This portfolio entry highlights a unit plan I implemented while teaching a twelfth grade Classics and Shakespearean Literature course. This unit was geared toward teaching students the skills and strategies associated with active reading, utilized a number of whole class and small group discussion formats, and exposed students to writing compare and contrast essays. The artifacts included in this entry illuminate my efforts to make the work of a 2,800 year old poet come alive for twenty-first century learners.

Shakespeare read it in Latin, Thomas Jefferson read it in the original Greek. However I was fairly certain my students would have enough of a challenge reading Homer's Iliad in English. For contemporary readers, the Iliad is truly a reading odyssey. They must travel through a sea of strange names and epithets, do battle with Greek conceptions of immortality and prophesy, and unravel the cultural code that sparked the writing of this nearly three millennia old poem. If the vast body of western literature is thought of as a river of conversation between readers and writers, stretching from the earliest writings to the present time, the writings of Homer represent a powerful undercurrent which continues to influence the ebb and flow of the river along its course. I wanted my students to become part of this conversation. So, despite the difficulty of the journey to be undertaken, I felt that it was one worthy of my students' time and energy, and I only hoped I could convince them of the same.

Prior to even taking the first step of the difficult journey through the poem, I wanted to make certain that students had a set of useful tools gathered in previously read materials and lessons. I wanted to activate and make students aware of their prior learning. I also wanted to create a set of common classroom experiences students could grasp onto while reading, and also make students aware that this was not the first time they had entered this part of the literary river. Dennie Wolf, author of Reading Reconsidered, upholds the notion that in order for readers to "read resonantly, we have to demonstrate and insist upon memory-the willingness to think back on what you read in September, last year, or in some other class" (1989). Many of the students had read Greek myths prior to entering my classroom, and I needed them to bring those readings with them on this journey. However, I did not want students to have to rely solely on those readings, nor did I expect that all students had read and/or fully remembered this information. I wanted to create a new set of experiences students could rely on. Through each of the previous texts we had read in the class, we had discussed and explored the concept and theme of honor. This connective thematic thread was to be woven through the reading of the Iliad as well. Likewise, before beginning this unit, students were exposed to lessons concerning the structure, origins of, and purpose of Greek mythology and a short unit in which students learned and researched the names, symbols, and roles of the major Greek gods. All of these pieces were in operation before students had read the first line of the text.

I wanted the first lesson of the unit to draw students in and to demonstrate my own enthusiasm for the text. Putting aside some personal pride and dignity, I dressed up in a sheet (toga), adorned my head with "laurels," traced a map of Greece on the white board, and interactively presented the story leading up to the Iliad, in the oral tradition of the poet Homer (minus the playing of the lyre). Students found this interactive story highly engaging. One student, in writing about the experience claimed, "when you dressed up in the sheet and told the story of the Iliad, that got me so engrossed in the book- that I actually wanted to start reading it. It was so good." This story not only served as a way to get students to engage with the reading, it also served as a way for me to gauge the prior knowledge discussed above. By asking questions of students concerning various parts of the story, I was able to initially assess areas in which students were strong and areas in which they needed additional support.

This anecdote helps demonstrate my approach to assessment in this unit. As the designated "tour guide," I would need to build in a series of check points along the way to make sure that students were keeping afloat. In order to make these assessments valuable to not only to me as the teacher, but also valuable and useful for students, I tried to make the worth of each assessment transparent to students, and also to develop multiple ways for students to demonstrate their learning. The best example of this type of assessment was the reader response journals students kept as they read the poem. The journals required that students ask and respond to their own questions of the text and track their reading of it. The questions ranged from factual to global. By reading students journals, I could track their interaction with the text and influence and coach their reading. If a student became stuck asking factual questions I might pose a few interpretive questions to the student to push his or her thinking and interaction with the text to a higher level. These journal questions also served as entry points for class and small group discussions, which became tools for assessment as well. Because the questions were authentically student-generated, the discussions stemming from them served the real and engaging purpose of seeking answers to personal questions. The journals also served to focus the students' reading for the purpose of finding materials for the final compare and contrast essays they would write. The students were given topics for their essays along with the reader response journals so they could track information and ideas that would be useful for this final product. A number of the entries students placed in the journal gave them an option for responding to the reading (see RRJ information sheet). Some students chose to create a comic strip version or drawing of a scene from the poem. Others conducted personal interviews with characters, or wrote a poem of their own based on events in the Iliad. Having the option to show their learning in non-traditional but viable ways allows the teacher a broader understanding of his students' interaction with texts in the classroom (Purves, Rogers, & Soter, 1990).

When asked for feedback about the most valuable assignments assigned to them, many students responded that the reader response journal was high on their list:

"It forced me to read the book and actually understand what was being written. It also REALLY helped me when it came time for writing the essay."

"I thought that the reader response journals were valuable because it helped me get a closer look at what was going on in the text, and gave me incentive to answer some of the questions I had."

The value of reading texts such as the Iliad in the contemporary classroom is often questioned by many educators, parents, and students. They are skeptical of the value such texts hold due to the stark contrast between today's world and the worlds written about by Homer. There are others, however, who find that many of the themes and values captured by these texts ring as true in our day as in Homer's. The value they find is not necessarily immediately connected to helping students gain employment or in buying a new home, the value lies in being aware of and able to tap into a broader literary culture. It is significant and personally gratifying when a person is able to look at a painting, read a poem, or watch a film and understand a reference to something he or she has read earlier. Such reference points make these other works that much more meaningful and in turn help to reinforce the continuation of a reading memory. By helping students begin conversing with authors and their texts, teachers are ensuring that the river of literacy, the conversation of culture, runs deep and true.