My son is halfway through his freshman year in high school. He decided last year that he’d like to take Advanced English. I was so proud!

But getting him motivated to read all the material has been a bit hard. This semester, when I found out some of his assignments, I thought “Oh no.” because, one of his required readings is Homer’s The Odyssey. I read that in 9th grade. Or, I should say, attempted.

I had Mrs. Goodrich for English and I’m sure in a gesture to open our minds to things larger than SE Hinton’s That Was Then, This Is Now and The Outsiders, Homer was assigned.

The first thing you need to know about the story is, that it was written years ago. Centuries ago. So long ago – about 700 BC – that Homer didn’t even have a last name. One wasn’t required as there probably weren’t any other Homers in the world then.

The second thing you need to know is that it isn’t really a story – it’s what’s called an epic poem, which is code for extremely long. Actually, it is really a beautiful love story about a man, Odysseus, who is trying to get back home to his beloved Queen Penelope. But, he’s imprisoned by Calypso, who is in love with him, and will not let him go. Then of course, the standard Gods of Mythology get involved and so on. (Disclaimer: This was actually the entirety of the paper I handed in to Mrs. Goodrich. No. Really!)

But to a 14 year old boy, how do you make that entertaining? I’m sorry Mrs. Goodrich, but Ms Olsen and the 21st century have you beat.

“Mom,” said my futile freshman (no, really, futile, I’ve seen his grades). “I need you to sign this permission slip to watch a movie in Advanced English.” I looked at the slip. “We get to watch ‘Troy’ with Brad Pitt to get us into the feel of that timeframe for The Odyssey.” “You get to watch Brad Pitt?” He shrugged. Brad Pitt? I mean, we didn’t have Brad Pitt, but boy that sure would have made the assignment pop a little bit, don’t you think?

 “Yea, I guess, but then guess what we’re doing?” He didn’t wait for my obligatory response. “We get to make a myspace page.” For what, I asked him. “For Troy. We can do it on any thing in Mythology and we can put them on our real myspace page, we can add the other Gods to it…it’s going to be cool!” Cool.

Now, I don’t really know what the word equivalent for cool was in 800 BC, but I wonder if Homer with no last name knew what he was doing when he wrote this poem of epic proportions. “One day, Permithius,” he may have said to a friend, “they’ll make a myspace page for me!” And Permithius probably said “Cool!”
                                              
                                      by Ann Belote Weir

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