by Trey Colvin

Every year, I teach multiple sections of ninth-grade literature and composition. Usually, I focus their attention on the foundational texts and writers of the Western canon such as Hesiod, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. For most freshmen, the complexity of these texts overwhelms them, and it does not take long for some to throw up their arms in frustration. Honestly, I feel their pain. After all, in the first week of class, they encounter characters like Eris (the goddess of discord), Iris (the rainbow goddess, and messenger of the gods), and Eros (the god of erotic love). Similarly, after one of my classes started The Odyssey, students lamented the fact that the story introduces not only Eurycleia, but also Eurydamas, Eurydice, Eurymachas and Eurymedusa. Clearly, some of those characters are more significant than others, but I inevitably receive the questions, “Why are their so many Eurys” and “Why are all these characters named Poly-something?” Later in the trimester, after I returned the first quiz, these questions turned to “Why do you make us know all the characters in The Odyssey?” Even though I tried to explain that I do not expect them to know all the characters, my words inevitably fell on deaf ears.

I try to teach freshmen how to move from concrete observations about the texts to more abstract observations about significance, but I have found that most of my students had trouble demonstrating their command of the most basic aspects of the narratives. If students have a strong command of the facts of the narrative, including the characters’ names, then they can construct more effective arguments about the significance of the works as a whole. Unfortunately, basic memorization does not come easily for some of my students, and the massive amount of material covered over a school year only compounds the problem. In the past, I have made numerous attempts to help my students manage the material, but I have met with varying degrees of success. I had some students make their own flashcards with names on the front and descriptions on the back. I had others highlight important new characters as they met them. To my disappointment, I did not observe that any of my suggestions resulted in significant improvement. In class discussions, students still referred to Polyphemus as “that guy Odysseus blinded.”

I had no doubts that many of them were reading the material because they asked questions about passages they did not understand, but their knowledge of the story seemed rudimentary. To me, it was a curious phenomenon that I watched play out several years in a row, but a solution (at a least a partial solution) presented itself when one of my students had to miss an entire unit on Greek mythology at the beginning of the year because of an illness. “I want you to have a friend take notes for you,” I told her, “but I will send you a list of important characters that you should know. You may want to highlight new characters in your book while you are reading.” The student said, “I can just look the characters up on Wikipedia if I can’t find some of them, right?” For some reason, her question took me by surprise. My first response was that it might be a problem since Wikipedia is a self-editing resource, and I told her as much. I encouraged her to run her notes by me so that I could verify that she did not find any erroneous information. After thinking about her question for a while, I realized that I might be able to provide her with the information while simultaneously assessing how well my other students knew the facts of the texts we were reading. The next day, I introduced a new project for my classes; they were going to create their own “Wikipedia” for freshman English.

The basic premise of the assignment was that I would set up a wiki for each of my freshman English sections, and students would provide the content. I told them that everyone was required to make at least one quality post per week and that if they were diligent about keeping up with it, they could use the site as a study guide for their final exam at the end of the year. Using the website Wikispaces, I invited them to join the wiki for their class. Once they accepted the invitation, they could start contributing information. I initially posted the titles of all the works for the year with three links for each work: important characters, key symbols and images, and significant themes and quotations. They had to determine what content to place in each of those categories. At first, they were a little more skeptical than I expected, but after I showed them how to use the Wikispaces tools, and after a few eager people started posting some information from their notes, their skepticism disappeared.

Several unexpected benefits of the project began to emerge after the first few posts. The first was that I saw that the nature of the wiki allowed me to assess student thinking informally in a way that traditional reading journals could not. Some entries read almost like a blog entry about what happened in class on a particular day. Take, for example, the following excerpt someone posted on our class discussion over the myth of Prometheus:

Today in class we talked about the myth of Prometheus, son of Iapetos. He is known as an ally god to humans, and he is also the god of trickery. the myth of Prometheus is important because Prometheus was the one who introduced fire to the humans and tricked Zeus into letting humans get the better of "the meat of an oxen" explanation [sic]: Prometheus butchered an ox for a feast with men and gods, he made two different portions, one had the good meat covered in inedible organs, another dry bones covered in fat. He let Zeus choose b/w the two portions as to trick him, and succeded [sic]. Zeus took the fat, but below found the bones and was outraged. This trick is described in Greek history to be what lets Greeks eat the good meat of an animal, but must burn the bones as a sacrifice. Also important is the story of fire. Zeus wanted to keep fire all to himself and the other gods on Olympus, but Prometheus, ally of men, stole an ember of the fire and delivered it to men. Important because it describes how Greeks believed fire came to humanity.

This looks like any traditional journal entry. It is clearly informal and some of the details are oversimplified, but because it is much more of a public document than a journal entry, it invites discussion and questions among the class. In fact, the day after the student posted this entry, several other students came in asking the writer for clarification on his reading of the myth, particularly his take on the “importance” of the myth. Another thing I realized was that such an exchange would have never occurred with a traditional journal because of their private nature; the other students would not have read them. In other words, I realized that whereas a journal entry may have helped an individual student think through a reading, the wiki entries contributed material for the group, even students who were absent from class.

By examining the material each section posted, I was not only able to see things like gaps in coverage, but also the extent to which the class as a whole was making the shift from the concrete to the abstract. Many of the earliest posts were basic character lists that grew with each passing day. At first, they were noticeably brief and probably not very useful. For instance, an early version of the description for the god Jove read, “Olympian controlling the heavens.” Later posts added more details such as “Turns into a bird, picks up Ganymede, and makes him his cup-bearer,” and “Also named Jupiter, son of Saturn and the Father God after the war between Titans vs. Olympians; husband of Juno.” The benefits here seem obvious. By collaborating on the construction of the character descriptions, the class produced highly detailed lists from which they could study. Understandably, I began seeing significant improvement in their quiz grades. In one instance, the class ended the first trimester with only 20% having a quiz average above B-, but by the end of the third trimester over 50% of them had a quiz average over B-. I also observed improvement in how they discussed the readings. For instance, they began talking about how different Ovid’s representation of Apollo is from Virgil’s representation of the same deity. Observations such as that lead to discussions about how each writer can affect the reader’s opinion simply by portraying the same situation from a different point of view. Before we started using the class wiki, the idea of a cumulative year-end exam terrified my students; the fact that only 40% of my students earned higher than a B- on the first test of the year certainly contributed to that anxiety. However, by the end of the year, 75% of students in both sections earned higher than a B- on that exam.

I found very few significant drawbacks with the assignment, and the results I observed in the performances of my classes definitely outweighed the few minor trouble spots that emerged. Managing the wiki took more of my time as the posts accumulated, but it eventually reached a point where several students were monitoring the content themselves. They grew impatient with other students who just dumped content in without organizing it, leaving notes for them on the wiki saying things like “try to keep [the character list] alphabetical- just for easy access.” When the students realized that creating and maintaining a user-friendly wiki was in their best interests, the quality of the posts improved. By the end of the year, I only had to check that everyone had posted something of substance. While perusing one class’s wiki, the quality of the posts amazed me. Take, for instance, the following excerpt that raised some great questions for class discussion:

Throughout Odysseus' journey home, the theme of temptation seems to rise in very vital situations that would originally augment the extent of his character change. During these situations, he usually seems to be tested in a sense. On his journey, he meets with the witch, Circe, who lives on Aeaea. She turns his crew into swine, and Odysseus has to take responsibility to stop what she is doing. In this situation, Circe seems to be the one doing "bad", but looking at it in a various perspective, Circe seems to be dealing Justice. Was it wrong of her to punish the crew for coming to her island and being reckless? There is no definite answer to that, but it makes one ponder as to who is dealing the Justice and who is being punished.

The freshman English wiki was a bigger success than I expected. Collectively, students were able to take ownership of material, which allowed them to decide what was worth including and what was not. They even identified categories that they wanted to add to the three original ones I established. I liked that the process forced my students to reflect on their own study needs and that they had to take responsibility for their own learning. In the end, I felt that the students who created the freshman English wiki clearly were better prepared for class each day and that they were more confident going into the final exam than students in previous years. I used to prepare a lengthy review sheet every year, but now, those days are gone. The wiki empowered students by allowing them to prepare their own study guides collectively and it taught them to help each other develop a sense for what is significant more effectively than anything else I had tried.

Trey V. Colvin teaches Upper School English at Greenhill School in Addison, TX. Mr. Colvin received his Ph. D. in English in 2001, and has taught at the University of North Texas, Brookhaven College, and Tarrant County College prior to coming to Greenhill.

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