| Alive after all these years
Classics department faculty promote new classroom techniques, new
media and liberal-education benefits in the teaching of the ancient
world
They
say Latin is a dead language. Don't tell that to the students in Robert
Ulery's courses, for whom Latin is very much alive and well. Ulery's
students not only have to decipher the complicated grammar, but they
also have to speak it.
"I was quite frightened at the beginning
when I found out we were going to have to speak Latin in class. I wasn't
sure if I'd be able to figure out what he was saying, but now I'm pretty
used to it," said Michelle Buckius, a first-year student from Long
Island, N.Y., who took intermediate Latin with Ulery in the fall.
"When you translate, you read the sentence and plug in all the
words to make it make sense. When you're just talking to someone, it
forces you to think faster."
That's exactly the effect Ulery is hoping to
achieve with his experiment to replace translation of the Latin reading
into English with a series of questions and answers in Latin. Students
aren't so much learning ordinary conversation as they are learning to
read and interpret using Latin instead of English. Only a handful of
professors around the country are attempting this method, but Ulery, a
professor of classical languages, is helping to spread the idea through
presentations at various professional meetings and work on textbooks
that would apply the idea to reading the ancient authors.
"If you use Latin as a conversational
medium, your reading can be more fluent," Ulery said. "The
simple repetition of the questions and answers leads eventually to
comprehension. And it is comprehension either in the thought of the
language itself, or in a simultaneous mental English. The important
thing is to keep the English from being written down, memorized or
otherwise fixed."
Using Latin as the medium of instruction is one way faculty members in
the Department of Classical Languages are working to make their subject
matter more engaging and more accessible to students. The professors see
it as their mission to be "stewards and transmitters of the legacy
that has come down to us from antiquity," according to John
Andronica, professor and chair.
"It is our responsibility to master the
corpus, and then, as best we can, to pass it on unimpaired to our
successors," he said. "In the classroom what is needed are
efforts to be creative in the use of new pedagogical and technological
developments to keep alive the texts and their spirit, and to explore as
much as possible the ancient world and much about the modern that may
serve to illuminate the texts and be illuminated by them."
Once the core of higher education, classics --
the study of Latin and Greek and the world they served -- has taken a
backseat to courses of study that some would consider more practical.
When the first American colleges were formed in the 17th and
18th centuries, classics ruled the curriculum, says Associate
Professor James Powell. Now it has disappeared entirely from many
colleges. Some reasons for the shift include the explosion of knowledge
that has produced more disciplines and the democratization of higher
education with its accompanying increase in numbers of students. But its
also a matter of a fading interest in the study of anything that doesn't
appear practical and oriented toward helping a student find a job after
graduation.
"The high-minded approach, which I happen
to agree with, is that the study of classics and indeed of all the
liberal arts is inherently good and you don't need to justify it
further," Powell says. "But there's a practical argument for
studying classics also. Employers are saying that in this rapidly
changing technological world, its impossible to train students
specifically because the technology will be outdated by the time they
graduate. What the employers need are people who are intellectually
engaged, who know how to think analytically and to learn. Then they can
teach them the specifics."
Not all students are a hard sell. Tim Williams,
a sophomore Latin and history major from Blacksburg, Va., said studying
the language has made him a better writer and analytical thinker.
"People always say they can't believe I'm a Latin major, that I'm
never going to make any money at that," he says. "But I'm
doing something that challenges me and brings me enjoyment, and I think
that's what's important in life. Its making me a more well rounded
individual, and I don't think the whole point of college is to worry
about what job you're going to get after graduation."
At Wake Forest, the commitment to the
discipline remains strong although student interest has waned over the
years. "Some of Wake Forest's outstanding students have done a
great deal of work in the Department of Classical Languages," said
Paul D. Escort, dean of the College. "The value of the classics for
a liberal arts education remains great, and the questions addressed by
the major Greek and Roman writers have abiding significance."
When Wake Forest first opened, all students
were required to study Latin and Greek for all four years. By 1869,
those requirements had been relaxed, and 66 percent of the students
studied Latin, while 37 percent studied Greek. Those numbers have
steadily declined so that now only 5 to 6 percent of Wake Forest
students study Latin, and 1 percent study Greek. This year, seven
students are majoring in Latin, Greek or classical studies; seven are
minoring in those subjects. Additional students take courses in the
department, of course, and one of the more popular courses, taught by
Powell on mythology; has 85 students enrolled for the spring semester.
The department has developed several new courses, including one on the
Age of Pericles and another on the Age of Augustus as well as a
first-year seminar on Cleopatra that was designed to cross media to
engage students in the ancient world.
"The current generation has been shaped by
video and music. We suspect today's students have a decreased ability to
process certain kinds of knowledge if they are not packaged in those
formats," Ulery says. "Much of the work in Latin requires
memorization, and for many of these students, it's the first time
they've been asked to do that."
The faculty members hope that being aware of
these propensities will help them infect students with their passion for
Latin and Greek. "The appeal of studying the classics is the sheer
intellectual thrill of encountering an author across the gap of
centuries in that author's own language," Ulery says.
Part of the difficulty in getting students
interested in Latin and Greek begins long before they reach the college
level, Powell said. Latin isn't exactly the most popular foreign
language course in high schools, aside from those students who study it
to help increase their verbal scores on the SAT. The number of public
high school students who enroll in Latin actually has increased in
recent years, but a nationwide survey by the American Council on the
Teaching of Foreign Languages found that the number of students taking
Latin was only 189,000 in 1994-95, up from 164,000 in 1990-91.
"Teaching language to adults is a
difficult proposition because the brain is wired to learn language as a
child. If we were starting at age 9 like in the old days, it would be a
different story" Powell says. "The brain is in the wrong shape
to learn at this age, and the two year language requirement is not as
long as it seems when you want students to learn to read something as
sophisticated as Virgil and Plato."
Associate Professor Mary Pendergraft is working
on a project through the joint Committee on Classics in American
Education that will detail what each state requires of its high school
Latin teachers. There is a shortage of qualified Latin teachers, and
even those who meet requirements are often strapped for time as they
must pack mythology, culture and civilization, along with the language,
into their classes. "Teaching is a spectrum," Pendergraft
said. "We are partners with the high school teachers, and any
support we can give to them is good for the education of our
students."
Ellen Dockham |
