These days, it’s assumed that if you want a teaching career, you need to get a Ph.D. and then attach yourself to an educational institution.
But as Katherine Bradshaw shows in today’s Martin Center article, it is quite possible to pursue a career as an independent scholar. She explains that she has carved out a life as a language scholar, teaching students who want to learn Latin and Ancient Greek.
She writes:
The title ‘freelance language scholar’ would also describe me accurately. In modern America, the word ‘scholar’ often conjures up a vision of the halls of academia, but my job is a testament to the fact that the traditional, full-time-professor route is not the only way for academic types like me. True, my current path as a freelance scholar is unconventional, and was unexpected, but for me it is also unmistakably right.
No worries about whether the students are “diverse.” They’re homogeneous in the key respect of wanting to learn something.
And yet, her students turn out to be quite diverse:
As a language instructor, I have the opportunity to meet and teach fascinating students. My online learners join our Zoom meetings not only from the United States but from Australia, Brazil, the British Isles, China, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland, as well. These students have various occupations and reasons for learning classical languages. They include a pathologist seeking to study Greek historians, an attorney wanting to read Tacitus, a mother interested in ancient medical texts, and students taking a language for college credit. In addition, there are pastors, priests, professors, and laypeople planning to read the Greek New Testament or texts by various Christian authors. In all of these classes, I have the joy of giving students the tools for accessing great works of the past directly, without a translator’s mediation.
What a wonderful concept — students finding an instructor to teach what they are eager to learn, not just enrolling because they need credits for a credential.