Ben Revkin

Skyping and Classical Education

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Our feature article this week comes from Charlie Bradshaw, the CANE President-elect, who teaches at Wahconah Regional High School in Dalton, Massachusetts.

Sometimes the incredibly friendly nature of CANE members, and the camaraderie among both its longest and newest members can translate into wonderful things for the kids we hope will follow our collective footsteps as lovers of all things classical. Last month on 10 April my Latin IV Honors class of 25 seniors experienced one of its best academic sessions of the year. I owe it to the kindness and accommodating spirit of Professor Margaret Graver who has taught for many years in the Classics Department at Dartmouth College. Margaret has many areas of expertise in the classics, and philosophy is prominent among them.
I have taught the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius for many years to seniors. It is a work that can have a profound effect on students when they wrap their arms around its enormous offering of ideas that by their very nature prompt them to get their critical thinking juices flowing. I was perusing the web for more Lucretius offerings when I spotted an interview of Margaret by a Dartmouth physics professor, part of an effort to encourage academic sharing across the college’s many disciplines. It’s an engaging thirty-two minute YouTube video about Lucretius worth its time in gold to enhance an understanding of this prolific, if not mysterious Roman author. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvKQ_IzNeZ8) I have known Margaret a long time, especially through the Cane Summer Institutes held at Dartmouth for nearly thirty years. She is a consummate professional, but also is approachable and supportive for those of us in secondary education. It doesn’t get any better than having such a solid connection with colleagues in CANE like Margaret. I contacted her to see if she had time, and would be willing to share an hour with my seniors via the medium of Skype. Margaret’s almost immediate response (despite my knowledge that the semester and end of year business would be facing her) was a cheerful “can-do.” The result was a Monday afternoon Latin IV Honors class channeling the knowledge and experience of someone in Hanover, New Hampshire with a group of young men and women in the Massachusetts Berkshires about to step into the next phase of their lives, something at once both daunting and exhilarating.
Each of the kids was asked to prepare beforehand a question emanating from a passage chosen earlier as a class exit project. The questions covered many of the topics found in this amazing first century BCE work, from the constant swerve of atoms, to life on other worlds, to human sexuality, abusive treatment of the planet, and the outbreak of the deadly plague in Athens centuries earlier. The genius of Lucretius’s dactylic hexameter and beautiful Latin alone are strong reasons to include it in an advanced level’s curriculum. There is such a treasure trove of topics—I could teach it all year long, for that matter. One by one students stood in front of the live camera, and I was proud of their poise. My principal attended the session (a former four-year student of mine), and remarked to me after the hour-long interaction, that Margaret answered their questions in a very professional and polished way, making them feel entirely comfortable. He also said that there was a feeling upon its conclusion, that the Skype could have lasted much longer, because the kids were energized both by Margaret’s respect for them and their questions, and for their feeling, for this hour at least, they really did” get out of high school.” I am sharing this with the CANE web site because I truly believe that this is the kind of reaching out in both directions we in classical education will have to do if we are to remain a vibrant and highly subscribed core academic discipline in the decades ahead. Don’t underestimate the importance and helpfulness of this kind of activity in your classroom, and of sharing your own classrooms with colleagues across the aisle via technology such as Skype. The rewards have both an immediate and potentially long-term effect both for students and their teachers.

De Finibus Annorum Scholasticorum

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As the end of the year approaches (two weeks for me, but I know a lot of you will be in the trenches until late June), I find myself in a constant state of re-assessment of how to properly cap off a year’s worth of learning. The traditional method is with a cumulative final exam, which is in fact a requirement in many schools – my school allocates a two-hour block to every class for the purpose of administering exams, and I teach junior high.
The idea, I guess, is that students are expected to demonstrate that they’ve learned and internalized everything taught over the course of the year. In my experience, though, cumulative exams are more a source of stress than anything. Looking back on my own education, I can say with certainty that I would never point to my performance on an exam as an illustration of how much I’d learned. More often, they were a illustration of long nights of studying, of anxiety, of caffeine. The grammar method of Latin in particular has a reputation for being “crammy,” requiring memorization of long lists of vocabulary and grammatical terms. The more I learn about the daily lives of my students – already laden with tests, athletic contests, clubs, performances, and competitions of all stripes – the more I feel the desire to relieve them of the stress of a final exam. It isn’t worth it.
Rather than exams, the things that I would point to as crowning achievements of my education are the things I created – things I wrote, things I presented, things that came from my own brain. I can’t imagine I’m significantly deviant from the norm in this regard. And so in recent years, I’ve been moving towards more creative final exams. How better to end an academic year than with something my students can own and be proud of?
Personally, I’m fond of capstone projects, composed in Latin. My beginning students create projects on Greco-Roman myths of their choice, my more advanced ones cover Roman emperors. In between there are all kinds of subjects my students have covered: Roman holidays, deities, famous buildings, poets. I try to remain flexible year to year and ask my students what they’d like the medium of their projects to be. Depending on skill level and preference they can be low- or high-tech, individual or collaborative, a slideshow, a poster, an oral presentation, a movie, a narrated Minecraft video in the vein of Divus Magister Craft – I try to vary from year to year. I keep my rubrics basically the same: Get it done on time, show effort, give citations, use X/Y/Z grammatical feature and X/Y/Z vocabulary, make it look nice. I try to give a lot of class time over to preparing these projects in order to minimize time anxiety, as my students often don’t have a lot of collaborative free time outside of class. I use our final two-hour block as a forum for students to present their capstone projects.
My students seem to love this style of exam; the ones I’ve taught over multiple years remember fondly the highs and lows of previous capstone projects: In my advanced level class, graduating this year, they good-naturedly tease a classmate: “Are you going to finally finish your Hercules presentation from two years ago, Matthew?” (the time limit for this oral report was 15 minutes, and I cut him off at 45) In a first year class, a giggling student puts together a poster on the murmillo gladiator: “Ummm, what’s the Latin for ‘half-naked’?” And in yet another class, a boy who is not a high achiever in Latin, but is passionate about stadiums, still talks with joy about his slideshow on the Colosseum.
A final exam remembered with a smile – if that’s the best I can do as an educator, I’ll take it.

Quid Agitur? (May 14th)

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Festinate, o collegae!  REGULAR REGISTRATION for the 2017 CANE SUMMER INSTITUTE @ BROWN ENDS TOMORROW, MAY 15th!
Register now for the for the 2017 CANE Summer Institute at Brown University! This year, the theme is “The View From a Distance: Perspectives on the Greeks and Romans From Across Space and Time,” inviting consideration of perspectives from around the ancient world as they reflected on Greek and Roman societies as well as adaptions of Greek and Roman culture in later literature and art. Undergraduates, graduate students, and teachers at any level in the fields of Latin, Greek, History, English, the Arts, or other related disciplines, as well as lifelong learners are encouraged to register! Look forward to a thoughtful and enriching experience that includes a variety of mini-courses, lectures, workshops, reading groups, and special events while also offering opportunities for conversation and warm collegiality among participants.

  • Visit the CANE News page, which lists CANE-sponsored events, events connected to Classics throughout New England, and events around the country of interest to students and instructors.
  • Links to the New England states’ classical associations: NH, VT, ME, MA, RI, CT.