2007 APA AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN THE TEACHING OF CLASSICS AT THE PRECOLLEGIATE LEVEL

Awards for Excellence in Precollegiate Teaching

2007 Precollegiate Teaching Award

Imagine this scene: a Harvard freshman from a public school meets his new roommate, who is a product of a private school well known for its academic excellence. In conversation, it emerges that both of them took Latin in school. “Six years of it did nothing for me,” says the private school boy. The other student’s reaction is instinctive. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he says, in the tone that one uses when one hears that someone is tone deaf or has never seen the ocean. They laugh, and one asks what the other meant. “If only you met my teacher,” the student from Amherst-Pelham Regional School District answers, “you’d know what I mean.”

Sean Smith is that teacher, and his students and colleagues bear ample witness that he can do what the best teachers do for our subject: show that it is as indispensable to life as music and as rich and unfathomable as nature. At the Amherst-Pelham Regional High School and Middle School in Massachusetts, he guides students from seventh grade beginners to Advanced Placement seniors, and in addition serves as chair of a 14-person department offering six languages in grades 7-12.

The best Latin teachers not only inspire students once they have found our subject, but also guide them to it. As Sean Smith says, “we have the best stories,” and he turns these stories into plays—“Perseus: The Hero,” “The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships,” and half a dozen others. Each year his middle school students perform these plays for sixth graders in the four elementary school that feed Amherst Middle School. The result is a rich annual harvest of eager beginners in seventh grade. If you have used the Ecce Romani audio files, you have heard some of Sean Smith’s middle school Latin students, and you can attest to the exemplary pronunciation that they learn from him and to the enthusiasm for Latin that he imparts.

Sean Smith has served our profession at a member of the SAT II Latin Committee, an AP Consultant, and as a mentor to dozens of practice teachers from the University of Massachusetts, from which he received his M.A.T. in 1985. He has presented papers at meetings of CANE and CAAS and at the ACL Institute, and he is the one of the authors of Catullus: A Legamus Transitional Reader. His collaborator, Prof. Ken Kitchell, attests to his philological skills and sensitivity to questions of interpretation.

“If only you knew my teacher.” We are lucky to know Sean Smith and to have him as our colleague, and it is my very great honor to present him with the 2008 APA Precollegiate Teaching Award.

How many of us know German as well as we would like? How many of us could teach it if we had to? The recipient of this year’s APA Precollegiate Teaching Award has earned advanced, secondary level professional certification in Latin and German, and she began her academic life as a freshman at Bryn Mawr College intending to major in mathematics.

How many of us have a former student who can say, “In my second year studying Civil Engineering at Princeton, I have been able to apply my knowledge from her Latin class to a Roman architecture history course. . . . The foundation in Classics that [she] created for me has aided me tremendously in understanding architectural design in the context of ancient Rome?” This year’s recipient has never failed to show her students the totality of the ancient world, including its material culture.

How many of us would dare to give our students a worksheet with nine absolutely horrible macaronic Latin puns? Example: If your Latin teacher orders you to do something, do you do it? Answer: Iubet.

These examples merely sketch the breadth, creativity, and good humor of Mary Ann Staley’s teaching and learning. For thirty-five years in both private and public schools she has, as one of her colleagues says, “modeled excellence in the teaching of Latin.” In 2001 she was one of the first Latin teachers to receive certification from the National Board for Teaching Standards. At that time there were no certification standards for Latin teachers, so she adapted the guidelines for English Language Arts to our subject and was successfully certified.

For the past twenty-four years she has taught our subject in the Howard County Public School System in Maryland. Her students and their parents attest to her dedicated labors in a vineyard where the climate has not always been congenial to the full fruition of Latin; for example, it was only in the 2005-2006 school year that she was able to introduce Advanced Placement Latin to Glenelg High School. But introduce it she did, and between that year and this the course has grown from six to 28 students. One of the first students in her AP course speaks of the joy she found in Mrs. Staley’s creative approach to teaching—dare I mention the Ginger Roman Cookie Project?—and of the “constant patience, quiet confidence, and supportive instruction” that she found in Mrs. Staley’s Latin classroom.

I have spoken of labors in an uncongenial vineyard. That same student saw” three Latin teachers . . . enter and then leave” during her four years in high school. Mary Ann Staley has had to be a teacher of Latin teachers. She has patiently taught teachers with little or no training in the language, served as a guest teacher and example in their classes, and done everything that she could to make sure that those who wanted to learn Latin, thanks in large part to her example, had the best possible instruction.

For her sound learning, creative teaching, good humor, and tireless endeavors on behalf of the important subject that we all teach, I have the very great honor to present the 2008 APA Precollegiate Teaching Award to Mary Ann Staley.