Troubling the Familiar into New Life: Some Thoughts on Teaching Mythology

The stimulating papers on teaching mythology that appeared in CW last year represent an invaluable compendium of approaches and ideas for all of us who teach such courses.¹ I offer these comments in the hope that they too may be of use.

Given the deficient background of many students, simply covering the material in a myth course can be daunting, and the CW papers suggest a panoply of resources for meeting this challenge. I think, though, that we miss an important opportunity if we do not also build into such courses strategies for eliciting active student response. My experience teaching mythology at Carleton College for many years suggests that such strategies are a natural fit for this subject and that they contribute materially to what students learn in the course—and to what they retain.

One approach we used was to require students during the term to develop their own definitions or descriptions of myth. I began the opening class by asking students to take ten minutes to write in their notebooks, for their eyes only, a brief statement of what, at that moment, they thought myth was. At the end of the third and sixth weeks of the ten-week term all students turned in one-page definitions or descriptions that drew on what we had covered in class to that point and on ways in which their own thinking had evolved. These two statements were ungraded (except for an F, if they were not turned in) but received extensive comments and criticism. The final stage in the saga was an hour-long question that represented either 50 percent or 33 percent of the final exam:² "In a well-organized and cogently argued essay, elaborate your own definition or description of myth. For documentation you may draw on whatever myths you choose, but be sure also to relate your comments closely to two of the following: X, Y, or Z"—with X, Y, and Z being myths announced at the time students took the exam.

Because this ongoing exercise had as its telos a question that materially affected their grade in the course, students took it seriously—and in the process often became deeply involved in it. Most students chose to relate their definitions closely to what we were covering at the time in lectures and readings, so that writing their statements inevitably entailed active review and assimilation of class material. Even among those who followed this approach, however, responses varied greatly: different students focused on different aspects of what we had covered, found different handles for dealing with it, different ways for arguing their cases. And a substantial portion—perhaps 25 percent in a typical class—came up with highly original answers, often relating the assignment to the theoretical focus of their majors or to reference points of personal interest. Science students often compared the function of myth to that of a scientific model, noting that neither is a literal representation of the "real world," but that both help us comprehend and deal with that world. Students in the arts often related the evocative power of myth to the artistic languages they were developing, while students in the social sciences tended to ground their definitions in the study and observation of human society. Some of the best definitions were those in which students approached myth indirectly, through metaphor or analogy. One student, for instance, began her description by commenting that "from author to author and from age to age, the characters and relationships in myth are viewed from different perspectives. Like a glass prism, the story we call myth has innumerable faces which reflect as many lights/colors/interpretations as there are human experiences."

There is, of course, no "right answer" to this question, a fact I emphasized from the start. But that the question is so open-ended, can be approached from so many angles, obliges students to confront myth on their own, to forge their own answers. In order to encourage students not only to come up with their own ideas but also to relate them rigorously...