Saturday, SAVY Day 1 “The Call: Heroism and Transformation of Percy Jackson” (5th/6th)
SAVY Parents,
It was wonderful meeting your student today. We began our day getting to know each other by sharing about ourselves and playing a fun game of “Would You Rather.” This helped students build relationships and trust by sharing their ideas on fun and funny topics like “Would you rather fight a Minotaur or a Cerberus? Would you rather have Medusa as a mother or Poseidon as a father?” We had some great laughs, and I enjoyed hearing all the thoughts that helped them make a decision.
To understand Percy Jackson, our main character in the Percy Jackson book series, we started discussing what it means to live in a complex reality and how we can make sense of this complex reality. Students became thinkers. Each student brainstormed modern-day topics that can be hard to explain or hard to understand. Some of the great ideas discussed on day one were global warming, why students turn to bullying, the difficulty of math, and how hard it is to understand emotions. As humans, we have a need to try to rationalize the world around us. One of the ways in which people have done this was to create gods and goddesses to represent and explain encounters with the world.
Our first task in class was to do just that with the topic they chose. Students became creators by creating a god or goddess that could rationalize why kids bully, or why we have emotions, and why global warming exists. Students made posters identifying their god or goddess by creating a name, a symbol for their god or goddess, and then writing a short origin myth. After their creation, each student became a communicator by presenting their poster to the class. This project led to a discussion about the complex reality Percy faces at the beginning of the book. Percy can’t explain why he has dyslexia, has visions no one else sees, or why his dad abandoned him. As his journey continues, he eventually turns to answers from the gods and goddesses he encounters.
Another way we as humans look to rationalize the world around us is to look for patterns. In the afternoon, students were introduced to archetypes. Archetypes are behavioral patterns readers encounter in stories. Students learned that not only are these behavioral patterns seen throughout time, but these patterns are also seen across cultures. Students watched a video and completed a mind map explaining what archetypes are, why psychologist Carl Jung believed they are universally inherited patterns, and how these archetypes appear in nearly every story we read.
To wrap up our day, students watched the first episode of the Percy Jackson series. This episode, and the first chapter of the book, will be what we reference to further our understanding of archetypes. Students will apply this knowledge to identify the archetypes we come across in characters we meet in the story. Students will also begin to establish who Percy Jackson is at the beginning of the story, so we can see his transformation by the end of the story.
Some dinner table questions:
- What does it mean to live in a complex reality? There are issues and concerns we have in the world that we can’t understand, and we look to various sources like gods and goddesses to come up with an answer.
- Why can we argue it was harder in ancient times than it is today to rationalize our reality? In ancient times, there was no internet or advanced tools to explain phenomena around us. This is why some Native American tribes believed the Earth was the shell of a tortoise. We use what we have at the time to rationalize what we don’t understand.
- What is the collective unconscious? The collective unconscious is what connects us to people around the world. Even though many of our customs and practices may be different, we tend to act and respond to events in the same way. For example, when we are faced with something scary, we freeze. This has been passed on to each other throughout time. When Ancient Greeks saw Medusa, they would freeze. When we see a bear, we freeze. These form behavioral patterns that connect us all.
I look forward to even more great discussions in the next class. Have a wonderful week!
Jeffery Bray