Teaching

I have developed a relatively elaborate teaching portfolio while teaching at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, West Springfield High School (MA), the University of Texas at Austin, and Yale University. This experience allows me to help graduate students as they teach both language courses and courses in translation and as they prepare for the job market.

My Job

Due to the idiosyncrasies of my particular job at Yale, I don’t teach a standard course load. Instead, a normal semester looks like this:

• One Greek or Latin language course, usually upper-division, but this depends on departmental needs
• Weekly language sessions with each graduate student preparing for a PhD qualification exam the coming summer (so typically all the second-year students and maybe a first-year student or two)
• If anyone needs a crash course in Greek or Latin, I will give them one
• A weekly teacher meeting in which the graduate student language instructors and I work through challenges we face in class that week
• Class observations, vetting of assignments over 10% of the final grade, and other administrative tasks related to directing a language program
• Each May, I offer a teacher workshop for graduate students expecting to teach Greek or Latin the following academic year and to undergraduates interested in high school teaching
• Regular committee work at Yale and beyond

My Teaching Background

I discuss my approach to teaching in my Philosophy of Teaching statement:

Here is a summary of the courses I have taught:

Language Courses: I have taught introductory Greek and Latin using a range of approaches—from a the grammar-translation approach (in Greek: Hansen & Quinn, Mastronarde, Luschnig; in Latin: Wheelock, Keller & Russell) to the reading approach (in Latin: Oxford and Ecce Romani) to the linguistics approach using my own Greek textbook, Gareth Morgan’s Lexis. At the intermediate level, I have taught (in Greek) Euripides, Herodotus, Homer, Lysias, and Plato and (in Latin) Caesar, Cicero, Petronius, and Vergil. In upper-division undergraduate / graduate courses, I have taught (in Greek) Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, female poets, and “romantic comedies” and (in Latin) Augustine and Senecan drama. I have also taught some high school Latin (two sections of Latin I and one section of Latin III).

Courses in Translation: I have taught large introductory lecture courses on Greek Civilization, Roman Civilization, Mythology, and the Ancient Mediterranean World (including Mesopotamia and Egypt in addition to Greece and Rome). I have taught small Freshman and Honors seminars on Greek Civilization and Mythology. I have taught a range of upper-division seminars: Moral Leadership in World Drama (a writing course on dramatists from Sophocles to Shakespeare to Ibsen to Danai Gurira), Alexander and the Hellenistic World, Who Cares about Antiquity? (a Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing), Death and the Afterlife, and Africa and Rome: History, Memory, and Identity (cross-listed with African and African Diaspora Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and History).

See this document for overall instructor ratings from my time teaching at the University of Texas at Austin (Spring 2008-Spring 2021):

And see this document for my course ratings at Yale (Fall 2021 to present):

My Projects

As of Spring 2025, my focus is on three things.

(i) With David Welch (Alabama) I am building an open educational resource for Greek (and eventually Latin) morphophonology called Reading Morphologically. The project will supplement existing textbooks for teachers and students who wish to understand Greek (and eventually Latin) from a linguistics approach.

(ii) With Talia Boylan (Yale) and David Welch (Alabama) I am creating another open educational resource on teacher training at the college level called Classics Teaching.

(iii) My students and I are editing inscriptions we find in New Haven, including on Yale buildings, and uploading them to a searchable online database called New Haven – Yale Inscriptions.