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Keeping Classics Current The study of Latin and Greek at GFS has long been a celebrated mainstay of the school’s curriculum, culminating in the annual department-wide Classics Day. BY JULIE MARREN, CLASSICS DEPARTMENT HEAD A Classics Day performance of The Trojan Women in 1957 (left). Students dressed for Classics Day festivities in 2019 (opposite).
hen I was applying for a job teaching Latin in Philadelphia a couple of decades ago, I got a good feel for the programs in the area. Some were Quaker and some had Classics, but only Germantown Friends School had both. If you wanted Quaker as well as a full Greek and Latin program, it was the only game in town. Through the creative thinking and hard work of past and present faculty members, the Classics Department at GFS has offered students throughout the years both a challenging curriculum and a place to belong—a sense that they are learning a significant amount each year within a community that helps sustain them in their work. We truly value digging deeply into words, looking at ancient texts, and thinking about why the civilizations around the Mediterranean Sea had such a profound impact on the founding principles of our own country. Students get a lot of satisfaction from working with complex language and feel that they make huge strides each year. But along the way, we also give our students many
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opportunities to come together to collaborate and learn as a community. In part, this community building happens because most of our classes meet in rooms quite close in proximity to one another. As students wait outside to enter their Greek 1 classroom, for example, they can overhear students in perhaps Latin 2, or after an upper-level class has left the room, younger students might see terms and forms on the board from the previous class and start pondering when they, too, will learn these things. I remember teaching in Alumni my first year and was surprised to see former Classics teacher Florence Mini wander in to get a book. She later told me how important it was for the department that we keep our doors open literally and figuratively, that we can hear each other and feel welcome tiptoeing in. We have sometimes stopped mid-class to invite a colleague to give their take on something. Once [former Classics Department Head] Natasha Labbé was observing my Anatomy of Language class remotely, and I asked her to teach us a few phrases in her native Haitian Creole. She was (of
course!) gracious, and the students came away with a broader sense of how many languages are at play in our school community. Balancing out the serious study of language and literature with opportunities for experiential learning has long been at the heart of our program. For the 1931 Virgil Pageant, the whole school came together at Wistar Brown Field to celebrate Virgil’s 2000th birthday. Produced by English teacher Henry Domincovich, the three-hour performance included a script written by two senior girls, a Trojan Horse built by sophomore boys, and seventhgrade girls dancing as Italian peasants, as well as a cast of hundreds. All of the local newspapers covered the event, with the Philadelphia Inquirer’s front-page headline declaring, “Virgil Relives in School Pageant—450 Pupils Take Part.” Students who have come through the Lower School build on what they learned from their fourthgrade immersive Greek curriculum and their Greek Day experience. And Classics Day, which has been a central event in the lives of Latin and Greek students at GFS since it was established in the mid-1980s, has always been a great opportunity for us to learn from one another. (Classics Day was preceded by the Dionysia, which was started in 1963 as a way to enrich the tenth-grade study of Greece.) The department has worked diligently to give students at every level the chance to participate in some part of the Classics Day program. That way, students can readily see what they might do in subsequent