Volume 5 - Number 4

Three members of the Classics Department, all outstanding teachers, now stand among the number of select CU faculty honored for teaching excellence in recent years. They are Barbara Hill, Noel Lenski and John Gibert. Pictures of each now hang or will soon hang on the wall of Norlin Library.

Senior Instructor Barbara Hill is the most recent honoree, receiving one of four Boulder Faculty Assembly Awards for Teaching Excellence in spring 2001. Hill has coordinated the Latin Program since 1988 and, during that time, has shepherded hundreds of beginning and intermediate Latin students through their initial semesters of Latin and, in many cases, into Classics majors or minors. An expert in Latin pedagogy, she instructs Latin Teaching Methods and supervises Latin student teachers. This April she also received an ovatio from the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, an organization she has long served, at its 2001 annual meeting. Deeply honored by these two awards granted within the span of a single remarkable week, Hill wishes to thank both her colleagues and her students for their support.

In the spring of 2000, Assistant Professor Noel Lenski was awarded a Boulder Faculty Assembly Award for Teaching Excellence. Lenski was cited in particular for his innovative work using technology in his lecture courses: Roman Empire, Roman Republic, Paganism to Christianity and Roman Law. Though he enjoys using internet and video technology to liven up his courses, Lenski's true love is running discussions which he claims "offer students the best way to engage the material in ways which generate real meaning and lasting impressions." Lenski's favorite course, Roman Empire, will be offered next fall. He loves the course because of the rich variety of materials with which to recreate all aspects of the ancient world, from pot sherds to amphitheaters, inscriptions to papyri, histories to novels, biography to hagiography, treasures to garbage heaps, and is already planning ways to revise and improve it.

In 1995, Associate Professor John Gibert was one of four recipients of the Student Organization for Alumni Relations (SOAR) Teacher Recognition Award. Although his use of instructional technology in a large lecture class would soon be attracting notice, Gibert received the SOAR award for rather more traditional work: Beginning Ancient Greek. That spring, his class of 15 students included one who is now a PhD candidate in CU's Comparative Literature department, and another who, a Fairview High School student at the time, went on to earn his AB from Harvard and will enter the PhD program in Classics at Berkeley this fall. Gibert recalls that it was fascinating to be teaching Greek to this memorable class at the same time as his own children, then one and five years old, were becoming more and more talkative at home.