Lessons Learned from Teaching During the Pandemic

The pandemic brought two things into sharp focus: first, the translation model may no longer work in the COVID era classroom or any Classics classroom of the 2020s. Second, Classics courses have an underutilized power to address current issues of race, inequity, colonialism, and contemporary DEI socio-politics.

This presentation reflects upon my experiences teaching a unit on ancient pandemic narratives (e.g., Hippocrates, Thucydides, Procopius) in a course titled ‘Language and History of Medicine’ at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic during the Spring semester of 2020. I also address my work developing another course, ‘New Diseases in History and Literature’, to be taught during Spring 2021.

Teaching high school Latin during the pandemic offers us a liminal space in which to consider three worlds: the worlds of what we did, why and how we did it in the Latin classroom before, during and after the pandemic. I will offer those reflections based on the experience and collaboration of our seven person Latin team in our 3200-student public high school. While acknowledging varied experiences, viewing the pandemic in this way offers teachers a way of reflecting on educational adversity.

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 immerse