1. I have been avoiding reading the latest conversation published in Eidolon on the state of classics, not the awesome in The first gen series, but the one interviewing people from the same narrow subset of people who always seem to be counted as the voices of our field.

2. But tonight in my inability to sleep and after seeing a few pull quotes, I read it and I am once again stymied by the myopia and understand once again that people at PhD granting programs are willfully blind to what 85% of the field does regularly.

3. Like, most of us are hyper focused on undergraduate and secondary education & teaching because that IS our mission. We do not have graduate students, we aren’t sending students to graduate school, we aren’t focused on research because it isn’t what we are valued for.

4. The idea that if people just got back to that mission it would make everything better for the humanities and classics shows a real ignorance of what is happening at undergraduate programs. And I am not surprised given that we are invisible for the most part.

5. Also, “college professors never talk to high school teachers”. Speak for yourself. I have been having an eye roll with a couple of high school teachers about this. Maybe at PhD granting schools, it is still considered a failure for someone to become a K-12 teacher, but...

6. ...again, it seems like a willful blindness and a funny assumption that this is how the majority work. I guess it is good that people at the top of the pyramid are starting to wake up to the rest of the world, but it sure is frustrating to watch it happening in real time.

7. ...because it really does hammer home how little the work of the majority of classicists has mattered to those up top and how decades of having the same conversations seems to have gotten us nowhere. The future of classics starts w teaching at the k-12 and undergrad level.

8. It has always been the future, but no one ever talks to us about it or treats it with respect or recognizes everyone doing it. “Maybe we should refocus our mission to high school & undergrads” is something most of us would never say because it is already what we do. Everyday.

9. I wrote this about my most recent class: https://rfkclassics.blogspot.com/2020/05/correcting-nonsense-about-ancient-greco.html

Almost zero classics majors or minors in the class. But real impact on students. And someday, some of those students will be in a position to influence their kids, their alma mater, their colleagues...

10. ...their constituents, legislation, administrative decisions on cuts to or opinions about humanities and classics and they will remember this class and what it meant to them and they will make an argument for why classics and humanities matter. They will hire classics BAs...

11.... because they know the value of what they learn in the classroom and how that 1 or 2 classes impacted them. This is why I did what I do. And why most classicists do what we do. It isn’t about feeding grad programs or prestige journals. It’s about the students...

12...the ones who will never become professional classicists, who don’t want to, but they got a lot out of classics that one time they encountered it. That is how we save classics and the humanities, by making that one class they had as undergrads count for everything.

It isn’t radical to focus on undergraduate and secondary teaching unless you have always treated that as an annoyance, someone else’s job, or meaningless. And that is just wrong and always has been.