Five Tips for Teachers on Bringing Homer to High Schoolers
Goodkin: The Odyssey and its hero, who does not behave in ways that conform with our modern understanding of heroism, is more relevant than ever.
Goodkin: The Odyssey and its hero, who does not behave in ways that conform with our modern understanding of heroism, is more relevant than ever.
Five Tips for Teachers on Bringing Homer to High Schoolers
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How can a 3,000-year-old epic capture the attention of students shaped by screens and short attention spans? These practical strategies help teachers bring The Odyssey to life as a deeply human story of home, identity, courage, failure, and perseverance, inviting a new generation into one of our civilization’s enduring conversations.
Classical Christian education in Africa is not a cultural import or a luxury reserved for the materially secure. It is a humane education that equips students to think, speak, serve, and flourish within their own communities.
Coby Dollof was a ninth-grade student trying to avoid the reading when a classical school teacher assigned him Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. There was no shortcut, no SparkNotes page, no easy way around the book. So he opened it and something opened in him. What began with Chesterton became a doorway into wonder, beauty, humility, and the great questions of life. Years later, standing before Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica, Coby found himself moved by something larger than he could explain. He was being drawn into a story bigger than his own. Now a writer and teacher at Pepperdine University, Coby helps students ask the questions that once found him: What is wisdom? What is virtue? Why do truth, goodness, and beauty matter? What is vocation? And what kind of life is worth living? This is a story about classical education as awakening. The kind of awakening that forms a person and helps them become fully alive.
What does beauty have to do with the spaces where we learn, teach, worship, and gather? In this shared bonus episode of Composed and Forged, Christine Perrin speaks with Brian Williams about Templeton Hall, the home of the Templeton Honors College, and the deep work of making a place that feels whole, hospitable, and human. Their conversation moves from architecture and furniture to poetry, asking how beauty forms us before we can fully explain what it has done. This is an episode about attention, creation, community, and the grace of places that help us to belong and to overcome the rootlessness of our times. Brian reflects on the making of Templeton Hall at Eastern University as an act of stewardship, one that honors the old while creating room for students and faculty to dwell together in the pursuit of the true, the good, the beautiful. Christine and Brian consider why beauty is not a luxury, why material places matter to Christian formation, and how the experience of a beautiful space creates harmony. The episode closes fittingly with Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,” a poem of praise for the dappled, particular, and creaturely world.