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Dear Community Member,

With gratitude, I am reaching out to provide a glimpse of Friends Select’s upper school Latin classrooms, where Quaker tenets are deeply woven into the fabric of our Classics curriculum. Here’s how your support helps us bring a “dead” language to life for our students.

I started studying Latin at the age of 11, and my childhood ambition to become a Latin teacher has turned into a career I value more and more each day, especially at Friends Select, where I've been teaching for 14 years.

Initially, I struggled to find ways of connecting Latin with Friends Select’s mission and Quaker values. How could a subject I learned in part through passages about war, written in a language with 27 different verbs meaning “to kill,” be taught through the lens of teaching for “the whole of life,” incorporating the Quaker SPICES: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equity and Justice, and Stewardship?

It turns out, Latin is ideally suited for that purpose. The history of the academic discipline of Classics is a dark one, often used historically to justify systemic oppressive forces. Unpacking that history allows us to look at both the ancient and modern worlds through the lens of justice.

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With this in mind, I developed a series of courses that are unique in high school Latin programs. I thought about courses I would like to teach at the college level, where investigations into Classical reception are common, and scaffolded back. The ancient world provides us a distorted mirror through which students can investigate our own world and question our preconceptions and biases.

For example:

• In Latin III on gender and sexuality, students analyze love poetry written during an age of civil war to consider male anxiety over growing female power and explore gender fluidity we wouldn't expect in the ancient world.
• In Latin IV on race and ethnicity, students interrogate poetry that rails against immigrants and question whether we can read racism into the ancient world and how Roman propaganda persists today.
• In Latin V, students examine topics such as imperialism, disability, and ableism, and consider how ableist narratives from the ancient world were used to justify race pseudoscience in the modern world, as well as the importance of the language we use.

This is academic work in its fullest sense—intellectually demanding, deeply interdisciplinary, and rooted in inquiry. Students are not only analyzing language; they are practicing ethical thinking, interrogating systems, and forming sophisticated, nuanced arguments about how they might disrupt those forces while at Friends Select and beyond.

Our community sustains and strengthens this work. Thank you for encouraging us and investing in Friends Select School.

Sincerely,