Sharing a Classroom

My classroom is small, measuring about 23' x 13'.  For this reason, most of my Latin classes meet in other classrooms.  As I have written elsewhere, and borrowing Hamlet's expression, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite space, and because this is true, I do not mind at all sharing my small classroom with many, many other teachers.  Both in this classroom, which is really more of an office, and in any place where I teach, I do not teach alone but am engaged in a most collaborative enterprise, for I have the pleasure of working alongside some of the greatest teachers the world has ever known.

There are Socrates and Plato and Alexander Pope, to say nothing of Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Ovid, and Vergil.  The history teachers have their say thanks to Livy and Tacitus, and of course Homer holds a mighty sway.

Texts and commentaries

Oxford and Loeb texts

Penguin translations

Sometimes they speak their native Greek or Latin, and sometimes they speak in English, but always they are there, guiding the conversations I have with my students.  Even when their voices cannot be heard directly, they are teaching nonetheless, for they are like the waters described by William Butler Yeats in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Although the majority of my fellow teachers speak their wisdom from across the centuries, there are more modern educators as well, speaking to matters of linguistics and philosophy and the natural sciences.

A few of my colleagues who teach philosophy and science

Surely, you say, these do not all make their way into the daily curriculum of a high school Latin class.  Surely it would not be appropriate for them to do so.  Isn't a secondary language class about nouns and verbs and learning the basics?  No, they do not all make their way into our daily lessons, at least not explicitly so, but I disagree with the notion that any of these teachers should not be allowed through the door.  In 1970, G. P. Goold, who over his illustrious career served as the chair of Classics departments at Harvard, University College London, and Yale, as well as serving as the chief editor of the Loeb Classical Library for twenty-five years, wrote a most unfortunate statement with which I took issue in an article I wrote a few years ago about a textual difficulty in Vergil's Aeneid.  Goold 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 wrote in response, "I would argue that the true magister can never be so bound, but must, along with the students, pursue the truth, no matter how anfractuous the path."

And if truth, rather than the important but necessarily lesser goals of skills proficiency and career readiness, is the foundation and raison d'etre of education, then surely there must be another teacher in every classroom, even the one who claimed to be truth itself, Jesus Christ.

The 3-D printed bust of Christ, courtesy of my son

You see, all of these great teachers have taught me.  I am the product of their wisdom, eloquence, and art, and in that way alone, they are teaching my students as surely as I am.  Because I have spent considerable time with many of them, their words and ideas are also at the ready when I attempt to do what all teachers do, make connections.  Education is essentially helping someone see that this is that.  In its simplest expression it may be an equation, for example one connecting the ideas of 2 + 2 and 4.  In more complex forms it can be seen in metaphors, allusions, and parables.  Indeed the metaphoric nature of all language points to the this-is-that nature of communication, of which formal education is but one particular instance.  For this reason, the assassination of President Kennedy can make its way into a reading of Caesar in Gaul.  The dual nature of light as wave and particle will enter into a discussion about the opening of Vergil's Aeneid.  Even Disney's The Lion King will help to illustrate the aspects of Catiline's conspiracy and the fertile ground for demagoguery among the poor and disenfranchised.

Just as these secular teachers weave their way seamlessly and effortlessly through our exploration of Latin, so does the greatest teacher of them all, but for a different reason and in different ways.  I am blessed now, somewhere past the midpoint of my career, to teach in a school where Christ is acknowledged as Lord.  We are, therefore, free to offer a complete approach to learning, one that does not exclude faith as a way of knowing.  My students and I can easily make references to Scripture just as we do to writings by Plato or Homer.  Yet, and far more significantly, Christ is present in our classes in a way the others cannot be, for He is still alive.  His Holy Spirit dwells within us, leading us, according to John 16:13, into all truth, which, as stated above, is the reason a school exists.  Although it is my name on the door, my small classroom is actually crowded with the greatest of all teachers, and I am more than grateful to share with them the delightful, exciting, and provocative calling of teaching.

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.

To Be A Child?

And in my heart you will remain forever young. -- Rod Stewart

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. -- 1 Corinthians 13:11, ESV



Our school's chapter of the Indiana Junior Classical League offers a scholarship each year to one of our graduating seniors.  Part of the application requires that candidates pick a Latin quotation and use it as the basis for a discussion of the benefit of Classics to them and their own interest in Classics.

This year one of our seniors chose, "Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum."  This is Cicero's famous statement, "Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child," and it comes from Orator, 119.  At the end of a thoughtful essay, this student, who began as an 8th grader and thus took five years and prepared for the A.P. and I.B. tests along the way, had this to say.

Cicero

 "Being able to understand and parse themes from the Classical era develops a mindset for understanding the out-of-reach parts of the world, separated by either time or by distance.  That ability turns a person from a child, trapped in a singular world of self, to a person of the world, conscientious of those they have never met and may never meet.

"So ask me why I have spent the last five years studying a dead language of a people long since passed.  Ask me why I have bothered to translate classical works from the Latin instead of just reading someone else's translation.  Ask me why it matters if Horace was able to openly attack his contemporaries in his satires like his predecessor Lucilius or not.  My answer will remain the same:  I refuse to remain a child when I can be a person of the world."

It is not news to say that ours is a youth-obsessed age.  "I don't want to grow up.  I'm a Toys R Us kid."  That is the theme song of the present day.  I do not know whether this is the cause or the consequence of our failure to expose children to the great works of literature, art, and music.  Likely as not the two are now caught in a vicious cycle.  Anthony Esolen, yet again, sounds the alarm by merely stating the facts.  Would that those who had ears to hear should do so.  In that article, he cites Henry Van Dyke from an 1893 piece in which Van Dyke will not give in to pessimism with regard to literature, but expects a recovery from poets who merely "please a degenerate race with the short-lived melodies of earthly delight and the wild chants of withering passion."  Esolen is not so sure.  Actually, he is sure...that Van Dyke was wrong.

I would tend to agree with Esolen with regard to our literary and cultural landscape.  Yet there are, as there have always been, the remnants who know and are shaped by the true, the good, and the beautiful.  They are as Aeneas described the Trojan refugees in Aeneid I.30, "reliqui[ae] Danaum et immitis Achilli," the offscourings, if not of the Danaans and savage Achilles, of a society whose systems of education no longer read to become human and to make connection with humanity, but for much duller, more ephemeral, and sadly utilitarian ends.

Aeneas in the storm

I say these remnants exist, for I am blessed to see them in my classes.  Will those who read Caesar and Cicero, Horace and Vergil in high school turn the monstrous and sinking ship of our society, barnacled as it is with grotesqueries imaginable in another age perhaps only to a Dante?  Titanic's rudder was indeed too small.  Yet small is also the mustard seed, and while I am not sure I have its quantity of faith, I do have at least that amount of hope, and that hope stems from students like this senior.

A Lucullan Feast

A warm breeze ruffled his hair as he walked through the hotel patio.  A quick glance at palm trees waving in the Arizona sun brought a smile of recognition that he was indeed far from his frozen Midwest home.  As he pushed through the glass doors of the hotel lobby, carrying his monogrammed black briefcase, he stepped into the retro '60s chic of the Hotel Valley Ho and felt not a little like Connery Bond.  Striding across another patio, he was greeted by the smiles and welcomes of newly familiar faces and took his seat at nothing short of a Lucullan feast for the body, the mind, and the soul.

There was, of course, the food, actual food.  Five star offerings at breakfast, lunch, and dinner formed a savory backdrop for even more delicious conversation.  No rubber chicken dinner, this.  Gourmet offerings of meats and vegetables and soups served with china and linen strengthened body and spirit and allowed the mind to begin to imagine once again.

The mind, thus refreshed with physical sustenance, then partook of an intelligent, meaningful, useful buffet of workshops that combined the best instruction with ample opportunity for reflection and practice.  Technology training, policy discussion, communication techniques and avenues were all a part of the magnificent spread.  Talks, activities, and opportunities to process were arranged in seamless orchestration to produce an abundant flow of nourishment to minds remembering what it means to think and dream and live.

Yet it was the banquet for the soul that made the week complete.  A delicate combination of semi-structured and free opportunities for intelligent, educated adults to gather led to a soulful rejuvenation.  Beneath the cloudless blue of the Arizona sky, a truth was recovered.  Anything is indeed possible.

I am, of course, talking about the 2014 National Teacher of the Year Program Conference hosted recently in Scottsdale by the Council of Chief State School Officers, ING, the National Teacher of the Year Program, and People to People.  Some may think my phrase "of course" a bit misplaced.  After all, isn't it rare for teachers to have an experience like this?  Yes, it is rare, but it should not be.  It should be as expected as and more acceptable than the amenities-laden trips and conferences enjoyed by other professionals in our society.

"Ah, there you teachers go, asking for more things.  Why can't you accept your role as martyr-saints, put on your hair shirts, and be content with your locusts and honey?  We always knew you were just in it for the money and material goods."

The apostle Paul and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., both did great work from prisons.  It is possible, but it should not be the norm.  When the Roman emperor Augustus, after bringing peace to the Mediterranean world, turned his attention to domestic affairs in Rome, he wanted to bring about a flowering of the arts.  He did not attempt this by locking poets in a dungeon and ordering them to write with their own blood.  He instructed his friend Maecenas, a wealthy citizen, to provide for their needs.  The result was nothing less than the polymetric masterpieces of Horace and the Aeneid of Vergil, that magnum opus that has delighted and inspired generations for two thousand years.

Make no mistake, teaching is both a science and an art.  The scientific side receives much attention, but less so the artistic.  Not every teaching conference or professional development can feature all the components of the NTOY Program Conference.  Every teaching conference and professional development can, however, come close.  They can be guided by the spirit that acknowledges the humanity of this enterprise called education.  This is not about providing a soft life for teachers.  It is about creating the environments in which their bodies, minds, and souls can flourish, where they can dream, and where they can be inspired yet again as they lead our children on the shared journey of discovery.  As I rediscovered in Arizona, anything is possible.