Welcome!

Salve!

The 2024-2025 school year marks my sixth year at Windham High School, but I've been teaching language and humanities variously for the past decade or so: Latin at Oxford Hills and in Vermont; Latin and mythology as a graduate student at the University of Kansas; English as a foreign language in Mokpo, South Korea.

 

I'll just briefly explain here why I teach Latin and why I think it matters. 

 

Extensive language study is an important part of any comprehensive education, but the longer I teach the more I dislike the typical reasons given for this. Increasing your vocabulary, improving your chances on the SAT; cultural competency and critical thinking and all the other boilerplate... Latin used to be studied because it was the international language of scholarship and science, because it was the language of the church, but over time it became an important way to signal belonging in an elite club. This seems to be the way education, or "education", evolves over time. There's this initial value to a domain of knowledge, but as time passes it takes on a secondary significance in the competitive game of degrees and credentials and Pedigree. Latin has long-since lost that game to STEM, for which I am eternally grateful.

 

So then why take a dead language like Latin? The reason is precisely because the Romans are all dead. There's not one of them left. And they had all these strange ideas about the world, and about what a human was, and how therefore society should be organized. Who had worth within society and so on. And all of this can seem quite peculiar or even at times cruel and irrational to us. And unlike with a modern language, where in our encounter with something entirely alien there's at least some degree of give-and-take, of negotiation, of accommodations made to our sensibilities, the Romans grant us nothing. Because there's no negotiating with a dead man. And this in turn creates tension. And dissonance. And in our modernized, consumer-oriented culture where the self is sovereign and the customer is right and where, moreover, we've become used to and fond of the situation where the world leaves all its rough edges and strangeness behind and meets us right where we stand on our own two flat swollen feet, this leads to a salutary and vital discomfort. 

 

And the idea is hopefully also humility and other-orientedness. And, ultimately, compassion for the stranger.