One my projects this fall has been
a collaboration with 8th grade social studies teacher, Darcel
Deodato. Darcel is one of the teachers who participated in the long-term
teacher education program that Julie Della Torre and I wrote about last spring.
We are both back at the school, but this year we are each working intensively
with only two teachers.
Eighth grade students in New
Jersey study Civics. They learn about forms of government and, specifically,
the organization of the United States government. When Darcel and I discussed
how to embed storytelling into this curriculum, we decided to focus on stories that would help students think about why
people need laws and how government serves society. Over the summer, I thought
about a lot of stories: stories about justice being served, stories about the
miscarriage of justice, and stories about people taking justice into their own
hands. In the end, I decided to begin the year by telling the students the
ancient Greek story of the trial of Orestes in Athens.
As I was preparing my lessons, I
spent quite a bit of time trying to craft the myth into a tellable tale. This
is always an issue when you’re working with a long and complex story, but with
this particular story, I began my work with the goal of making it less
graphically disturbing. The story of Orestes comes near the end of the Legend
of the House of Atreus, a cursed family whose generations were blighted by
murder, cannibalism, and incest. The horror begins when a first ancestor,
Tantalus, cooks his son and serves him to the gods. It ends, five generations
later, with Orestes in the court of Athens, on trial for matricide.
Orestes was the son of Agamemnon,
the king who led the armies of Greece against Troy. The story of Agamemnon and
his immediate family is beyond tragic. Not only was his sister-in-law, Helen,
the cause of that bloody, drawn-out war, but he, himself, felt obligated to
kill his oldest daughter, as a sacrifice to Artemis, before his armies even
left Greece. While he was at war, his wife, Clytemnestra (Helen’s sister), took
a lover (who was Agamemnon’s cousin) and plotted revenge for her daughter’s
death. Upon his return from Troy, Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon and, in turn,
their son, Orestes, killed her to avenge his father.
The murders of Agamemnon
and Clytemnestra are the subject of a trilogy of plays by Aeschylus. In the last play,
At first, I thought I would follow
Aeschylus and cut the pre-Agamemnon generations out of my story, but as I
worked, I realized how important the stories of the early ancestors are to one
of the most significant results of Orestes’s trial: Athena’s persuasion of the
Erinyes, chthonic goddess of retribution and guardians of family bonds, to
remain in her city. I began to think that a listener needs to hear about the
horrible crimes of Tantalus and his descendants to understand why society needs
the presence of these goddesses and, while Aeschylus’s audiences would have known the
family history, my audience would not. Ultimately, I decided to tell the story
from the beginning.
The unit took five class periods.
The story worked in the social studies curriculum. Not only did it introduce
the idea of a judicial system based on trial by a jury of peers, it was also
relevant to the lives of the students who live in a city where neighborhoods
are torn apart by retaliatory gang killings. As the story unfolded, we stopped to allow
time for students to discuss the moral issues involved. For example, students
debated Agamemnon’s choices at Aulis. Should he kill his child so that the
Greek Armada could sail to Troy? This discussion raised important questions: Is
it ever justifiable to take a human life to further a cause or ideal? What
about if taking one life might save others? We also talked about ‘laws’ that
seem basic to our human instincts, like those against murder and incest. Students
spoke passionately about these questions.
Near the end of the story, before
I told the outcome of the trial, Darcel
divided the class into prosecution and defense teams who presented arguments
for each side based on the story and our related discussions. During the
debate, six students sat as jurors. The outcome of the 8th grade
trial differed from that of the original. The jury felt strongly that Orestes
should be punished for his deed. The next day, students did a dramatic reading
of the trial scene from Aeschylus’s play (We used Peter Meineck’s translation
which is easy to read and lends itself to performance.) and discussed its
outcome. Much of this discussion focused on Athena’s appeasement of the Erinyes
and why it was important for her to persuade them to become guardians of the
city.
