Arma Virumque Cano

In last night's dreams, I was on a frozen pond with my students, teaching English. Robert Frost, specifically. The ice may be thawing in reality, but in my dreams, my students stand on the thin, fragile ice of Post Pond. As we walked and talked, the ice under my feet began to give way. I did what any good New Englander would do; I fell flat, and spread my surface area out over the weak ice. My students did the same, and lay on their stomachs, reaching their arms out to pull me off of the soft ice. I heard a loud crack, and the surface of the pond gave way under my students. I knew right away I was going to have to get in the water and swim away from the safety of the ice, behind them, to make sure each one was able to grab on to the solid promise of safety. People on the shore brought long branches and hauled my students out, one by one, and I woke up as the last one was pulled out, on to the surface of the pond.

Becoming a teacher was much like becoming a parent, in that I had completely underestimated the weight of the job when I got my first post. Sure, I assumed I would feel a sense of duty toward my students, but I had no idea that it would extend outside the classroom, past graduation, into long term relationships with my former adivsees. I expected to attend graduations, but I was caught off guard by the weddings, births, and particularly the funerals.

I know there are teachers out there who choose to confine their duties to the classroom, but I can't be that kind of teacher. I feel a greater duty. I feel pietas.

Pietas is most commonly translated from the Greek as "piety," but this definition is inadequate. In his translation of The Aeneid, Robert Fagles translates the word as "devotion," but that's not quite right, either. Pietas is one’s duty and expected behavior toward all those to whom duty is owed. Just as I owe pietas toward my students, my family, my boss, any gods I worship, these people owe pietas to me in return.

Pietas can suck. Pietas is hard. Pietas wakes me up at night.

But what am I going to do? I am a teacher; it's my fate. Some days, I want to stay in bed, have more time to work on my writing projects, maybe even use that law degree I'm still paying off. In the end, though, I would know that I had strayed from my path. Even when other opportunities threaten to burn my world down to the ground, I can't keep from running back in and saving what I can.

Just as Aeneas could not ignore his fate, just as he felt obligated to toss Anchises and his household gods over his shoulders and stumble to safety, I, too, have to get out of my warm bed every morning so I can make sure all of my students are hauled to a place of learning and safety.

When a Man Teaches Latin

This Latin teacher thing. It freaks me out sometimes. My Latin teacher in middle school and high school was, well, a stereotypical Latin teacher. She was five feet tall, gray-haired, and insisted on teaching Latin as a spoken language. Because being able to speak Latin is about as useful as being able to speak Klingon, so drill those verbs! Harden those consonants! Roll those Rs!

I shelved the oral Latin for a long time, but then I moved to Italy during my Junior year of college, and as I had only had one semester of Italian before I moved to Siena, my French and Latin helped me more than my sad, elementary Italian. I asked for French bouteilles of water and inquired as to where I may find the tonsor who would cut my Roman hair, but at least I was close and could (mostly) be understood by the Italians in my neighborhood.

When I returned home to the United States, I had a challenging semester ahead. I had to catch up on some of my comparative literature requirements. I signed up for intermediate Latin so I could take at least one class that offered the chance of an easy-ish ‘A’. My Latin teacher was a very bored graduate student, kind of cute in his dorky way, but so traumatized by his 4-year sentence in undergraduate hell that as long as we showed up and didn’t debase him with our improper pronunciation (Drill those verbs! Harden those consonants! Roll those Rs!), we passed.

So when I interviewed for my current post and gleefully informed my now-boss that I’d studied Latin in middle school, high school, and college, she asked me to teach Latin as well as English.

(Note to self: some skills are better left un-shared.)

The good news is that I only have to teach my students enough Latin to prepare them for Latin II in high school. The bad news is that I have to know far more than the simple Latin II material in order to answer challenging questions from my students.. As Latin teachers are thin on the ground in my neck of the woods, I have come to depend on my colleagues across the world to help me understand the whys and wherefores of the Latin language and ancient Roman world.

A while back, I posted about the wonder of the Latin teacher listserv and the weekly Latin teacher digest. I have learned so much from these seasoned Latin teachers and thanks to them, I am not afraid of the hard questions. This week, I was intrigued by an email that fell into my inbox from one of the Latin teachers, mostly because the subject line included Marilyn Monroe. A Latin teacher – Steve Perkins, from North Central High School in Indianapolis – shared his methodology for teaching Latin poetry according to the alliteration, themes, and rhythms of popular culture and song lyrics. This particular email was about a Roman poem’s resemblance to the specific pronunctiation of Marilyn’s p’s and t’s in her “Happy birthday, Mr. President” performance, but I was even more fascinated by comparisons between rock and Rome.

As I was curious, and love a good cultural literacy tie-in, I emailed Steve and asked him to elaborate on the connections between popular music and Roman poetry, and he sent me a brilliant email describing his top ten hits. He teaches Horace’s Odes III.10 and Ovid’s Amores I.9 to the melody of Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” particularly the line “sleep all night in the pouring rain if that’s the way it had to be.” He explains that both poems feature a man “enduring the harsh weather by spending the night on his beloved’s doorstep.” According to Steve, this type of poetry is sometimes called paraclausithyron, which comes from the Greek words meaning “door” and “to lament.” He will bring in the 80’s hair band Whitesnake if he has to, but he admits that 1987 might render the band a bit dated. You know, as opposed to 50 B.C.E.

He goes on to explain that he teaches Ovid’s Amores I.9 and others with Pat Benetar’s “Love is a Battlefield,” Horace’s Odes I.25 with Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May,” and Caesar’s De Bello Gallico I.8 with the film Boys ‘n’ the Hood. Thanks a semester with Sir Christopher Ricks, my first poetry professor, I teach Bob Dylan lyrics during my poetry unit, but Horace and Rod Stewart? Brilliant.

My favorite of his suggestions is a reference to the band Deep Purple in the midst of  The Aeneid II.246-247, the section about Cassandra during the Trojan War. In Steve’s words:

“Cassandra was the priestess of Apollo who, after she spurned his love, was cursed that she always foretold the truth, but that no one would believe her. I bring in the title song to the 1973 album Burn by Deep Purple. The lyrics run, ‘The city's ablaze, the town's on fire.  The woman's flames were reaching higher.  We were fools, we called her liar.’ Cassandra was known as a firebrand, and in fact, Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote a novel called The Firebrand, which is a telling of the Trojan War from Cassandra's perspective. Although the lyrics of the Deep Purple song support my interpretation quite well all the way through, I have had emails with the song's author, David Coverdale, and he says he was not inspired by the Cassandra story.”

Dude. Steve’s no outdated, gray-haired, Latin teacher with a penchant for oral Latin. This guy is my new hero.