Redefining "Relevance": "Classics" in the Classroom

For most of us, teaching is the biggest impact that we will have as scholars; it is the most important thing that we do. And since by far the majority of students we will teach will not become academics in our own field, I would suggest that our responsibility is not so much giving them as much ancient world as possible, but, instead, to teach them how to incorporate ancient material into their ways of thinking--about other kinds of material, material from other periods, about comparative work, about de-naturalizing their expectations, etc. The more ways into ancient material that we can give students, the more students will find their way in. I mean this in terms of offering diversity of 1) ancient material (the use of material and visual sources not as illustrations, but as real evidence about the cultures in which they operated; different kinds of texts that operated in different ways and for different audiences), 2) ancient contexts (temporal, geographic, cultural: yes, it takes some time to build up case studies outside of the world you have been studying, but broadening your own lens will also ultimately benefit you, too), and 3) different ways of modern thinking (that models different kinds of methodologies and disciplinary approaches, or that engages contemporary issues that you can segue back into or use as a model for thinking about the ancient world or about thinking about our blindspots in the ancient world! "Relevance" for students can lie in difference as much as in similarity, and in what we haven't thought about as much as what we have!). Broadening your experience--of theory, of disciplines, of material, of approaches, of books--outside of the Greco-Roman helps your teaching and it helps your own thinking about your material (and that will help Classics or whatever Classics becomes). This takes time, and something else will probably have to give, but it helps to build connections between fields when you have common intellectual ground or, at least, can point to shared questions, problems, or approaches.