My students hate Latin. It’s a dead language, it has nothing to do with their lives, it takes too long to look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary, all of the sentences are in the wrong order. As far as they can tell, Caesar bored the Gauls into submission, Vergil was right to ask that the Aeneid be burned upon his death, and Cicero has received the nickname the Roman Aeolus on account of the fact that he possesses such an ample store of wind. They like Catullus at any rate, and react to his poems with that peculiarly condensed form of internet speak which effortlessly conveys entire paragraphs of thought in one adjective, ‘relatable’. (Or sometimes, though now less frequently, ‘saaame.’ Yes, the vowel must be lengthened.)

Why are these students in Latin then? For the most part, they aren’t. Approximately 2,700 students attend my school, of which about 100 are enrolled in one of the Latin courses in any given year. Of those, I have never had more than 20 enrolled in my Latin III & IV courses (that is, 20 students between those two courses combined) because students in Texas are only required to take two years of any given language. Of the students who go through all four years, typically only one or two are there for Latin; the rest simply like me as a teacher. (Lest this seem prepossessing, I note that this is what the students have told me explicitly.)

I often tell them that I would prefer that they love Latin while hating me as an odious tyrant, whose grim oppression they endured in the pursuit of their favorite subject. Though I may be charged with insincerity on this score, I nevertheless cannot help but feel like a failure as an educator when I realize that I have not transmitted my enthusiasm to my young charges. I have heard Reginald Foster remark on numerous occasions that this is the central failure of modern Latin pedagogy: a failure to instill a sense of Latin’s beauty, power, and interest. Typically he adds that a music class would be unsuccessful if the students walked away disliking Mozart. Rhetorically, this is appealing, yet I think that it unfairly compares something (music) which has a certain universal and almost primal appeal to something else (Latin), learning which requires a previously-developed interest to undertake, and – once undertaken – a substantial amount of labor to appreciate in any meaningful way.

Latin per se is a hard sell in high school, because few students have any real idea about the potential treasures which await them. Indeed, I did not even take Latin until my third year of college, and only then because I was so captivated by a Classical literature in translation class which I had taken the year before, and I doubt that I would have applied myself so diligently to mastering declensions and conjugations if I were not already so eagerly desirous of reading ancient texts in the original.

I have been listening recently with rapt attention to Scott Lepisto’s delightful Itinera podcast, which satisfies my own deep craving for vicarious professorial experience as someone who always thinks wistfully about what could have been if I had gone to graduate school. Yet, both on the podcast and in my personal interactions with professional Classicists, I have been surprised to learn just how many professionals in the field either hated Latin in highschool, or found it extremely challenging. I first encountered this latter sentiment among one of my fellow Latin teachers in town. Never before had it occurred to me that anyone in Classics found Latin difficult. This may itself reflect an inherited form of elitist prejudice which I subconsciously inherited in my early days as a Classics student. We are told that the languages are what make the field rigorous and clearly superior to the other humanities as physics is superior to the other sciences. Quite often, as Amy Pistone noted in her post, ‘You can’t spell Classicist without Classist’, the phrase ‘linguistic rigour’ is used as a criterion for base exclusion. Indeed, professors and graduate school application advice pages often imply that a certain linguistic wizardry is required to even consider proceeding to advanced study within the field.

Indolence, however, is my chief besetting vice, and in this case managed to form a potent cocktail in conjunction with personal vanity. I recall that I spent a fair amount of time doing the basic gruntwork of paradigm memorization, but I was attracted to Latin in part because I found it supremely easy. This in turn allowed for the requisite amount of idle time-wasting so essential to the authentic American college experience. Whether my interest was bolstered by my apparent facility with the language or whether I acquired it so readily because of my blossoming enthusiasm for it is impossible for me to determine. My retrospectacles have become so darkly tinted with the accretions of later time and experience that I have lost all sense for the difficult spots in Latin.

That is why I am a terrible teacher. I can present reams of information in an exciting and compelling way, but I struggle with anticipating students’ difficulties, and indeed, cannot understand it when they are stuck. Boswell noted of Samuel Johnson that he was not “well qualified for being a teacher of elements, and a conductor in learning by regular gradations”. This has given rise to my most toxic and obnoxious pronouncement in class: “Oh it’s not that bad, Latin practically learns itself.” By now, I regret saying this to my students because I realize that it is likely to produce further frustration among the ones who are struggling, but at the same time, it has become something of a running joke/catch-phrase among the kids. One student even wrote on the top of her test, Lingua Latina a se discitur!, which was enough to earn a laugh and some extra points.

Mythology, history, and Roman culture all still captivate the students. But not Latin itself. They catch a sense of my unbridled enthusiasm for Classics. But they do not catch that enthusiasm themselves. I often return home depressed that, because of my pedagogical limitations, my own highly-charged and passionate teaching does little more for the students than the sit-at-your-desk-and-watch-football pedagogy so rigorously and assiduously applied by the coaches on campus. Only one of my students has gone on to study Classics in college, and even the best have laughed when I suggested that they may want to hold on to their Latin dictionaries after high school so that they can keep reading.

Perhaps my perspective is fundamentally flawed. Almost all Classicists took Latin in school somewhere, but that in no way implies that all people who took Latin in school wanted to become Classicists. I try to remember that there is a disparity in experience between my role in the classroom, where I am doing what seems to me the most important thing in the world, and the students’ role, which is simply to make it through one of seven courses for the day in the pursuit of grades and credit certifying them for the next stage in their lives.

I have begun to get away from thinking that every student in my class needs to learn Latin. Some of them simply do not put in the time to make anything meaninful out of any of the texts. I could of course simply give them a failing grade, but this would compound the problem of having wasted my own time by wasting their time too. Recently, for those students whose averages are regularly well below 70, I have assigned essays on Roman history/culture, Classical myth, and even Classical reception. One student is inordinately fascinated with dictatorships, so he is now writing an essay on the use of Roman history and symbols under Mussolini’s fascist rule. Another student is reading Plautus in translation and writing a comparative appraisal of Roman comic tropes with those of contemporary Hollywood comedies. I wish that they were doing actual Latin, but at this point (second semester of the second year), it seems clear that they can/will not. Perhaps a better teacher could make it happen through sheer force of will, and perhaps this compromise is more reflective of my limitations than theirs.

It may be that one of these students will be interviewed on Itinera twenty years from now, and they will concede that though they didn’t care much for Latin itself in highschool, they gave it a second shot in college and became experts on Martianus Capella or something similarly recondite. Perhaps they will at least, in later life, look back upon the time in my classroom as well spent and pick up a translation of Tacitus to better understand our own time. My impact on the field and on the world may always be entirely negligible, but I am at least happy that for a few hundred hours of these students’ lives, I get to share with them what I love.