εύρηκα!: How I Utilized Classical Myth to Help Explain Audience: Lesson Plan

by Kelsey Schalo

Before class, be sure to gather these 3 things: 

1. A snippet of Hesiod’s Works and Days, centered on the discussion of Pandora’s origin (lns 60 – 80. Free access can be found on Perseus tufts). It is important to screenshot the original Greek without any indicators of what the material is. 

2. A translated version of the same passage: Perseus Tufts has a great 1914 translation that you can access on the same page as the original ancient Greek. 

3. Locate the Ted Talk on Pandora’s box: https://www.ted.com/talks/iseult_gillespie_the_myth_of_pandora_s_box

Note that this lesson plan can be easily modified with any topic, so long as the basic point gets across.

I will outline how this plan unfolds. 

• When the students enter the classroom, have the ancient Greek pulled up on the board. Once they’ve settled down, start asking them about what they can assume about the audience of the passage. Naturally, these answers should be something like “Well, it was written for someone who spoke Greek,”  Do not keep the Greek on the screen for too long but do try to get the most out of the discussion with it. The key take-away here is that they are definitely not the audience. You, naturally, don’t expect them to have a clue what they are looking at. 

• Next, pull up the translation (or print it out and distribute it) and have the students read through the English translation of what they just looked at. While they read, they should be marking language that sounds odd, things they don’t understand, things that they don’t know and would require more information to know, etc. Once they’ve finished that, go through another round of discussion about the audience. At this point, you should be able to incorporate a more detailed analysis of language, rhetorical devices, knowledge, etc. The bonus is that the translation is from 1914, and thus the language used will certainly be different than a ‘modern’ translation. 

• Finally, show them the video. The main emphasis on the video’s discussion should be on how they know that modern people are the audience. This is seen in the animation, in the explanation of myth, of the explanation of symbolism, etc. They should notice that the video takes from many sources, given that it provides more information and detail than the translation gives. The discussion, here, was more lively for my class. They got excited about the use of animation, about the story-like telling of the myth, and how they were told what they were supposed to get out of it. Additionally, it may be worth pointing out that the myth of Pandora means something different for a modern audience than it did for an ancient one. Whereas it certainly warns against temptation, for ancient authors it was also a warning about how dangerous women are! 

There are really so many different ways that this discussion can go, but the gist of it is to explain the audience, rhetorical devices, and how information is delivered.