They Should Have Sent a Poet

Golf is a challenging game, but the perfectly hit shot, one that causes the ball to explode from the sweet spot of the club face, is one of the most satisfying and exhilarating of feelings.  No one needs to write one more piece about how challenging teaching is.  The internet is filled with such articles.  But when everything comes together in a day of stunning academic experience and student ability on display, that needs to be shared and celebrated.

To The Stars Through Antiquity

Apollo 1 Exhibit at Kennedy Space Center

Ad astra per aspera.  To the stars through difficulties.  The path to the stars has indeed been a difficult and a long one, perhaps longer than many realize, stretching back as it does to the age of classical antiquity.  We recently completed a unit in our Latin II classes that saw our high school students reading selections from Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero about space, along with parts of the first science fiction novel, True History, written by Lucian of Samosata in the second century A.D.  To get the full story on this unit, which saw students translating and discussing ancient works on outer space, being introduced to ancient technology through the Antikythera Mechanism and ancient mathematics through the calculation of the earth's circumference by Eratosthenes, and exploring the music of the spheres with NASA's discovery of the sound of black holes and the classical music of Gustav Holst, check out our short documentary.

One part of the unit about which I was particularly excited came at the end.  After three weeks of deep study in ancient readings on space, our students met a friend of mine via Zoom.  Neil Jenkins and I go back to first grade in our friendship, but I did not bring him in for us to discuss our fondness for '80s music and Miami Vice.  He holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Alabama and is an amateur astrophotographer, although you should not let the title "amateur" mislead you into thinking his work is second rate.  

IC 1805 The Heart Nebula in the Constellation Cassiopeia
Event Horizon Astrophotography (c) 2021

The Great Orion Nebula M42
Event Horizon Astrophotography (c) 2022

He talked with the students about quantum physics, laser physics, and astrophotography, along with how his Christian faith and work as a scientist fit perfectly together.  When students were asking for his email, asking me for copies of his slides, and staying after class to discuss further the wonders of space, I knew this had been a meaningful event.

Duces Discipuli Facti

As soon as the last bell of the day had rung, another small group of students came to the room for a leadership meeting about a Latin club event.  My intent was to let them handle everything, and I doubt I could have added much that afternoon anyway.  My mind and heart were already too full from the Zoom class with Dr. Jenkins.  As it turned out, I was not needed.  These student officers led with such efficiency they could have given a lesson to many adults.  They worked together, listened to each other's ideas, yet did not become stuck in the mire of indecision.  Just when I thought my heart could take no more of being impressed with students, I was overwhelmed by their display of leadership skills.  In Book 1 of the Aeneid, Vergil describes Queen Dido by saying, dux femina facti, the leader of the deed was a woman.  In this case, the leaders of the deed were students, and I could have offered nothing that would have made their work better.  On the drive home, I called my wife and more or less babbled.  I could not find the words to describe these extraordinary young people and was reminded of the a scene in Contact, the 1997 movie featuring Jodie Foster as Dr. Ellie Arroway, who takes a trip through a wormhole to another part of the universe.  Stupefied at what she sees, all she can say is that instead of a scientist, they should have sent a poet.

Life's Rich Pageant

For many people, the phrase "life's rich pageant" is familiar because it is the title of R.E.M.'s fourth album, although it has a much longer history.  I reach for that phrase often, for it captures perfectly what is my typical experience of the academic and educational life.  Have I known the sorts of stories that are driving so many people out of the education profession?  I have, but they have never been the norm.  When given the opportunity, young people will astonish with the depth of their thought and their ability to do something with it, and I saw that once again just the other day.

Update

Two weeks after publishing this post, I came across an amazing, new discovery.  The star catalogue of Hipparchus, long thought to have been lost, has been discovered, in part, as a palimpsest at an Egyptian monastery.  The following images are from the article about this amazing find in the Journal for the History of Astronomy.

Detail of f. 53v, beginning of the first column of undertext (Syriac overtext in dark brown, and faint traces of a few letters of the undertext).

Courtesy Museum of the Bible Collection. All rights reserved. © Museum of the Bible, 2021.

Detail of f. 53v (multispectral image, by the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library and the Lazarus Project of the University of Rochester processed by Keith T. Knox: the enhanced Greek undertext appears in red below the Syriac overtext in black).

Courtesy Museum of the Bible Collection. All rights reserved. © Museum of the Bible, 2021.

Detail of f. 53v (yellow tracings based on full set of multispectral images).

Courtesy Museum of the Bible Collection. All rights reserved. © Museum of the Bible, 2021.

An excellent article in Nature puts this amazing discovery into context.  As we continue to learn more about the ancient world, we also find new ways to combine modern technology with fields of study such as archaeology, linguistics, philology, science, and more.  Putting together a passion for classical studies, computer imaging, and astronomy, for example, can lead to an exciting career, and as the Roman playwright Terence once wrote, "Homo sum:  humani nil a me alienum puto."  "I am a human being:  I think nothing human alien to me."  (Heuton Timorumenos, 77)

Leadership Lessons

Title Page of Samuel Clarke's Latin Iliad (published 1729)

What does it say about an organization or business, a school or a church, a team or a group, when its best people start leaving?  

My second-year Latin students have been reading selections from Samuel Clarke's 1720 Latin translation of the Iliad.  They had previously learned some of the rudiments of Greek and had just finished reading parts of Julius Caesar's account of his war in Gaul.  By diving into a Latin translation of the Iliad, a war poem originally written in Greek, they were able to bring both of those strands together.  Among the many themes and ideas that can be drawn from this roaring adventure story are lessons in leadership.  In fact, the entire epic could be read as a case study in leadership styles, but one key thing leapt out recently as we discussed the argument between Agamemnon and Achilles in Book 1.

Upon learning that the plague in the Greek camp outside Troy had been caused by Agamemnon's capture of a Trojan girl who was the daughter of a priest of Apollo, Agamemnon was persuaded to return her to her father.  He demanded, however, that one of the other Greek soldiers replace his lost war prize with one of their own captured Trojan women.  Achilles found this intolerable, arguing that each warrior had won his spoils of war fairly and should not be forced to give up anything.  Set aside for a moment the moral issue of taking human slaves as war prizes and notice what happened next.  When Agamemnon retaliated against Achilles and his defense of the soldiers' spoils by threatening to taking Achilles's own slave woman, Achilles replied,

νῦν δ᾽ εἶμι Φθίην δ᾽, ἐπεὶ ἦ πολὺ φέρτερόν ἐστιν

οἴκαδ᾽ ἴμεν σὺν νηυσὶ κορωνίσιν....

Nunc itaque abeo in Phthiam: quoniam multo melius est,

Domum ire cum navibus rostratis....

Now, therefore, I leave for Phthia, since it is much better

To go home with my beaked ships....

Achilles was far and away the greatest of the Greek warriors in the Trojan War.  No warrior worthy of the name would leave the fight, but here was Achilles himself willing to pack up and head for home.  It was a question Agamemnon would have to deal with over the course of the Iliad, but it brings up a point that my students and I discussed.  When good, qualified people start to leave, leadership needs to start asking the hard questions of itself.

The most recent in an endless series of articles about teachers leaving education is one in The Wall Street Journal, which talks about companies that are snatching up educators who are, like Achilles, leaving the fight.  Unfortunately, the article makes only one brief reference to "dealing with challenging...administrators" as a cause for the teacher exodus, yet I would argue that it is one of the primary reasons for it.  Several years ago I wrote a piece titled "Bad Administrators Are Killing Education," and little has changed.

To give you an idea of how the leaders of an organization set the tone and influence their employees, consider the following email from my current principal to his staff regarding the cancellation of school for inclement weather.  After laying out the details and discussing what we needed to do with our students, he concluded, "Last, but not least, enjoy your time at home.  God must have thought we needed a break."

You do not need to be a person of any faith at all to recognize the generous humanity in his comment.  And what did that inspire in me?  It made me want to share that generosity of spirit with my students, so when I messaged them about assignments to be completed during our time away from school, I added, "Most importantly, call to mind these words from Roman poet Horace in Ode I.9.1-6.

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum

Soracte nec iam sustineant onus

silvae laborantes geluque

flumina constiterint acuto?

Dissolve frigus ligna super foco

large reponens...

Do you see how Mt. Soracte stands gleaming

With deep snow and the struggling forests

Do not sustain their burden and

The rivers are frozen with sharp ice?

Melt the cold as you place upon the hearth

A large stack of wood...

As I work on other school matters during this snow day and drink a cup of Earl Grey, I cannot help but think that if Agamemnon had been more like my principal, Achilles would have stayed.  I am quite certain that if more building and district level leaders in education followed his model, we would not be facing quite so sharp a crisis in education.

Learning to Lead

Omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset.  (Tacitus, Histories, 1.49)

"Everyone agreed he would have made a fine emperor...if he had never actually been emperor."

Aside from its being one of my favorite, bitingly witty lines, this assessment of the Roman emperor Galba by the historian Tacitus speaks to a central truth of leadership.  It is something that must be learned and developed.  This is not to say that there are no natural leaders, but the gift of leadership must be nurtured and brought into its full flower.

Just as many people think that teaching is something anyone can do, so a common and equally misguided assumption is that leadership is an automatic function of position.  As Galba and so many others have demonstrated through the ages, title alone does not a leader make.

Enter Liz Wiseman and Elise Foster, authors of The Multiplier Effect:  Tapping the Genius Inside Our Schools.  You can read about these phenomenal leaders who train other leaders here.  I first encountered this book through a leadership summit at which Liz took the stage alongside such leadership greats as Gen. Colin Powell (ret.), Jim Collins, and Patrick Lencioni.  Liz and Elise have identified five principles for leadership that will help everyone get better at their game, but unlike some books of pure theory, theirs contains many examples of classrooms, schools, and districts that have put them into practice and found success.  This is not one more thing for a school to do in a long list of things to do.  It is a framework for helping people live to their potential, and at the end of the day, is that not what education is all about?

Yesterday I had the pleasure of entertaining Elise at our school.  We went to lunch along with my department chair, Traci Rodgers, who had also read The Multiplier Effect and has incorporated key components in each of our department meetings this semester.  We talked about education and leadership, but the most exciting part for me was when she met with my Latin Club officers in the afternoon.  Our school has one of the largest chapters of the Indiana Junior Classical League in Indiana (some years we are the largest), and our officers are engaged in authentic leadership.  Not only do they plan the usual things like pizza and movie nights, but they also lead significant community service projects such as Reading the War on Poverty and Fabrica Ursam, which has our students making stuffed animals and writing fables for patients at Riley Hospital for Children.  These are the kind of teen leaders who have written a grant proposal for the United Way to obtain funds to create a literacy garden at a local elementary school.  When I saw the opportunity to put young teen leaders in the same room with a world-class leadership trainer, I couldn't open the door fast enough.

If you have not read The Multiplier Effect, order it right now.  You will want to read and highlight it and share it with other leaders.  As I said, this is not one more program to implement.  It is a way of approaching people to help them develop their own best gifts.  As I have written before, this is what motivates me as a teacher.

Caesar on Leadership

In a recent post, I wrote about a leadership lesson from a simple story in our Latin I textbook.  The theme of leadership continues for our students in Latin II as they explore the war writings of Julius Caesar.

When I took a history of education class at Indiana University from Hornfay Cherng, (now at National Hsinchu University) we read Machiavelli's The Prince.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Yes, it was that Machiavelli.  To this day I have maintained it was one of the best educational texts I have ever read.  There are sound principles of leadership and classroom management to be gleaned from it.  You simply have to get past the notion of killing people.  In other words, you have to distill whatever good and valuable principles there are in the work and discard that with which you disagree, and that brings us back to Caesar.

Statistics tell me that the majority of my students will not enter military service.  A reasonable question, then, is why we would read the war commentaries of a first century B.C. general.  As with Machiavelli, Caesar shows sound leadership characteristics that can be applied in a variety of contexts.  You do not have to lead troops to benefit from his leadership.  You certainly do not have to agree with his acts of war for the purpose of conquest.  You do not need to like the guy to learn from him, and important lesson in itself for all students.

One of the passages we read each year comes from De Bello Gallico I.25. Caesar primum suo, deinde omnium ex conspectu remotis equis, ut aequato omnium periculo spem fugae tolleret, cohortatus suos proelium commisit.  "Then Caesar, with his own horse sent away first and the other horses removed from everyone's sight so that, with the danger made equal for all, he might take away any hope of retreat, encouraged the men to begin battle."

Caesar was not the kind of general to issue orders from the rear of the army.  He fought with his men.  He was not the kind of leader to command others to do something he would not.  He endured the same conditions as his soldiers.  As a result, his men loved him and were willing to follow him anywhere, even if it ultimately meant waging war on their own homeland years later.

Our students look at this from the perspective parents or coaches or bosses on the job.  We talk about how this principle could be lived out in various contexts and why the opposite, leading from behind or unwillingness to share hardship, makes for poor leadership.

What leaders, good or bad, throughout history can serve as models for leadership today, especially in education?  If you distill the valuable points and discard some of the particulars, you may find leadership models in unlikely or overlooked places.

Latin Lessons in Leadership

I am passionate about leadership and have often said that good leadership inspires me, while bad leadership motivates me.  It is why I love books like The Multiplier Effect:  Tapping the Genius Inside Our Schools and regularly attend the Global Leadership Summit, where leaders from the worlds of business, government, non-profits, and churches (including heavy hitters like Gen. Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Jim Collins, Liz Wiseman, and Bono) gather to help each other stay sharp.  As a result, leadership is a running theme throughout the levels of Latin I teach.  I point out to students that they will all lead something...a company, a Little League team, a project at work, a government, a family.  It is never too early to start thinking about how.

In our Latin I textbook, we read a story about the first king of Rome, Romulus.  It is historical fiction and based on the limited, simple vocabulary in the early part of a first-year textbook, but there is a line that always draws our attention.  Romulus says to the people, "Rome will be great.  You will be famous."  There is no ancient source for this, but that does not matter.  This quote illustrates a key leadership principle.  It is not enough to tell people their organization will be great.  Leaders must connect vision to the lives of the people themselves.  A leader may have a fantastic idea, but the people all want to know, "How does this affect me?  How will my life be different?  Will it make things better for me?"

We do not spend a long time discussing this.  After all, we have our basic grammar to learn in Latin I.  It is not enough, though, just to learn our nouns and verbs, and even when reading a bit of historical fiction, we must take time to draw out what is important.