Awards for
Excellence in the Teaching of Classics for the Year
2003
In three decades of teaching on both
the high school and the university level, Professor
Martha Davis has
shown the verve and commitment of a stellar teacher.
Professor Davis has served the needs of her college unit,
the Department of Greek, Hebrew and Roman Classics,
particularly well by developing new courses and forging
new alliances on campus. Her honors level course, "The
Orpheus Myth," brings academic analysis to bear upon the
creative process by examining a mix of media from text to
film. She has also created a trio of classes that focus
on life in ancient urban centers. Her courses,
'Hellenistic Alexandria,' 'Augustan Rome,' and
'Byzantium' compliment her colleagues courses on
'Periclean Athens' and on 'Jerusalem.' She
enthusiastically takes her students out the classroom
from time to time on excursions to New York City,
Princeton and even to Eta Sigma Phi conventions.
Last year she was awarded the Violet
B. Ketels Award for her service to the Intellectual
Heritage Program at Temple University. One of her
students observed: "Dr. Davis is one of the most engaging
and articulate teachers I have had. When she stands in
front of a class, you can see it in her eyes (and they do
shine) that every moment is a joy when she is discussing
the subject at hand. You can tell by the way that she
teaches that this is more than a job; it is her life. Her
aim is to get all her students involved in learning and
wanting to know more, to make the classics more than
something you take as a requirement, or because you need
the credit to graduate."
Professor Davis' excellence as a
teacher is not limited to the field of Classics per se.
Her especial talent in teaching her students how to read
with a critical eye and how to write with clarity has
earned her the reputation at Temple University as a
teacher who invests her students with life altering
skills. Their strong performance on various standardized
admissions tests is a testament to her effort. Her pupils
tell us: "The personal discussions were priceless."
"Meeting with students and going over papers is a really
nice thing- most teachers wouldn't take the time." "She
always encourages students to come and have work edited
and critiqued*she expects her students to put in much
effort because she puts it in herself." "Dr. Davis comes
in early, stays late and will miss lunch for a student.
She has no free time to speak of, simply because a simple
hello in the office can turn into one of the most lively
discussion periods you will ever see. We hate to leave."
Another declared proudly: "I don't fear writing anymore!
It is a wonderful realization."
Her colleague Daniel Tompkins bears
witness: "Because my office adjoined Dr. Davis' for about
15 years, I became fairly familiar with her teaching
style. The time she spent in conference with students
helping them become better writers, was amazing. Her own
handling of these conferences was also impressive. Seldom
raising her voice or becoming emotional, Dr. Davis put
students in the foreground, getting them to think
carefully about what they intended to say and how they
might best say it. Authorities on learning say that
conferencing is one of the most effective forms of
teaching, and it clearly has paid off immensely in Dr.
Davis' case." He recalled one student with "terrible
reading and writing problems" who after working with
Professor Davis turned in an astounding LSAT score and is
now doing well in law school*"doing," he notes, "much
better than she did in my Latin [class]."
In addition to her dynamic work at
Temple University Professor Davis has contributed to the
activities of classicists in her city, state and region.
With funds from the Pennsylvania Classical Association
she organized a series of workshops for elementary and
secondary school teachers on life in various provinces of
the Roman empire, and she in turn served the Pennsylvania
Classical Association as a second and then first Vice
President. This "teacher of teachers" has also lent her
support to the Philadelphia Classical Association and to
the Classical Association of the Atlantic States. In 2002
she helped make the APA's meeting in Philadelphia the
success that it was by working on the local organizing
committee.
Among the letters of support we
received in her application was an endorsement from a
student who studied with Professor Davis at the
very beginning of her career in the early 1970s. Now a
professor of English at Temple University, she recalls
vividly Professor Davis' "raw pedagogical talent and
prodigious intuitive intelligence" which "have been honed
by decades of work in the classroom." The ensuing years
have not diminished the effect that Professor Davis has
upon her students. A student who recently finished her
Orpheus class commented happily: "I know that I can sit
in the classics lounge and feel welcome and very
comfortable. Why? Because Martha Davis rules." I am sure
that this pupil will be delighted to learn that the
American Philological Association has bestowed its
Excellence in Teaching Award upon his dear Professor
Davis.
His sole Classics colleague at the
University of Arkansas writes of David Fredrick
that he is "an outstanding scholar, athlete, musician,
artist and snooker player, but it as a Teacher
[capital "T"] that he is making his mark on our
profession, and helping Classics to thrive…. Dave
Fredrick is the colleague we all dream of. He attracts
students, makes them work hard, sweat blood, and then
thank him for it. This is a poor state, and
isolated from centers of classical education, but Dave
Fredrick is putting it on the Classics map."
The evidence bears out this accolade.
First, Dave is an indefatigable teacher. In eleven years
at the University of Arkansas he has taught 1210 students
in 90 courses, an average of 3.5 courses per semester in
a college in which the average is 2 to 2.5 courses per
semester. The courses range from Latin at all levels to
Greek at every level but elementary to general courses in
Classical Studies, Mythology, Gender Studies, and
Humanities, and include a series of seven honors
colloquia in which he has never repeated the same topic.
Enrollment has varied from the usual handful in advanced
Greek or Latin to over 60 in Classical Studies and
Humanities, and he has never had a teaching assistant or
grader.
Secondly, Dave is a demanding teacher.
Of a third-semester Latin class in Petronius one student
wrote, "This was a great class & [sic] Dr.
Fredrick is a great, great teacher. This class was hard
as hell and I didn't want to work as hard as I had to. In
retrospect the hard work was good for me." Of an Honors
Colloquium in the Religions of the Roman Empire another
wrote, "Maybe the hardest class @ [sic] U of A.
Total Work out. But it was a great experience. Great
Teacher/Scholar." A non-traditional student wrote, "As a
working professional who returned to school …, I was
struck at how soft even the best professors had become.
This is not so with Dr. Fredrick…. I have taken some
of the most difficult tests and completed some of the
most challenging projects for Dr. Fredrick…, but I
have yet to feel unprepared for those
endeavors…."
It is not only Dave's students who
find his courses demanding. A colleague in the Humanities
Program who team-taught with Dave a Roman unit on the
urban environment of the high Roman empire and its
remarkable religious diversity wrote, "I have been
teaching in [the program] since 1995, and I can
honestly say that this was the most demanding,
intriguing, and winning unit I have ever taught."
And Dave's pedagogy is astonishingly
creative and engaging. Of his Rome on Film class a
student with an MFA in Creative Writing wrote, "Dr.
Dave's class was an incredible experience of sight and
sound. He spent hours developing web-based lectures that
were amazing assimilations of past and present. Suddenly,
antiquity moved and was in color." But, as an art history
professor who taught with him in Rome notes, Dave also
"creates research projects around student
[emphasis added] generated web-pages and
films…. In the Rome program," she goes on to say,
"the interweaving of technology and the classical
environment reached new educational levels, as Prof.
Fredrick had students experientially recreate the
Pompeian domus
by walking through the actual remains of the houses
filming with hand-held digital cameras…. The
students completed their inquiries by adding narration,
text, music, and images of the frescoes and art objects
that once completed the ancient dwellings…. I borrow
some of these [student] films to illustrate my
own lectures on Roman domestic architecture in my
architectural history survey courses."
"It is no accident," writes Dave's
colleague, "that the numbers of our Classical Studies
majors have gone from fewer than 20 a few years ago to 40
today. He brings them in." And they stay engaged and
become well prepared. University of Arkansas students
"have been accepted into Classics graduate programs in UC
Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Michigan,
and the University of Cincinnati. They go to the American
School of Classical Studies at Athens and the American
Academy in Rome."
It should be noted that these
prodigious efforts have not exhausted Dave's energies. He
also maintains an active scholarly agenda: Since 1990 he
has published a book and 10 articles, chapters, and
reviews, and delivered a total of 17 papers, most at
CAMWS or the APA, others by invitation at scholarly
conferences. He is Associate Editor of Arethusa and reviews for a number of other
journals. He served on the APA's Committee on the Status
of Women and Minority Groups and for the last seven years
has been the State Vice-President for Arkansas of the
Classical Association of the Middle West and South.
Dave Fredrick has received formal
recognition on his own campus, receiving both a Master
Teacher Award and an award for sponsoring Excellence in
Undergraduate Research. Perhaps more significant to him
is the esteem of his colleague who writes, "I'm the
luckiest classics professor in the country because Dave
is my colleague. University of Arkansas students are the
luckiest undergraduate students because Dave is their
teacher…. Dave Fredrick is one of our profession's
best teachers&emdash;by far. "axios estin!"
The committee concurs. David
Fredrick is indeed worthy of the American Philological
Association's Award for Teaching Excellence.
Those who
grew up in the 1950's inevitably came to associate the
Wild West with the Lone Ranger, the strong but gentle man
who brought order and justice to a lawless world and who
always spoke grammatically correct English. Today we
honor someone very similar, the Lone Classicist, who, not
far from the Badlands of Wyoming, has labored all by
himself, without even a Tonto at his side, to share the
languages and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome with
his students and colleagues at the University of Wyoming
as well as with the citizens of his state. When Philip
Holt arrived in Laramie in 1987, he was the
only Classicist in the Department of Foreign Languages
and indeed in the entire state. Like the Lone Ranger, he
has been "an ever-dependable source of comfort and
guidance", in the words of a colleague, and his courses,
as a student has characterized them, have marched on,
"covering vast expanses of terrain with very little time
for rest &emdash;nothing clouds Doc Holt's quest for the
objective."
Understandably,
Philip Holt has to be a homo omnis minervae,
teaching everything classical. In a typical semester he
teaches four or five courses, often with one or two
independent studies thrown in. What is even more
impressive, Prof. Holt never really gets to teach what he
knows best: Greek language and literature, the field in
which he steadily manages to publish in spite of his
workload. Instead, he teaches a Greek Civilization course
in alternation with a course on the Epic tradition from
Homer to Dante, and offers Latin from the beginning
through courses on all of the major authors. A colleague
in the English Department praises Phil's intellectual
breadth, which enables him to contribute to the
University in ways that extend beyond his own courses:
"He comes as near to being the complete Renaissance man
as anyone I know here. Though his scholarly work can be
narrow and exacting, it can also be broad and
all-embracing . . . he is worth his weight in gold to us
as a general scholar of the humanities." As a product of
St. John's college and its Liberal Arts curriculum, Phil
Holt was ideally prepared to play the versatile role
which his loner status demands of him.
Everyone
praises the optimism and energy which Prof. Holt brings
to his challenging situation. Rather than lament the
absence of Classics in Wyoming, he works tirelessly, with
"irrepressible wit, humor, intelligence and optimism", as
a student reports, to make the Classical world a vivid
and relevant presence there. "Ancient Rome", a student
wrote in her course evaluation, "is perhaps more real to
me than modern Europe, thanks to Prof. Holt." In his
understated and humorous way, Phil Holt relates his
material to the time and place in which his students
live. In talking about Roman attitudes toward the
Christians, for example, Phil held up a recent tabloid
newspaper, with the headline: "Saddam throws Christians
to the Lions". With only a twinkle in his eye, he then
deadpanned the line: "They haven't found the Lions yet,
either." The citizens of Wyoming, he has suggested,
should feel a natural affinity for the ancient world; for
both cultures turn barbecue into a religious experience.
One student has aptly summarized Phil's teaching persona:
"His passion and eccentricity are an absolute beauty in
the classroom."
Prof. Holt
has also worked outside the university's walls to share
the Classics with teachers and citizens throughout his
state. For the last four summers he has won the support
of the Wyoming Council for the Humanities to conduct
week-long, residential institutes on antiquity, modelled
on the successful programs of the Classical Association
of New England. These programs have moved from the Age of
Homer through the Age of Nero, bringing on each topic
scholars from across the country to Laramie and thereby
temporarily enlarging the size of the Classics community
there. Through these programs Phil has demonstrated the
power and appeal of the Classics to everyone from Middle
School teachers of math to retired couples who normally
live in isolated communities.
After his
sixteen years of service to our profession as Wyoming's
only classicist, Phil may soon be honored not just by
this recognition but also by another, valuable prize, the
hiring of a second classicist. While he is on sabbatical
this year, his classes are being taught by a new
colleague who will, it is hoped, be able to stay even
after his return. For his patient dedication to the
Classics in building his program all alone, the APA
awards to Philip Holt an Award for Teaching Excellence
for 2003.