Blogs on History

This is part two of seven-part series from the Project Happiness curriculum. It explores the many facets of happiness and provides practical techniques to generate greater happiness and a more meaningful life -- from the inside. Each door can be done alone, or the Seven Doors journey can be done in sequence.

Here's an experiment you can conduct in many schools, maybe even the school where you teach. Look through the door of one classroom and you might see the students hunched over, not engaged, even frowning. The teacher looks frazzled, tired and wishing he or she were somewhere else. You might think, "Well, everyone has a bad day." But you might witness this scenario in this teacher's classroom no matter what day you look through the door. For the second part of the experiment, look through the door of another classroom, and you might see a room full of lively students, eager, engaged and participating. The teacher is full of energy and smiling. This happens no matter what day you look through that door.

Cocooned in the safety of a library carrel, students can travel the world via Google Earth and see live video feed of the Doll's Festival in Japan. The haiku master Basho had to travel on foot for the same event, sleeping on hard floors in flea-infested straw. Today, students can peruse images of the English countrysides, full of the oxlips, nodding violets, and sweet musk-roses that inspired Shakespeare, without dampening their sneakers in dew or suffering the consequences of allergies. They can listen to the voices of strangers telling their life stories on podcasts and add their own stories to the voicethread of the world.

"The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war."
-- Douglas MacArthur

Why Teach Classical Greek Literature?

Near the end of the 2008-2009 school year, I had started reading The Iliad with my students and was struggling to connect them with the text. The language of the poem, the extended metaphors, the repetitious patterns of phrases and names bogged my students down, and they constantly questioned to the value of reading the text. I spent weeks answering questions about Greek culture and the Trojan War, showing short videos and PowerPoint presentations and rereading passages with them -- but the buy-in still wasn't there.