Day 6 - Rachel

What is something you wanted to spend more time on?

This is another easy topic for me. In my Latin IV classes, we ran out of time on the House of Atreus unit. Though, to be honest, I would have been glad to have delved deeper into all of my Latin IV units (you can find the Roman Food and Harrius Potter Units here!) except the role play game we did, which was simply exhausting and, while wonderful and a true chance for my students to delve into a world while interacting in Latin, I was ready for it to end when it did.
But for the House of Atreus, we really only got around halfway through the story, and had only heard the men's stories, before the end of the school year. As good as those stories are (and I am developing the entire thing into a horror novella), I was disappointed not to spend some time in Clytemnestra's eyes and, of course, in the eyes of Electra, a character so intriguing that multiple plays have been written about her (and she has her own complex!).
Instead I had to rush and summarize the ending of the story for my seniors who would be graduating at the end of the school year--I couldn't even hope to finish the unit with them the following year.
A large part of this is due to the amount of testing that happened at the end of the year; the AP tests took up a large part of the year, as did state and local tests, plus finals and performance finals, and it was all I could do to get half a unit in. But it was disappointing; this is my first real foray into horror, and these students have been with me through four years of trial and error and experimentation. I can trust them to tell me what works, what doesn't work, and what can make it work.
Now I will have to train an entirely new generation.
What I did do:
Read sections of House of Atreus

1. Check Understanding: Since this was Latin IV and we were reading a chapter at a time, I would not do choral reading with the class, but I also did not want students to move forward in the story with an incomplete understanding of the events of a chapter, either. So students would read together, in small groups (up to 3) and then we would discuss the story as a class. I would break into English to check important plot points, especially if they would be necessary for understanding a later betrayal, etc., then reinforce those points in Latin, often writing them on the board so we could review back through them several times with lots of expression and shock.
2. ​Build Character Knowledge: As a class, I had bulletin board paper up for each character, and when we'd read a new chapter, students in groups would choose sentences that help illustrate the character's...character and write the sentence on the paper, as well as an explanation as to why they chose that sentence. Most characters got a chance to evolve over more than one chapter. "Di," instead of being treated as a character, were treated more as a way to look at the mortal characters' relationships with the gods.
3. Reinforce Chapter Knowledge: In small groups, students would be asked to do one of the following:
   1. Create Story Towers. Miriam brought these to my attention after she read about them here on Martina Bex's blog. They are a different way to do art+sentences from a story and my kids really got into them.
   2. Freeze Frames. I basically have students create Snaps (snapchat images) that encapsulate the chapter and they have to pair them with Latin that makes sense. They can use props, add to the images themselves, etc. Then they upload them to a dropbox (we have a system via the school, but there are several online options if you do not) and if I want I can even take those and make them into a review activity for the next day).
   3. Big Drawings. This is exactly what it sounds like. I like to jigsaw some chapters and give each group a small part and then they make a huge art piece and then we review. This can be done on bulletin board paper or even on the whiteboard. Either way, the rule is the image has to be CLEAR. Not beautiful (though that's okay), but clearly about the sentence and clear to understand.
4. Visual Verse Analysis: As a final activity when I realized we were running out of time, I had them take the semi-poetic openings to each chapter and analyze them using this rubric.

So I made the best of the time I had, but I had really hoped to get into the female portrayals and their underlying questions: Why is it better for Orestes to kill Clytemnestra and avenge his father than to leave his father unavenged but also avoid the blood sin of killing his mother? Why does Electra insist that Orestes kill Clytemnestra instead of doing it herself--why is she so powerless? etc. There is a lot of shock value in the House of Atreus mythological cycle, but there is also a lot of depth, and we had already been exploring what it means to be a mortal at the whim of gods, and whether Tantalus was right in his goals, if not his means.
However, I had only five weeks in reality, instead of the nine in the books, and had to make do.