I have some version of this conversation with a lot of my first year students, so I thought it was worth finally putting something more official together, in terms of how titles work in academia. There’s no reason that anyone who is new to college would necessarily know any of this stuff (no one is… Read more: What’s In a Professional Name?

A while ago, I spent several evenings going around to bars in South Bend, IN, pestering bartenders with stories about Greek and Roman mythology and asking them to help me make delicious drinks inspired by said stories. A bunch (with the very helpful editing of Sarah Scullin!) made it into an Eidolon piece (RIP Eidolon),… Read more: How to Drink Like a Hero (Part 2)

My Greek classes don’t really use a lot of conversational ancient Greek, and my students don’t know how to type in Greek (and now does not seem like the time to teach them about polytonic keyboards), so going to an online format is presenting some challenges in terms of how to still have an interactive… Read more: Teaching Ancient Greek Remotely

If your academic conference has been canceled and you would like to still present your paper or hold your workshop/roundtable (you want the practice, you need feedback on your research, you think the content is important and want to make it available), we have the technology to address this! If you are relieved and thrilled… Read more: DIY Online Conference

I’m taking a lot of these sentiments from conversations that have been happening online (predominantly Twitter), so these are not at all original ideas. My goal here is to consolidate all the things I’m seeing in one place. This is aimed at college instructors who have not been teaching predominantly online courses before and who… Read more: Resources for Teaching Remotely

Years ago in grad school, I and some friends (who were all teaching Latin 102 at the time) made some great Lupercalentines and while the quality varies a bit between these, I wanted to make them available in case anyone can use them. Here’s also some Ovid-text we pulled together for our students to read… Read more: Happy Lupercalia!

First of all, here’s a post about what gameful course design even is. I used the GradeCraft platform, something I’d learned about when I was a grad student at Michigan (where it was developed and also). The platform can be its own LMS (Learning Management System) but it can also integrate with other systems. I… Read more: My Adventures with Gameful Course Design

You can find a lot more information at GamefulPedagogy.com, and a lot of what I’m drawing on is taken in all or part from there. To start, here’s how they gameful learning: Gameful learning is a pedagogical approach that takes inspiration from how good games function, and applies that to the design of learning environments.… Read more: What is gameful course design?

Inspired by discussion around this tweet from the FIEC conference, I wanted to share a few vocab-prioritizing tools I’ve used, since I think there’s a real market for them! Why did no one ever share this with me when I was learning #Ancient #Greek? The 65 words which, according to Nick Lowe ⁦@RoyalHolloway⁩, constitute the… Read more: Trimming down Greek Vocab

This panel (organized by the Classics and Social Justice SCS interest group) focuses on the question of who “owns” Classics and explore some of the implicit and explicit ways the field has marginalized specific communities. More importantly, the panel discusses the role that Classics can play in discourses about identity and offers suggestions about how… Read more: 2019 FIEC/CA: Who “owns” Classics? Redefining Participation and Ownership of the Field

I wanted to share some reflections on the recent Naked Soul conference organized by The Sportula (in particular, Kiran Mansukhani and Nicole Nowbahar organized the conference, and they deserve a lot of credit for the wonderful job they did). In part, I’m hoping that this will encourage people who couldn’t attend to go watch the… Read more: Naked Soul 2019: Conference Reflections

There is a thorough write-up of this amazing workshop here. There was such good feedback and participation from workshop attendees — thank you all for coming and for having a conversation about what it means to make more inclusive courses in our field!

I taught Intermediate Greek for the first time this term, so everything was new to me, but there was one particular new thing that succeeded beyond my wildest dreams — these individual text presentations.  Goals:1) I wanted students to learn to use Greek resources — commentaries, lexicons, maybe even an apparatus criticus. 2) I wanted students… Read more: Intermediate Greek Project: Individual Text Presentations

I generally hate unsolicited advice, hence the title’s acknowledgement that this is in a genre of things that are quite rude. But I was given a lot of good professionalism training in graduate school (I know not everyone has that!) and I do think I have some thoughts that might be helpful for first-time conference-goers.… Read more: Some unsolicited advice for junior people at classics conferences

Academic conferences can be a very challenging experience for a lot of reasons. They are often high-stress, and expensive, and a great many academics are not naturally extroverted people, so 3-4 days of constant activity is a lot. Full disclosure, I am one of those obnoxiously extroverted people who really likes making small talk with… Read more: It’s Dangerous to Go (to academic conferences) Alone!

I wrote this back in May (hence, some somewhat/very dated examples) but then got busy and never finished it and the moment passed. But I had a sneaking suspicion that this would be relevant again, at the start or end of a subsequent term. Lo and behold, I see people snarking on social media again… Read more: Stop picking on your students for some likes

I wanted to have a place to write a bit more about this form that I made, for a database I hope to assemble. It all started with this tweet, from David Wright. #ClassicsTwitter, anyone have success Skyping guest speakers into their classes? I’m thinking it might be good for my students to hear talks… Read more: Guest Skype-Lecturing and Increasing Visibility in Classics

Note: I’m spotlighting a particular class project here, but I want to note that I’ve tried this in other classes and have had really wonderful results there as well. This is just the most fine-tuned version I’ve done of a creative translation project. If you just want to see my students’ awesome projects and not… Read more: Creative Translations

I’m editing this to add that this is (as people have pointed out to me, and was an unintentional oversight!) a specifically US problem in some ways. I don’t know enough about foreign education systems to speak to these questions — I should have qualified my comments accordingly! I’ve spent a long time mulling over… Read more: You can’t spell Classicist without Classist

The numbers have not, I don’t think, been made available, but if I can make any conjectures based on my own social media and email correspondence, I would say that upwards of 1/3 of registered attendees never made it to Boston. And many more only made it late in the day on Friday, meaning that… Read more: Time to Change the SCS?

In the Winter a young classicist’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of the SCS… It’s that time of year, and I’m starting to get pumped for the SCS, which has (among other things) meant thinking about the big world of classics and classicists, which has also meant that I’ve been thinking about Twitter, and the… Read more: Trying to Be a Better Conference Tweeter

There’s been a lot of buzz in academic circles about an article that the NY Times recently ran. No, not the Nazi one. This one: Laptops Are Great. But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting. That’s right, academia is fighting about laptops again! Susan Dynarski, the author of the article, explains that she bans laptops… Read more: The Fight Over Laptops and Why I Don’t Ban Them

I generally love Pod Save America, but in one of their recent episodes, in talking about the effects of the proposed tax plan on higher education, one of the hosts said We need physicists. We want engineers. We want people to go to grad school and be able to afford it… One problem america doesn’t… Read more: Humanities Grad Students Are Worth Fighting For, Too

Keynote Address — Our Nation’s Professoriate, Diversity and Racism: The Five Truths We Don’t Want to Confront Dr. Marybeth Gasman, Judy & Howard Berkowitz Professor of Education, University of Pennsylvania Dr. Gasman opened her talk with an article she wrote (which, in turn, came out of a blunt response she gave at a conference, when… Read more: Keynote Address — Our Nation’s Professoriate, Diversity and Racism: The Five Truths We Don’t Want to Confront

I’d been thinking a lot since I read this recent article on Eidolon, Why Students of Color Don’t Take Latin, by John Bracey. I’ve been teaching from Athenaze this semester, and it’s been a difficult transition from how I learned (Mastronarde’s text) and how I’ve taught in the past (Hansen and Quinn) to Athenaze. A lot… Read more: Speaking of Spoken Latin . . .

I wrote this post 5 or 6 times over the past 8 months. Originally, this was supposed to be published on my Rackham blog (the graduate school at the University of Michigan), and because of the nature of the post, administrators wanted the post to be carefully vetted, and it kept getting bogged down in… Read more: Racist Appropriations of the Classical World

What’s your first step when you want to learn about something? Is it to Google it, and then go to the Wikipedia page? You aren’t alone — professors do that too! There’s nothing wrong with starting with Wikipedia, but you need to know the limitations of Wikipedia as a source. What is Wikipedia good for? It’s a… Read more: Sources — The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

This last weekend was my breaking point, in terms of how much terrible news I can handle. I know many of us are uncomfortably numb, or have stopped checking the news so compulsively, or have found whatever other ways they can to function and process the speed and frequency of tragedy. Just last weekend, we… Read more: The World is Dark and Full of Terrors

I’ve long loved the idea of flipping a class, but have also long been intimidated by the whole process. In theory, though, a language course is the perfect course to try to flip, at least in part, because covering content out of class means that you have far more time in class to practice reading… Read more: I Flipped a Class, and It Wasn’t a Flop

Inspired by Crystal Paul’s great post, “10 Books I Wish My White Teachers Had Read,” I would like to read and talk through these books with anyone who is interested. I’m dumping all this info here, as a way to organize things and remember that I want to do this. I have no idea if there… Read more: 10 Books I Wish My White Teachers Had Read — Book Club