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.