This year, my daughter and I are reading Plutarch with a group of 15 students, aged 10 to 17. It is a mixed bag in terms of experience with Plutarch ; for some, this is their first exposure to Plutarch. Here is how we handled the first term’s Plutarch exam.
We are reading the Life of Alexander for the entire year, using Edwin Ginn’s text, which is abridged and annotated for schools using Clough’s translation. This term, we decided on an in-class group activity for the exam. It went like this. The week before the exam, each student wrote a list of stories they recalled from our readings thus far. Short answers like “Bucephalus” or “Homer’s Iliad” were acceptable. Then, as a group, they compared and compiled their lists into a single list.
For the day of the exam, I had re-written the anecdotes from their compiled list onto sticky notes and stuck them up on a wall. Working in small groups, their task was to choose the anecdotes that best matched a given character trait and demonstrated how Plutarch supported that idea. For example, one group had the statement that Alexander preferred “action and glory than pleasures and riches.” To support that claim, they chose stories from his life such as his founding a city at age 16 and his displeasure at his father’s conquering “all” and leaving little scope for Alexander.
The other groups had these statements: Alexander often acted with “resolution and magnanimity” rather than giving in to the masses, and Alexander was “a great lover of all kinds of learning and reading.”
Sometimes they challenged one another, “Why did you include this story?” and sometimes they had to decide if a story was a better example of one trait or another. It was a lively time, filled with great discussions and observations.
Give it a try and let me know what you think!
