That Darn Itch—the Stephanie-Robinson-Copyrighted “Itch”

Last month I proclaimed far and wide that my eager scholars had graduated from the “Scratch” phase of our rigorous boot camp, also known as my History class, and I wondered what to call the next phase of development in scaling the Mt. Olympus of Academe. Stephanie, a friend from Denison Singers days, and a new, integral part of my correspondence life, offered the following suggestion as a comment to that posting:

“Hmmm....I'm gonna go with ITCH as a graduation from Scratch...now you have them itching for knowlege...their skin is crawling in anticipation of learning new things. It's still a bit uncomfortable, but thrilling too. How's that?”

Stephanie—how prescient! I think itch is perfect.

This week my classes and I had to have a pow-wow, or pep talk (given the time I spent on it, I should at least capitalize that—Pep Talk), following weak showings on a test last week on ancient Greece. Oh, these tests should have been the best of our experience together! In the two weeks we studied Athens, the students were engaged, focused, excited, mesmerized—all the great verbs that the Athenians inspire anyway as we explore what Homer was hoping to cultivate in the young men of Greece. Studying Greece never fails to move me—indeed, it is why most of us teach! Homer hoped to use epics about the Trojan War as a “lab report” explaining how the Greeks triumphed over jealousy, pettiness, and mediocrity to emerge as determined, thoughtful, young men striving for excellence. I introduced what has often been called “the Homeric Ideal”—the template of how to assiduously prepare yourself for life, coupled with a savviness of how to take advantage of opportunities in life. We discussed why every single western civilization textbook says things like, “Greece is the cornerstone of western imagination.” We looked beyond the bravura of that statement: What does this even mean? Why is Homer still read in college? How can we take these abstract pieces of advice and convert them into concrete achievements?

In the last few years for me, studying the funerary practices of the ancient Greeks have served as interesting examples of not only how to mourn a death, but how to best live life. In ancient Greece, families went to cemeteries and poured oil, a libation, into kraters that rested on the remains of the deceased. The krater had no bottom to it, so the oil seeped into the earth, and the Greeks felt this act of pouring oil helped connect them with their loved ones. There was less “fear” in the Greek world about death I think, but still a desire to mourn a loss, and a desire to create some kind of bond from the living to the dead. As time went on, mourning practices changed, and Greeks erected statues of young men that rested on top of the graves. The statue was a kouros, an idealized young man, and the thought was that as you saw this young man, you considered the potential of youth, and the excitement of what every youth might achieve. What an interesting idea to visit a cemetery and as one mourned the loss of a loved one, one mourned the loss of that person’s potential. Instinctively, that should rally us to consider our own potential, and take note of how much we have plumbed our own potential. The Greeks didn’t miss a trick—they created another interesting visual image in the cemeteries: they ringed this potentially sad place with cypress trees, a tree that had come to symbolize hope. Thus, as the Greeks mourned the losses of family and friends, they are yet reminded of the concept of potential, and filled with a sense of hope.

How can any teacher not love digging into the Greeks with all those wonderful concepts just begging to be explored???

As you read Stephanie’s explanation of this stage of ITCH—it was so accurate! They loved hearing the back story of Aeschulus’ trilogy, The Oresteia, and you could hear a pin drop as I explained the parade route of the joyous Pan-Athenaic Procession, the annual event galvanizing all of Athens. (Strange though, it took me a while to explain what a parade was, or a procession, no one seemed to know a good Arabic word for parade. Could it be that they do not have parades in the Arab world? The best I way I could convey it was to discuss the daily parades at Walt Disney World—then they understood the excitement and festive quality of the procession!). This Athenian celebration began in the cemetery (remember what you see there) and heads by the schools of Athens (where we learn about the Homeric ideal) darts through the agora (the marketplace, the source of the income flowing through Athens) and than takes the arduous path up to the Acropolis, to the Parthenon crowning all of Athens. If you remember your history, the Parthenon had been built on the rubble of the Persian sacking of Athens, and so represented the phoenix rising triumphantly once again.

It is exhilarating teaching the Greeks—staring at the panels from the Parthenon, wondering about how they sought to convey all that is strong and fragile about the (clichéd phrase, I know) the human condition. And along the way, a number of them offered wonderful insights. Hamzah, he of the “Coupla Guys” entry, after we read about “The Cave,” emphasized, “Mr. John, it is our responsibility to teach others, right? It is our responsibility to teach them about the Greeks!” And Sarah explained why the Athenians loved entering the Parthenon so much: “They see themselves up there in the frieze. It is like where they would normally see the gods. But it is the Athenians up in the sacred part of the temple.” Sarah echoed a comment that Darren Sinatro brilliantly suggested last year in AP Art History about the Athenians. These were heady days in class. As we read about the hubris of the Athenians, and the eventual end of the “Golden Age,” there were gasps in class, shocked faces—looks of disbelief that we were finishing the Athenians. It was as if we were all watching a gripping movie, and wanted to avert our eyes from the inevitable denouement. The last art work we studied, the Laocoon, prompted one boy to say, “They are so tortured. It looks like they are ashamed of being human.”

And then came the tests. Oh, this should have been the pinnacle of four months of work! Just days before the test we had a five-day weekend (the trip to Budapest for me). Okay, am I still naïve enough to think that my young scholars might study during that break??? I knew we were headed for trouble at the study session the night before the test, when it was obvious that few students had studied at all. I had questions like, “I didn’t understand anything last week—do I have to take the test?” “Is Athens in India?” “Could you just tell me what I absolutely have to know?” As Stephanie predicted, it had been thrilling to compare ourselves to Athenians with all the hopeful rhetoric, but it is still uncomfortable to go back and actually untangle the Trojan War, Persian War, and the Peloponnesian War. That classroom dynamic gets a little musty when facing a notebook and realizing you have to do work to make sense of all this hoopla. Yeah, yeah, “cornerstone of western imagination” my eye…

The morning of the test, a usually-aware young man asked me, “Do we have a test today?” After I reminded him that I had written it on the board, on an assignment sheet, mentioned it in class, yes, indeed he would be tested today. Oh, preparation—that elusive muse!

So the tests were ho-hum. I had 1 A, 1 A-, 6 B+, 4 B-, 4 C-, 12 D, 6 D- and 4 F grades.

In the Pep Talk, I mentioned that we had let down the Greeks. “The most curious people in history, maybe, and we let them down,” I trumpeted. Some of the answers are worth sharing. According to one, the physical geography of Greece helps us understand the Greeks because: “they liked math.” That was my favorite. But many other answers offered stale stuff like, “The Greeks tried to be all that they could be.” It is a nice slogan for the Army, but hardly an analysis or evaluation of Greek civilization!

My favorite anecdote of the last week comes just after I showed a section of world history some art from the Gupta Golden Age in India (last week we attempted to compare four golden ages—can we do it? We compared the Golden Ages of Athens, Rome, the Gupta, and the Han in China). Now this art from the Gupta often showcases the beauties of the female form. The poses are sensuous, never vulgar, but definitely provocative—in celebration of the female form. I showed several images to a class of 9 boys and 2 girls (what was I thinking?!!!!) and we had lots of giggles. I abruptly ended the slide show, and went back to discussing how the Gupta loved mathematics and developed numerous (get it?) innovations in mathematics. Math seems much tamer to discuss than the swaying breasts and hips of the Gupta women.

So in the next class I did not even bring mention the art, and so we are reveling in the Gupta development of pi and decimals, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, when a young man says, ”But Mr. John, aren’t we going to see some art? You always show us art.” “Well, Malik, I showed some to the earlier class and they giggled, so I decided we would skip the art.” Of course the class wanted to know what the art was like, and I said, “Let’s just say—the Guptas really liked female bodies.” Malik quickly replied, “But Mr. John, I like female bodies too.”

Oh well. So here we are in the land of ITCH.

As we learn to absorb material, wonder about consequences, speculate about causes and effects, battle over words and meaning, and seek a better understanding of our place in the world, I will try and enjoy the glories of Itch. I’ll let you know where the GPS takes us.

This afternoon I am going away for the weekend. To Egypt! A quartet of us decided that we needed a little break from Itch, and booked a weekend get-a-way to Cairo. It is only an hour flight from Amman, and in the next 48 hours I will get to see the Pyramids, and the recently unwrapped body of King Tut. I gotta say, this is making me giddy that Egypt can be a weekend adventure.

I’ll send you a postcard on Sunday.