Homeschool High School Reading and Rhetoric: The Medusa Mythology Exam as a Spine for High School English
I often say jokingly (but also not) that my teenager knows more about Greek mythology than anyone else that I've ever met.
To be fair, I haven't met Rick Riordan, Helene Guerber (if only!), or Madeline Miller, but I have met my fair share of academics, well-read individuals, and other homeschoolers with their Special Interests, and none of them compare to my own resident mythologist.
Fortunately, mythology makes an excellent spine for any level of reading/rhetoric/language arts study, but it's especially suitable for the high school student. Themes that deal with explaining the world and our place in it, plots that have these elevated gods and goddesses acting petty and mean and just as flawed as the rest of us, and language that even in translation is meaty and rich are perfect for the growing emotional and academic maturity of a high schooler.
This works even better if you homeschool, because you can incorporate cross-curricular elements so easily, depending on the interests and academic needs of your high schooler. I like to incorporate geography and art history into our mythology studies, but you can also add in Ancient history, architecture, the history of science (with enough hands-on demonstrations and experiments to count it as a lab credit), comparative literature, world religion study... and I'm sure numerous other topics that haven't even occurred to me!
Every year, my homeschoolers have used the National Mythology Exam, administered by Excellence Through Classics, as a spine for part of their grade-level ELA credit. Studying the curriculum easily accounts for a semester's credit, and the exam, itself, makes a nice culminating project.
The exam curriculum varies each year, and I also love that it incorporates some obscure sources as well as some more well-known sources, allowing kids to become proficient with the canonical works while studying more deeply and building context with lesser-known works. There's also variety between prose, poetry, and plays, so it feels like a well-rounded unit.
Now that the kids have sat the exam for multiple years, I also appreciate the way that the curriculum continues to incorporate past resources, but in new ways. Last year, for instance, we studied The Odyssey and The Argonautica in their entirety; this year, kids are asked to read just a couple of short selections from each, with the focus on gaining different information from them than last year. So if you study for the exam over multiple years, you learn to see the same sources from different viewpoints and make deeper, more sophisticated connections between them and other source material.
The one "flaw" to the National Mythology Exam is that it only covers Greek mythology. This is a narrow focus when you consider all the mythologies of the world, but it's still a vast amount of content to work with. And if Greek mythology is your kid's Special Interest, then it's definitely the gateway to getting them to get some solid academic work done!
This year's theme for the Medusa Mythology Exam for high school students was "The Ichor of Zeus." I had no idea what this phrase meant, but the first time I read it to my teenager she explained that it referred to Zeus' fully immortal children. When you study for the exam, you can focus your efforts on that theme, but the exam DOES ask questions outside of it, so you can't *only* read those selected passages that deal with that selected topic. Here's part of what we studied for this year's exam:
Alcestis, by Euripedes: we watched a Zoom production of this play on YouTube:
The Odyssey, by Homer: this is the third time in three years that my teenager has studied The Odyssey! This year, though, she wasn't looking at Odysseus and his adventures, but specifically the actions of the gods/goddesses.
It's a LOT, but the only long text that we read in its entirety before the exam was The Iliad. If you're going to study only one long text in its entirety, The Iliad is a good one! You can talk about the Homeric hero, hero archetypes (including the fatal flaw), the oral tradition, issues in translation, and all kinds of tropes and literary devices. And because of the way Homer wrote, you get a look at most of the Pantheon (I think Hades must have been off playing tennis or something during the Trojan War...) as well as see references to numerous characters connected to other works, such as Aeneas, Agamemnon, and Odysseus. Afterwards, you could transition immediately into The Aeneid and go off on your Roman way, or The Odyssey and hang out with giants and my favorite character, Calypso!
The shorter texts include stories from Metamorphoses, entries in Library of History, the poems that are the Homeric Hymns, etc. It is MORE than enough content for a semester's high school ELA credit!
Content-Rich Resources and Activities
If you're a homeschooler, you're probably used to living and breathing your main unit of study. Fortunately, mythology is easy to live and breathe!
There are 41 videos that are all less than 15 minutes long, so it's pretty easy to pace them. I don't even worry about matching the videos with whatever mythological text we're currently studying; I see them as building a knowledge base and context, so we watch them as they come up and discuss whatever Entopics or connections they bring to mind.
Crash Course Mythology is part of our school day, but because my teenager just simply loves mythology, she's really open to incorporating mythology-centric books, films, audiobooks, and podcasts into her personal time and our family free time. I think she'd proudly tell you that Percy Jackson was her gateway into Greek mythology, and she still rereads all the Percy Jackson books constantly. I love them all, too, and I love having this fandom connection with her. And with all the books plus the non-fiction companions, a younger kid really does have everything they need to build quite a substantial base of mythology knowledge to support advanced study.
My teenager really loves audio input, and she's always got music, a podcast, or an audiobook in her ears. Even before we read The Iliad together, she listened to this podcast in its entirety:
I mean, it's not like you're going to get a lot of spoilers for the Trojan War these days (I hope you already know who wins!), and I think that having such a thorough synopsis, including the parts that aren't actually included in The Iliad (did you know that the Apple, Helen's abduction, and even the freaking TROJAN HORSE aren't actually IN The Iliad?!?), makes understanding the text so much easier.
Other podcasts that we listen to more selectively, depending on the episode, include the following:
We use these during the unit for synopses and analysis of the texts we're reading, background historical information, and context-building discussion of the characters we're studying.
Flash cards and Quizlets are terrific for content checks; they're not always the most fun, but they DO help students memorize what they need to memorize. Here's the Quizlet that my teenager used to study for her exam; it's built from the Study Guide doc where she took notes from all her readings.
One year, to make things more fun, my homeschoolers created trading cards for the Greek Pantheon. They looked a little like the ones in this activity, but on the back of each card they wrote the character's stats and main accomplishments, trading-card style. I only have one kid who super loves art, so we didn't do a ton, but I think it would be so awesome to make a bunch of these, color copy them onto bristol board, and then use them for a whole other range of activities.
Creating memes and AITA entries is also really fun, and sneakily solidifies characters and events and sometimes pretty minor plot points.
Interactive Notebook
If you plan to do a multi-year study, or at least to take the National Mythology Exam multiple years, an interactive notebook would be a great resource for your student to create. If you put it in a three-ring binder, you can easily review and then build on your knowledge every time you revisit a particular text or myth, creating your own homemade reference book/study guide as you go. For getting started, I like some of the components in this Odyssey interactive notebook--the character list and comic strip summaries are fun and useful!
When my homeschoolers were in the upper middle school and early high school years, I gave them a lot of projects that asked them to create digital infographics, because I think that kind of visual/textual informative communication is an important part of literacy. These kinds of infographics on the subject of Greek mythology could include family trees, detailed character profiles, info about specific texts, etc., and all could then be placed in an interactive notebook.
Maps are also really important to include. Every year we review the geography of the Mediterranean by drawing and labeling maps with modern and ancient places and features--here's a good basic map of the Mediterranean. I usually rely on maps created by others for understanding specific texts, like this map of The Odyssey that I printed for our study last year but which still lives on the magnet board in the family room because it's so great.
You can also include in the interactive notebook all the other student-created products of a high school unit, the essays and comprehension quizzes, even the old National Mythology Exam test papers.
Cross-Curricular Art Enrichment
There are so many artistic outlets that an art-inclined student can incorporate into a mythology study, both to add a cross-curricular component and to help build mastery of the information covered. Check out, for instance, this Tiktok:
Imagine the graphic design skills built, the screenprinting skills in practice, AND the correct ordering of the places Odysseus visited and who he encountered there!
To see awesome Greek artifacts close to home, of course, just hit up your nearest and best art museum. Even our local university has some artifacts from Greece, the museum in the nearby state capital has more, and whenever we travel somewhere amazing (this summer to England!), I make sure we visit a museum where we can see things from all our family Special Interests, including Greek mythology, the Maya, and prehistory.
The British Museum stole SO MANY great Greek artifacts that I'm looking forward to seeing!
I also use Google Image to find high-res images of the artworks that my teenager is studying, print them four-to-a-page on cardstock, then cut them out and label them with their info on the back. The teenager can study them, sort and organize them, and display them around our study space.
This year, my teenager and I are studying art history right along with ancient world history, and I love how crucial architecture is to this study. Architecture IS art! She's not my kid who loves model-building, so we don't do nearly as much of that as we did when my college student was still at home, but modeling something like the Parthenon really does allow you to study its features in more detail.
For more art enrichment, you could model Greek vases to learn more about the embellishment style, or create a shoebox diorama of an important scene from a specific text.
Enrichment Resources
In some ways, the best Greek mythology enrichment that we ever provided to our kids was the trip that we took to Greece! We saw such wonders as--
Mycnae, where Agamemnon was king when he said to the siege of Troy, then came back to be murdered, along with his enslaved consort, Cassandra, by his wife Clytemnestra, Helen's sister. She in turn would later be murdered by their son, Orestes.
Ever since that trip, we have a running joke that everytime we hear crickets chirping, we start to talk loudly as a family about how much we love poetry and music, because crickets are Apollo's ears and he uses them to check up on you and see if you're properly respecting his gifts.
In other ways, though, the trip was really just an excuse for the younger homeschooler to explore the one Special Interest that is dearer to her heart than Greek mythology:
Here's a Tiktok that really encapsulates what it's like to visit Greece, home to untold numbers of feral cats, with a cat lover:
Exploring the Greek language is also an excellent enrichment--you don't have to learn to speak it to benefit from stretching your mind to explore a new language system. Memorizing the Greek alphabet and their letter names is fun and easy, especially if you display an anchor chart and just spend a few seconds going over it daily. Take another small step forward and memorize the phonemes, and you'll suddenly discover that there are so many cognates between Greek and English that you can actually read a surprising number of words! I bought this Greek alphabet block printable way back in 2017, and it was a great purchase because I can build new blocks as needed.
By the way--if you haven't studied Greek roots yet, now is the time!
I think our favorite enrichments, though, are the more contemporary books and films made on mythological subjects. I love fanart of all kinds, and these are no exception! Last year when we studied the Argonautica in depth, I showed the kids the old Jason and the Argonauts movie, especially my favorite all-time movie scene:
It is so good! I love how all the actors are absolutely pouring sweat because it's probably at least 110 degrees on that bare dirt and rock, and how the Argonauts just stand there for, like, ten minutes while the skeletons get sown and grown and form up to march. Just kill the humans really quick and run, Jason!
We also love, of course, Clash of the Titans and Troy, although y'all, Patroclus is NOT Achilles' baby cousin.
Along with all of Percy Jackson, (of course!), here are some other good Greek mythology fanfics for high schoolers:
Fun that they're all written by women! I've also been wanting to read this newer Emily Wilson translation of The Odyssey, but I haven't gotten around to it. Perhaps that will be a good Jurassic Coast beach read this summer!
We usually also read at least one book a year that can be usefully compared to some mythological tale. We haven't decided what our book will be for this year, but last year we read The Hunger Games and compared it to the life of Theseus. Theseus and Katniss are so much alike!
Let me know if you can think of any good modern works that one could fruitfully compare with The Iliad...
My teenager sat this year's National Mythology Exam a couple of weeks ago, so we'll probably move Greek mythology to the back burner for a while, maybe just popping in once a week or so to read a little more in one of the texts that we didn't need to read in its entirety for the exam. It became apparent during the text that my teenager had forgotten a couple of important things about The Odyssey (oops!), so maybe we'll do that Emily Wilson translation together over the summer.
I mean, you have to listen to SOMETHING while you put together jigsaw puzzles and solve Sudoku!
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