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Metcalf
awards honor three teachers of excellence
Metcalf Cup and Prize: dead language comes to life
in classics prof’s
classroom
By Brian Fitzgerald
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Patricia Johnson talks with graduate Molly Ann Connors (CAS’03), whose majors were ancient Greek and Latin and classical studies. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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The Greek mathematician Archimedes, one of the most important intellectual
figures of antiquity, is known for his discovery of formulas for the
area and volume of various geometric figures, as well as his application
of geometry to hydrostatics and mechanics. He also discovered the principle
of buoyancy. But Patricia Johnson’s students know him in other
ways.
To them, Archimedes is also an engineer — and the inventor
of the menacing “claw,” a
device maneuvered by levers and pulleys that actually reached over the
city walls of Syracuse, fastened onto the prows of enemy Roman ships,
raised them in the air, and dropped them back into the sea, causing them
to capsize.
Johnson, a CAS assistant professor of classical studies, and
winner of the 2003 Metcalf Cup and Prize for Excellence in Teaching,
not only explains
how Archimedes’ inventions work, but also shows the genius of the
devices by using animated sequences in classroom PowerPoint demonstrations,
where her students see the attacking ships being snared by Archimedes’ claw,
along with water being pumped from the hold of a leaky ship by another
of his inventions, the Archimedes’ screw.
But Johnson wasn’t
given BU’s highest teaching honor simply
for using technology effectively. Her enthusiasm, her extensive research
and preparation for each class, and her ability to demystify an intimidating
field of study were all contributing factors. Many of the students in
her Roman Civilization course, for example, have no background in classics.
It can be a difficult audience to reach. “And yet when I have sat
in on Professor Johnson’s classes,” writes a fellow classics
professor, “it has been clear to me that she has had these students
in the palm of her hand.”
One of Johnson’s students of Latin
describes the liveliness and variety of her classes: “One moment
we would be translating a paragraph into English, and the next we would
be laughing at the absurdity of the
gods in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. She has the rare gift of
bringing the ‘dead language’ to life.”
That’s
not to say, however, that her classes are ideal for everyone, especially
for those satisfied with just getting by. Johnson also has
a reputation for being demanding, for having high expectations of her
students. “I am a tough grader,” she says, pointing out that
the average grade in her Roman Civilization course is a B minus. “Nobody
gets a special favor. But hard work is rewarded, and a certain level
of ability is rewarded too.”
Johnson admits that grading students
demands a difficult balance. “In
terms of fairness, the Roman Civilization course is tough, because I
have seniors in it who are fulfilling their final humanities divisional
requirement with a 100-level course,” she says. “They have
been writing papers for four years. And then I’ve got first-semester
freshmen, who haven’t even taken our writing sequence yet. Still,
with freshmen, I am very tough on their first paper, with the idea of
terrifying them into working incredibly hard on the next paper.”
“
Terrifying” may be too strong a word. Nonetheless, Johnson wants
her students to know from the start that writing a term paper for her
is an elaborate process that consists of submitting a detailed proposal,
writing a draft, and listening to her recommendations on how it can be
improved. If they are willing to set high goals for themselves and put
in the time and effort to attain them, they will get a lot out of the
course.
Johnson is strict, to be sure, but she is also there for her students
when they need her. On the nights before exams, she stays up late to
answer e-mailed questions from students. She pushes them as far as they
can go, but she also pushes herself. And the result, according to those
she has taught, is a more qualified, dedicated student. “I know
that the pride in my work and the confidence in my abilities that I have
attained would have been impossible under the tutelage of another professor,” writes
one of her students.
To enhance her students’ appreciation of the
subject, Johnson takes them to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and
arranges movie evenings of Hollywood sword-and-sandal epics as old as
Cleopatra and as recent
as Gladiator. She has won two grants to purchase equipment and
hire students to create a database of digital images for classroom use
by the entire
classical studies department. Prior to her initiative, the classical
studies department had a limited collection of slides of recent excava-
tions and recent museum acquisitions, architecture, artwork, and objects
pertaining to the lives of women in ancient Greece and Rome. “These
images are not intended to provide decoration for lectures,” she
says. “I want them to be as fully integrated in the course as a
textbook, to use as many original sources as possible.”
Joining
BU in 1996, Johnson previously taught at the College of the Holy Cross,
the University of Southern California, and Cornell University.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in history and a master’s
in classics from Cornell, and a Ph.D. in classics from the University
of Southern California.
Johnson, also the winner of the 2001 CAS Gitner
Award for distinguished teaching, credits her success as an educator
to having found the balance
between palatability of subject matter — what she calls “entertainment
value” — and the rigor needed for students to master the
complex material. She measures that success first by determining if they
have
learned and understood the material well enough to work with it and draw
conclusions, and second by whether they have become engaged enough to
develop a curiosity about ancient cultural ancestors and a true appreciation
of how the contemporary world is shaped by history.
“
The students,” she says, “are not graded by this second measure.
I am.”
6
June 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations