Building an Online Classics Program

And why it exists

“How charming is divine Philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo’s lute,
And a perpetual feast of nectar’d sweets,
Where no crude surfet raigns.” - John Milton Comus

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It has been two and a half(ish) years since I began teaching Latin 1 online for the House of Humane Letters. I have seen the program grow in ways I never imagined possible, and I am writing this post to share the experience and to explain why it exists in a world that increasingly devalues and denigrates the study of classical languages as, at the very least, a pointless hobby.

When I began at HHL, I had just graduated from my PhD program in Classical Studies and had, truth be told, done everything “wrong” for an academic. Especially in our current situation with the atrophying of the humanities in academia. I did not attend conferences (I had had more than enough of those in my undergrad days), I did not try to publish anything as a grad student. I applied to a small number of tenure-track jobs “for the experience” as I neared graduation but had no expectations of being competitive on that job market.

For one of those applications, I was told (upon polite rejection) that around 350 candidates had applied for the same position.

I had made peace with the situation years ago but somehow still had a sense that “something” would turn up. And it eventually did because of a podcast I had listened to for three years at the time. The Literary Life Podcast had sustained me intellectually through the gruelling marathon of classes, motherhood, and writing a dissertation. When I got wind that they were looking for a Latin teacher, I emailed them my CV.

And the rest is history, as they say. I stepped into a milieu that was already well-established and I am blessed to have been a part of it over the past two years.

In Fall 2023, Latin 1 began online with around 80 students split into two sections. The following year, about 40 of those students progressed onto Latin 2. Then 22 or so of those 40 students went on to Latin 3 taught by Mr. Thomas Banks which started for the first time in Fall 2025. A ~ 50% retention rate was rather astonishing to us all.

As of today, our Classics program boasts of well over 100 students (we now offer both Greek and Latin, and the philology emphasis means that we also offer Anglo-Saxon taught by my brilliant colleague Jenn Rogers). We now also have the delightful prospect of discussing what to do with our crop of high school Latinists who are hungry for more. We have high school students who are fluent readers of both Latin and Anglo-Saxon, and soon readers of Greek as well.

In addition to my “bread and butter” classes (Latin 1, 2, and Greek 1), I have had the opportunity to teach webinars on Plato and Herodotus, and a mini-class on Plato, Aristotle and the Inklings alongside Jenn Rogers. I have had the opportunity to give a talk at the Literary Life Online Conference in 2025, and will give one at this upcoming conference in January 2026. I still get to research and learn and read deeply in primary and secondary literature, and then present it to a highly appreciative audience.

Nevertheless, my primary focus is on honing my abilities as a Greek and Latin pedagogue (and a pedagogue in general). I don’t see teaching the basics of Greek and Latin as a chore that I have to do in order to do the more “fun” things like teaching philosophy or literature. The challenge of presenting material effectively is one I find exciting. Anticipating pitfalls and devising new ways to help students avoid mistakes is deeply satisfying.

My expectations of my students are not that they will all be scholars. Nor do I expect everyone to love Latin or Greek or want to continue, but I do my best to make sure everyone gets something out of the experience. The students who do want to be scholars will get the foundation they need for continuing their studies. The students who do not will still benefit for whatever else they end up doing.

I always look forward to my classes and feel excited to work on whatever material is on the table that day, and I get plenty of opportunity to teach my students about history and ancient literature, and make connections to other periods of literature and history.

We also develop a lot of running jokes over the course of the year. Last year’s Latin 1 class wrote a mock epic in simple Latin collaboratively called De Bello Pullorum or Concerning the War of the Chickens. The current Latin 1 class is enjoying discussing which mythical hero would be what kind of cheese, among other things.

The textbook I use as the “spine” for instruction is Wheelock’s Latin, largely because it is a “tried and true” textbook with a lot of built-in and reasonably-priced (or free) resources that go along with it. At the same time, I have a lot of my own materials that I’ve gathered and built along the way.

In my classes, I do engage a little bit with the debate ongoing in classical language pedagogy circles about the “immersive” or “comprehensible input” approach vs. the “grammar-translation” approach. I have experience with both sides of the debate, and I try to take the best of both where I can, which for us looks like a lot of reading along with plentiful explanations and systematic introduction to the grammar and syntax of the languages. Online classes run via Zoom present their own challenges, so I have tried to make my approach work for our particular situation.

Latin 1 takes one year, and our students finish the first half of Wheelock’s Latin. Students in Latin 2 finish the grammar cycle in the following year. By the end of Latin 2, the students have been exposed to a wide array of authors from Vergil to Alcuin. I try to prioritize finding unadapted passages that fit the level of the students wherever possible. My students learn a lot about the nature of language in general, even that language is more than a social construct and that it does operate on logical principles and that those principles can be learned.

When students reach Latin 3, my colleague Thomas Banks teaches them and guides the students skillfully through an array of authors beginning with the Latin Vulgate, sermons from St. Augustine, through Cicero, Vergil, and Seneca.

After two years (provided they are putting in the time), our students are fully equipped to read any work in Latin that they wish to read. It doesn’t mean that they don’t find some works challenging or difficult but they have all the grammatical and syntactical skills they need to tackle anything intelligently and get something out of it.

My role is to help them stay inspired and motivated to keep putting in the practice with the language. I try to guide their understanding and lead them through a lot of reading, including reading they have never seen before because I don’t want them to be afraid of encountering “unseen” passages.

It does not need to take 5+ years for students to attain a basic reading knowledge of Latin (or Greek, for that matter). And I have found that students as young as 12 or 13 are fully capable of coping with concepts like the subjunctive or indirect statement, provided that those concepts are explained well which does not appear to be the case in a lot of contexts.

Every class is recorded, and while I highly encourage live attendance as much as possible, the videos are made available to the students who have the occasional conflict or can only be live once per week.

Another distinct advantage of the program we have built is that we offer our more advanced students the opportunity to be tutors for the newer students. We now have students in Latin 2 and 3 who provide tutoring under close supervision from me and another colleague Ella Hornstra, who runs the Tutoring Center. We try to make it very easy for our students to get help at no additional cost while also enabling the students who are further along in their studies to learn by teaching others. All the tutoring sessions are recorded via Zoom and sent to the students who received tutoring as well if they want to review.

The Greek program is newer as I have only been offering Greek 1 as of this Fall but I have two very capable tutors who help the students in that class as well.

The Tutoring Center has helped foster a sense of community amongst the students, which is remarkable for an online space where everyone is scattered across the US, and even the world.

As things are continuing to grow in the Spring of 2026 we will offer a new Latin class called “Latin Foundations” which will be taught by one of our brilliant HHL grads, Ella Hornstra. Latin Foundations is aimed at younger students (9-11 or so) who want to shore up their grammar foundations before beginning Latin 1 with me. It will cover the first handful of chapters in Wheelock’s Latin at a slower pace to ensure students have a thorough mastery of inflected endings and Latin word order.

Oue hope is that we can continue to build a classics program that gives its students a thorough grounding in the languages that will enable them to read anything, write in the language, and be able to appreciate the deeper aspects of the field such as poetics. Even for those many students who will never progress past Latin 1, I try to make sure that they gain valuable knowledge they can take into any area of study.

It is at this point that I must digress to say that the student body at HHL is unique, and in all my teaching experience, I’ve never encountered students like them. I have many adult students who are all fantastic, have contributed greatly to class, and have been very successful in the acquisition of Latin. Among the middle and high school students, most are homeschooled. These young students are by and large consistent, disciplined, respectful, and extremely well-read. They understand that anything worth doing takes time, effort, and a lot of frustration at times.

And still they show up. I could not ask for a better group of kids to teach, and I am overwhelmed by the privilege of getting to be part of their education.

But the final question I want to address is this: why? Why does such a program exist? In today’s world, classical languages are not valued as a staple of education like they were even a century ago. But the classical languages have endured far worse obsolescence and still remained relevant or found their way back, so I trust that this will continue to be the case in the future no matter what happens.

The House of Humane Letters exists to study the literary tradition and its languages, and that literary tradition is global and truly diverse. Amongst my colleagues, our literary and historical interests range from Western literature to Classical Chinese and the Middle Eastern tradition and the folktales of Subsaharan Africa. We do not exist to serve any side of the so-called “culture wars.”

All I want to impart to my students is that these things are beautiful and worth learning about, and then give the students the freedom to make of it what they will. I make it clear from the first day of class that I am not trying to do anything to their characters. I am content to let what I teach them shape my students as it will, but I have no control over that.

But what I have seen so far from my students is incredible curiosity and creativity and deep knowledge. Those who choose to put in that time own it for themselves, and I stand in awe of what I see them doing (and I really can’t take much credit for it). I just point them in the right direction and walk with them, pointing out some landmarks along the way.

The point of any real education, classical or otherwise, is simply this: human beings need intellectual nourishment just as much as they need physical nourishment. A true education lays out a feast of ideas, narratives, and images before the hungry mind of a human being. And that includes everything: math, science, literature, language, art, and music. It includes the development of skills and an appreciation for what is real.

When it comes to the various offerings of the feast, a person will have different likes and dislikes, but the primary job of the educator is simply to lay it all out. The feast can be more or less expertly prepared depending on the teacher, but that is it. We have no control over how that feast is received inside the person, but the person must be fed intellectually. The hope is their intellectual palate becomes accustomed to what is wholesome through the exposure to things that are wholesome. And one hopes that their developed intellectual palate will reject what is unwholesome.

My part of this feast is sharing my knowledge of classical languages and all that goes along with it, and that is all I have ever wanted to do.