Teaching the Odyssey to Modern Teenagers

“I need a hero. . . . He’s gotta be strong, and he’s gotta be fast / And he’s gotta be fresh from the fight.”

As teachers, we’re pretty sure you feel Bonnie Tyler’s pain on a daily basis, though most of us would probably settle for a student who is not so much a hero as “awake,” “moving at any speed,” and “willing to take a break from their phone.”

Some texts make us long for a hero more than others. And teaching the Odyssey, that well-over-2500-year-old epic, to modern teenagers can certainly leave us feeling in need of saving.

Depending on the translation you use, teaching the Odyssey can be intimidating. All the elements are there for a great story—adventure, monsters, hidden identities, a houseful of suitors, bloody revenge—but in many translations, these details are described in poetic language that can be hard for us, much less our students, to navigate.

That’s why we were thrilled to find Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation when it was our turn to teach the text. Not only is it classical literature translated by a woman (!), but her translation is fresh, modern, and highly readable. Our struggling readers and our PreAP students can have a meaningful experience without us feeling the need to define every other word.

Teaching the Odyssey is also important because it helps our students build their cultural toolkits. The ancient Greek epics form a significant part of the foundation of Western literature, and our students are sure to encounter references to Odysseus, the Cyclops, or Scylla and Charybdis at some point in their lives. Definitely that grey-eyed goddess, Athena.

But teaching the Odyssey also needs to look different for different levels of students.

When we taught it to our PreAP students, we felt it was important for them to learn about the hero’s journey archetype; after all, that’s something they’ll need in their cultural toolkits for AP Literature.

But we weren’t ready to take on that challenge with our struggling readers. We just wanted them to get through the text and at least kind of care about what happened. So with them, we took the approach of comparing the modern hero (whether that makes you think of the Avengers or of COVID front-line workers) to the Homeric hero. There’s a lot to discuss because . . . let’s just say, Odysseus would never be mistaken for Captain America.

So if you’re looking for resources for teaching the Odyssey that engage a wide range of modern teenagers, we hope you’ll join us on our own little version of the hero’s journey.

The Call to Adventure: Introduction Activities

In the traditional archetype, any hero’s journey begins when the hero receives a message, invite, or challenge that calls him to his adventure. He may or may not want to heed the call.

Doesn’t this sound like embarking on any novel unit with our students? Especially that last part. We don’t know about you, but a lot of our students are choosing to “decline” our “calls.”

When we’re getting ready to tackle a text that will challenge our students, we definitely need to hook them. And we can’t assume they’re all well-versed in the ins and outs of ancient Greek ideals and Trojan War history. (By the way, if you’re looking to brush up yourself, Stephen Fry’s Troy is fantastic.)

For all of our students, we started with Edpuzzles that introduced the Odyssey and recapped the basics of the Trojan War: The Odyssey: Crash Course Literature, Everything You Need to Know to Read the Odyssey, and The Trojan War Finally Explained. We love using Edpuzzles to hold our students accountable for watching videos because they’re quick and easy, for us (self-grading for the win!) and for our students.

We also needed to provide some introductory content for each of our two focuses. For our standard students, who would be comparing the Homeric hero to modern heroes, we created a Nearpod based on Kendra Cherry’s article, “What Makes a Person Heroic?” and an Edpuzzle for the video, “What Makes a Homeric Hero?”

For our PreAP students, who would be tracing the hero’s journey archetype through the text, we introduced the hero’s journey archetype (“What Makes a Hero?”) and provided students with videos introducing the ancient Greek ideals of xenia, nostos, kudos and aidos, and (of course) the Homeric hero.

Trials: Reading the Text

Once the hero has entered the new world, they must solve a riddle, slay a monster, escape from a trap, or, perhaps, all of the above.

Puzzling through the text definitely feels like a trial for many of our students, and we like to do what we can to help them navigate it (if only we had Athena’s grey eyes).

Caution, this next part may be polarizing: 

We didn’t read the full text with either group of students: there are some sections of the Odyssey that just aren’t worth the effort (Books 13–20 feel especially unnecessary). Instead, we pulled important excerpts and summarized the gaps, breaking the text into six chunks: Books 1–8, Book 9, Books 10–11, Book 12, Books 13–20, and Books 21–24. We spent most of our time in and attention on Books 9–12, which is Odysseus’s description of his actual adventures and by far the best part of the story (and the part our students most need to be familiar with).

For both levels of students, we wrote multiple-choice questions to guide them through key features of the text as well as one short-answer question per assignment with different expectations and scoring guides for standard-level and PreAP students. This strategy allowed us to help them navigate the text and hold them accountable for their reading while minimizing our grading load. Many of the questions were the same since Wilson’s translation was so straightforward, but we did make a few adjustments to align with the end goal for each group.

Because the short answer questions do take time to score (and sometimes our students need a break from reading), we also included two creative assignments for students to complete at key points in their reading.

After reading Books 1–8, they created a series of Instagram posts from different character’s perspectives, and after reading Books 9–12, they created a storyboard illustrating Odysseus’s adventures. Some of the students’ creations were pretty good!

Crisis: The Essay

In the crisis segment of the hero’s journey, the hero faces his darkest hour, possibly even dying, only to be reborn.

While the stakes for writing essays aren’t quite that high, the writing process can certainly feel like a crisis for us and our students.

We assigned our standard-level students to write an argumentative essay in which they explain how Odysseus meets two of the characteristics of a Homeric hero and then decide whether or not he can be considered a hero based on a modern definition. 

This clear tie-in to the introductory activities reinforces for students that we’re not completing assignments “just because,” but that everything we do is working toward a specific end goal. Letting your students know those introductory Edpuzzles will be helpful when it comes time to write the essay may help you get some additional buy-in from those who always want to know “Why do we have to do this?”

A prewriting assignment guided students through selecting the characteristics of a Homeric hero and modern hero on which they would base their argument as well as supporting evidence from the text.

Then, they worked their way through a graphic organizer, essentially a scaffolded “rough draft” with sentence-by-sentence directions in the 5C format (Claim, Concrete Evidence, Context, Commentary, and Connection) as well as sentence starters to help guide them toward producing proficient academic writing.

We assigned our honors-level students to write an explanatory essay in which they discuss how Odysseus’s journey fits into the twelve stages of the hero’s journey archetype and how Homer uses this structure to highlight the importance of an ancient Greek ideal (a call back to those introductory Edpuzzles and videos: your PreAP/honors level students may benefit from the same “pregame” talk as their standard-level peers).

The prewriting document guided students through selecting appropriate quotations to support each stage of the hero’s journey archetype. In most cases, we provided guidance on which part of the story corresponded with each stage of the hero’s journey: in part because the stages can be interpreted in different ways and we wanted students to focus on the writing process, but also because providing specific directions made it at least a little bit more challenging for our students to turn to their good friends Google and ChatGPT for help.

Like we did for the standard-level students, we provided a graphic organizer that functioned as a scaffolded “rough draft” with sentence-by-sentence directions in the 5C format (Claim, Concrete Evidence, Context, Commentary, and Connection) as well as sentence starters.

Note: We don’t traditionally provide sentence starters for PreAP students, but did so on this assignment because it was their first essay and we anticipated our freshmen might struggle with organization for this particular prompt: after all, we wanted them to address twelve stages in less than twelve paragraphs.

New Life: The Final Exam

When the archetypal hero returns from his journey, he has outgrown his old life, having learned a few things on his adventure.

We can never guarantee that our students learn everything we want them to learn, but we did find they had at least a little bit more knowledge when we finished our time with Odysseus and friends (or enemies).

We assigned students a final exam that covered all the background information we used to introduce the text as well as character identification and reading comprehension questions. As we often did before end-of-unit exams, we also provided students with a review Kahoot, ensuring that if they paid attention and took the time to prepare, they ended the unit on a strong note.

Overall, teaching the Odyssey was a rewarding experience for us, and we believe it can be for you, too, regardless of the level you’re teaching. In our superhero-saturated age, the concept of the hero is familiar and engaging to students, but we also live in a world that questions the characteristics that truly make a hero far more than other generations and cultures did. Our definition of a hero continues to evolve, and that makes for interesting discussion.

Interested in trying out our approach to teaching the Odyssey for yourself? You can purchase the full unit with all the materials, answer keys, and scoring guides you need to implement both the standard and PreAP versions. If your students need a review of Greek mythology before you begin, you can also purchase the unit bundled with our Introduction to Greek Mythology mini-unit, which includes Edpuzzles and Kahoots that review the key characters from Greek mythology along with an introduction to the hero’s journey archetype using Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. Our students enjoyed getting started with this quick and easy review, and we referred back to it for examples and comparison throughout the unit.

Whatever your journey toward teaching the Odyssey looks like, we hope you’ll share it with us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works. We always love to hear what’s working (or not working) for you!