Since my last article, where I talked about the difficulties of addressing the competition within the field of Classics and the skepticism from outside it, I have embarked on a new adventure: trying to get hired.  As of April 12 I have been listed with two different teaching placement agencies, gone to three different teaching conferences, had twelve interviews, taught two sample lessons, visited two schools, been offered jobs by two English schools in Seoul, South Korea, completed the Teach for America application process, and written a 90-minute essay-on-command (in lieu of an interview).  It’s been a complete whirlwind, with new possibilities surfacing or disappearing each day.  The strange part is that I’m doing all of this to put off going to graduate school – the same way many of my friends are going to graduate school to put off working.

The common strand pulling everything together is Latin.  My aim may be to someday teach Classical History, but this experience has taught me that, if nothing else, the ten years of Latin study are the most marketable thing on my resume.  At the beginning of the year, one of my past Latin professors told me not to worry about job prospects, that Penn always got more requests for Latin teachers at high schools than it could fill.  I passed this information on to satisfy my skeptical parents, only half-believing it myself.  I did not realize how right my professor was until I went to a conference in Boston.  There I saw how much secondary schools alone need Latin teachers.

I was waiting for my prospective interviewer to return to his abandoned table when a married couple in their late 30’s who had been teaching in China and were looking for jobs as science teachers started talking to me.  When I told them that I was still in college, they were surprised.  “I thought Carney Sandoe didn’t look at your resume until you had taught for two years.  What are you proposing to teach?”  Latin, I answered.  “That’s why!  You’re a rare bird.  A lot of schools are looking for Latin teachers, but there aren’t that many out there.” 

What has become very apparent to me as I have spoken to other schools is that I’ve been riding a very recent wave of popularity for Classical Studies.  While Latin was a standard offering at the turn of the last century, the subject fell from many curricula over the years, with the number of Latin students reaching its lowest in 1976.  I have seen a rise in popularity even during my own short experience.  Since I entered Ridge High in 1998, my own school added two more Latin teachers; at Penn, the size of an Advanced Latin (LATN 309) class has gone from 10-15 people my sophomore year to around 40 my senior year.  Until the department assigned a TA to teach half of the class, students were actually sitting on the floor.  There are statistics to back those anecdotes.  An October 2005 New York Times article reported the numbers of students who take the National Latin Exam, a test administered each March.  The Times reported that 6000 students took the test in 1977, the year it was first offered; by 2005 that number had increased to 134,873.  Even assuming that the exam has gained a reputation among Latin teachers that it did not initially possess, a 22,500% increase is staggering by any measure.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what has caused this increase.  One suggestion, in a 2001 National Geographic website article, says that the transition from treating Latin as a purely reading course to one more closely resembling a modern language course has triggered a renewal of interest.  According to my father (who hated it), my professor (who, I guess, didn’t hate it), and some prospective employers (who just want someone competent enough to teach it), my secondary school Latin education was not the same as theirs.  This is probably very true: in middle school, my class spent a good deal of time doing Roman history, cultural activities, singing songs, reading myths, making skits, and bringing in food, as well as memorizing noun and verb endings.  On the other hand, my dad’s class was a hellish experience involving a lot of chanting.

One caveat of this method is that teachers can spend too much time on other activities and not enough on the language itself.  My high school experience had this shortfall, with my heavily-tenured, well-entrenched Latin teacher cultivating a reputation for an easy A – I didn’t realize how bad I was after five years until I pitted my skills against kids from other schools at UDallas’ Latin-in-Rome program.  Luckily, while my high school education may not have been orthodox, it sparked my interest in Roman history, which pulled me back to Latin and Classical Studies in college. 

In the process of interviewing, it has been interesting to see how this and other issues play out.  I have learned about strange curricula and I have been asked even weirder interview questions.  The best was, “Do you think that Christianity caused the fall of the Roman Empire?”  No.  But we Classicists have more subtle ways of turning your students into little budding atheists… wink. 

Altogether, the search for a job has been an eye-opening experience.  Most irksome, though, is maintaining the presence of mind to realize that just because Latin and Classics are important to me doesn’t make them important or necessary to anyone else.  If I get a Teach for America job, you can bet that Latin is not even going to be on their list of considerations.  I’ll probably find myself fully immersed in the realm of the basic and useful, because there are some schools that can’t afford to ride the tides of popularity.