feature stories
Vivat longe Schola Latina Brookliniensis!
May 24, 2007 4:49 PM
(Long live the Brooklyn Latin School)
Students at the Brooklyn Latin School love talking with Ovis, a sheep who speaks Latin (with a little help from Jonathan Yee, Latin teacher and chapter leader). The new high school gives gifted students an education in the classics.
Jonathan had a little lamb; its fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Jonathan went, agnicellus Latine dixit.
Yes, the lamb spoke Latin.
The lamb is actually a little toy sheep, named Ovis, of course. (Get it? Ovis as in ovine, meaning pertaining to sheep, like feline for cats and canine for dogs.) Students already know that Ovis means sheep in the ancient tongue, which is alive and kicking at the Brooklyn Latin School in East Williamsburg.
The fleecy celebrity’s official stage name is Ovis the Imperfect Sheep. He’s an important teaching tool for Jonathan Yee, chapter leader and Latin teacher at this new high school for gifted students, which enrolled its first class of 63 9th-graders in September. Roving around the class of 13- and 14-year-olds, Yee uses Ovis as a kind of puppet to converse with kids in Latin and as a reminder when it’s time to conjugate the imperfect tense, with its “ba” endings.
When a few kids are at the blackboard conjugating amare, to love, Ovis rears his fluffy head and the kids write amabam (I was loving), amabas (you were loving) …
Suddenly Ovis is in the face of a New York Teacher reporter asking what her name is: “Quid est nomen?” the wooly little bugger demands. When she answers to the best of her ability, he says that his nomen is Ovis. There’s some confusion. He’s pronouncing his name as “Owis,” as if the V were a W.
Nate, a tall, laid-back teenager in a white shirt and requisite purple school tie — purple was an important color in the Roman Empire — is more than happy to clear up the confusion: Ovis is using the proper Latin pronunciation when he says his name that way. “You know, when Germans speak, the way they use V for W and W for V? Same thing,” Nate says. “That’s because German is very much like Latin.”
It may not be a quote from Cicero, but it has its place in the halls of academia.
Sure, kid. Like don’t you have any baseball cards to play with behind the teacher’s back or something?
Another student makes a point to Yee, who calls out, “Aha, you’re going back to the enclitic!”
Yes. Well.
“Jonathan makes Latin fun,” said Headmaster Jason Griffiths. He’s sitting in a lofty, old-fashioned office with tall windows and woodwork painted a color that could be called Williamsburg Taupe, referring to the historic Williamsburg, not the Brooklyn one. The room could be in a New England prep school except for the fact that it’s on the top floor of PS 147 on Bushwick Avenue.
Brooklyn Latin will expand to include the entire floor and the one below as it grows into a 9-12 school. There are plans for a library and other facilities. The library will probably be like something out of “Masterpiece Theater.” The science lab will most likely be beyond the wildest dreams of Galileo.
The school must cope with the current lack of its own athletic facilities. For now, kids play soccer in a nearby city playing field. They can take dance classes in a space downstairs in the elementary school. It’s not all Homer and Sophocles at Brooklyn Latin. There’s yoga, Pilates, chess, museum trips and drama — you’ve got to blow off steam somehow when you’re expected to do three hours of homework a night.
Students, a diverse group who hail from all boroughs, are also expected to perform “declamations” each marking period, memorizing passages and reciting them in both English and Latin to hone their skills in public speaking. They also participate in a weekly Socratic Seminar, in which they debate according to formal rules of discussion.
Declamations, the Socratic Seminar and the school colors of purple and white are just a few of the things that have been transplanted from the school’s model, Boston Latin, the renowned, highly selective public high school that has been offering an education in the classics since 1635, making it the oldest ongoing school in the nation. As the in-joke goes, according to English teacher and Socratic Seminar leader Alexander Nazaryan [see “Speakout,” page 18], “Harvard was founded so Boston Latin graduates had somewhere to go.”
The school was designed like Boston Latin under the auspices of Replications, Inc. Headmaster Griffiths heard about the fledgling school while enrolled in New Leaders for New Schools, a national, non-profit training institute for principals, and went for it.
Teaching Spanish at the school has invigorated Nathaniel Cabot’s career.
“I had four years of Latin and two years of Classic Greek, which opened up a world for me and changed my life. I couldn’t have designed a better school for my philosophy,” he said.
“Jason’s [Griffiths] vision was a saving grace for me,” said Spanish teacher Nathaniel Cabot, who had been excessed and had just returned from traveling around Mexico when he got a call from Griffiths. “I was disillusioned, ready to give up teaching and go into sales. I’ve never worked in a school where I was so close with my colleagues and leader, where there was so much mutual respect. I have a new lease on my career.”
Cabot and each of his colleagues have discussions with Griffiths about teaching every day, which can run to over three hours a day all told. On Wednesdays, school closes early so teachers can leave for professional development, while students participate in mandatory community service such as the Reading Buddies Program linked with the little kids downstairs. Teachers take turns keeping late-afternoon office hours, similar to the way college professors do, when students can drop in to discuss their concerns.
“Recruiting excellent teachers was easy, because the school’s concept was attractive,” Griffiths said. “We did have to sell the kids on getting an education in the classics, though, telling them that there are not a lot of people in New York who have access to that. They love it now and they love Latin.”
Back in the double-period, 80-minute Latin class, now some kids are quietly writing sentences on the board to translate, such as Magister pueros retinuit quod formas verborum non verant: The teacher held back the boys because they had not learned the forms of words.
Like his colleagues, physics teacher Robert Bussell is called “magister” by students, the Latin title for teacher.
No holding back these kids when class is up; all have aced their Specialized High School Admissions Test. They’re New York’s smartest — taught by “New York’s Brightest” as the city nicknames its public school educators — who address their teachers by the Latin term “magister.” Many come from public middle schools; others were pulled from parochial and private schools by their parents to attend Brooklyn Latin.
“I love it here,” said history teacher Alina Lewis. “It’s an intellectual and academic community; we’re all learning together.
“We focus on the ancient world, but we constantly look at how it’s influenced today’s world, how the Roman Republic influenced the American government, how the Socratic method influenced today’s method of teaching a classical education; the students realize they’re having the same education that Plato received from Socrates.
“The other day we were having a dialog as part of the Socratic Seminar about the collapse of the Roman Empire,” Lewis said. “I had just been teaching them about the Crusades, and it was amazing to listen to them debate whether it was the rise of Christianity as a political force or Barbarianism that caused the collapse. It’s a point that historians have argued about for ages! Then one kid was being didactic and another one said, ‘You’re being a Caesar right now!’ I mean, wow, who ever says that; they’re 14 years old!”
“This job is my dream come true,” says art history teacher Kathleen O’Leary. Her students spent a good portion of her morning class looking at Masaccio’s “The Tribute Money,” determining if the building on the right-hand side of the painting was in one-point or two-point perspective.
Headmaster Jason Griffiths couldn’t have designed a better school for his philosophy.
Down the hall, Robert Bussell was teaching physics and guidance counselor Emily Coleman was getting ready for the afternoon advisory session, in which kids research colleges and pitch them, recruiter style, to the group. “It’s very exciting,” Coleman said. “We’re learning as we go, we’re creating a school together.”
Not only are the teachers close-knit, the students are as well.
“Kids here are competitive, each wants to do well, but they want everyone else to do well; they understand the rise and fall of the team,” said Gina Mautschke, who teaches mathematics and coordinates the Reading Buddies program. “They have manners. They shake people’s hands. They listen. As a teacher you truly get the whole 45 minutes to get your message across.”
The message that Brooklyn Latin is getting across is the importance of discovering, questioning, disagreeing, debating, speaking and writing. It introduces students to the thinkers, writers and politicians upon whose principles America was founded. It gives them wings to soar into all disciplines after a thorough grounding in ancient history, Spanish, English, physics, math, art history. And, of course, Latin.
The school is dripping with Latin. It’s written in sayings on the walls, on banners, on the boys’ room door — Latrina Puerorum — and the girls’ room, over portals and under portraits of immortals.
Kind of makes you want to shout, “Vivat longe Schola Latina Brookliniensis!”
Long live the Brooklyn Latin School.
“Just the fact that the school values art history makes it my dream come true,” said Kathleen O’Leary (front row, second left), who teaches the subject. With her are (from left) math teacher Gina Mautschke, physics teacher Robert Bussell, administrative assistant Angie Ortiz, Headmaster Jason Griffiths, guidance counselor Emily Coleman, Spanish teacher Nathaniel Cabot and Latin teacher and Chapter Leader Jonathan Yee.
