As a follow up to an earlier post (here), I wanted to share a couple more stories about Classics teachers. These posts contain only a few of the many and great examples of the references to Classics teachers in the HistoryMakers archive.
Chemist and academic administrator Grant Venerable tells about a Latin teacher who pushed her students to succeed:
“There aren’t enough teachers in the school who do that, who recognize the potential that’s there, and they pull it out… The Latin teacher, it was the same thing. She had students who were getting Cs in their other classes, and they’d get As from her, because she sat on them and made them love Latin.”
Jeannette Brown, an organic chemist and author of African American Women Chemists (Oxford, 2011), tells her Greek and Latin teacher’s advice to her as an African American woman:
“She taught, she taught classics, Greek and Latin. And she was strict. And I just thought she hated me, except when I got, when I got–when I graduated, she gave me a hug, and later on I went back as an alum… I still remember what she looked like because she’d sit, you know, she was straight, and she was strict. And she was always well dressed because, you know, as ‘the’ African American teacher in the school, she had to hold up the reputation of African American teachers and ‘Jeannette Brown, Ms. Brown, you will also–‘ She didn’t say it that way, but that’s what was her intent. And I, you know, I’d be the best I can be.”
