Meeting the last man on planet earth who could speak Latin
This moment impressed on me more clearly than ever that language is a function of individuals. The warmth, respect, and sense of fun that Fr. Foster radiated--especially toward me, a bumbling college student of no special experience in Latin--was crucial in undercutting his words. You cannot learn a language without getting to know a great deal about your teacher or students. Speaking a language is scary. Those of us who teach foreign languages have an awesome responsibility, and the power, to set our students at ease.
And with a single sentence, he taught me an unforgettable lesson in how to answer a question in exactly the right way.
A single question changed the course of my life.
When I first began studying Latin in 1996, it was a dead language, no doubt about it. It was pointless to try to speak it; everyone agreed the grammar was just too hard.
Legend had it, though, that a single man—a priest, somewhere in Rome, Italy—could do it. The last man alive who could speak Latin! I had to find him.
And after endless blind turns, I did. It was spring 1997, and I was spending the semester abroad in Rome.
I got up very early one morning because the immortal Reginald Foster—papal secretary of Latin to four popes—agreed to stop by on his way to work at the Vatican.
Not knowing what to expect, I opened the classroom door to find a man dressed as if he’d come to repair the dishwasher. He was sitting down and smiling widely.
“Can you really speak Latin?” I whispered, terrified.
He grinned wider and shot back, “Quid, tu censes me heri natum esse?” (“What, do you think I was born yesterday?”)
That did it. That absurd outfit, that warm grin, that exuberant and virtuoso reply—that all settled it. I’d found my guru.
This moment impressed on me more clearly than ever that language is a function of individuals. The warmth, respect, and sense of fun that Fr. Foster radiated--especially toward me, a bumbling college student of no special experience in Latin--was crucial in undercutting his words. You cannot learn a language without getting to know a great deal about your teacher or students. Speaking a language is scary. Those of us who teach foreign languages have an awesome responsibility, and the power, to set our students at ease.
And with a single sentence, he taught me an unforgettable lesson in how to answer a question in exactly the right way.
Spring 1997
<a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/humanities-in-class-guide-thinking-learning-in-humanities/">Michael Fontaine,</a> 40, professor of classics at Cornell University
meeting-last-man-on-planet-earth
It’s the Little Things
There is a distinct moment I remember from my high school days that, while seemingly insignificant, is the reason I have always valued the humanities and humanities courses throughout my college experience. I was walking to a restaurant to meet a friend for lunch nearby my high school when a Taiwanese couple stopped me and asked for directions to a famous pond nearby. I could tell that they could not understand my instructions, so I tried my best to tell them the directions in Chinese, given my limited knowledge studying Chinese in school. Afterwards, they were very appreciative, smiled, and gave me a nod before being on their way, but this small moment made me recognize that the skills I was learning in my math, science, and computer science courses, while valuable, would rarely grant me such an experience.
My knowledge of Chinese, a foreign language and therefore a part of the humanities, was necessary for this moment to be memorable. If I had been unable to help the couple, I would have been disappointed with myself.
Spring 2014
Soravit Sophastienphong, 21, Undergraduate at Duke University
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Taking Russian and Other Happy Accidents
James Hackett discusses how a pursuit of the Russian language led him down various paths—and ultimately, to a career in the energy sector.
James Hackett, CEO, Alta Mesa Resources
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One movie changed my life!
The first time I saw <em>Children of a Lesser God</em> was in a large theater. I expected it to be just another blockbuster and as it started my expectation was to be entertained for 2 hours and then I would go home. In a very short time my senses were overwhelmed and I realized there was a whole world that I knew almost nothing about (the deaf world). It was amazing to see scenes unfold and a story told through facial expressions and music. The use of music to conjure up emotions and advance a story was a new phenomenon for me. <br /><br />I realized that words are not the most important means for communication but rather body language and facial expressions "say" as much, if not more, than words. This one movie singularly changed the way I see and experience the world. The sounds of birds are not background noise but a conversation in a different language. Music isn't just something you hear when you turn the radio on but it is the basis for all experiences and emotions. Deaf people "feel" the bass line of a song and can experience music without hearing a single note. Sign language is a language without sound and deaf people use it and facial expressions and body language to communicate.<br /><br />This movie changed the way I experience music and sound (even as I write this the music behind the words/scenes on the TV show playing tells me when to look up and alert me to something that is about to happen). It introduced sign language as a language like English or Spanish. It greatly increased my awareness of facial expressions and body language as a "language."
Movie: Children of a Lesser God
1986
Lisa Perrier, 52, director of print
one-movie-changed-my-life
Reflections on the Banks of the Tiber
Like so many significant events throughout the history of the Western world, my humanities moment begins on the banks of the River Tiber in Rome. I had just crossed the Ponte Sisto bridge and was standing at the crosswalk to Piazza Trilussa in the Trastevere neighborhood. The sky was crystal clear and had the color of deep blue topaz, and the sun was bearing down in an unforgivable blaze. Only three minutes prior I had been hellbent on making it back to my AirBnB as quickly as possible; I desperately needed an hour or two of rest and relaxation in air conditioning.
But the Tiber pulled me back.
I asked my spouse Brandon if he minded my turning back to get a photo. Ever the Type-B match to my persistently Type-A personality, he said it was no problem, even though I know he was just as ready to be back our apartment as I was.
I approached the bridge’s short wall and gazed out. The river was moving at an even pace, but its motion looked lazy in comparison to the times that I had visited Rome in the spring—when the snow from the Alps melted into the tributaries and flooded rivers like the Tiber with a rush of new life and renewed possibility.
I recalled a Horace poem that I read during a summer Latin language-learning intensive I attended three years prior. It was not a particularly inclusive environment. The institute taught Latin via the nineteenth-century-style grammar-syntax model, demanding its students to learn the language, not as a vibrant cultural milieu brimming with life and storytelling, but as if it were a mathematical equation to be decoded and solved. In this program, there was no room for nuance.
As a burgeoning literary scholar, I struggled with this model because my entire academic career had been built on the notion that meaning and context are fluid. So, when I encountered one of Horace’s Carmina describing the Tiber as yellow, I was baffled by the adjective/noun agreement. Bordering frustration, I asked an instructor of the institute, and he casually (and not a little derisively) explained that if I had ever been to Rome, I would know that the river looked yellow.
Having not had the resources to travel abroad in well over a decade, I felt ashamed, small, and provincial. It was July 2016 at this time, and the preceding August I lost my mother to a long-term illness that none of us knew she had. Her passing was quick, but the grief stuck around. This instructor’s condescension cut deeper than my ineptitude at translating Latin poetry. It felt like an indictment of my life, the choices I made, and the opportunities that had not been afforded to me.
The only amelioration was my summer study group that year, the group of underdogs that kept me tethered to the Earth and from going completely mad.
(I should note, we were the underdogs not because we were somehow lesser than intellectually, but because we were all pursuing advanced degrees in higher education. We all were also, it should be known, the only students in the entire program who fit into some category of “minority” student; we were either female, or BIPOC, or LGBTQ+, or first-gen, or a combination of all the above. But we persisted, and all of us managed to hobble over the finish line after three months of intensive study.)
When I saw for myself the yellow tinge of the Tiber last summer, this pedagogical memory came flooding back to me.
But instead of feeling sad or sorrowful, I felt empowered—vindicated, even—because I was in Rome for a professional reason. I was invited to present a paper at the European Shakespeare Research Association, an experience that would eventually lead to my first peer-reviewed publication the following spring. The inclusivity I felt in that moment resonated greatly with me.
Unlike my experience three years prior, my voice was valued and sought after. I mattered.
My education and language-acquisition struggles being what they were, it gave me perspective. Yes, I can see for myself now that the river looks yellow. It is a beautiful sight, to be sure, but the yellow river is not all that different from the brackish waters I grew up with in Mississippi.
I can guarantee, however, that I will convey this piece of trivia in a more accessible way to my students, those like myself, who a few years prior was someone with little cultural capital but the rapacious desire to research, to learn, and with a little help of my friends, to lift myself out of a life that felt inescapable.
Tiber River in Rome, IT
July 2019
Alexander Lowe McAdams, literary scholar and dedicated pedagogue
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