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Odyssey Research Project - Reflections

This lesson was part of a unit on Homer's The Odyssey that I taught to my 9th-grade Honors English class. My students found the epic to be a rather difficult text, but they expressed a strong interest in mythology and, for the most part, they enjoyed the unit.

Although the lesson plan itself was little more than an adaptation of my Holocaust lesson (taught simultaneously to my non-Honors students), I got very different results from my Honors class. Despite demonstrating a high degree of technological proficiency, most of my students preferred to use computers only for the research itself. Their visual aids tended to be handcrafted or hand-assembled models rather than Powerpoint slideshows.

As with the Holocaust research project, I was very pleased with the students' enthusiasm, engagement, and ingenuity in researching and designing their visual aids. The model ships and scenes built by some groups demonstrated a lot of effort and planning; other groups did posters that were colorful, informative, and creative. One group combined the two, creating a 3-dimensional map of Odysseus's travels and populating it with model ships and creatures.

The only negative aspect of my students producing such creative and interesting models has been the difficulty I've faced in storing and displaying them. Such amazing work deserves to be seen by other students; I'll need to work out a way of displaying the models (at least, the ones I'm allowed to keep) while protecting them from possible damage.