Engaging Teachers: Emelie Inderhees
In order to promote discussions of what leads to high engagement in classrooms, we at The Wellington Initiative create profiles of teachers who have, over time, led classes where students report higher than average engagement. Teachers profiled are reported by students as being both significantly higher in “love it” and “challenge” scores than their school average, and are endorsed by their institution for this profiling.
Emelie Inderhees has been teaching Latin at The Wellington School, in Columbus, Ohio since 2010. To say that teaching Latin in our modern world is a challenge is to state the obvious. Have you heard the old poem:
Latin is a language, Dead as dead can be, First it killed the Romans, And now it’s killing me.
The most recent data from the National Center for Educational Statistics show that only 2.7% of students take any Latin in High School. Yet to the initiated, Latin offers exciting and fundamental insights into the structure of language, access to some of the world’s greatest literature and means to appreciate English. Emelie exudes a love for her subject and her students which has made Latin anything but dead at Wellington. We had a chance to sit with Emelie recently to discuss her views on student engagement.
Rob: What led you to teaching and particularly teaching Latin?
Emelie: My grandmother was a teacher. My mom and my aunts were teachers. Teaching was something that just existed all around me growing up. The college that I went to had a relatively selective education program. In applying to the program, I focused my essay on why teaching is awful and how hard it is. Then I turned it to why I still want to be a teacher, because I understand the challenges. I understand what it takes and I see the value in it still. I got in the program.
Rob: Why Latin?
Emelie: I wanted to be a middle school science teacher first, but I really like words. I really like playing with them. And so when I started taking Latin in high school, I realized how much I loved Latin and wanted to teach Latin. Students get a better understanding of grammar in English through their work in Latin. And then you get to use those wonderful Latin words to understand an entire world.
Rob: Why do you think your students find your class engaging?
Emelie: Part of it is because I love my subject, and I want them to love it too. When they ask questions, that's the most important thing to me. They we go off on tangents, but in reality, they're actually just getting to things that are future topics. We're having these big in-depth conversations that I was planning to do four weeks from now. Anyway, they just asked this question ahead of time—so a really nice example of this was one of the students asked a question about a participle, but he didn't know what a participle was. We were learning participles in three weeks. And so we stopped, and we did this big conversation about participles. I made participles stick figures. There's one stick figure who is a verb and one stick figure who's an adjective. And then there's a stick figure who's a verb who leaves behind all of his verb friends, sheds all of his like nerdy clothes, tries to put on the clothes of the cool kids but never can quite make it into being a full-fledged adjective. But it's still a verb. That’s what a participle does. So it's really meeting the students where they are and engaging their questions, their interests, and pulling the curriculum to where they are right then and right there.
Rob: Do you have a pithy philosophy of teaching?
Emelie: It's important to know students as whole human beings so that you can know what's important to them and to challenge them in those areas, to know when you need to step back and when to push.
Rob: What is your single favorite lesson or thing to teach?
Emelie: I love history, I love mythology, but I really love grammar. I feel like the grammar is where the students learn the most. The ablative absolute is my favorite grammatical construction. I Love that it doesn't exist in English, but that it should. I love explaining to the students that it is a thing we could have, but don't. And see how you can use this in writing to shorten things and make things beautifully succinct, and add depth to your sentence. (Editor’s note: Merriam Webster defines the ablative absolute: a construction in Latin in which a noun or pronoun and its adjunct both in the ablative case form together an adverbial phrase expressing generally the time, cause, or an attendant circumstance of an action. What’s not to love?)
Rob: How do you work to lead students to love the subject?
Emelie: I think it is patience and finding ways to help them excel when they struggle, different modes of applying it, mixing it up between individual work, group work, large group work and really tailoring it to that particular class in that particular day. To sum up, patience and flexibility.
Rob: How do you ensure that your students are challenged?
Emelie: It's making sure they're supported, but that they're pushed at the same time.
Rob: Are you aware of your own engagement data?
Emelie: Recently my ninth graders were lower in challenge than I thought they would be. So, I ramped up their class in the past few weeks to try and make it more challenging. They shocked me, because we're learning something very challenging. I just taught them in one class period, all three tenses in the passive voice. So we did present imperfect and future passive voice. And I thought they were going to be overwhelmed and they were like, no, we got it, we can move on. And I thought, Great, we can we can move on and we can do harder things.
Rob: What do you see as obstacles in your doing your best work?
Emelie: Always time, right? Time outside of class to do the thinking that I need to do, time to meet individually with students. It's just time.
Rob: And what makes you hopeful, if anything does about education?
Emelie: One of my goals is always to be a learner in my own classroom. I come to the classroom as the expert in Latin, as the expert in classics. That's my role. But they come to the classroom as the expert in their own world. I love that I always learn from my students.