Throughout our seminar, Dr. Wilson emphasized the importance of performance in the history of Greek poetry, and the extent to which the original audience for Homer’s work perceived it as an entertaining and engaging, public performance piece. These were poems written to be experienced as an audience, poems based on an extensive oral tradition of centuries, and poems that unapologetically appealed to hearers’ emotions and attention. In the lessons below, I suggest asking students to perform and even rewrite portions of The Odyssey themselves, leaning into the potential of poetry performance and collaboration to strengthen adolescent identity. These lessons are designed to highlight for students three key ideas that I took away from our seminar: the themes of violence and trauma in The Odyssey, themes of identity and snap (mis)judgment in The Odyssey, and the role of poetry as performance piece in our society today and the society of Homer.