INTERVIEW WITH
MR. HOWARD CHANG
What do you think about the state of the Latin language in the classroom today?
On the whole, the language seems to be doing well. There are always different initiatives and trends in education that to different degrees, a Latin teacher may see as threatening or problematic. I think seeing these things as a threat is probably a mistake. Working with others is probably the best way to protect your program in many ways. We have a lot of great teachers, a lot of young people who are doing good work out there, which is promising. Technology is changing things for the better. I went to my first ACL institute a few years ago, my first one as a teacher. I was really enthused to see just how much the Latin teachers there had embraced modern teaching pedagogies and technologies. A lot of teachers have really embraced spoken Latin and teaching Latin almost like you teach a modern language, through a method called comprehensible input. That’s not necessarily my cup of tea, but I think those methods are very interesting and very valuable. If I were still in the classroom today, I would be experimenting with that. Not necessarily to run a spoken Latin classroom but to use those methods as one of several tools to teach the language. I think that could be very powerful. I just think it’s good that people are still trying to find ways to improve Latin pedagogy.
What was the biggest challenge you faced throughout your time with the JCL?
When you’re a student, your biggest challenges are the competitions or the experience of being away from your family at convention. In those early days, as a student and a competitor, Certamen meant a lot to me. Obviously, I wanted to win every time. We won our first year and we won our last year and it was great. But every year in-between we lost in the finals to someone else and it was hard to get so close to something you worked so hard for and to fall short. When I was in college, working as an SCL officer, I started off as VSCL Vice President. The then president, who was a friend and older classmate at UVA, resigned from his post at the beginning of the year. That left with me, a college freshman, the job of putting together all the tests. This was a time when college students ran 100% of the tests. 100 question tests instead of 75 as they are today. There was a ton of work to be done and it was in the very early day of the Internet. Floppy drives, MS DOS based emails, very awkward. I was someone who had never owned a computer and I had to put together all the state convention tests. I got started in August and convention was in November. I was a 19-year-old kid and I was proud of the fact I got all the work done, I think reasonably well. It was countless hours of painful, slow word processing and editing. I learned everything I know about using word processors from using Word Perfect, which was basically the MS word of the time. The only errors were that answer choices b and d were the same on three of the questions on the reading comprehension tests. But the thing was, both of the answers were wrong, so we just had to tell the kids to pick either one since it had no bearing on the actual answer. Other challenges included coming back to JCL as a teacher. I took 5 kids to my first JCL convention as a teacher: I was a little overwhelmed. I remember one kid being disappointed he didn’t place on any tests and that was hard to see as a first year teacher. The challenge of allowing myself to get back into it was hard. The real challenge was telling myself I wasn’t going to do Certamen because I thought the emotional stress would be too much. Surely enough, at nationals in Richmond that year, there were emergency tryouts to fill the Certamen team. I had a strong kid and suggested he try out and he made the team. He got sucked into Certamen and that sucked me right back into it as a coach and a moderator and everything else.
Do you have anything you want to say to the JCL’ers?
Cherish the experience. All of it. The class, the language, the culture, the literature. The fact that it’s different. The fact that it’s a little weird sometimes. The friendships, the relationships you’ve made. Cherish all of it because it goes remarkably quick. As a student, you think it’ll last forever and next thing you know, you’re a senior holding back tears because it’s finally coming to an end. Then when you’re a teacher, strange things happen and you’ll find yourself being appointed to an administrative role that you didn’t anticipate which changes the arc of your career and not being involved with the organization. Cherishing it is really important, going form Horace to every single cheerful speech at National convention. It’s all the same message, but you have to think that if everyone says the same thing over and over again, whether Horace about life in general or NJCL officers about the NJCL, they must be on to something. I hope I haven’t gone to my last convention, but I don’t know how much I will be involved with the JCL moving forward. I’m obviously coming to another fork in the road in my life story and cherishing every minute of it is important. When you’re in my position, cherishing it and hoping you’ve given enough back to say goodbye is all you can really hope.