Today’s post comes to you by way of Emily Landau, a Latin teacher at the Eaglebrook School in MA. She shares with you her experience at the conference last month.
Professional conferences can be eye-opening for the inexperienced classics teacher. We frequently operate as islands unto ourselves; I spent the first three years of my career as the lone Latin teacher in my school, and was largely left to fend for myself. So it was a remarkable experience for me to walk into my first CANE conference (back in 2012, at the University of Connecticut) and discover that there was a vibrant community of Latin, Greek, and classics educators out there, from old school chalk-and-blackboard sentence diagrammers to folks on the cutting edge of current research, all excited to share their love of classics with their students and peers. The discovery that one is not the “last man on Earth” can be quite a relief.
My second CANE conference, The 110th Annual Meeting at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, was no exception. Over the course of two days, I had the chance to interact with and attend sessions given by a wide variety of scholars and educators, from elementary school teachers to graduate students and professors. The energy, passion, and in intellectual rigor of this diverse group, of all ages and backgrounds, was infectious and deeply encouraging.
I especially appreciated those sessions that tackled questions of how to make Latin socially relevant to students. One such was Bethanie Sawyer’s “Latin for All Identities.” We discussed examples of gay and lesbian couples in classical mythology and debated whether the Roman Galli, the priests of Cybele, were an example of a transgender priesthood. We also engaged in a spirited discussion of the “preferred pronoun” movement, and how one would address in Latin a student who identifies as agender. Is the neuter acceptable to refer to a human, or should one skirt the issue by avoiding pronouns and adjectives with easily identifiable gender?
The MAT students at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst gave several presentations on how to tackle heady questions surrounding race and multiculturalism. Hayden Schulingkamp gave an intriguing talk on the parallels between Stoicism and Buddhism; Olivia Brooks and Sean Riel discussed in the classical world, and the ways in which Caesar and Tacitus essentially forced their own culture (such as the names of gods) onto other peoples in order to make them identifiable to their readers; finally, Ramandeep Kaur and Alexina Aron discussed concepts of race in the ancient world through historical and literary depictions of the people of Ethiopia. I emerged from the talk with a renewed appreciation of just how multicultural and international the Roman Empire really was, and how relevant this particular period of history can be for our students in the contemporary world.
What communal gathering would be complete without food? The daily “Prandium Latinum” allowed us to practice our spoken Latin in a friendly, non-judgmental environment as we munched on cibus in the lovely Neilson Library. Spoken Latin and the Comprehensible Input method were both major themes of this meeting, with a number of workshops and speakers discussing strategies for moving away from playing “find-the-verb” and successfully teaching Latin as a spoken, living language.
After all the workshops, paper presentations, book shopping, and conversations between sessions in the hallway, I left the conference with a huge number of new ideas and lesson to bring to my students, as well as a renewed confidence that the state of classics learning continues to be strong. See you next year!