Helen Chesnutt's The Road To Latin in the 21st Century Classroom

Helen Chesnutt's The Road To Latin in the 21st Century Classroom

Helen M. Chesnutt, noted Black classicist, and her two colleagues Martha Olivenbaum and Nellie Rosenbaum wrote the The Road to Latin in 1932 as a beginning Latin text for high schools. The book was successful enough to have three more editions and an accompanying workbook. The book features women and treats the feminine and the first declension as default for nearly a quarter of the book, a welcome upending, at least for a while, of the usual masculine focus in beginning Latin. Prompted to adopt the book by its unusual features and the diversity of its authors, I hoped that the text would avoid the “happy slave” narrative so ubiquitous and so pernicious in beginning Latin texts. The trope is there, alas, but with remarkable passages that complicate the narrative considerably. In a number of ways, within the strictures of putting together a textbook marketable in 1930s America, Chesnutt, Olivenbaum, and Rosebaugh challenge received pedagogical notions about Roman values. Teaching from the textbook has given surprising and refreshing opportunities “to interrogate, rather than adopt, the ideologies that the texts we teach communicate implicitly and explicitly.” (Geller-Goad, 2015) This talk discusses the features of the book and recounts the resulting discussions in two cohorts of beginning Latin students using the book.