Dr. Madeline Monk

Latin

I earned my PhD and MA in Classics (the study of Greek and Roman language, literature, history, and culture) from the University of Texas at Austin. I received my BA in Latin, History, and English with a minor in Classics from Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, where I graduated as valedictorian. I only came to Latin in college as my foreign language requirement – I thought I was bad at languages, and back in the day Latin was “the language you don’t have to speak.”

I fell in love with Latin and with how alive the ancient world felt. On the one hand, we have high drama: elephants! Murder! Exile! On the other hand, we have the opportunity to explore how people at such a vast chronological remove were similar and different to us. Roman women dyed their hair and removed body hair, but Roman men considered pants barbaric.

At UT, I worked with the Supplemental Instruction program, which provided student support for the large introductory lecture courses colleges are notorious for. SI’s active learning philosophy taught me that learning only happens when students get a chance to work with the information for themselves and figure out where it fits in their mental model of the world. After receiving my PhD, I taught middle and upper school Latin at Norfolk Collegiate School, where I discovered how fun and passionate and weird middle school students are! I’ve been working on building a Latin classroom centered around comprehensible input (the idea of teaching a language as a language, for communication, instead of largely through grammar) and gamification, one where students use creativity to generate meaning for themselves as they discover the wonders of the ancient world.