WHO CAME AS
ENVOYS TO TROY to negotiate the return of Helen? What was draped
over the door of Antenor's house to protect it from the Greeks?
What rock band would the ancient Romans
have known as T-quoque? If you said "Menelas and Odysseus,"
"a leopard skin," and "U2" and hit the buzzer
fast enough you'd rank as a contender among the hundreds of high
school Latin students who've converged on UMass over the past
year to brawl with their brains in Jeopardy-style "certamens"
on classical languages, history, and myth.
For many classics fans, all roads lead to UMass, whose leadership in the field is contributing to the current resurgence of classics in high schools across the country. Since last year, the classics department here has hosted the annual convention of the National Junior Classical League, the annual institute of the American Classical League, and, as always, the annual Classics Day of the Pioneer Valley Classical Association.
Underpinning the periodic bustle and occasional pageantry of such gatherings is the ongoing work of the department's MAT Master of Arts in Teaching Latin and Classical Humanities program, which has long enjoyed a national reputation. The laurels for increased interest in Latin among high-schoolers, you see, go directly to the secondary teachers. A recent story in the New York Times held that a renaissance in classroom methods is what has reversed the declining fortunes of classics in the schools.
Each year at UMass, four to six such innovative teachers of Latin for grades five through twelve receive the MAT. As alumni of a program "recognized as one of the top two or three in the country in terms of teacher preparation" the assessment of Richard LaFleur, classics head at the University of Georgia and former ACL president those grads have no trouble finding jobs. One afternoon last spring in the office of MAT program director Gilbert Lawall, imminent graduate Nancy Wall `99 illustrated LaFleur's point by accepting a telephone offer from Boston College High School even as Lawall was describing to a visitor the prospects for program grads. "All those who graduate from the program and want to be a Latin teacher find work," says Lawall. "There are plenty of opportunities."
Lawall helped found the MAT program in 1970, a time when enrollments in high school Latin classes were declining "catastrophically," he says. The cultural upheavals associated with the war in Vietnam were "turning people off to academics generally, and when kids did go to college,the key word was `relevance'." In this atmosphere, Harvard, Trinity, and other schools dropped their Latin teacher training programs entirely, but "it seemed important to some of us to try to reverse the trend," says Lawall. "It was a matter of beginning something here that didn't duplicate training programs elsewhere. Other schools list the MAT, but they lack the coordination of subject matter and pedagogy, the intimate, careful coordination between the department and the School of Education."
The UMass program stands today as the only one in the nation that is based in a classics department but integrates subject matter and methodology. The School of Ed provides courses such as Issues in Instructional Methods in Special Education and Introduction to Multicultural Education; classics faculty supply such courses as Advanced Latin Grammar, Republican and Augustan Rome, Teaching Latin Literature, Teaching Classical Humanities.
It's in methods courses that MAT students hatch the fun stuff: the impersonations of Sibyl of Cumae or Tarquin the Proud, the comparison of inscriptions on headstones from antiquity and modern times. These kinds of active-learning projects, say their advocates, help high school students see the continuities between modern and ancient cultures, and ignite passions like those of Daniel Burleson, a junior at Watertown High School in Wisconsin. "I'm crazy about the classics," Burleson told an inquirer during the JCL convention at UMass last summer. "It's the challenge. I like the grammar, the oratory, the certamen. Latin is like a treasure hunter's dream. You find a map at the bottom of a box and you think, `Oh what am I getting into?' You find something and you want to go after more."
"You have to stimulate that interest," agrees acting chair of classics Elizabeth Keitel, pinch-hitting since last summer for long-time department head David Grose. "Latin used to be artificially at the top of the list of languages. In the `60s, if you wanted to go to a good school, you took four years of Latin. By the `70s, that was gone." But, adds Keitel, "It's healthy that Latin has to compete with other languages now. It's been brought in line with how, for example, French and Spanish are taught. Students learn much more about the culture and lifestyles."
Evidence of this cultural connection abounded at this spring's PVCA Classics Day, which brought orating and brain-wrestling students from fourteen Massachusetts high schools to campus, along with Marcus Loreius Tiburtinus (in the body of actor Bernard Barcio). "Tiburtinus" touted the life of a wealthy paterfamilias in Pompeii A.D. 79 and eyes lit mischeviously pitched "the prime real estate on Mount Vesuvius."
And last summer, with the arrival of the national JCL convention at 1,704 students and teachers, the organization's largest in thirty years UMass became Rome and the Fine Arts Center the Coliseum. In the opening ceremony, Chancellor David Scott welcomed the invasion, noting that the founding charter of the Massachusetts Agricultural College "stressed the importance of combining practical studies with classical studies in a liberal education" and what better describes the MAT in Latin and Classical Humanities than that?
Whereupon all Hellenic and Roman broke out. There were Cincinnatuses striking poses, and Ciceros orating parts of Pro Milone and Philippic II, and young literature lovers bravely spouting Pliny the Younger and Vergil, and buzzer wires trembling on stage and fusillades of cheers after the moderator's crisp "That is correct," and olympika events and a procession and a banquet the works. Everything but the lions.
"I thought to myself, `Is this what the Coliseum was like?'" says Keitel of the final afternoon's "spirit session" in the Fine Arts Center, where trumpet blasts pierced the cacophony of dueling state cheers and plastic swords and satin state flags floated on a froth of white togas tossed over hundreds of shoulders. (Also around a huge inflatable lobster bobbing above a contingent from North Carolina, and their teacher Robin Boots Farber `81, a classics alumna whose students know her fondness for Maine.) Then JCL president Melissa Travis called the assembly to order, and everyone quieted for the opening remarks, including UMass President William Bulger's profession of admiration for the Greek Demosthenes and his extemporaneous quotation, in Latin, of the Roman satirist Juvenal.
"Can I mention what brought the classics alive to me?" asked Bulger this spring, recalling his days as a student at Boston College and Boston College High School. "Father Carl Thayer at BC. Carl loved the Greeks. That was contagious: His enthusiasm and personal love for them. It wasn't until later that I realized he was considered eccentric.
"We had good lively teachers but no impersonators," said the president. "We took our learning from grammar and history books." This suited Bulger, he says, "But I recognize the need to make it lively for students."
Of the relevance of the classics today, says Bulger, there can be no question. "There's always going to be stress and strain for the humanities, because their value is not immediately visible," he says. "But we're much more than an economy; we're a civilization, a community. "The educational benefits that accrue to people who study the best that's been thought and written are the very things a community needs: A sense of history, and where we're going, and how humans behave. A land-grant mission is achieved if we're turning out teachers who teach the classics, giving us hope for better leaders."
The personal relevance of the classics for Bulger is equally clear. Though he says, "Oh, I'm amateurish at it, you know," his conversation is peppered with spirited allusions to such classics as Cicero, Antigone, and the Anabasis, and such classicists as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Samuel Johnson.
Asked which Greek or Roman he'd be if he could, Bulger said, "Demosthenes, I think," and added with a laugh, "You know, I'm always battling with the press, and Demosthenes taught me something about this in his famous `Crown' oration, when he said, `Men have always had an interest in invective and gossip.'
"He knew that good news doesn't sell," said Bulger. "I also like him because he was a politician. He was in the life."
In the ancients' writings, which he reads "understanding my biases," Bulger believes we learn about human nature. "Themistocles said, `The one constant of human history is human nature'," says the president. "That's why the classics remain." Or in the words of one JCL student, why "Lingua Latina saltat!" Latin rocks.
