The Woman You Know And Have Never Met

 

Alice Ranck Hettle

You know this woman, although unless you attended New Albany High School between 1952 and 1986, it is unlikely you ever met her.  If, on the other hand, you were one of my students in Missouri, Texas, or Indiana, you have.  In fact, if you have ever encountered one of Alice Ranck's students...teachers, doctors, lawyers, athletes, business people, moms, dads, coaches, and more...you have in some way come to know her.

Dedication for Dedication

I have written about this extraordinary Latin teacher before, and now I need to post an addendum.  On Sunday, April 24th, 2022, the New Albany High School media center was formally dedicated as the Alice Ranck Hettle Media Center.  It seemed only fitting that a space we used to call a library be dedicated to a teacher whose dedication both to academics and her students was and perhaps always will remain unparalleled.

Although she retired more than thirty-five years ago to marry a man she had met in the 8th grade, none of us could ever call her Mrs. Hettle.  She was always "Miss Ranck" or "Miss Alice" to her students, the latter appellation undoubtedly derived from her own habit of addressing us as "Mr." or "Miss" and then our first name.  I was always "Mr. Steve" to her.

After her passing in 2019, a group of her former students began to plan a suitable and permanent way to honor this woman who had so profoundly influenced so many lives.  The choice of the library/media center was obvious, as was the choice for a quotation on the plaque that now adorns the wall to the right of the picture above.

Seneca was a Stoic philosopher who lived from 4 B.C. to A.D. 65, and in Epistle LXXVI he wrote, "Tamdiu discendum est quamdiu nescias."  "You must keep learning as long as there is something you do not know."  Had Seneca not said it first, Miss Ranck surely would have said it herself, for she would often stop class to impart some bit of wisdom, prefaced by her trademark statement, "This is more important than any Latin I will teach you."  It is for that reason more than her clear presentation of the subjunctive mood or the ablative absolute that so many people were present for this dedication.

Across the Decades

Steven Prince, Latin Teacher, NAHS

The emcee of the ceremony, current New Albany High School Latin teacher Steve Prince, asked people to stand as he called out the decades, and people rose who had been students of Miss Ranck in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.  The youngest among us had last sat in a classroom with Miss Ranck thirty-five years ago, the eldest more sixty.  What could possibly draw people from as far away as Houston, Texas?  What could have compelled people with physical infirmities for whom motion was clearly a challenge to visit a southern Indiana high school on a Sunday afternoon?  The answer is simple.  We were there for Miss Ranck.

When she was inducted into the NAHS Hall of Fame several years ago, Miss Ranck said, "It is our responsibility as educators to provide a sound education based on ethical principles.  Innate within every human being is first the desire to be noticed and to be loved, then comes the need to be taught to learn how to learn.  It is the role of the teacher to notice and yes, to love the student so much that he is ready to learn, and in turn develop all of his potential.  What better way for a teen-ager to learn to live honorably and well than to read from the literary masterpieces of Cicero."

After school board member Elizabeth Galligan read a poignant piece to acknowledge and commemorate the life of this extraordinary teacher, person after person took the microphone to share a "Miss Ranck" story.  Had Steve Prince not drawn this portion to a close, we could have been there all night listening to stories about this woman, whose first year of teaching was at Spartanburg High School in Lynn, Indiana, during the 1945-1946 school year, we could have been there all night.

That's My Teacher

I have friends in many noble professions, yet I do not think there is a calling that produces the excited statement, whether by a child or a senior citizen, quite like, "That's my teacher!"  

My calculus teacher, Jim Dickman

As guests began filling the atrium for the ceremony, I spotted across the room the man who had been my calculus teacher my senior year, Mr. Jim Dickman.  I quickly grabbed my daughter and asked her to take a picture of the two of us.  Mr. Dickman had also been a student of Miss Ranck, and although he is now retired and I am in the second phase of my own career, I was still excited to see "my teacher."

L to R:  Steve Perkins, Tim Harbison, Steve Prince

Many of Miss Ranck's students went on to become teachers and college professors, but only three that we know of became Latin teachers.  Tim Harbison, Steve Prince, and I share a special bond in that, but as all teachers know, there is something about the student-teacher relationship that is unlike any other.  The eminent polymath George Steiner wrote of this in Lessons of the Masters, a book that should be required reading for all teachers and that I explored in another post.  Those who have experienced such a special connection with a teacher can recognize the reason why in Miss Ranck's words above.  Before it is an academic relationship, it is a relationship based in love.

A Personal Note

To date I have taught more than 2,200 students, and while I have been blessed by a great many extraordinary teachers, a topic I have written about in "Why I Love Teaching, Part 1," it would not be too much to say that I would not have taught any of them had it not been for Miss Ranck.  As I described in the post titled "Infinite Space," God spoke to me when one day in 1986 she made an offhand reference to Antioch as the first place where anyone was ever called a Christian.  The call I felt on my life that day in Room C317 has led me to a life I have been blessed beyond measure to lead.  For this reason, I was grateful when Steve Prince took a few of us on a tour of the school and I was able to see that room once again.

Some things have change since I sat in that room years ago, learning from textbooks like Latin For Americans and Our Latin Heritage.  The door is in a new location, and there used to be windows that looked out across the football field.  For me, however, it was sacred ground, for it was there that I learned from Miss Ranck, heard the voice of God, and was inspired by the calling to which I have given my life.

A Brief Post on Mistakes

 

Errare humanum est.  To err is human.  This is proved in the frequent misattribution of this quotation to the Roman philosopher Seneca.  It seems the kind of thing he might have said, but we have no evidence that he actually said it.  But is that a really big deal?  If making mistakes is human, then perhaps we should just learn to live with them.

When Mistakes Matter

At some point in my Latin classes, we talk about how the Latin texts they read in their books came into existence.  We have no autographs from any ancient author, which is to say, we have no manuscripts written in their own hand.  We possess copies of works by people like Homer and Plato and Cicero and Vergil, but we do not have even one scrap of papyrus in their handwriting.  Copies were made even in their day, and then copies of those copies were made, after which copies of copies of copies were made, and so on down through the ages.  If you have ever copied something, however, you know that it is easy for your eyes to skip words, to write the same word twice, or to make other errors in transcription.

When I was a graduate assistant in Classics at The University of Texas, I was grading a set of etymology exams for a certain professor and noticed that a large number of the students had incorrectly defined a particular word.  Even stranger was that they had all misdefined it in the same way.  The word was "anthropocentric," and these students had defined it as an adjective related to the belief that "man is the center of the unwise."  I have often told my own students that if an answer does not make sense, it is probably wrong, but this professor had obviously not given such advice.  Eventually I figured out what had happened.  Apparently a student with illegible penmanship had shared his notes with the class, and although he had written "universe," the word looked like "unwise," and that was what the students had memorized for the test.

This kind of thing happened all the time in the transcription of ancient texts across the centuries, especially when those doing the copying did not know the language they were transcribing.  As a result, scholars have poured much work into establishing authoritative versions of texts by comparing the various manuscripts and applying philological rules to resolve discrepancies.  For more on this, see Max Hardy's excellent article in the online journal Antigone.

A Calligraphic Goof

I encountered this scribal problem firsthand recently after putting on our dry erase board the Verse of the Week for our Latin III class.  A student had come to see me before school, and as we talked, my eye wandered over to the board, and suddenly I saw the error, but even that I corrected incorrectly.  In the picture above you can see the Latin of 1 Peter 3:15.  The first word in the next-to-last line is posenti, which is not a Latin word at all.  I began to think about the verse and, not having memorized it in Latin, assumed that I miswritten petenti, figuring that since "e" and "o" are similar, my brain had simply taken one for the other.  Furthermore, because there are two instances of the long "s" in satisfactionem immediately above, I had mistakenly used the long "s" instead of "t."  My mental emendation had the benefit of keeping the sense of the verse, but when I actually looked at the Vulgate, I found that not only had I misspelled a word, but my intended correction was wrong as well.  The actual word in that verse is poscenti, and I had left out the letter "c."

The corrected version

I quickly changed the word on the board, and all was well, but it was an interesting reminder of the kind of thing that happened countless times as scribes copied the works of antiquity.  It is also a reminder of the debt of gratitude we owe classical philologists who have produced reliable texts that we can be quite confident express what the ancient authors wrote.

Vowels and Baptism

It can be caused by viruses, bacteria, and parasites.  Lactose, fructose, and artificial sweeteners can cause it as well.  It can even be associated with diseases such as ulcerative colitis, and despite its relatively simple treatment, there is some debate over how to spell it, or at least there was recently among some of my friends.

When Wordsmiths Text

In a text thread of three other friends and me, one of us had shared a screenshot from a news update on a certain illness, one of the symptoms of which included the condition described above.  What bothered someone on the thread was that the word was spelled "diarrhoea" instead of the more familiar "diarrhea."  One of my friends quipped, "I'm sure Steve will give us a full etymological report, replete with Latin roots -- whether we want it or not!"  Since I am the obliging type, sent them a diagram tracing the roots of the word to the original Greek noun "diarrhoia," and began unpacking the matter at hand.

You will notice that the Greek noun ends with iota alpha (ia in the transliteration).  That iota often comes into English as "e," as in "Phoinix" becoming "Phoenix."  Same thing with Phoibos -> Phoebus, as in Apollo.  There is a tendency in English to collapse diphthongs into single vowels.  The spelling you see is legitimate and is closer to a transliteration from the Greek.  This is why "caelestis," the Latin word for "heavenly," comes into English as "celestial."  The "ae" diphthong has collapsed into the single vowel "e."

[Referring back to the original issue of why someone might spell "diarrhea" with an "o," I added the following.]  Richmond Lattimore did this kind of thing in his translations of Homer.  He wanted to convey a sense of the Greek, so he used transliterations of names, e.g. Achilleus (Achilles), Hektor (Hector), Achaians (Achaeans), etc.

After introducing Richmond Latimore into the discussion, I thought I would share with my friends the translation of the New Testament that this renowned translator of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey had produced, and it was then that our conversation took an important turn.

From Vowels to Baptism

As I searched for a link to Lattimore's New Testament, I ran across the story of his baptism in 1983, just a year before his death.  The story was told more than twenty years later by Rev. Andrew Mead in a sermon on Sunday, January 16, 2005.  The message is short, and I urge you to follow this link and read it now.

I remember excitedly discovering Lattimore's translation of the New Testament nearly thirty years ago, and I was drawn, as I always am when picking up any translation, to the preface.  This preface did not, as one might expect in a Bible, give historical or theological or other specifically biblical information.  It did, however, as one would expect in a translation of Homer or Vergil, present stylistic information and a discussion of the translator's method and underlying theory of translation.  This was a scholar's work.  It was the work of a poet, and it never occurred to me that there might have been something more going on for Lattimore himself.  Yet there clearly was, as Lattimore revealed to Rev. Mead, to whom he had just admitted his desire for Christian baptism at the age of 73.  Mead shares in his sermon that he pressed Lattimore on what had apparently been Lattimore's known difficulties with the faith.

"Dr. Lattimore [though he preferred it, it was difficult for me to call him Dick], I thought you had reservations about the Christian faith and the Church."  "I did," he replied.  "But you don't any longer?"  "No, not any longer."  "Please then may I ask you, when did they go away?"  He was silent for a space; then, again with that smile and twinkling eyes, he answered, "Somewhere in Saint Luke."

The Closeness of Reading

Translation involves the close reading of a text.  Even someone with a cursory knowledge of another language can skim a text in that language and glean information, but translation is something entirely different.  Is the verb in the indicative or subjunctive mood?  To what does this relative pronoun refer?  Answering questions like these is essential to making an accurate translation, but when it comes to the biblical text, this close reading leads to another kind of closeness, one that Lattimore clearly experienced.  When we slow down and ponder a biblical text, when we look at it from multiple angles and ruminate on it, as it were, at the atomic level, we are drawn closer to the One Who is the author, or more simply, to The One Who Is.

There is a difference between “to hen,” The One, of Plotinus, and “ho ōn,” The One Who Is.  It is the latter that we see surrounding the head of Jesus in icons and that we find in Revelation 4:8.  A close reading of these two Greek phrases reveals an impersonal quality to the former and a personal aspect to the latter, and therein lies all the difference.  God is not an idea, but a person.  To be precise, He is three persons eternally existing as one deity, and it would seem that this is Whom the renowned translator Richmond Lattimore encountered when reading closely the biblical text.  It is not necessary, of course, to read Hebrew or Greek or Latin to encounter God in the Bible.  What is necessary is a slow, careful reading, one that does more than skim a text to glean information.  Lattimore said that his reservations about the Christian faith were allayed "somewhere in Saint Luke."  What an exciting proposition to think that you, too, may encounter “ ho ōn,” The One Who Is, as you read the Bible today!

Words Matter

Michael Biehn as Johnny Ringo in Tombstone

The 1993 film Tombstone opens with a scene of violence as members of the ruthless gang known as the Cowboys invade a wedding party.  The priest hurls words of Scripture at them in Spanish, and one of the gang translates, albeit loosely, for their leader, Curly Bill Brosius.  Fearsome gunslinger Johnny Ringo, however, knows better what was said.

Cowboy:  Patron, he say, uh, someone will come to revenge for him.  Something like a, a... sick horse who comes to sit with him.  He talk crazy.

Ringo:  That's not what he said, ya ignorant wretch.  Your Spanish is worse than your English.

Later, as the Cowboys help themselves to food from the wedding banquet, Curly Bill revisits the topic.

Curly Bill:  Hey, Johnny, what'd that Mexican mean..."a sick horse is gonna get us," huh?

Ringo:  He's quoting the Bible.  Revelations.  "Behold, a pale horse.  The man who sat on him was Death.  And hell followed with him."

Words matter.  Translators bear an enormous responsibility, one that is almost impossible to fulfill perfectly, and this is the reason the Italian expression traduttore, traditore exists.  The translator is in one aspect or another nearly always a traitor.

Consider the story of the woman caught in adultery that is told in John, chapter 8.  When the Pharisees bring the woman to Jesus, they cite the law of Moses for what should happen to her, and both the original Greek and the Latin of the Vulgate are quite clear.

ἐν δὲ τῶ νόμῳ ἡμῖν μωϊσῆς ἐνετείλατο τὰς τοιαύτας λιθάζειν.

In lege autem Moyses mandavit nobis huiusmodi lapidare.

In the law Moses commanded us to stone women of this sort.

The key words here are τὰς τοιαύτας in the Greek and huismodi in the Latin.  They both indicate categories or types.  The Pharisees are applying the general to the specific.  In general, women caught in adultery are to be stoned.  This particular woman was caught in adultery, and the consequence is clear.

Most English translations of the Bible get this right, but one, the New Living Translation, misses the mark.  It translates John 8:5 to say, "The law of Moses says to stone her."  As we just saw, the implication of the law is precisely that, and so, on one hand the NLT scholars were justified in this translation, yet they have also proved the truth of the Italian expression traduttore, traditore, for they have betrayed a key aspect of this verse.  The Pharisees see the woman merely as a category, but Jesus sees her as something else, something more.  He sees her as a person.

Fr. Mark Toups in The Ascension Lenten Companion has this to say about what happened that day just east of Jerusalem.

They stand behind her, the scribes and the Pharisees, each of them teeming with righteousness.  They bend down, looking around, hunting for the perfect rock to hurl so that they can crush her to death.

They do not see a woman.  They do not see a person.  They see a category.  To them she is a category, a thing with a label:  "an adulteress."  They are ready to stone her, to kill her, because they want to remove the category.

Jesus does not see a category; he sees a woman.  Jesus sees a person.  Jesus sees this particular person.  To Jesus she is not a category:  "adulteress."  No, she is a person.  She is a person who has made an egregious mistake, but she is a person who can be forgiven.  (p. 135)

By rushing on to the implication of the law for this particular moment, the NLT passes too quickly over what is really going on here, but if we stop for a moment, we see a profound lesson for ourselves.  How often do we in the shrill age of screeching social media merely see people as the categories into which they seem to fit?  It is easy to rail against Debbie the Democrat or Rob the Republican, Harry the Hollywood Elite or Charlotte the CEO, especially from the anonymity of a social media screen name, but what do we actually know of Debbie or Rob or Harry or Charlotte the human beings created in the image of God who have the same opportunity to accept redemption through Jesus Christ as any other man or woman?  Of course, Jesus was right in Matthew 7 when He said that we can know people by their fruits, which is to say, by their words and actions, but what does that mean?  Does it mean that we can use what people say and do to assign them to categories that we can then proceed to pillory, reject, or dismiss?  Or does it mean that we can use those fruits to see when people are not walking with Christ so that we can reach out to them as the salt and light Jesus has called us to be?

This gospel story convicts me, for I, like most people these days, can get caught up in the bloodless blood sport of sitting around with like-minded friends to skewer with wicked wit groups of people whose words and deeds seem out of alignment with what we think is right.  We should not turn a blind eye to sin, nor should we excuse sinful behavior, but we must be careful not see people merely as categories and rather as Jesus saw them, as He has seen each of us, as friends in need of His grace.