We Don't Always Need To Teach

 

Edith Hamilton

"In Greece there are most lovely wild flowers.  They would be beautiful anywhere, but Greece is not a rich and fertile country of wide meadows and fruitful fields where flowers seem at home.  It is a land of rocky ways and stony hills and rugged mountains, and in such places the exquisite vivid bloom of wild flowers comes as a startling surprise."  (Mythology, Edith Hamilton, p. 111)

This is the passage that a high school junior who is the student of a friend of mine chose for a typical read-and-respond assignment.  What that student wrote regarding this quotation forms a powerful reminder, or perhaps a startlingly new idea, that all teachers would do well to bear in mind.

 "I personally enjoyed this quote because it was so vivid in details that I could visualize what was being described.  This quote struck me because it was not about something that could be taught or learned and applied to one's life.  It is simply a quote describing details of Greece.  I think it is important to also recognize quotes or passages like this one because sometimes in life we need the simpler things rather than always looking at quotes that are about how we should live our lives, passages that teach.  Yes, teaching and guidance quotes and passages are good but so are the descriptive ones, the ones that transport us into a space in our minds that is purely creative and imaginative.  Quotes like this one ...make whatever the reader is reading far more interesting because quotes like this allow that reader to imagine what ancient Greece or any other place from the past would have been like.  This may be a simple quote, but I see something deeper in this quote that is very important....  It brings out the creative and imaginative side of literature."

We sometimes think of lyric poetry in classical literature as being that which does not advance the plot.  It is personal and emotional.  It sets up mood and atmosphere and evokes feelings.  When, for example, the Roman poet Catullus in Carmen 5 asks of his beloved, "Give me a thousand kisses and then a hundred more/And then another thousand and a hundred like before/Then add another thousand and a hundred to the score," he could have more simply said, "Give me 3,300 kisses."  Yet, as Howard Nemerov so elegantly put it, there is a line between prose and poetry.  It is as indiscernible as the moment of transition from rain to snow, but it exists and it is the realm of lyric, and to be honest, would you not much rather have your lover propose passion in the lyrical way of Catullus than with a prosaic mathematical sum?

And this brings us back to what this high school student observed and that teachers should remember.  Education is not always about teaching and learning facts.  It is not always about producing something with those learned facts, whether on a test or through a project or presentation.  It is not, as it were, always about advancing the plot.  There is a necessarily lyrical aspect to education as well.

We seem to have lost sight of this, and there can be no more unfortunate or compelling proof than in the numbers of students who have told me over the years that they have lost their love of reading because of their English classes.  I enjoy spotting a Greco-Roman reference in literature as much as the next person and find a well crafted tricolon crescens an absolute delight, but no one looks at a Monet merely to count the brush strokes.  How often do we make a reading, especially in English or world language classes, merely a mining expedition for figures of speech, historical factoids, or salutary aphorisms?  Do we ever with our students simply read a poem, listen to a piece of music, or observe a work of nature or art and then do nothing more?

I can hear the objections rising even in my own mind as the presumed need for assessments and productivity claims the honor of precedence that we have yielded to it.  My colleague's student, however, was right.  In addition to all the pragmatic facets of education and the demonstrable proofs of their having been mastered, we need as well those facets that "transport us into a space in our minds that is purely creative and imaginative."  I hope to remember this as I plan future explorations for my own students into "the glories that were Greece and the grandeur that was Rome."

How Classics Saved My Life

"I am a college-educated American.  In all my years of formal schooling, I never read Plato or Aristotle, Homer or Virgil.  I knew nothing of Greek and Roman history and barely grasped the meaning of the Middle Ages.  Dante was a stranger to me, and so was Shakespeare.

"The fifteen hundred years of Christianity from the end of the New Testament to the Reformation were a blank page, and I knew only the barest facts about Luther's revolution.  I was ignorant of Descartes and Newton.  My understanding of Western history began with the Enlightenment.  Everything that came before it was lost behind a misty curtain of forgetting."  The Benedict Option, p. 154, Rod Dreher

As I read these words, I was struck by the realization that there, but for the my chosen field of Classics, would have gone I.  Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Virgil...why, of course, I thought, but then I paused.  Had I actually encountered them in any class not of my choosing?  I thought long and hard about it, and the answer was no.

In my high school senior English class we read a bit of Chaucer, and I will always be grateful for the introduction I received to Pope, Donne, and Keats from that teacher, Mr. John Richardson.  I also got from him Shakespeare's sonnets to go along with Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar, the only Shakespearean plays I would ever be required to read throughout my educational career.  Somewhere there were bits of Homer's Odyssey.  There was no significant world history class for my high school diploma.

As an undergraduate at Indiana University, I took only two English classes.  Through one, a survey, I was introduced to Dante, though only parts in the Norton Anthology that included glimpses of the Old Testament as literature.  I took only one history class, and that was in ancient history for my major in Classical Studies.

Only in classes that I chose to take as a high school Latin student or undergraduate and graduate student in Classics did I encounter any of the following:  Caesar, Cicero, Horace, Catullus, Lucretius, Vergil, Plato, and Herodotus.  I was introduced to Montaigne and Hume in an elective freshman honors seminar.  Although we read part of Augustine's Confessions in that class, I had never heard of the church fathers until I casually encountered them through friends in graduate school, and then it was not in any class.  All that I know of Aquinas has been acquired on my own.  The same goes for Anselm, Descartes, and Milton.  Alexis de Tocqueville, The Federalist Papers, and The Constitution of the United States of America...if I had not read them of my own accord, they would hold no place in my knowledge.  In fact, as I survey the significant authors on my bookshelves, I find that at best I know of a few from any required class in my schooling.  Most I learned about on my own, and almost all I have read solely outside the classroom.

My encounter with Latin in high school sparked an interest in me that led me to pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in Classics, and it was through that interest and study that I have come to know most of what I know of any importance.  Friends, such things ought not to be.  The human heritage bequeathed to the world through the history, literature, and theology of the West should not be a curiosity available only for a kid who studies Latin to discover.  Should everyone become a Homeric scholar or an expert in Dante?  Of course not.  But everyone should be introduced to the true gems of human discovery and achievement.  Whether or not a person picks up one of those gems and makes it his or her own is up to that student.  This much, however, is true.  Any school or system of education apart from a program of specific skills training that does not, as Benjamin Jowett wrote in the preface to his translation of Thucydides, "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," stands convicted of dereliction of duty and betrayal of its true mandate.

A Not Untypical Day In High School

I teach at a public high school of just under 4,000 students. Our classes are huge. We are not elite. And yet these things happened today. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

In my Period 2 class of Latin I, one of my students taught the grammar lesson. I have recorded myself teaching key grammar points, posted those videos on our website, and the students must watch them at home while taking notes. The following day students volunteer to teach, or re-present, the lesson. Today Samantha not only put the information on the board, but asked questions of her classmates and and sought volunteers. She did not merely regurgitate information. She taught.

In my A.P. class we discussed an alternative form of a verb in Latin poetry (for you Latin folks out there, it was the -ere suffix for -erunt in 3rd person plural perfect active indicative). In this instance it was the verb fulsere, meaning "they flashed," and one of my students said, "Oh, that's just like in that Catullus poem we read last year where the suns flashed for him." He was referring to Catullus 8, and I simply shook my head in admiring disbelief.

Perhaps my emotional pump had been primed by discussions over the past few days. In my Latin III class we had read about a murder in 53 B.C. on the Appian Way. The wife of the victim demanded that her husband's corpse be displayed in the forum for all to see, and we discussed the parallel with Emmett Till, whose death in 1955 prompted his mother to have an open casket for her son and for Jet magazine to run the pictures. As the story of the ancient murder developed, it described the mob violence that followed and led to the burning of the senate house. My students discussed violence in the modern world and that free speech does not mean shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. They discussed the proper limits to freedom that make freedom livable without devolving into chaos.

Again, it was my A.P. students who just yesterday discussed the dangerous role of rumor as depicted by the Roman epic poet Vergil and as seen today in our social media. In both the Latin III and A.P. discussions, I shared that I was concerned for my students' well being and that they not find themselves caught up in the kinds of messaging or activities that have led to ruined lives.

And then, after school, a young man who observes me twice a week from Indiana University in preparation for student teaching, engaged with me in the most heady and delightful of discussions. We talked about his passion for Medieval works. We looked at the prayers of St. Ambrose and talked about St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, the Dies Irae, and the Stabat Mater. We talked of Boethius, and he introduced me to Alan of Lille.

To be sure, not all days are as rich and satisfying, but those described here are not untypical, and because of that they stand as a testament to both the depth and the breadth it is possible to explore in high school.

International Education

Gaius Valerius Catullus, 84-54 B.C.

The Metropolitan School District of Washington Township, where I teach high school Latin, is a K-12 International Baccalaureate district.  Our district website states, "All three programs, PYP, MYP, and DP, focus on the development of the whole child, emphasizing intellectual, personal, emotional, and social growth through the study of languages, humanities, technologies, sciences, mathematics, and the arts. The approaches to teaching and learning are diverse and flexible allowing teachers to meet the individual needs of all students. Teachers stimulate curiosity and foster lifelong learning in all students."  As the name suggests, we have an international focus, and this can be seen in the seven languages we offer:  Latin, German, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese.

Our district recently received a lesson in international education that was not a welcome one.  A 2006 graduate of our school recently became the most recent victim of the savage and inhuman acts of ISIS.

The news came out on a Sunday, and the next day each of my classes spent a few minutes discussing it.  Why?  First of all, we are an International Baccalaureate school, and this is international news.  We rightly focus on the positive aspects of the different cultures and time periods we study, but we need to be reminded that not everything in the world is rosy.  The very cultures that we study are sources of great human achievement and brutal human atrocity.  This is part of the human story.

We also discussed this tragic event because it affected one of our own.  Certainly we have lost other current students and alumni over the years, and every death is a painful loss.  Yet our school's name was being used in international media, and we needed to have our own say.

It also fit within our curriculum, for I shared with each class part of a poem that the Latin III students read.  It is poem 101 by the Roman poet Catullus, and it was written about the death of his brother.  The line I shared was its famous last line, atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.  "And into eternity, brother, hail and farewell."  A key aspect of our Latin studies is exploring how ancient words apply in the world of today, and these poignant words spoke perfectly to the situation we were facing.

Finally, if none of the above had been true, we still should have taken a few moments to honor Peter Kassig.  Education is a most human enterprise, and as Donne reminds us, the loss of one touches us all.

John Donne, 1572-1631