Call In The Experts

There was a time when teachers led students on field trips during which they could explore the world around them, often with the guidance of experts in a particular area.  Those days are long gone for too many schools saddled with budgetary constraints that make trip transportation next to impossible.  And while we do have the Internet and video access to vastly more information than we could explore in situ, these resources cannot replace the value of the human interaction that comes from having an expert interact with students in person.  Primary and secondary teachers must reach out to university colleagues, and professors must ask their colleagues in the lower grades how they can help.  By fostering relationships across the educational spectrum, we can retain a bit more of the humanity in the distinctly human enterprise that is education.

I recently shared in a Facebook group a post on student engagement during my A.P. Latin class.  A friend of mine, Dr. Betty Rose Nagle, commented on it, and that sparked a conversation between us that led to her speaking to my class today.

First of all, Dr. Nagle is professor emerita of Classical Studies at Indiana University.  With her focus on Latin and Roman studies, she translated Ovid's Fasti and the Silvae of Statius.  She has also given many popular talks connecting the mythology of the ancient world with the mythologies of the modern day in comics and movies.  With such a background, she was the perfect person to discuss with my A.P. Latin students the challenges, intricacies, and art of literary translation.

They asked her questions about translating from another language into Latin and whether her reading of other translations influenced her own work of translating the same author.  She talked with them about her efforts in translating poetry using a more formal approach with iambic pentameter and a freer approach based on beats per line, and she even discussed the system of Roman metrics and how it was borrowed from Greek, a language to which it was much better suited than Latin.

And true to her own pedagogical roots, Dr. Nagle asked questions of the students.  She asked them what they looked for in a translation, and their responses ranged from accuracy of content to literalness of grammar to flow to feeling.  With each response, she spun the discussion deeper, bringing in at various points Frederick Ahl's Aeneid, the compilation of Ovidian translations called After Ovid, and Douglas Hofstadter's tome Le Ton beau de Marot on this topic centered around eighty-eight renditions of one tiny French poem.

For many years I took some of my students to visit the experts.  The A.P. students made a trip each fall to Indiana University where the completed research at the undergraduate library, had lunch with a Latin professor, and then sat in on that professor's class.  One professor who regularly hosted us was Dr. Tim Long, pictured here with one of my students at a state Latin convention.

Last year we were fortunate to have Dr. Bernard Barcio, former Latin teacher at North Central and other Indiana high schools as well as adjunct professor of Latin at Butler University, visit one afternoon.  He talked with the students about the catapult competitions he oversaw that became truly legendary in the 1970s, leading to numerous spots on ABC News. 

Am I comfortable turning over my classroom to other teachers?  Absolutely!  It is important for students to hear from different voices on the same subject.  It is important for them to enter the realm higher academic discussion before they enter college.  And it is important for them to see their teacher join with them as a fellow student on the shared journey of discovery.

The Fall and Rise Of Student Engagement

I told my A.P. Latin students today that they were a reason for getting up in the morning.  Their emotion-laden response of, "Awwww!  Mr. Perkins!" was sweet, but this post is for adults, so let us move past sentiment and on to the reason for my perfectly honest comment.

We were reading Vergil's Aeneid and had come to the part in Book I in which Neptune calmed the sea after a storm unleashed by Aeolus, god of the winds, had churned it into a maelstrom.  In line 154 the great Latin poet wrote, "sic cunctus pelagi cecidit fragor," which literally comes into English as, "thus all the crashing of the sea fell."  The key word in this tale I am about to tell is cecidit, a perfect tense form of cadere, meaning "to fall."  Katie, a junior and one of our Latin club officers, suggested "subsided" for this word, but immediately said that this translation indicated a change over time, whereas the Latin word described something quick.  I was stunned at her appreciation for such nuance and rewarded her with a piece of colored duct tape.

A short aside is needed here.  Several years a student said or asked something brilliant, and I wanted to acknowledge it with a small gift.  Having nothing of value in my room, I ripped off a piece of grey duct tape from a roll I just happened to have with me that day and offered it as the award.  It was something of a joke, but the students thought it was cool, and soon I began receiving rolls of the adhesive.  We have had lime green duct tape, silver duct tape, and glow-in-the-dark duct tape with ghosts and bats.  There has been tie-dyed, paint-splatter, and candy-striped duct tape, and now receiving a piece of the stuff to put on a notebook has become the most desired achievement.

But back to the story.  Katie had raised the issue of finding just the right word to translate something, and although we were a bit behind in our syllabus, it was a moment that could not be passed by.  I distributed various translations of the Aeneid and instructed the students to find the passage we were reading.  We then made a list on the board of the verbs that the translators had used to render cecidit into English. 

And then the lid simply blew off.  We talked about how "subsides" is present tense even though the Latin is perfect, but that such a translation is justifiable as a historic present.  We discussed how three different translations chose "fell silent," which retain the basic sense of the Latin verb, yet add the word "silent," and that this, too, is justifiable, for "to fall silent" is an English idiom.  We observed that "abated" makes a one-verb to one-verb equivalency and maintains the perfect tense, and we talked about how "subsided," "died down," and "grew quiet" all contain a sense of change over time, just as Katie had observed about her initial suggestion.

I pointed out that they were all reasonable translations, and then I asked them which they preferred.  Nicholas liked the single word "abated" and thought the sound and meaning perfectly captured the essence of cecidit.  Others thought some of the other translations worked better, although I do not think anyone preferred "subsides."

We laughed that our discussion of one verb had taken nearly half the class period, but by the time the bell rang, we were close to being back on track with our syllabus.  Yet that was of little importance.  Classical G.P. Goold once wrote, "An elementary teacher, to reach in due season the end of his curriculum, must every hour turn a Nelson eye to serious problems and refrain from pursuing truth beyond the charted boundaries of the textbook."  I took issue with that statement in an article I wrote, and based on today's engagement by teenagers with one of the seminal texts of world literature, I would refute it yet again.  These students could appreciate the nuances and subtleties of translation and were eager to explore them.  In their plumbing of the depths of a verb meaning "to fall," they rose to heights of academic engagement that, well, give this teacher one more reason for getting up in the morning.

A Teacher's Office

A few of the books that overflow the ten bookshelves, tops of filing cabinets, and windowsill in my classroom.

In a Facebook group called Latin Teacher Idea Exchange, a Latin teacher named David Smith posted a picture similar to the one above.  He wrote, "Whatever else you do this year, remember our OFFICIUM: Keep the voices in these books alive in your students--lest they fall into oblivion. We are so blessed to be Latin teachers!"  He went on to say that he had posted his picture and comment because it is easy for teachers to forget why they do what they do.  He concluded, "If we fail in our task, who will read Vergil, Tacitus, Caesar, or Cicero in the next generation?"

The word David used is officium.  It is the root of the English word "office," which far too often people thing of merely as a place to do work.  Yet the Latin words suggests much, much more.  At its root are the words opus and facere, meaning "work" and "to do/make."  The word opifex meant a craftsman or artificer, and opificium described, according to the Oxford Latin Dictionary, "the performance of constructive work."  Officium was a contraction of opificium and came to have a wide range of meanings including an act of service or respect and one's duty or obligation to another.

Now consider the office of a teacher.  We have a duty, indeed even a sacred trust, to pass on what we have learned, and David's question has haunted me for several years.  In no sequence of high school classes can students plum the depth or explore the breadth of Classical writing.  It is humanly impossible.  We do as much as we can, of course, and if we are not going to read Aristotle or Plautus, I can at least mention their names and hope that someday, maybe, one of my students may see those names scrawled in an old notebook and seek out their works.

A quotation from Benjamin Jowett, taken from the preface to his translation of Thucydides, hangs outside my classroom door.  "[T]he voluminous learning of past ages [has] to be recast in easier and more manageable forms.  And if Greek literature is not to pass away, it seems to be necessary that in every age some one who has drunk deeply from the original fountain should renew the love of it in the world, and once more present that old life, with its great ideas and great actions, its creations in politics and in art, like the distant remembrance of youth, before the delighted eyes of mankind."

Teachers are translators.  We literally carry the ideas of humanity from age to the next.  We have been called to a wonderful, delightful opificium, and it is the performance of this most constructive work that is the teacher's true office.