“I survived Catholic school” is a quote displayed and spoken among many Catholic school alumni. It’s almost as if it were a badge of honor to go through X amount of years in a highly restrictive, sometimes closed-minded environment. Thanks to my parents, my sister and I both survived thirteen years of Catholic school. It was not until I went to college that I understood that other people could have other religions. Despite growing up in a big city, I existed in a bubble.
Of course, the Catholics are known to be quite fond of the Latin language, and I was fortunate enough to start learning Latin at the ripe old age of ten. I was in fifth grade reciting the first declension, and I couldn’t quite understand why or how I would learn a “dead” language. I kept coming back to Latin simply because it became the only thing I felt I could do well.
Now I am a teacher at the very same academy that I attended, and I am faced with dilemmas every day. The biggest dilemma is: how do I minimize the harm that the Catholic church actively inflicts on my students? Am I being dramatic? Maybe, but the Catholic church, especially the Archdiocese, a district of the church led by an archbishop, has not been kind to victims of sexual assault, LGBT people of all ages, and, of course, women — the type of people most, if not all, of my students will grow up to be.
My school tries, like many others, to empower its students with women-centered language (i.e., “freshwomen” instead of “freshmen”) and consistent encouragement to take on leadership roles in and outside of school. But the leadership inside of the church hardly empowers women. As you may know, it is forbidden for a woman to hold a leadership role in the church, and if they are called to serve, their only option is to become a nun, taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. I remember being fourteen and thinking that my two options were to get married and have a family or become a nun.
While Catholic womanhood has the potential to be truly universal, Catholic schools, especially those in affluent areas, tend to only focus on the white, straight, and upper-middle-class ideals of womanhood. Schools pride themselves on being diverse in their student body, but do not think about the diversity of their faculty and staff, leaving many students of color without role models. As of this year, I will be one of two people of color on the faculty.
This lack of diversity was painfully underscored for me when one of my Latina students came to me with stories of being bullied by a white student because of her curly hair. The bully would put on a fake Hispanic accent and greet her with an unwelcome “hola.” I didn’t know what to do, except to validate my student’s pain. But why didn’t she go to a guidance counselor? Why did she come to me out of all of the faculty and staff? Because she thought that I would understand.
I wish I could’ve told her that these microaggressions stop when you’re in a so-called “leadership position.” I wish I could say that those things never happen anymore. And yet, we were in the same place, facing similar microaggressions from our colleagues. Granted, no one was making fun of me, but many of the staff members did confuse me for the “other Asian” faculty members more times than I would like to think.
Other students have come out to me as gay and trans, and they were surprised to hear for the first time from an adult that they were not going to hell for who they were. When I asked why they came to me with these issues, they assured me I gave off very strong bisexual vibes. (I wear Doc Martens in class.)
In spite of the ten years that separates my time at the academy from my students’ time there, not much has changed. They have most of the same teachers I did, as well as the same dysfunctional and unhelpful guidance counselor. Most of the curriculum is the same, with a heavy emphasis on the National Latin Exam, as well as going through the first fifty chapters of Jenney’s in the first two years.
When I started my job, I knew I wanted to make Latin more alive to my students than it had been for me my first years with the language. We would speak Latin, sing in Latin, and thus be able to engage with the text by experiencing firsthand what Latin felt like, instead of just what it looked or sounded like. With this in mind, I paid special attention to the female characters in the stories from the NLE syllabus and their textbook. I searched our resources for myths about women, girls, and what they might have meant in the Roman Empire. I wanted my students to be able to see themselves in the Latin.
Unfortunately our textbook provided us with only three myths: the Sabine Women, Apollo and Daphne, and Pluto and Proserpina. I gave them very simple Latin versions of these stories and, without much prompting, they were able to see the issues present in the stories passed down over and over again.
Before embarking on many of these readings, I was worried that these tales about explicit and implicit sexual assault would upset my students, so I made a point to give a content warning in the beginning of class, as well as permission to leave the room if they at all felt uncomfortable. This seems like very little, but the freedom to leave is something we rarely grant students, and I didn’t want them to feel trapped. My students saw Prosperpina as a victim of sex trafficking (their words, not mine). And they pointed out how, although her name was in the title of the passage we were reading, she only spoke once. The remainder of the action was about her, but she was being ferried back and forth without much of her own say.
When reading about the Sabine Women, they noticed that the women were being talked about like cattle, prizes to be won, and plunder. They then began speaking about their own place in the world, and how very little has changed when talking about women — citing a very well-known politician. I began to fear that they, at fourteen, had already been subject to the same type of language.
Finally, while reading about Apollo and Daphne, one of my students talked about how she froze when she was assaulted on the subway. She related to the text because, like Daphne, it was as if roots began to grow from her feet and bark grew over her body. The dissociation my students, myself, and countless other women have felt when a man touches them without consent has been felt throughout millennia. I was worried that these myths would upset my students. Instead Daphne’s experience made them feel less alone.
Looking to the future, I would like to use a textbook that is more inclusive, honest, and diverse in its reading passages as well as its methodology. (Death to grammar-translation, am I right, ladies?) This year at ACL, I was happy to see the amount of women-centered and diverse novellas available for purchase. While I am not totally confident that I can completely un-textbook, I was so excited to see stories such as Cloelia being told in comprehensible Latin, as well as a textbook centered on women, and even one about a Jewish girl in first century Jerusalem.
Wherever you start — whether you go all the way and “un-textbook” your class, or whether you work with what you have — know that your students, like mine, deserve to read about these difficult subjects. The parts of the classical canon that touch on women can easily be seen as a litany of young women victimized by our world and the Roman world. But I want to focus instead on the strength and scholarship of my students and these new textbook writers in the face of such victimization. I am proud to say that I, in spite of being a twenty-two-year-old schmuck, created a safe space for my students to interact with these difficult passages and “historical” events, in a way that encouraged them to make the Latin language their own. I am especially proud of myself, and my amazing colleagues, who have created safe spaces for our students in Catholic schools. God knows we need them.
Clare Quinn: Latin teacher, recovering Catholic, cuts her own hair.
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