Suzanne Nussbaum, the only Latin teacher at IHS, is one of the school’s little wonders. Her office, hidden in the confines of K-Building, is stocked full of filing cabinets and various knick-knacks paying homage to a language that was spoken commonly thousands of years ago. She is often seen hurrying along the halls with a stack of Xeroxed worksheets in her arms. She has taught all of the high school’s Latin students since 2006—that is all of Latin I, Latin II, Latin III, Latin IV, AP Latin, an extra independent study, and beginning Greek. She has done so with an unmatched dedication to both her students and Latin itself. In October, I had the opportunity of interviewing her over email and asking her about her life and experiences with Latin and teaching.
Anna Westwig ‘21: What was your early life like? Where did you grow up? Where did you go to college?
Suzanne Nusbaum: I grew up mostly in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. In my elementary school years, we moved around a bit (to San Francisco and New York City) because my father worked for the U.S. government, but most of the time we were in Maryland. I went to Barnard College in the mid to late ‘70s and majored in Latin and Greek. This turned out to be a perfect place for me: it was a supportive, small liberal-arts college for women (so I figured that no one would resent my presence on campus) but also part of a major university. In my last two years as an undergraduate, they were kind enough to let me take some graduate courses in Classics, too. I went straight to Yale, to the PhD program in Classics. I didn’t wind up with the PhD because I never finished my dissertation, but I did a lot of course work, took exams, proposed a dissertation topic that was accepted, and (best of all) had the opportunity to do a lot of teaching of elementary and intermediate Latin, elementary Greek, and even some advanced Latin literature courses.
AW: When did you first fall in love with Latin? Was there ever a time where you thought you weren’t going to pursue something Latin-related (teaching or otherwise) as a career path?
SN: I fell in love with Latin in high school, where I had the most marvelous teacher: Mr. Emery Eaton, who is elderly now but still with us, thankfully (a few years ago I had the satisfaction of getting in touch with him again by email). I had three years of Latin with him. I already was a “language fan”—I had some excellent French teachers, and that was the language I started with, but something about Latin really “clicked” for me. It seemed like a logic puzzle at first, and that was satisfying. I remember that, in the second year, it got really difficult, and I actually contemplated giving it up; I think it was only my affection for Mr. Eaton that kept me going . . . The great payoff was in the third year, my senior year, when we read Vergil’s Aeneid. Very difficult, at first, but I remember my mother asking me what I liked so much about it: the story? The poetic rhythm? Figuring out what it meant? And I really couldn’t explain. But I was more or less addicted to it: we were supposed to read excerpts from Books 1, 4, and 6 (with some disappointment, Mr. Eaton had said we weren’t going to have time for Book 2). I found that, when we got to the end of Book 1 and were supposed to skip ahead to start Book 4, I couldn’t do it—I had to keep reading all of Book 1, then all of Books 2 and 3; so I just did it. (I wonder now how much I understood of what I was plowing through at home on my own!) I couldn’t stop then, and continued reading all of 4, 5, and 6. I remember nights working late with the radio on low, sitting at the kitchen table, figuring it out line by line . . . Incredibly enough, I didn’t even know—it came as something of a shock—that there were six more books to the story which I eventually read in graduate school.
AW: When/how/why did you come to teach Latin at IHS?
SN: When I showed up as a freshman at Barnard, I knew I would study languages. I signed up for French literature, Latin literature, and beginning Greek; I knew that if you loved Latin, you needed to go on to Greek as well. (Some people, like my husband Alan, go on to Sanskrit after that, and then they’re likely to wind up as Indo-European linguists!) My first Latin class was Catullus and Horace; I loved it. The same remarkable teacher (her name was Anne Sheffield) also taught the beginning Greek course, which was incredibly difficult. I remember thinking I had to quit when our class started participles, but after about two weeks’ work, it began making more sense, and I think that first year decided me towards “dead” languages. I’m afraid I was a bit terrified of some of the students in my French class who’d studied in France and really spoke French . . . I had the privilege of studying with, among others, a great scholar of Horace (and Latin poetry in general) at Columbia, Steele Commager, who was a charming and charismatic teacher. If I’d any sense, I would have signed up to get a New York teaching certificate in Latin, and life would have been easier, later on, but I was so sure that I was going to be a professor! So I went to Yale, where, instead of becoming a scholar, I had the opportunity to do a lot of teaching, and I remember thinking that it would be a great life, to have to prepare a work of Cicero to teach to intermediate college students every year—since, it’s really when you have to teach it that you learn it thoroughly yourself. This is the kind of life I’ve found teaching here at IHS, I’m happy and grateful to say.
On the strength of being almost done with my dissertation, I got a job teaching at the University of Cincinnati. One thing I learned there was that I couldn’t live without the man I later married, who had just moved to Cornell from Yale, so I left Cincinnati and moved to Ithaca. By coincidence, Hobart-William Smith Colleges in Geneva needed a one-year replacement for someone who’d gone on leave, so I learned to drive, bought a car, and drove three days a week to Geneva and taught Latin, Greek, and classical civilization there. The next year, the Latin teacher at IHS left in October. A call came to the Cornell Classics Department looking for someone who knew Latin; Alan heard about it and told me, and I got the job. This was October of 1987. I held the Latin job, which was Latin I, and Latin II and III (together in one period), for the next two years. Since I wasn’t certified, I needed to start taking courses in education (which I did in the summer of 1988). When I found out I was expecting our first child, I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to manage having a baby, teaching, and continuing to earn education credits, so I gave up the job and focused on my new family. About eight years and two children later, I had the opportunity to start teaching Latin to children ages 9 to 12, part-time, at the Montessori school my children were attending. Latin had been a tradition there (taught in an exploratory way, two half-hours a week for upper elementary school children), and the teacher who’d been doing it was leaving, so I offered my services! This was a great way for me to learn about teaching Latin, and I had something like twelve years there to work with, during which time the school expanded into a middle school program, of which Latin was a part (so Latin was a regular course, with as many class hours as, say, math, in seventh and eighth grade).
IHS had continued to offer Latin all this time: Mary O’Brian, Tonya Anderson, Chloe Mills and John Hershey successively carried the torch; at some point, AP Latin was added to the curriculum. In 2007 John Hershey retired; I had filled in for him for several weeks, in the fall of 2006, and I had started taking education courses again. IHS hired me in fall 2007, and I’ve been here ever since.
AW: What’s a fun fact about you that people don’t know?
SN: The first student I ever taught the Ecce Romani I textbook, the textbook that we use for Latin I, was IHS’ own Ms. Kyle Erickson! She was a student at the Montessori school when the middle school program was first added, and she was my most advanced Latin student. Luckily, out of the blue, the publishers who sold us the Cambridge Latin Course (used with the upper elementary kids) sent me an examination copy of Ecce Romani. I realized right away that this approach—in effect, “starting over” in Latin, but at a much more demanding level—was perfect for middle school and high school.
As seen from Mrs. Nussbaum’s responses above, she’s a thorough teacher. If you take Latin, you’ll learn Latin. So, to all the people questioning whether they want to learn this language or not, take this as an invitation, if you’re committed, to sign up in April. I can’t imagine a better person to teach you this beautiful corpse of a language.