Kenneth KITCHELL "Quis Docebit Doctores?: Proposed Models for Change"

Each fall two seemingly unrelated phenomena occur in Latin classrooms throughout America. On many university campuses teaching assistants stand, often for the first time, before a class in elementary Latin or Greek. Elsewhere, often in the same city or town, a Latin program is canceled for lack of a teacher or, almost as bad, is taught by an untrained, under qualified teacher.

The phenomena are not as unrelated as they seem and, this paper contends, can not remain unrelated if our field is to flourish. Our first year TAs frequently begin to teach with little or no training. Yet it is from the very courses they teach -- elementary languages, introductions to Greek or Roman civilization, mythology -- that we hope to draw majors into our BA programs and, after that, into graduate programs or middle and high school classrooms as teachers.

This paper will outline various models for putting teacher training in place at all our PhD granting institutions. It will call first for methodological training (in any of a number of ways) of all MA and PhD candidates and will discuss the possibility of creating a pedagogical minor field as an adjunct to some PhD programs. It will also touch on the professional prejudices which, for too long, have tended to keep holders of the PhD degree out of the pre-college classroom. Why is it that some school administrators seem to believe that "PhDs can not teach at the high school level" and why do too many PhD recipients feel that "Teaching in a high school is beneath me if I have a PhD" ?

The paper will end with some practical suggestions on ways in which a change in prevailing attitudes will have a beneficial effect on the job market for our doctoral candidates, for the current Latin teacher shortage, and for the overall health of undergraduate Classics programs at larger institutions of learning.

"Quis docebit doctores?" If the profession does not pay careful attention to how our future educators are taught to teach, we run a serious risk of becoming increasingly marginalized in the curricula of tomorrow - both those of the college campus and those of the middle and high school classroom.