High student debt and budget concerns have led some universities to consider online courses for their students. Photograph: Rii Schroer/Rex Features/Rex Features
I teach classics at a small, Jesuit university on a well-trafficked boulevard in Jersey City, across from lower Manhattan. With another school year ending, I'm feeling wistful to be saying goodbye to my graduating students.
But in our technological age it might be said that there are no real goodbyes anymore. I've been friended and followed by students via Facebook and Twitter, and some read my blog. They ask for recommendation letters and tell me about graduate school acceptances via text messages. As often noted, theirs is a generation for whom computers and cell phones are commonplace.
Being virtually connected is, of course, different from having face-to-face contact. The latter – conversations with friends in the wee hours of the night or with professors after class – is what I remember most from college. The internet offers plenty of resources (images of archaeological sites, famous classicists lecturing in the Roman forum) that can enrich my teaching of the ancient world – especially since my classroom is often filled with the wailing of police sirens or garbage trucks's grinding.
But I also carry around five dry erase markers so I can write (and sometimes draw, terribly) on the board. To show the students all the grammatical forms of the middle/passive voice of verbs, I climb onto a chair, because whoever installed the boards did not have five-foot tall classicists in mind.
That gets students' attention, as does telling them that scholars estimate that about a third of the population of ancient Rome were slaves, and that Roman slavery was not based on race. When teaching about citizenship and elections in ancient Athens or in the Roman republic, my students – African American, Hispanic and Asian, and many not born in the US – quickly realize that none of us would have been able to vote.
I also point out that all of us in a classroom would have simply been impossible in the ancient world, not least because I'm a third-generation Chinese-American woman, whose grandmother never learned to read or write, and who was certainly the first in her family to study ancient Greek.
I decided to learn Greek after I stumbled upon a book of Greek myths in the tiny library of my fourth-grade classroom. The stories of Perseus and Andromache, of medusa and the minotaur, and of all the oh-so-human gods, entranced me. The myths hold the same appeal for my students: any lesson on the uses of the ablative case is enlivened by discussing mythology. Students often know these stories through video games like God of War and Skyrim, which take liberties with the Greeks' versions. But seeing students so enthused reminds me that that is what matters.
Similarly, while I have much to critique about the movie 300 – its portrayal of the Persians, its use of Greek history – I have to admit, it has gotten students to study Greek and even to feel a little chill when they realize it's the dead Spartans speaking in Simonides' epitaph for those who died at Thermopylae: "O stranger, tell the Lakedaimonians that here we lie, their orders we did obey."
Very few, if any, of my students will go on to study ancient Greek or Latin, and many will very likely spend the rest of their lives, or at least their working lives, in front of a computer. That's why, as much as students have to know how to conjugate verbs and decline nouns for an exam, I not only hope they've learned something of Greek or Latin, but that they've learned the value of a real, living teacher, especially because college is becoming more and more of a virtual experience, with some universities are allowing students to take "massive open online courses" (Moocs) for credit towards earning their degrees.
Could the day come when, seeking to keep costs down and trying to combat the huge debts saddled on undergraduates, schools have students take Moocs rather offering courses taught by their own professors?
For the past couple of decades, colleges and universities have been watching the bottom line, and that affects who teaches undergraduate classes. The number of full-time, tenure track faculty at US colleges and universities has drastically fallen to that point that today, about 70% of teaching faculty are not on the tenure track. In most US schools, the majority of courses are now taught by adjuncts. My colleagues and I have talked about the likelihood that, in the not too distant future, smaller schools likes ours will start using Moocs or other cost-saving "innovations". Except at elite schools, full-time, tenured faculty are becoming an endangered species.
Will students' memories of their college days be about watching pre-recorded videos by a famous professor, of clicking "send" to submit their major papers electronically? My students may not recall all the details of the grammar of ancient languages or the causes of the Peloponnesian war, but they likely will remember me pulling over a chair and filling every space of the board with Greek words in purple and green.
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