Overall, I am really happy with the way that my hybrid class is going. I have never had such good attendance in a Friday morning class. Granted at least 1/3 of my students show up late, but I won't really be too picky. Classes are always lively and fun despite the 8:40am roll taking. I think that I must have gotten really lucky with this group of students. I can't think that this is all because of something that I am doing. I just have a really good group.
The activities that I have set up are proving to be both a challenge and a lot of fun. I am starting to run out of ideas for activities and it isn't even half way through the semester. I think that some research is going to be required on my part. Thus far here is what we have done:
8/28- Write, Pair, Share "What is myth"
This activity wasn't really all that fun but the brainstorming and talking out of the ideas really helped to get their brains thinking. I wrote up all of their ideas on the board and we talked about the merits of each definition and why some didn't work out. I posted a picture of our brainstorm on D2L for the students to refer back to but I highly doubt that any of them will look at it.
9/6- Creation Comic and Telephone
One of my focuses in my class is to get students to not only remember the myths and think about their relevance and importance but to also identify them in art work. For that reason, I have my students do a lot of art related activities. The first was the Creation Comic. This week students read Hesiod's Theogony and the opening lines of Ovid's Metamorphoses that deal with Creation. In class students were charged with picking out the most important scenes (to their mind) from either Creation story and creating a comic strip. I found that several students did not do the reading so they were allowed to make up their own Creation story (a decision that I am regretting now that I realize several students are still not doing the reading). I wanted the comic strip to make them think about what was and was not important in the stories of creation and to help them to think about how to get ideas across in art. Overall, I think that it was very helpful and it was hilarious to grade.
The second part of the activity for the day was Telephone. In the end this turned out to be a failed experiment but it was a lot of fun while it was failing. The logistics of this activity were really what brought it down and looking back I would change a few things. Here is how it went the first time though: Starting out I numbered all of my students starting from one end and working around. Every student was instructed to have out a piece of paper to write notes on along with their name and number. I made up a story about a monster slaying hero, Shelby, who was deified after defeating the monster. I told this story to Student 1 as he wrote down notes. I did not repeat any part of the story. When we were done Student 1 had to tell the story as he remembered it to Student 2 with Student 2 taking notes and none of the story being repeated. I really wanted this to illustrate the changes that occur in oral tradition. The story moved through various people with different backgrounds so it should have changed with each telling just as myths with an oral tradition change over time and space. This did not work out so well. My students quickly lost my story so they made up their own to fill in the gaps. It eventually became not so much a story but a commentary on Hera's bitchiness and how she is hot. (Their words). I find it really interesting that they fell back on what they knew if Greek myth when they couldn't remember or understand the story that was told to them by the previous student. Next time I think that I should allow for a second repetition of the story.
9/13 Poseidon and Athena Casting
This might have been my favorite activity so far. Poseidon and Athena are really the first gods that we look at in depth and in order to get the students thinking about what we can of the deities' character I charged each person to cast Athena and Poseidon (as if in a movie) using either characters or real people and to justify their choices. Once they were done we came up with a list of attributes that we thought that Poseidon and Athena had to have and then we started making the lists. Their was a lot of rivalry and defense of particular choices over others and I think that in the end the students got a lot out of the experience. Even two weeks and four gods later they seem to have a really good grasp on the nature of these gods. The final contestants and winner along with the list of attributes were also posted, in pictures, on D2L. Our final vote was Wolverine, from X-men, for Poseidon and Mrs. Archer, from Archer, for Athena. I like the Poseidon choice but I am not sure that I can get behind Mrs. Archer.
9/20 Draw Artemis and Thesis statements
The draw Artemis activity felt like a bit of a cop-out to me. I probably should have come up with something better. This activity they just had to draw Artemis using all of the hints that artists generally throw in to help their audience identify what they are looking at. I got a lot of very funny pictures and one student was even brave enough to draw his on the board. Again, I think that it helps pull on a different part of the brain when students have to produce rather than recognize art. I guess I'll know at the midterm whether this worked.
The second half of the activity was to break up into pairs (I even made them move and sit next to someone new) and come up with a thesis statement of the gods of the day, Aphrodite and Artemis. Based on the groans and complaints, my students hated this. We wrote up all of the thesis statements on the board and went over them a bit. There were a lot of funny ones generally along the lines of "Artemis is a bitch." After all of the theses were on the board we came up with at least one piece of evidence to support each thesis. My personal spin on this was to not allow the group that came up with the thesis to provide the evidence. While my students did not like this activity I think that it was really good for them to think about the readings and lectures in a different way. I also posted a picture of the theses on the board on D2L.
9/27 Charades
I think that I might chalk today's class up to a vague failure. Now more than ever I really need to do some work on learning how to lead a class discussion that isn't just leading them to answers. Apollo and Dionysus, our divinities du jour, are such a cool contrasting pair and while I talked about them I didn't get a lot back from the class. This might have something to do with most of the class not watching the lectures due to some technical difficulties but I don't know. AND I am unhappy with them from not telling me that they couldn't watch the lectures. Why can't they send me an email so that I can do something to help them? Especially when today's activity was charades featuring all of the characters that we read and talked about for this week. It was really painful watching them flounder because they didn't remember character names and stories. Oy.
My final observation is that this class, while being very bright and participatory and lively, has the same problem as every other class that I have taught. Getting them to write papers every week is like pulling teeth.
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