Marcie Handler

Teaching Philosophy

What is/are most important skill(s) you want to teach your students?

As a teacher of Latin and English, I want my students to fully understand and appreciate the cultural contexts of the language we are studying or literature we are reading, whether it’s Latin or English. I hope my students will become critical, close readers of texts, and I hope they leave my classes with a greater love of language learning.

What teaching methods do you use to help accomplish those objectives?

I strongly believe that learning should be fun, so I like to incorporate games into my teaching on a regular basis. In sixth-grade Latin, we practice new grammatical concepts and assess vocabulary mastery using various online gaming platforms. My seventh-grade Latin students are acquiring Latin through an online role-playing game in which they control characters in a fictional (but historically accurate!) ancient Roman environment. In my Upper School Latin and English classes, I invite my students to zoom in to focus on the function and significance of a single word in a text, then zoom out and put the whole passage in its social-historical context.

What is your favorite project or activity of the year?

My favorite project is a manuscript project in Latin III Honors. Students make quills from goose feathers, and use the quills to ink illustrated medieval-style manuscripts with Latin fables they compose themselves. I love how students are involved in the creation of the texts from the very first step of choosing words working through multiple revisions of their Latin texts to the final step of decorating the manuscripts with colorful illustrations.

What do you like best about teaching at Seven Hills?

I love how much freedom I have to design lessons and projects (and whole courses!) that will engage the students in different ways. I also love going outside and having class on the deck. There’s nothing like leaving our iPads behind and taking a Latin text outside to read under the trees!