Home News Tribune Friday, March 16, 2007
Teacher helps children explore the origins of words and their uses in the world today
By KEN TARBOUS
STAFF WRITER
Waving his arms, his deep resounding voice rising in pitch as he speaks, Tom Hunt seems more like a student than a teacher.
Towering over his students at 6-foot-4, with receding wavy salt-and-pepper hair, the veteran of almost 40 years on the education scene has known since high school that his life's work would be teaching Classic languages. Most notably, his current gig is teaching Latin to the private-school set.
Wearing a bow tie, blue button-down shirt, dark-blue vest sweater with glasses slung around his neck, pleated khakis and brown loafers, Hunt, 59, chair of the World Language Department at the Wardlaw-Hartridge School in Edison, leads the foray into language instruction — Prima Lingua (that's Latin for "first language").
The sixth-grade Classics language course, developed by Hunt — who says he never sits behind the desk — and his teaching partner Katy Cedano, integrates Latin, Spanish and French with linguistic history and cultural context for words and their derivations.
The course covers the history of languages, specifically Indo-European languages with a focus on Romance languages and the way the Romans and their native tongue spread across the globe.
The sixth-graders enrolled in Prima Lingua, all dressed in their required Wardlaw-Hartridge uniforms, are joined today on step-up day by fifth-graders, checking out the class for next year.
Cedano explains that Hunt helps the children explore the origins of words and their uses in the world today.
"We have an introduction to modern languages with a foundation in Latin," she says. "We try to make connections in all the languages."
The day's lesson is on Latin words for the human body, or corpus humanum, a subject Hunt says is of great interest to all the future doctors in the class. (Wardlaw boasts that 100 percent of its graduating students go on to college. Junior- and senior-year tuition costs $22,900.)
Hunt is not your mom and dad's stern Latin teacher with wooden ruler in hand. He has built a rapport with his students. Before class he discussed some of the kids' pets names and foreign-language words for certain domestic animals.
"How would I know you have a dog?" he teases one girl.
"Because I told you," is her retort.
"Oh," he replies with a smile.
Hunt, Cedano and the 19 pupils in attendance today run down the Latin list of human body parts and the vocabulary they echo in English, French and Spanish.
"There's a city in Texas," Hunt tells the class, as he begins the Latin lesson list.
"Corpus Christi," responds a girl.
The teacher, or magister as some student refer to Hunt, explains that "corpus" is the word for body and the city's moniker translates to "the body of Christ."
"Obviously named by some very religious people," Hunt comments.
He follows with English words that derive from corpus.
"Maybe back when your parents went to school they had corporal punishment," Hunt jokes.
On down the list the class goes.
Like Trenton or Albany, "capital" means "head," he says.
On the board the left-handed teacher writes "captain" and "decapitate" as part of the growing list of Latin-derived English vocabulary.
While a student asks a question about the vocabulary, Hunt clasps his hands together and listens. After Hunt's completes his answer with examples of "cabbage," "chief" and "chef," he makes certain the response has adequately told the student what she wanted to know, then adds: "A lot of these words have really cool stories."
Students respond to Hunt's prompting for answers throughout the 50-minute class. When he needs help with a Spanish word, he asks Cedano to step in with an explanation or example.
At classes' end, students and teachers bid each other adieu for another day with smiles and waves.
Back in his office, which also serves as a seminar room for smaller classes, beside the computers and nestled under the window are teddy bears and a figure of the Greek god Zeus. A photo of his wife, Ellen Masten, adorns a bulletin board. Masten, daughter of legendary California poet Ric Masten, comes from a family deeply involved in teaching. She's also an educator, studying for her second master's, this one in counseling at The College of New Jersey. An innovator in her own right, the one-time Wardlaw teacher created the Lower School language enrichment program "Puentes" — "bridges" in Spanish — for preschools through grade 5.
Hunt, a New Englander by birth, comes from a working-class family.
A Classicist — he's studied Greek and Roman culture and its languages since the '60s — Hunt was the recipient of a 1986 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. But he's also been in the vanguard embracing technology and been recognized as a 2002 Alan Shepard Technology in Education Award winner for spearheading the use of high-tech tools like the smart board in the classroom.
Hunt returned to teaching after a stint as an administrator, having come to Wardlaw in '95 as head of the Upper School, grades 9 to 12.
"At this stage in my career, I wanted to get back in the classroom because this is my first love," he says.
Back in high school he was inspired to teach the Classics by Bertha Beardsley, who he affectionately refers to as "a little old lady with blue hair" who taught him Latin back in Burlington, Vt.
Wardlaw's Head of School Andrew Webster marvels at Hunt's vibrant style and passion for teaching, and the school's chief administrator praises his work ethic and dedication to the students and their educations.
"He's regarded as both somebody with veteran experience but who's never stale," Webster said.
