Experienced Latin Teacher and Writing Intensive Course TA

Matthew D.

I earned my BA in Classics with an emphasis in both Greek and Latin at the University of Missouri - Columbia. I graduated summa cum laude and with an honors certificate. I went on to the Master's degree at that institution and earned the MA in Classical Languages and Literature. In the year since I graduated there, I have been teaching 7th and 8th grade Latin. I worked at Great Hearts Roosevelt in Buckeye, AZ, where the school was new and I worked to scaffold assignments for children coming into class for the first time. I have developed many flowcharts, handouts, and different ways of approaching sentences for different learning styles (diagramming, finding synonyms, parsing, reading aloud, asking questions in Latin).

I began tutoring during undergrad for several Latin professors in the department about 5 years ago. I would meet with students over Zoom once a week and practice translating stories, memorizing charts, and providing them with handouts/resources I created. I made sure students were doing most of the work and that I was a soundboard but not a source of easy answers. During the Master's, I attended conferences and read scholarship about Latin pedagogy. I acquired resources with guidelines for accommodations for students with disabilities. I also studied other approaches to Latin pedagogy, especially reading/comprehensible-input based approaches.

My Greek and essay-writing experience are also robust. I have studied Greek for a similar amount of time to Latin – 6 years – and am well-prepared to offer advice in that area given the similarities to Latin. As a graduate student, I also led a section of a Writing Intensive myth class. In this section, students had 3 essays, where each was submitted twice for revision. I also was an online TA for another myth class where I provided feedback on a total of about 300 essays over the course of the degree program.