Aim: How can we evaluate Odysseus' leadership through his decision-making in his encounter with “Scylla and Charybdis” in Homer’s Odyssey?
Do Now: Whole Class Discussion!
Would you sacrifice one person in order to save five other people? What would influence your decision if you had to make a choice according to the Trolley Problem?
The class briefly discussed this Do Now by understanding and explaining what the Trolley Problem is and how each one of us would react towards it.
Next, we had a Kahoot!
This Kahoot was based on our opinions on who to save. We had to decide between 5 pregnant women and 1 innocent person, 5 prisoners who had escaped from prison and 1 innocent person, 5 people and 1 specialized surgeon, and some other options.
After this Kahoot, we continued to discuss the Do Now a little more in depth. The class came up with multitude solutions. For Example, Milana said that these decisions were strictly based on who these people were and the circumstance. Eleanor said that there is never gonna be a correct answer because no matter what, you’d be killing someone. Alyssa said that even though there is never a correct choice, some choices seem more tempting, for example the runaway prisoners. Lastly, Katherine said that her answer would depend on who the people are and the situation itself.
After talking about the Do Now we jumped into reading about Scylla and Charybdis.
Edward read it. The class found out that Scylla was a hideous monster with six heads, who was poisoned by Cyrce to become like this, and whenever a ship passes she seizes it with one of her heads. Additionally, the class found out that Charybtis is a female monster in the form of a whirlpool, that was cursed by Zeus, which sucks every passing ship in.
Following the reading we had a class discussion.
We read a short story about Odysseus, Scylla, Charybdtis.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OH77TtDun-Lkp1Oyq_BLisyQTIKKasr0/view?usp=sharing
After reading this short story, we had to figure out why Odysseus chose taking one route over the other.
Most of the class said that Odysseus choosing to go through Scylla instead of Charybdis is the wisest choice he could’ve made. The class realized that Odysseus had a choice between definite death or a probability of most of the crew coming out alive and he chose the correct probability.
Circe’s Advice
Next, we moved on to the next slide and read the little paragraph about Circe’s advice. She advised Odyseus to choose the correct route. She told him that one way he’ll only lose 6 crewmates and the other everyone would die. Odysseus thought about killing Scylla, but Circe reminds him that this creature is immortal and cannot be killed. Odysseus thought of Circe's advice as useful.
Afterwards, we moved on to looking at what Allusions are and how they are implemented.
Allusions are expressions or images designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly. We looked through a whole bunch of allusions during class. Many were from “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy”. During this small discussion we tried to figure out what each in each image was. For example, one allusion was with “The Simpsons”, showing the characters in the painting, “The Persistence of Memory”. Edward guessed this right away. Additionally, Ms.Peterson gave us a few examples of allusions in music. For example, many of Tayor Swift's songs have allusions in them. The song “Love Story” by Taylor Swift makes an allusion to “Romeo and Juliet”. https://youtu.be/8xg3vE8Ie_E.
This topic seemed really interesting to the whole class.
Then we moved on to Team Discussions.
The class divided into their teams and started to discuss the questions on the slide. We discussed whether or not Odysseus made the right call on choosing the route through Scylla. Also, we had to explain if Odysseus made the right choice of not telling his crew about this. Lastly, we had to make up our mind on if we would do the same thing that Odysseus did.
My group, which consisted of me, Elliot, Luciano, talked these questions through. Our concluding answers were that, in our opinions, Odysseus did make the correct choice with only killing 6 crewmates because in this situation most of the crew can get back home, unlike in the other situation where everyone would die. We thought Odysseus did make the correct choice about not telling his crew about what he had decided because there would be no fear, although when we started to discuss this in class someone said the opposite because then he would be counted as a bad leader. Lastly, we decided that we would’ve done the same thing as Odysseus had done.
For the last activity in this lesson we did a wrap up.
We had to answer the question of how the story of Scylla and Charybdis correlated with the Trolley problem. The class discussed this and we said that Odysseus had an issue of killing a few people and saving the rest, or just killing everyone. This is similar to the Trolley problem that we discussed in the Do Now because in the Trolley Problem a person also has to decide between killing one or killing most.
Reflection: This lesson has taught me a lot of new things. I really enjoyed and absorbed a lot of interesting information. The trolley problem seemed really interesting to me. I do not mean I would’ve liked having peoples lives in my hands, but i enjoyed the main idea of this topic. It was kind of fun doing the Kahoot and deciding who has to live and who has to be sacrificed. Also, It seemed crazy to me how such a problem could’ve actually happened to people (even if it is fictional people like Odysseus). Once we moved on to the allusions part of the lesson, I had a blast. It seemed so interesting how there is such a large amount of this simple literary technique in everyday life. Once Ms. Peterson mentioned the allusion in Taylor Swift's song “Love Story”, I realized how many more allusions there are in my favorite songs. This lesson has taught and made me realize a lot of new things. It was great!
Enrichment Sources:
ODYSSEUS
ALLUSIONS in movies
ALLUSIONS in songs
https://youtu.be/8ee3hXSSmxs alluding to “Alice in Wonderland”
https://youtu.be/OmBv_7SC7qc alluding to “The Legend of Achilles” Achilles heel
https://youtu.be/OavAfdDbZkI alluding to “Alice in Wonderland”
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