In the last class, I set up students with a series of comparative activities. In each comparative activity, we looked at some formal structures common across adaptations of the Iliad. So in today's class, I wanted to point out that these interpretive activities were basically structuralist. And, furthermore, I wanted to set up this interpretive strategy so that we could draw on it for later role-playing activities.

I was very worried about boring students to death, so I tried to make this introduction brief and practical. I probably spent the most time talking about meter, which should have been helpful to some of the students who've never encountered the formal study of prosody. Otherwise, I flew through the structuralism slides at surprising speed, and I didn't get as many befuddled looks as I expected.

So that went better than expected, but I hadn't prepared for the real problem issue. I found that at least three students were significantly confused by War Music. Those students said that they couldn't understand the storyline. Some other students said that they watched Troy to better understand the story.

My main mistake is that I drastically overestimated how much my students knew the stories of the classics. And I overestimated how much they could reconstruct the narrative of a poem, even in a world rich with Shmoop and Wikipedia and SparkNotes. I thought that this class would properly introduce students to the classics and the fundamentals of poetry, but I've found that my students need even more classics and fundamentals than I anticipated.

Next we're heading into the sonnets. I think this will be a relief to the students who believe that "poetry" is synonymous with "lyric." But I wonder how to carry forward the lessons of this section. First, I think I should exposit the historical context to a large degree. Second, I should probably teach students about the rhythms of each genre of poetry (eg, the volta of a sonnet). Third, I think I should lead students through very fundamental activities to help them annotate the text. In the next few weeks, I should refer to Engaging Ideas more frequently.