happiness (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), you would be hard put to find a modern author who has covered the full range of emotion that Shakespeare does.
   
He’s a great storyteller. He was able to take material from other sources, such as Plutarch’s history, and turn it into plays that people have loved for 400 years. His range covers tragedy, comedy, love stories, fairy tales, histories, and melodrama. He includes ghosts and witches, curses, mistaken twins, lots of disguises and a million ways for people to bite the dust. I love to show my students a chart of all the different ways people die in Shakespeare plays. He just knows how to spin a good yarn!
   
Along with great stories, Shakespeare draws great characters. Shakespeare’s characters are deep and complex. They are among the favorite roles for actors to perform because they are emotionally rewarding. From Brutus trying to make the correct decision for Rome to Puck commenting on what fools these mortals be, the characters have a depth of humanity rarely seen in modern drama. This is why students are so excited when we start performing the plays in Week 3 of the semester and why I hear the “I wish class was longer” frequently from my students.
   
It isn’t just the fun that people love about Shakespeare. The sheer beauty of the language draws people back to Shakespeare again and again. There’s a reason that Shakespeare is still the most often quoted English author. His ability to turn emotion into words is unsurpassed. His ability to coin new phrases (most are still in use) and his creation of around 1700 new words show his mastery of language. Shakespeare is one the driving forces in the way English is used today.
   
Shakespeare is a cultural icon. Other than Greek Mythology and the Bible, Shakespeare is probably the most quoted or alluded to writer by modern authors. The well-respected modern absurdist play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead can’t be understood without a knowledge of Hamlet. The title of William Faulkner’s influential work The Sound and the Fury takes on a whole new meaning to those who love MacBeth.  Modern literature is more complete and enjoyable when you have the Shakespeare background behind it.
   
A well-educated person is presumed to have a grasp of Shakespeare. Just as knowledge of The Iliad and The Odyssey are foundations of a classic liberal arts education, familiarity with Shakespeare is a mark of a well-educated scholar. Homer, Shakespeare and the Bible were the basis of most of the early education in America.
   
As Rex Gibson, an English academic put it, “Every student is entitled to make the acquaintance of genius. Shakespeare remains a genius of outstanding significance in the development of the English language, literature and drama.” He’s a genius we think is important enough to keep in our curriculum.

Classical Mythology Isn’t (Just) for Kids

Amy Barr

The Lukeion Project has offered two semesters of Classical Mythology for about a decade. Class size is typically on the smaller side and parents often push somewhat younger students into the class even though we suggest it is best for 10^th grade and up. Thanks to Classically inspired authors like Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson series) and feature-length films by major animation studios, this generation has consigned Classical Mythology to the “young children’s stories” for good reading and viewing material. Aside from a few tremendous battles between heroes and vile monsters (who doesn’t like those?!), nothing could be further from the truth.

Classical Mythology categorizes the largest body of preserved Classical literature and includes all epic, almost all tragedy, and a fair amount of poetry and even comedy. If one were to omit all other genres from one’s Classical reading list, it wouldn’t shrink much, and mythology would still vividly represent both major world cultures so well that we could maintain a very good picture of the complexity and sophistication of both Greece and Rome.

Classical mythological literature artfully presents our eternal human struggle with questions of good and evil, darkness and light, wisdom and foolishness. Perhaps even more importantly, Classical mythology forces us to grapple with the massive grey zones in between.

The experience of visiting tales of the worst-case-scenarios through myths was termed katharsis by Aristotle. One of the best ways of describing katharsis is “education for the emotions.” The Greeks embraced the curative power of strong story-telling so much that they facilitated the performance of tragedies and comedies at major healing centers like Epidaurus and Pergamum. You can still visit the most impressive intact Greek theaters at both these places.

The Iliad isn’t a story about a war, it is about the fight to weigh the value of one’s own life against death, glory against self-preservation, community against individualism.  The Odyssey isn’t a collection of monster stories, it is about the value of hospitality as a window to the soul. The Greek tragedy Hecuba asks if all really is “fair” in love and war. The tragedy Medea proves when two people behave monstrously, absolutely no one wins.

Sophocles 's Oedipus Rex, termed the perfect tragedy by Aristotle, together with the Iliad, showcase all the ideal parts of an excellent Greek story. These elements still frame what we believe make excellent novels and movies more than two-thousand years later.

So, to equate Classical mythology to “children’s literature” is to miss all its power and most of its artistry. Of all the unique parts of Classical studies, choose mythology first. Still today I find I must coax and push my most advanced AP Latin students to “please” take Classical Mythology! It is the context for almost everything we are still reading and watching today.   

Getting a ‘B’ Isn’t the End of the World

A Perfect Transcript May Not Mean There's been a Perfect Education

by Regan L. Barr

“I need to withdraw my daughter Celeste (not her real name) from your Greek 1 class,” read the email. I was surprised. Celeste was always enthusiastic and chatty in class. She had never indicated that she was unhappy or struggling. I checked my grade book. Celeste had a solid 88 – a nice B+. The email continued, “she doesn’t have time to take classes that she can’t get an ‘A’ in.” I was dumbfounded.

I had questions. Was this mother accusing me of making the class too hard? (Over half the class was earning an ‘A.’) Too time-consuming? (My class probably takes less time than a brick-and-mortar course with 5 hours per week in a classroom and homework besides.) Too fast-moving? (We’re on pace for our students to do well on the National Greek Exam, but well below the pace of a college course.) Or was she punishing Celeste for not getting an ‘A’ in a class, even though she clearly enjoyed it?

I don’t think it was any of these things. I think it was the quest for the perfectly curated transcript. Many believe that a transcript boasting a perfect 4.0 GPA (or higher!) puts the world at your finger-tips. It’s your ticket to the best colleges, the brightest careers, the highest income. But is a ‘B’ enough to bring all of this crashing down? If this has been your thinking, either consciously or sub-consciously, let me offer these points for your consideration.

GPA is important, but it’s less important than it was in the past. Studies have documented that grades (both in high school and college) are going up these days, while SAT scores are falling. Grade inflation is rampant, to the point that “gains in high school GPA raise questions about the ability of colleges to rely on the statistics in college admissions.”[1] There are lots of egos in the grade inflation race: administrators want to demonstrate their schools are performing well, teachers want to graduate that brilliant class, and parents want to brag about their child’s stellar performance.

Most admissions departments now recognize that a 4.0 on one transcript is not equal a 4.0 on another. Some colleges are even dropping the standardized test requirement (SAT, ACT, etc.).[2] To compensate for the disparity and imprecision of grading metrics, college admissions programs are placing greater emphasis on finding the well-rounded students rather than searching for the elusive “perfect” student. Extra-curricular activities, achievements related to the student’s chosen field, the content of recommendation letters, and class rankings all matter more than they did in the past.

There’s no doubt that a good GPA still matters, but a B or two among a sea of A’s will not knock you out or the running. We should all stop viewing the 3.85 as a failure. It’s not.

Learning matters as much as grades. Celeste didn’t have the highest grade in the class, but she was learning, making progress, and enjoying success. Greek is a challenging language, especially when taken online. Students must learn to both read and type in a new alphabet. Did it stretch Celeste? Clearly. But she was rising to that challenge. She was learning Classical Greek.

When we instill in our children the belief that the grade is all-important, all sorts of distortions can result. In Celeste’s case, that perfect 4.0 came at the price of only taking easy classes. In a year or two she may be sending a stellar transcript along with her college applications, but will she have truly been challenged? Will her transcript reflect how she does in a subject that doesn’t come easily to her?

In other cases, students are under so much pressure to perform that it leads to nearly incapacitating stress. When we first began The Lukeion Project back in 2005, parents rarely contacted us to say that their student was so anxious and apprehensive that they couldn’t take a quiz or complete a paper. Sadly, it’s becoming more frequent.

Still, other students are driven to actions they normally wouldn’t consider. We have a strict honesty policy at The Lukeion Project and we make our students aware of it at the beginning of each class. Nevertheless, each year we catch one or two students who have copied a Latin or Greek translation from a website. When we confront them, the answer is often that they are overscheduled, taking 4 AP classes, and didn’t have time to complete the translation honestly, but they just had to get that good grade.

Then there are those who try to game the system. They know when they’ve reached that ‘A’ according to the published grading rubric and that’s where they stop. They’ll do just enough homework to get credit, but no more. They’ll skip the last quiz if they know they have an ‘A’ without it. They’ll resort to distorted logic to argue for one more point on a quiz. Any teacher would rather have a Celeste than that student in their class

.

Students rise to challenges. I don’t know why Celeste’s composite average was an 88 instead of a 93. Perhaps she wasn’t spending an appropriate amount of time working on her Greek. Perhaps this was her first language and she had never had to do any memorization before. Perhaps she was truly working at her full potential, given everything else going on in her life at the time. Perhaps there was something more than the withdrawal email mentioned. But that email suggested that Celeste was expected to get an A in every class she took, or it wasn’t worth it.

I beg to differ. Sooner or later, every student will rise to the level where they must do more work in a class than they’ve had to do in the past. For many students, especially those who are used to easily getting top grades, languages are that challenge. Rather than shaming a student into feeling disheartened, we should challenge the student to find new paths to mastery. This is not a time to teach our students that quitting is their first response. It’s a time to teach them to push a little harder, study a little smarter, focus a little longer. It’s a time to tell them you believe in them, and they can do this hard thing. 

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[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/07/17/study-finds-notable-increase-grades-high-schools-nationally

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/05/college-admissions-gpa-sat-act/561167/