I started offering SeumasU classes (not by that name!) in 2019. I went full-time (ish), ditching my other work in 2020 thanks to the pandemic. So I’m now steaming and streaming into my 4th year of trying to teach somewhat-more-communicatively, online, as a full-time occupation (it’s not full-time, but it’s my full-time occupation, if that makes sense). And, it’s really possible.

When I look back over the slate of courses I’ve run in the last four-ish years, everything ranging from teaching absolute beginners the foundations of speaking Latin and Greek, through to playing table-top RPGs in Latin and Greek, through to reading the broadest selection of texts, covering 2800 years of Greek and 2100 years of Latin, with a high commitment to keeping our conversations in the target language as much as possible, using English whenever it serves best purposes, and helping students to learn to read, process, and communicate more readily, more accurately, more fluently, more confidently, and more joyfully in these languages.

My own speaking skills are coming along, as are my writing and reading. I don’t get as much time outside teaching as I’d like to just sit around reading slabs of Greek and Latin, but when I can I do. And seeing students come on board and read and discuss Plato, Homer, Lucian, Proba, Eudocia, Boethius, Ignatius, Augustine, Dhuoda, C.S. Lewis, Aquinas, Erasmus, Pausanias, Plutarch, Cicero, Tertullian, Egeria, Gregory of Nazianzus, William of Rubuick, (Ysengrimus), as well as some anthology classes, and even more. This is a dream come true.

Occasionally I get asked if I would think about taking an academic job. No one’s knocking on that door, and I am out of the academic game long enough that I make a terrible candidate. But also, you would have to offer me something incredibly compelling to give up the joy and the wonder that is SeumasU.

So, maybe it’s time you starting speaking ancient Greek and/or Latin, to read the ancients and the not-so-ancients in their own tongues, and to join the great conversations yourself!