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Kathleen McCarthyAssociate Professor, Classics and Comparative Literature |
Katheen McCarthy of Classics and Comparative Literature, won the American Philological Association’s highest honor, The Goodwin Award for Merit, in 2003 for her first book, Slaves, Masters, and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy. Since coming to Berkeley in 1995, she has taught an extremely wide range of courses, from undergraduate Latin courses, to graduate surveys of Latin literature to innovative courses like “Slavery and Literature in Antiquity.” Professors Leslie Kurke, Chair of Classics and Eric Naiman, Chair of Comparative Literature, call her a “teacher of rare commitment, skills, subtlety, intellectual seriousness, and range.” The Committee called her teaching “invigorating, challenging, and fortifying.” And her students clearly agree: “When you walk into her classroom, you know you will be expected to work intensely and think beyond your capacity,” says a student. “But the prospect is not frightening because Kathy’s patience and calm guide you through the ordeal and she is always right there to pick up the pieces if your brain momentarily explodes.”
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
I think conversation is one of the great pleasures of life and the reason I enjoy teaching is that it offers a specialized form of conversation.
This idea of a specialized conversation captures neatly the two key ingredients of teaching: preparation and spontaneity. We don't normally prepare for conversations, but in teaching the conversation will quickly fall flat if the teacher hasn't figured out in advance both the relevant factual information and a strategy for communicating it. This preparation is wholly different from the kind of work I do in my scholarly writing: I can spend months tweaking a piece, getting it into a final, fixed form. In teaching, there is no such finality, either in any individual class session or in the chain of conversation that stretches out across the semester and often beyond. It is exactly this quality of openness and unpredictability—the need to respond to both positive and negative surprises that arise in the classroom—that makes teaching like a conversation.
Seemingly furthest removed from the "specialized conversation" model is my large lower-division lecture course on Roman Civilization. Before I taught this course for the first time, I had never lectured and I thought that this style of teaching would preclude exactly the kind of experience I value and enjoy in the classroom. But every time I teach this class I try to find new ways to communicate with the students and allow them to communicate with me; at least once in every lecture I throw out an open question (ideally one that relies on deductive ability rather than on knowledge of the classics, so that everyone is on equal ground) and I break sections of the lecture by pausing for questions. As I grow more comfortable speaking across the footlights to them, the students get noticeably more engaged and less passive.
On the other hand, in undergraduate Latin classes, the challenge is to structure such classes in a way that allows the students to experience the reading we do as something fresh that is happening right at the moment in the (potentially illuminating) company of others, not just something they have struggled their way through as homework and are now reciting for my approval. To put this in the terms I introduced above, the problem here is to get students to experience that same kind of balance between preparation and spontaneity that I experience as a teacher. I use translation in class no less than my colleagues, but I try to make the point that we're using it as a tool: the real goal of the class is to read the Latin texts, not to translate them—and to share our thoughts on the texts we're reading.