Hello, everyone! My name is Alex-Jaden, and I am a fourth-year student in my last semester. I am a B.Phil. Candidate in Classics, one who is also pursuing a B.A. in English Writing and International Studies, minors in Ancient Greek and German, and a certificate in Transatlantic Studies.
At the twilight of my undergraduate career, I find myself increasingly marveling at all the things I have gotten to experience in my time here (working as a Community Assistant during my sophomore year with the Office of PittServes, learning in Germany, studying in Greece, serving as a Peer Tutor in the Department of Classics, and so much more), especially since I arrived in the Fall of 2020 with a Guaranteed Admission to the School of Pharmacy and a belief that my future was entirely decided for me.
Two of the greatest lessons of my years here—indeed, of my life—is the knowledge gained that the future is never settled, and that life does not happen to you. Stepping onto the path that I dance joyfully down now, I had no idea what would happen to me. However, I have had the privilege of ever having people in my corner, who have offered me their wisdom, their expertise, their advice, their laughter, and their sobriety. These people have instilled me the value of asking myself, “’Why not me?’”
Indeed, we are so often downhearted, set against ourselves and our own chances—things that can be greatly colored by our lived experiences and backgrounds—but, as Paul D says to Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, “You are your best thing.” As Toni Cade Bambara affirms in The Salt Eaters, “I love myself in error and in correctness, waking or sleeping, sneezing, tipsy, or fabulously brilliant. I love myself doing the books or sitting down to a good game of poker…” All things, both bitter and sweet, will follow you; you never need to be more than what you are to choose yourself, to take your own side. There are people waiting to share life with you and to celebrate you, places in stasis until you have set foot in them. There is so much waiting for your arrival, and you, with an open and curious heart, need only arrive there.
Okay, life-coach hat is off! CUTF talk is a-go!
The canon of introductory Latin textbooks is a rather small one. Lingua Latina: Familia Romana, Ad Alpēs, Wheelock’s Latin,and the Cambridge Latin Course compose it. However, its compactness is both a virtue and a vice. Virtuously, it creates a shared field of cultural and epistemic competence (e.g., If I offhandedly mention the names Metella, Caecilius, and Grumio to many scholars of the ancient Mediterranean, then I am very likely to find myself drawn into a nostalgic recollection about their early days spent with a well-loved copy of the CLC in hand). Less virtuously, its particularity contributes to hegemonic ideas about the ancient past in which such textbooks often situate themselves in—that the servi erant laeti (“The enslaved people were happy”) and that all the women were candida (“white”) to name just two. That so many of these participate in this myopic economy of ideas is what produces a discipline that often valorizes hypercanonicity and demonizes hyperinclusivity.
Under the guidance and good offices of Professor Ellen Cole Lee, I am very excited to be working on a project entitled “Supplementa in Lee’s Latin Supplement (LLS), an Open Access Supplement to Wheelock’s Latin.” Professor Lee has, since the summer, been developing course materials for the Beginning Latin 101/102 sequence to create an open-access supplement to Wheelock’s Latin, the most widely used introductory Latin textbook in America. This textbook has a host of advantages; namely, that it is inexpensive (a new copy usually costs $20-$30 and used copies in fair condition are both cheaper and very easy to find), and it is commonly used enough to have vocabulary lists and other basic resources readily available online.
However, as Professor Lee has expressed to me, its pedagogical methodologies are old-fashioned, and its exempla and exercises are often geared towards celebrating a ‘great man’ view of history (focusing primarily on the Roman statesman Cicero). Wheelock, which was first developed in the 1950s but continues a tradition of teaching Latin through the strict grammar-translation approach embraced in the 19th century by the elite schools of the British Empire, tends to sweep Rome’s legacies of colonialism, misogyny, and slavery under the rug and to ignore the perspectives of marginalized people, such as the enslaved, women, people with disabilities, and those existing at the intersections of those identities. Her proposed supplement, titled Lee’s Latin Supplement, which includes special topics modules, and additional exempla, exercises, and readings, will incorporate updated pedagogical approaches and advocate for a more comprehensive survey of the diversity and diverse lifeways to be found in the ancient world. Special topics modules that focus on particular aspects of life in the ancient world that textbooks like Wheelock’s often elide, but that students find compelling (e.g., disability in the ancient world, polychromy in ancient art, topics in gender & sexuality) provide students with a more comprehensive view of the poeciliousness of the ancient world. It is here that most of my work and role in the project will be situated.
Since Professor Lee has developed the bulk of these materials already, my main obligation towards these will be of the editorial variety. My first larger project includes the creation of an annotated bibliography on language pedagogy, one that will be posted on LLS and, hopefully, be of use to instructors (including graduate students!) of Latin, whether at the K-12 or University levels. Thereafter, others could take the form of composing unit 4’s lectio (Latin for “reading”), which would be a paragraph of a longer narrative for Beginning Latin students to work through. Another could be the creation of my own special module! I am thinking about something to do with funerary inscriptions—their topoi (Greek for “commonplaces”) and variations—which I became fascinated by during my Latin Prose Composition course in the Fall of 2021. I will definitely keep you all up-to-date about that!
Smaller projects include compiling biographies of the wonderful, generous scholars who have contributed to LLS, developing vocabulary modules, and scouring the web for relevant (public domain!) images with which to populate supplement pages.
Another opportunity that I am unbelievably excited for is the chance to lead “Lectio Days” for Latin 102 students! As someone intent on becoming a University professor one day, I am deeply committed to learning how to teach dynamically, equitably, and co-creatively with students. I love research, indeed, but teaching is something that I truly, as cliché as it may sound, feel called to do. I think that allure of the professorate for me is the prospect of, no matter how old or ‘senior’ I may become, I will always be a student, whether to my discipline or to my own students. Indeed, As someone who is on the graduate school market right now, I always ask respective programs how they support graduate students in teaching. I have had the privilege to peer tutor for nearly a year-and-a-half in the Department of Classics, and the CUTF provided the catalyst for institutionalizing a project that will allow me to engage in things that I delight in—teaching and learning—both of which are preparing admirably for future endeavors.
Looking back, I had my first experiences in teaching when I served as a Teaching Assistant to Latin 1 students during my senior year of high school, wherein I created lesson plans and lead activities. I became acutely aware and sympathetic to the ways in which people learn differently, and that it is not a matter of “fixing” how they think or approach a problem, but one of embodying the definition of being an educator, who, per the Latin root (educo), is meant to lead, to draw forth, to advise, and to raise up. Hence, I see teaching as a co-creative act and learning as rhizomatic (i.e., learning is most effective when it allows participants to react to evolving circumstances, preserving lines of flight that allow a fluid and continually evolving redefinition of the task at hand). Professor Lee shares very similar sentiments, which, combined with her expertise in pedagogy, means that working with her will provide me with an invaluable mentorship opportunity in how to create an inclusive and equitable learning environment in the Latin classroom, where the standard pedagogical tools and approaches are often not conducive to such aims, with the addition of digital pedagogy in the form of LLS.
Now to end with a fun fact: I have been to every continent bar Africa and Antarctica! I have plans to get to the former much sooner rather than later, but the latter… we will see where the wind takes me!
Valete, and see you all next post!