Lightning Thief Performance Assessment

One of the assessments for the first part of The Lightning Thief unit is this:

My Hero’s Journey Narrative

In this performance task, students will have a chance to apply their knowledge of the elements and purpose of myth as well as their deep understanding of the hero’s journey. Through a series of narrative writing lessons, students will create their own hero’s journey story that includes key elements of myth. Students will create a hero set in the ordinary world. They will then create a problem and a series of events that align with the stages of the hero’s journey. They will use descriptive details, sensory language, and transitional phrases to create an engaging reading experience. They will write a conclusion that naturally unfolds from the series of events. This performance task centers on NYSP12 ELA Standards RL.6.3, W.6.3, W.6.4, W.6.5, W.6.6, W.6.11c, L.6.2 and L.6.3. 

What this means is that students will create a personal narrative based in the real world that goes on the hero's journey. It's essentially a creative writing piece, but there's something about this which troubles me. This unit is being taught to sixth graders, meaning they're about eleven years old. Most kids this age have a pretty naive idea of how the world works — one of my problems with The Lightning Thief as well — and create tasks like this tend to bring this out.

This is not meant as a criticism for sixth graders. I was the same way at that age. Yet if we're going to set this story in the real world, why not do something a little more grounded, say, and find the biography of somebody real and heroic, like Gandhi or George Washington or Jacques Cousteau. That way the comparison could be more meaningful within the real-world context of the assignment.

Assignments like this are a lot of fun, but creative assignments are a lot more difficult than initially laid out in the assignment. There are issues of craft — voice, point of view, narrative consistency, theme — which are essential but hard to address in an assignment like this. I worry that this will be a check box type of work, the character did this, then that, then faced this, all part of the hero's journey but is this a deep understanding of what the journey is?

Lightning Thief Unit Supplimentary Texts

The unit of The Lightning Thief pushes a fair amount of supplementary texts, all either gathered from Gutenberg, various websites, or some included with the EngageNY unit itself. Oddly, some of the materials from the Gutenberg website are available on iBooks, but one of the texts, Half a Hundred Hero Tales of Ulysses and the Men of Old, is only available on Kindle for free. You can get this text on iBooks for $3.99, but it's in the public domain, so why bother? Of course you can also save the HTML file from a web page as a PDF and import that PDF into iBooks, but most teachers probably won't go through that step.

The two books from iBooks are Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome by E.M. Berens and A Book of Myths by Jean Lang. Both are somewhat old-fashioned texts that are compendiums of Greek mythology. The Lang book has the advantage of also including myths from Norse mythology and Beowulf. Neither of them do the annoying practice of referring to the Greek gods by their Roman names, a habit of writers of this period. While this means kids will have to get used to Heracles as opposed to Hercules, and Odysseus as opposed to Ulysses, I much prefer this. The Lang book does use the Roman names, which is annoying.

One of the Supplimentary texts, “The Hero's Journey”, is found on a website www.mythologyteacher.com, which is a great resource to discover. (I wish I had created something of the sort.) The document is a little hard to find, but I found it under the Teaching Materials menu. There are a lot of good materials here, and I especially liked the use of Star Wars as essentially a mythological tale, which it is. Too bad I won't be using it.

I'm also expected to have a copy of D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths, which I have. I also want the kids to have this.

So these are the basic texts. It's not a terrible idea to use the Gutenberg texts, and frankly I think they might be a better education of the myths than The Lightnng Thief.

Another Thing Nagging Me

If so many young people are reading The Lightning Thief, why am I supposed to be teaching it? Isn't the point of teaching novels to expose kids to stories they might not ordinarily be exposed to?

Seventh Grade Common Core Novel: A Long Walk To Water

I was dreading reading  Linda Sue Park's A Long Walk To Water for a couple of reasons. Part of it is that it was presented as a book dealing with refugee issues. I was dreading reading what I was anticipating as a NPR-style presentation of refugee problems from the eyes of an American middle-class perspective. Something akin to, "These refugee problems are terrible. And I could barely get cell service at the camp!" Describing the issue without living the issue. I was happily surprised by this book, but unfortunately also very disappointed.

The good aspect of the book is the perspective of the character of one of the two narrative strains, Salvation. His journey after his school is attacked by rebels is harrowing and terrifying. You get a genuine sense of how dangerous his life was, wandering throughout war-torn Northern Africa. That part I appreciated greatly. No citizen of America can read something like that without saying, “There but for the grace of God goes me."

The problems with the book though are many, and this is what makes me question this novel as an addition to the Common Core. The first is that it's a very thin book, only 120 pages of text. That is an appropriate length for a slower to average reader, but any seventh grader who is skilled in reading would blast through this book in a couple of hours. I don't think length means better, but if I'm going to be spending an entire unit on a book, I expected something meatier.

I have an issue as well with the narrative voice. I'm going to quote the book some to give an example:

Salva wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. He could see the bushes; they did not look too far away.

Uncle reached into his bag. He took out a tamarind and handed it to Salva.

Chewing on the sour juicy fruit made Salva feel better.

I think the scene itself is fine, but the voice is filled with quick, choppy sentences. Some of that is okay, but after a while (I wondered why the beaks were even there considering that we were still on the same action.) that seems intrusive. It creates a odd narrative flow, especially with the very short paragraphs. That combined with the odd lack of contractions make the text stilted.

Plus, Salva is traveling through what for kids in America would seem like an alien landscape. Unfortunately the details are relatively few. When we read about Salva's thinking about his family on the same page to make himself feel better, we don't get any scenes with his family to enlighten the reader about what that might look like. This would fill in details about Salva's life that are missing but also make that moment more powerful. The missing details get even worse later in the book where the story makes leaps of several years. I understand it doesn't want to spend much time with Salva's life in refugee camps and focus more on his transitions between places, but those gaps were abrupt. I needed to hear more about the poor conditions in the camps to make the transitions more meaningful.

There's a second narrative in this novel which takes place many years after the first. It's the story of Nya, a girl who much spend much of her day fetching water for her family, which is where the book gets its title. Again, the story is self is a compelling and interesting one, but the storytelling spends so much time with that twice-daily journey Nya must make that it neglects giving the reader a better sense of what her life is when not making that journey. I understand that it by necessity must address this one aspect, but the story doesn't give much of a payoff in terms of what that water means. Yes, it's water, but how does Nya's family use it? Tell me more and give that journey a greater value.

Overall I think this book is a good book to read but with caveats. With the Common Core Curriculum so focused on close text reading, I wonder why EngageNY is spending time with a book whose close text leaves much to be desired? I don't know a better book that deals with the same idea, but this one makes me wonder. I'll have more to say on it as time goes on.

Best Space Music Video Ever

Blogging Software for IOS

Just a quick note. I've been fumbling around for good blogging software for my iPad and iPhone. I started with Blogger because my original blogs were all done there, not with Wordpress. (I kind of regret that now.) Blogger had so few features that I looked for anything better. I discovered BlogGo, but that app had a lot of issues too, the biggest one was that if I quit out of the program while I was writing, it would lose my draft.

Now I'm working on a new app called Posts. I already like it better than the unresponsive and unpredictable BlogGo. Plus, it's free!

The Lightning Thief as a Derivative Work

I read The Lightning Thief by Rock Riordan with a bit of trepidation. My son, who is now ten, raced through the series and loved it, and now I am charged with teaching this novel instead of my typical sixth grade mythology unit. After having finished the novel, I have to say my concerns were justified and I'm honestly concerned that this novel is an inferior replacement for my self-designed unit.


My first issue is with the tone of the novel, which is comic and heroic. Things happen in often a silly way. Percy Jackson, the protagonist, is issued a sword in the novel for him to take on his heroic quest. Since twentieth-century characters can't be seen lugging swords about, this sword magically turns into a pen which our hero can safely put into his pocket. This works for the somewhat goofy tone of the book, but seems out of place in the myths themselves. They can be funny, exciting, terribly tragic, or empowering, but the silliness of the device as well as the convenience of it feels out of place. This is one of the great strengths of the myths, yet when the protagonist can whip a sword out of his pants pocket and duel a terrible monster, something seems wrong.

This is fine for the intended audience, but as a teacher I don't see my purpose as offering that sort of wish-fulfillment. Children certainly desire to slay monsters, especially late at night when those creature of the imagination seem real, but I think the myths serve a greater function in our culture. They teach us about the wide range of experience, and at times when this monsters under the bed are real. Yet these monsters are never easy things to kill, but I fear that's what this book teaches. As long as you're half god, of course.


When assigning a book as a unit, one needs to look at the goals of the unit. If the goal is to teach Freek mythology, I wonder why don't we have a unit that does just that? I suspect one of the reasons is that there is no good middle school text for Greek mythology. I've looked, and there is none. (Which may be a project of mine in the future.) The EngageNY folks clearly don't have the expertise to write one themselves, so they're looking to this novel as a gateway.

After teaching Greek mythology for the last nine years to sixth graders, I have never seen a problem with the source material being boring. Quite the contrary, these are some of the best stories of Western culture. That's why I think The Lightning Thief is a poor choice to teach these myths: it substitutes an inferior work for simply teaching some absolutely fabulous tales.

I'll have more to say about this novel as I teach it, of course.