Peter Blandino, 2016-2017 recipient of the Outstanding Teaching Award from the Graduate School
The Department of Classical Studies has selected Peter Blandino as this year’s recipient of the Outstanding Teaching Award for his excellent work in two stand-alone classes in 2016/17: CL111 Beginning Latin I in Semester I and CL262 Homeric Greek in Semester II. A fifth-year student, Blandino is writing his dissertation on Music as a literary theme in the plays of Euripides. The excellence of this work has been recognized by Boston University’s Center for the Humanities which has awarded him a highly competitive Dissertation Fellowship for 2017/18.
Blandino is extremely good at engaging the entire class in the hard and persistent work of learning Latin and Homeric Greek. In the Homer class I attended, he easily combined a love for the story with a passion for salient detail and grammatical precision. In the course of a 90-minute class, Blandino was especially skilled at modulating the rhythm of instruction, as he moved from an intense focus on a short passage where students read aloud lines in ancient Greek and then translated into English, all the while playing close attention to grammar, and word choice, to a student giving a 7 minute presentation on a famous passage from the Iliad several books later, before having the class return back to reading Homeric Greek aloud and translating into English. The maneuver worked well, as it helped students think how the paint strokes, so to speak, that they were examining in such close detail from one book fit in with the broad canvas of the poem at large. The shift in perspective also enabled them to return to the rigors of close reading and translation with renewed vigor.
You have the sense observing Blandino teach that students are beginning the process of converting words from centuries ago into their own living language and imaginations.