INTERVIEW WITH
DR. DARYL "GUS" GRISSOM
When were you first introduced to Latin?
I started teaching myself Latin in about the year 2000-2001, because I was in the Marine Corps, and I wanted to eventually get out of the Marine Corps and become a teacher.
I had been counseled wisely that the best way to teach ancient history was to first access it through the original languages, so I began teaching myself Latin in, again, 2001. The reason I know it was 2001 was because it was after September 11 that I was really in the desert, literally learning Latin in the desert, sort of sitting alone. It was kind of a weird, surreal thing in hindsight. But there was that- and Greek came later.
How did you make the leap from being part of the Marine Corps to being a Latin teacher?
Well, ok, so the leap was that I had had a position in the Marine Corps where I was an instructor, down in Quantico, Virginia, and I really fell in love with the act of teaching and working with students. I knew I wanted to be a teacher, and I always enjoyed history, so I thought the logical link was to become a history teacher. I had written a letter to one of my favorite authors and Historians, Victor Davis Hanson, who wrote back to me. He’s the one who said that if you really want to teach history, you need to learn the languages first to really give you access, and that’s true, because languages are merely a medium through which you can understand more of what the thought process was for the Ancients-- whether it was similar to us, or different from us. So that's the link, that the languages give me access to a world that I can’t see otherwise.
What are your thoughts on the state of the Latin language in the classroom today?
Well it’s exciting! I think right now we are in a very cool moment in the history of Latin, and I don’t mean just Latin as a language, but also Latin instruction, which has been around as long as Latin was a language-- people have always had to learn Latin. I think we are in a renaissance of sorts, where we are starting to reconsider our pedagogy and I think every teacher out there is looking for new ways to incorporate either technology, or new ways to incorporate language acquisition theories, or looking for new ways to incorporate the resources that are out there in terms of museums and cultural events, so I think it’s really cool to be a Latin teacher right now because so much is changing, but it’s all changing around a language that’s fundamentally unchanged for 2000 years. Every latin teacher I know is so passionately in love with the language, and now we all have access to tools that are allowing us to express that passion in more ways than have ever before existed.
Dr. Grissom earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Macroeconomic Policy Analysis from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993. In 2006, he returned to school, earning his Master of Arts degree in Greek and Latin from The Catholic University of America and earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Ancient History from University of Maryland, College Park, in 2012.
Before becoming a teacher, Dr. Grissom served ten years as a Marine Officer.