Benjamin Joffe (The Hewitt School)
Ours is a field of feast or famine. In the years just before the onset of Covid-19 as a global catastrophe, it was the norm for there to be less than a handful of openings for classicists at the university level in a given academic year across the country. In New York City, it was not uncommon for a single job opening to teach Latin at an independent school to garner one hundred different resumes from applicants within the tristate area and beyond, all looking to land a coveted spot in order to give themselves over to a community, mind and soul, for the opportunity to be immersed in the teachings of the ancients – and be paid, to boot. A Latinist’s life is a fulfilling life, and we love this life of ours, perhaps too much for our own good.
What’s more, a number of us also have children of our own, and from the earliest moment when our students began competing for our attention with our progeny, the work-life balance that was already predestined to see concessions made for the sake of maintaining the Latinist’s joy was imperiled by the lost cause that is trying to carve out enough time for family against a deeply held passion. Spending hours poring over a text is a deep joy for most of us, especially with students, and so is time with loved ones. And yet, joy is the obverse of responsibility, in both the classroom and at home – a lesson we have learned the longer we have been parents. In short, work-life balance has always been especially difficult for us.
But then the world stopped. Fear of illness and intense emotionality took up our headspace, while the responsibilities remained in both spheres. Work-life balance for everyone became a red-flag problem, and really only a problem for those of us lucky enough to have work. We Latinists, whether we chose to realize it or not, reached a crossroads. It was thrust upon us to decide whether all of the attendant hardships that come with a life devoted to pursuing a passion was worth the cost. Our own children started needing us in ways heretofore unseen, and teaching became a more difficult, and at times untenable task. They needed our attention more than ever, and yet in exactly the same way they always did.
At least that’s how the pandemic played out for this Latin teacher.
In this paper, we will explore that tension between work and home for a Latinist with children, particularly as it might exist within a fully post-pandemic world, when it will be incumbent upon all of us to create the next iteration of a life lived normally but meaningfully. Committing ourselves to this educational grindstone needs real thought – a genuine reappraisal of our commitment – so that after the trauma of being stretched too thin under impossible demands and real worry in every direction, we may not only begin to heal, but thrive in our beloved field once again.