Today I am going into a class of 7 year olds to talk about Greek mythical monsters, so if anyone who deals with children for a living has any hot tips on how to make them not immediately start throwing rotten eggs at me, that would be rad!
UPDATE: it went well!!! I got them to think about the monsters from their favourite stories and how the monsters might have felt about what happened to them.
We talked about the Cyclops and how Odysseus’ men broke into his house and stole his food and so he got angry and ate some of the men, and then a little girl made SUCH A GOOD POINT and said “it’s exactly like the end of the Odyssey, where Odysseus comes home to find lots of strange men in his house who want to marry his wife, and then he kills them!” and that’s a parallel that I, a 26 year old PhD student of Classics who looks at the relationship between monsters and heroes for my research, have never thought of. Kids are so smart?????
And we talked about Medusa, and how she was treated unfairly by Athena, and at the end I asked them all to raise their hands if they thought that sometimes the monster’s side of the story was just as interesting as the hero’s side, and every single one of them raised their hands!!!!
And at the end, several of them hugged me, many asked to see my Medusa necklace, lots asked me more questions about the Gorgons, some played with my hair and told me it was ‘beautiful but messy,’ and then one girl hugged me and told me she loved me.
God remember when u were 12 and you would just Make Art on like spare copy paper with crayola markers and an old pencil and even though you didn’t know anything about anatomy or perspective or anything you were jus happy to b Making Art and u didn’t constantly belittle your own efforts or feel like ur drawings weren’t good enough
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