feature The Old and the New in the Classics Thread: Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts By Christina GwinHA, English Department
What happens when Disney makes a movie about Hercules and the muses introduce the story with gospel music? What happens when Harry Potter has to get past Fluffy, the three-headed guard dog, to begin the adventure? These examples of the “old” in the “new” are more than just references to Roman and Greek mythology; these “new” contexts transform the “old” characters to make them a part of our world—our sensibilities, our jokes. When we look at the old in this way we become acquainted with it and innovate, inventing our own world out of what is given to us. It is with such a perspective on change and invention, in the transmission of cultural media and values, that a group of sixth grade teachers has begun building a Classics Thread to lay the groundwork for a liberal arts education in which the analysis and invention of our own perceptions of the “old re-made in the new” are forefront. In 2009, the school began an open conversation around the Latin curriculum, which resulted in the creation of the Language Task Force, and this body recommended that a Classics Thread be incorporated into the 6th grade curriculum. We started with History 6 and English 6 to create antecedents to a liberal arts education through the historical, linguistic, and cultural—the rationale being that the content the students would acquire would create a basic foundation from which further, more advanced, content could be pursued and conceptual questions of the humanities could be posed. We began with a historically focused unit, as it allowed for us to expose students to terms useful for History and to literary and artistic terms for English. So, for the first two weeks of school, we focused on approaching similar content through different disciplines. And because it is always worthwhile to be grounded in the concrete, tangible world for this age, our first theme was things: What do things reveal about who we are, what we value, how we live? What is the meaning we give to things? And then the “things” turned into “artifacts” and
8 | full circle
“caches,” and the culminating activities provided a foundational understanding of how archaeologists and historians learn about the past using both artifacts and oral history. And with these terms, the old becomes a medium, as it is a part of fashioning the new. There are the obvious linguistic connections between English and Latin and Greek, so English 6 is focusing on these through roots and context. It is exciting to see word play in definitions at an exact point in history, and we begin with Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary. We continue to give linguistic study historical context with the Oxford English Dictionary, and then we move to current online sources. (Feel free to adopt an almost obsolete word at savethewords.org.) We also created our own online Samuel Johnson-inspired dictionary: A Castilleja Lexicon of the 21st Century in which the Words are Originals and Illustrated in Their Different Situations