One of the reasons that I love teaching ninth grade English at my school is that we get to start with what could be my favorite story of all time – Homer’s Odyssey.
You might have read the Odyssey as part of your own ninth grade curriculum – it’s a common text for the first year of high school – but if not, it’s an epic poem from Ancient Greece that tells the story of one man’s years-long journey to return to his family. Along the way, he encounters temptations and distractions and monsters of every sort, and as a result of those challenges, he becomes the person that he needs to be when he finally gets home; he knows what is important to him and he has the experience and the skills to make it happen.
It’s a fitting metaphor for beginning high school. (It’s a fitting metaphor for life.)
But beyond the quest archetype, another dimension of the story that I like is the absolute centrality of xenia. Xenia is sometimes explained as the Ancient Greek code of hospitality, but I think that it’s more than that; it was a whole ethos for how to be a person in their society. Some of the rules of xenia were:
- If a traveler came to your home and requested hospitality, you were obliged to give it. No matter what they looked like! No matter what you thought of them! If a stinky, toothless, sore-encrusted beggar wearing tatters and rags knocked on your door, you welcomed them in because they might be a god in disguise.
- You gave your guest the best of what you had to offer – the tastiest food, the liveliest entertainment (in the form of storytellers and musicians), the comfiest bed, the richest gifts. You did this all before asking your guest who they were and why they had come to you.
- In return, your guest had to be willing to do the same for you, should you ever find yourself in their neighborhood.
- These hospitality-based relationships were hereditary. Once you hosted or were hosted by someone, you became guest-friends. In the Iliad, the prequel to the Odyssey and the story of the Trojan War, two enemies meet on the battlefield and discover that one’s father once hosted the other’s, and they immediately stop fighting and give each other their armor as gifts.
The Greeks must have discovered that this was the recipe for forging a new relationship between strangers. They recognized that creating a new connection required some vulnerability on both sides, and so they developed this framework to support a more-or-less peaceful, stable social structure.
And as luck would have it, a more-or-less peaceful, stable social structure is also one of our goals for high school! I thought that perhaps the Greeks might be onto something and that their ideas about hospitality might help in onboarding our new 14-year-olds into our high school community.
So this year, I decided to establish my own xenia-based relationships with my 9th graders. I have invited them all to have afternoon tea with me during part of our school’s Cardinal Hour (our extended lunch period) in the hopes of creating lasting, meaningful connections with each of them.
Obviously, my students aren’t Olympian gods in disguise, but they do all possess latent powers of awesomeness that are sometimes disguised by the awkwardness of early adolescence. This time together, in small groups, has allowed me to get to know them in ways that would be difficult to do during our normal class time with 30-or-so other students. Over Tetley’s British Black Tea and Danish butter cookies, they tell me about whether they miss middle school or are thrilled to leave it behind, what kinds of pets they have (including a lemur!), how the rain makes them feel after Houston’s spate of catastrophic flooding, and so on.
Getting to spend an afternoon with my students and hearing their stories makes me feel fortunate to get to be a stop on their journeys.
Using My Teacher Voice 