photo by Sally McCay
Living language
Career in classics earns Phil Ambrose the 2006 Kidder Award
The Greek god Hermes, accompanied by a host of classical deities and flanked by a throng of female admirers, walks swiftly across the arena. His winged sandals and cap, which mark him as the messenger of Mount Olympus, stand out against the red toga draped across his youthful frame. The white wires dangling from his ears to the iPod in his right hand, which mark him as a Vermont teenager, expose him for the mere mortal he is.
More temporal inconsistencies emerge: a young woman in the crowd adjusts her toga made from Batman sheets, Athena calls her mom on her cell phone, and then there’s the small matter that the setting isn’t lofty Mount Olympus, but humble Patrick Gymnasium.
Amid the myriad hi-tech distractions of the modern world, the nearly one-thousand middle and high school students in Patrick have devoted weeks to prepare for the activities of Latin Day. From writing and practicing skits, to brushing up on Latin conjugations, to learning how to tie a toga, these students have immersed themselves in classical culture.
What—or more appropriately who—is the driving force behind this annual event? The man at the podium asking the quiz questions, leading a variety of songs in Latin, and keeping the masses on task with an occasional blast from an air horn: Z. Philip Ambrose, professor and chair of classics, organizer of UVM’s Latin Day, and winner of the 2006 George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award.
Ambrose has kept Latin Day alive for 30 consecutive years, long enough to have taught several of the high school teachers who now coach their own toga-clad students seated in the bleachers. His tenure as Latin Day organizer is only outlived by his career in UVM’s classics department, which he joined in 1962. In 44 years at UVM, Ambrose, who retired this spring, has mentored dozens of colleagues, instructed hundreds of courses, and taught thousands of students.
He is perhaps best known among University students for his mythology course, which he began teaching in 1973, a class that regularly achieves an enrollment of more than one-hundred students. The immense scope of the course is a testament to the depth of Ambrose’s knowledge. Not only does the course focus on classical mythology require a precise knowledge of the various stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but it also looks at the ways in which classical mythology has been employed in the art and literature of every time period. Ambrose rises to the challenge, discussing Eugene O’Neill as effortlessly as he lectures on the tangled genealogies of the gods.
Angeline Chiu G’00, a former student of Ambrose’s who will join the UVM faculty next fall, remembers the professor’s teaching style well. “He has the ability to do the unexpected. He would read Latin aloud as if it were opera and sing Vergil and Homer to his classes,” Chiu recalls. Like Ambrose once did, Chiu has studied for her doctorate in classics at Princeton, where she is yet to meet a professor like Ambrose. “Coming to grad school at Princeton, nobody would do that—make you learn to read the texts as if they were music, make you engage in that way. He really did seem to think that literature was alive and that it should be more than just words on a page.”
Another former student of Ambrose’s, Mark Usher ’92, has come to know Ambrose as a colleague as well as a teacher. Usher, an associate professor of classics who will succeed Ambrose as chair of the department next year, admires Ambrose’s approach to teaching. “He’s always used his teaching as a springboard for research. I know that teaching and research don’t always easily meld,” explains Usher, who believes that many scholars consider teaching to be the secondary endeavor. “For him it’s absolutely the opposite. He’s one of the few people I know for whom that is true.”
Asked about his teaching philosophy, Ambrose carefully considers before answering. “One thing I think about teaching,” he says, “is that you must never give the impression to the students that they can’t learn or they’re stupid or they aren’t up to the subject. You have to give them the impression that it’s safe to speak up, to ask questions, to make a mistake, to be corrected without feeling that they’ve been reproved.”
How does Ambrose feel about winning the Kidder, a teaching honor bestowed by UVM’s alumni? As a professor known for his high standards, he doesn’t disappoint when critiquing himself. “That I have been considered a good teacher by anyone is amazing,” he says. “I have a face that turns somebody to stone when I get angry.”
He recalls a moment he spent at this year’s Latin Day with a former student turned high school teacher: “I put my arm around his shoulder and said, ‘Oh, my. I remember the day I locked you out of class when you came to class late for the the third time, and I just locked the door, and you were out there pounding the door.’ And the student said, ‘I remember that, and I remember the first test in that course. You came in and slammed the papers down on the desk, and you said, ‘These papers are an insult to my teaching.’” Ambrose pauses and smiles. “So maybe what I said before about teaching is more theory than practice.”
But the many letters sent in by former students paint a different picture of the professor. What those students remember is a man who was happy to devote countless hours outside of the classroom, individually mentoring them, and pushing them to achieve academic goals they never expected to attain.
“Phil is a very particular person,” says Usher. “He has very high standards and opinions, but at the same time, he is genuinely, to the core, a kind and compassionate person. He has taken this idea of vocation to heart. I think it’s a genuine sense of duty, and he gets that from his classical training. He sees that steadfastness and compassion in the texts.”
(for UVM staff)