“Do you want to teach the Aeneid with me in a prison?”

When I was asked this question, I had no idea what it meant to teach in a prison. I had never been in a prison, never known anyone in prison, and quite honestly, not thought much about prisons in my life. When I agreed, it was because I loved Vergil.

I can say now, though, that teaching in prison has been transformative. I have learned much more from my students, I am sure, than they have learned from me. The best analogy to describe the affect that prison teaching has had on me is that before, I was trying to focus an SLR manually, never quite getting rid of the blur. Too close, too far. Teaching in prison was like hitting autofocus. What was truly important to me in my scholarship, in my teaching, and in my life became much clearer.

I teach with the Prison Teaching Initiative (PTI) at Princeton, which works closely with NJ-STEP to provide classes accredited through Mercer County Community College. Students can complete their associate’s degrees inside, and many continue to work towards a degree after their release. The course offerings cover a wide range of subjects, including math, physics, philosophy, history, sociology, English, and foreign languages. My experience has been with three English classes: an introductory class on reading and writing about literature, an advanced class in which we read the Aeneid in translation, and an independent study with a group of three students on representations of magic in literature from antiquity to the present. With the exception of the independent study, I was teaching in teams of 4–5 graduate students. All were wonderful teachers.

I could tell you that I teach in prison because of the well-documented decreases in recidivism. These statistics are impressive: people who participate in educational programs — any educational programs, for any length of time, even only one class — are 43% less likely to go back to prison than those who do not. But the statistics are not what keep me going back, past the bars and guards. The students do.

The students in the prison demand honesty. They frequently ask teachers to hold them to the same standards as students on the outside (we do), and to be honest in our evaluations. They do not want white lies or sugar-coating. They are not interested in bullshit. They are there to learn. This is something that I have carried with me out of the prison, and I can honestly tell you that I have been constantly amazed by the dedication, intelligence, and creativity of the students in my classes.

Questions like “Why study Classics?” take on new significance when one of your students tells you that reading Plato’s allegory of the cave changed the way he saw his life. This student said that he realized that the bad influences in his life were like shadows in the cave, and that he could make a different choice. Reading Plato ignited in him a passion for philosophy.

The class in which the student read Plato was not a class on Greek philosophy. It was introductory English. Even in a class where the reading material is not primarily classical, the students inside respond to the classical texts with fascination. Not because they are ancient, or famous, or because someone told them that these texts are Great Literature, but because they enjoy them, because they raise big questions. They do not care what century Euripides lived in; they care whether Medea is a villain or a woman pushed to an extreme by her circumstances.

My independent study students this semester read Euripides’ Medea and loved it so much that they wanted to incorporate it into every paper and every discussion for the rest of the semester. In a response paper, one of them wrote that it was his favorite text that he had ever read, because Medea’s state of mind was so complex: she did terrible things, and yet did not seem to be purely evil.

Sometimes the interests of the students are surprising and rather delightful. In the introductory English class, the students read Oedipus Rex and were fascinated by the dancing of the chorus. They mimicked for each other what they imagined the dances would have been like, recalling the Greek theater which I had hastily drawn on the board at the end of the last class. They enjoyed acting out scenes from the plays, which can build self-confidence as well as simply being fun.

There is no such thing as a typical day in the prison classes, because so many things are out of the control of the teachers and students. Students may be prevented from coming to class if they are not called down, if there is a security issue that locks down a part of the prison, if they have parole hearings or other mandatory appointments. Students may be transferred to another facility or released mid-semester. Teachers may be prevented from going in if their clothes do not conform to the dress code or if their names are not on the pass list. Start times and end times for class are, at best, estimates. Flexibility is key.

Classes normally meet for two hours twice a week. In the classes I have taught, teachers typically go in once a week in pairs. The pair system has several benefits. First, if one teacher is not allowed in, the other can still run the class. Second, having two teachers in the classroom allows one to run discussion or small group work, while the other meets with students individually. Individual meetings are extremely valuable, particularly in classes where students are coming from a wide range of backgrounds. Some speak English as a second language, for example, and need extra help with grammar. All students benefit from individual meetings on their writing. These meetings also give the students an opportunity to voice opinions about how the class is going, and to suggest improvements.

Team teaching, whether in pairs, in a group, or individually, also has the advantage of exposing students and teachers to different teaching styles. Teaching in teams creates a spirit of collaboration in the classroom from the very beginning. We try to involve the students in this collaboration as much as possible, starting each class with asking what they want the classroom environment to be like. What do they expect of their teachers? What do they expect of themselves? We type this student-created document up and hand it out to them so we can all refer to it during the semester as needed. When issues arise, it is their own guidelines we ask them to follow. We have open discussions in groups and individually about how the class is going during the semester, and listen both to what the students want to change, and to their proposed solutions. Viewing the learning process as an act of collaboration among students and teachers is something that has shaped my teaching inside and outside of the prison.

The students inside are extremely highly motivated. In the upper level English classes especially, they do not just do the reading — they come into class knowing it inside and out. In our introductory English class this semester, the students were struggling to complete the reading. We raised this issue with them. When asked if they would like a daily quiz, they decided that this would be a good way to keep themselves on track, and they completed the reading much more consistently in the second half of the semester. To be sure, not every group of students would voluntarily choose a daily quiz. But giving students the ability to make some real decisions about the class can create a sense of investment.

One unique challenge of classes in the prison is the lack of outside resources. Because the students cannot use the Internet and have limited access to library books, they must puzzle problems out on their own. Rather than immediately finding an answer on Google, they have time to truly wonder at their own questions. In class, we let the students do the talking. They have plenty to say.

Opening up spaces for free and creative expression is also important, which is why we start most classes with a creative writing exercise. After reading Aeneid 6, for example, we asked the students to describe a journey to the underworld. What would they see, smell, taste, hear, touch? Who would they speak to? Some wrote about meeting characters from the Aeneid, others about seeing family and loved ones. The final project was also creative. One student wrote an alternate ending of the Aeneid, in which Aeneas and Dido stayed together. In order to do this, he also went through all of book 4, excising or altering lines which would prevent his alternate ending from taking place. It was an exercise in textual emendation worthy of an ancient scribe. He was intensely engaged with the text because he was working on a project of his own design. He continued to work on this project months after the class ended.

This variety and flexibility in the types of writing assignments could also be incorporated into classes on the outside. Many students flourish when encouraged to respond to the text creatively. Creative work can be just as intellectually rigorous as writing an academic paper, and academic and creative writing can inform one another. The students learn to engage closely with the text by writing academic papers, and then are able to write creative pieces which are tightly interwoven with the text that they are responding to. Sometimes writing creatively about a text will spark an interest which can be taken up later in an academic essay.

The student who emended the text of the Aeneid was the impetus for an independent study the following semester. He wanted to read Macbeth, so I built a curriculum on magic around the play. Two more students joined in. I gave them challenging readings: we read ancient literary texts involving witches (book 10 of the Odyssey, Euripides’ Medea, several poems of Horace) as well as a selection of magical papyri and curse tablets. I was surprised at how much they enjoyed the practical magic texts.

The magical papyri are difficult to analyze: they are practical handbooks for magicians and include spells and instructions for the performance of magical rituals. They are often dense, involving lists of obscure ingredients, a fair number of nonsense words, and some diagrams of human bodies and mysterious objects.

The students responded to the challenge admirably, writing with great detail about what constituted magical language, noticing patterns in the recipes, and writing about the relationship of the text to the diagrams. We spent several weeks on medieval magic, reading Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, the beginning of the Malleus Maleficarum (a 15th century treatise on the prosecution of witches), and an Icelandic saga (Grettir’s Saga). One student was so intrigued by the Malleus Maleficarum that he bought himself a copy so he could read the entire treatise. We then read Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the first set of diary entries from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, fifty pages or so of Gabriel García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, Duro Ladipo’s Yoruba play “The King Does not Hang,” and in a final return to the witches of Macbeth, Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters.

I have given this list of assigned reading to demonstrate the immense capabilities of the students, who are eager to read and learn anything and everything. The workload for this class was approximately 50 pages of primary source material, along with a short secondary reading (3–10 pages) and a response paper (often with an option to write a creative response to the readings), each week, with four longer academic essays (3–4 pages) throughout the semester and a final creative project (10 pages).

While the assignments were focused on developing the academic arguments, employing close readings and textual analyses, some of the best writing came out of the creative assignments. One student wrote an ending to the Squire’s Tale in verse, using archaic language he noticed in Chaucer and imagining himself as a bard, experiencing freedom through poetry. Another wrote for his final assignment the first chapter of a fantasy novel that he plans to continue working on. On June 3, these three exceptional students joined the ranks of graduating seniors, earned their associate’s degrees, and walked in a commencement ceremony held inside the facilities.

I have heard several students say that they were not interested in school until they started taking college classes in prison. One said that when he first arrived, he encountered people bragging about their crimes, numbers he was not impressed by. So, he started counting something else: books. Every book he reads goes on a list. His list has several hundred books now. He also enrolled for classes, discovered that he liked school and in fact was very, very good at it; he became a leader in the educational community, serving on the student-run academic advisory council.

Another student said during tutoring that he didn’t know how much he wanted to succeed until he started taking college classes inside. “Now I want to go all the way,” he said. “BA, MA, PhD, I want to go all the way.”

Mali Skotheim is a graduate student in Classics at Princeton University, writing her dissertation on the Greek dramatic festivals under the Roman Empire. She will be a fellow at the American Academy in Rome for the 2015–16 academic year.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.