Professor Rick LaFleur is a professor in the Post-Baccalaureate in Classical Languages program. We recently interviewed him about some things we thought current and potential students would find interesting. 

UGA Online: Tell us where you are from originally and a bit of background about the places you’ve lived.

Rick: I was born in Massachusetts, raised in Virginia, went to college in Virginia, did graduate work in Virginia and North Carolina, and have spent my teaching career in Georgia, at UGA. With that ever southward trajectory, I’ve often said that if I made one more move I’d end up in the Gulf of Mexico – and that pretty much happened when we bought a little place in Apalachicola, Florida!

UGA: Tell me about your professional background. I’ve heard you have a national reputation in Latin pedagogy.

R: I’ve done almost all my university teaching at UGA. I served as Classics department head at Georgia for 21 years, and loved working with my colleagues to build the program into one of the largest and most vibrant in the country; by the time I retired from full-time classroom teaching, UGA’s Latin enrollments had risen to become the highest in the more than 1,700 colleges and universities in the U.S.– something I was enormously pleased to see happen. I fully subscribed through my entire career to the tripartite mission of a land-grant research university – teaching, research and public service. I view research and publishing as yet another form of teaching, teaching beyond the brick and mortar classroom to a national and even international audience; and the bulk of my public service work has also been an extension of my interest in teaching, through my commitment to collaborating with K-12 education. While most of my early publications were in areas of traditional literary scholarship, the majority of my later articles and books have centered on pedagogy and classroom teaching materials. As President of the American Classical League for two years, and editor of its journal The Classical Outlook for 25 years, I was long in a position to help effect positive changes in Latin pedagogy at the national level.

UGA: How did you get into the Classics? I know you’ve been interested in it ever since you were a child, but how did you know this is what you wanted to do for a living?

R: Gosh, I used to say it was a result of seeing the movies “Ben Hur” and “Spartacus” and an accidental curiosity about the Latin language that had somehow developed by age 12 or 13. But in retrospect, I realize there was a lot more to it – a genetic predilection for the phenomenon of language in general and a strand of Latin DNA that somehow ended up in my gene pool! In an interview for my high school newspaper, I mentioned I wanted to become a teacher. A lot of the credit for that, most of it no doubt, goes to some truly excellent and inspiring teachers I was fortunate to study with in school and in college.

UGA: When did you begin teaching online classes? Why? Did you have any reservations at first?

R: I recall my department head Jimmy Alexander cornering me in the hallway one afternoon during my first year at UGA and saying something like, “You wouldn’t mind taking on a correspondence course or two, would you?” Distance education has been an increasingly enriching component of my professional career for more than four decades, from back in the day when such courses involved pen-and-paper assignments, folded up, sealed in an envelope and popped into the nearest mailbox. Al Gore had not yet “invented” the internet! When e-mail finally came along, I started offering my distance ed students that option on the sly. Lessons were supposed to go through the U.S. mail to the Georgia Center, be logged in there, then forwarded via Campus Mail to my office in Park Hall. I gave my students who wanted it the opportunity for near instant turnaround, though they still had to mail those lesson wrappers, with a blank sheet of paper tucked inside to fool the unwary administrators. By the time I’d get one of those blank “assignments” in my campus mailbox, my students had already received their work back, with lots of my comments and other feedback, a week or more earlier.

UGA: How is teaching online different from traditional, classroom teaching? Are your interactions with your students different?

R: Well, there’re some huge negatives, and I’ll start with those, the obvious ones. I’d always prefer classroom teaching, I’d want my kids and my grandkids, and everybody’s kids to do their learning in a brick and mortar classroom, with a real, live and lively, inspiring teacher. There are huge pluses involved in distance ed too, as is equally obvious. Learning in a time and place of the student’s choosing is the biggest advantage of course; then there’s the instant online accessibility of so many resources, texts, video, and audio, and again when you want to access them and where. The very best distance ed takes into account both these advantages and disadvantages, via excellence in course content and design on the one hand, and through every possible effort at PERSONALIZING the experience, at getting to KNOW the student, and making yourself KNOWN to the student. The personalization, humanizing of distance ed is what can make the experience most EFFECTIVE and also the most FUN, and that’s something I’ve always strived for in my online instruction, via lively, chatty curricula, regular emailings, and occasional telephone meetings.

UGA: Will you give me a background on the post-baccalaureate Classical Languages program? What are you excited about, in relation to this new program?

R: There are post-bac programs in classical languages elsewhere, on campus, but the purposes of this sort of training are perfectly well suited to distance education. The work involves the acquisition of reading, translation, and analytical skills, and the students are highly motivated to attain those skills to the maximum extent possible for their own intellectual advancement and not simply to earn a diploma. I am actually not an advocate for the sorts of online degrees that are proliferating throughout the country, too often for the worst of motives, mercenary and otherwise. But this post-bac seems ideally suited to its students’ intellectual purposes and their logistical needs, and so I applaud it.

UGA: Tell me a little bit about yourself and your hobbies, as well as your family.

R: My wife, Alice, and I have between us five children and eight grandchildren, whom we cherish spending time with. We both love gardening – Alice does the ornamentals, while I grow the vegetables and love walking into our backyard every day to “pick our lunch”! I collect old U.S. coins, and I write a monthly newspaper column for the Apalachicola Times called “The Secret Lives of Words,” dealing with little-known etymologies of common English words derived from Latin as well as interesting facts from ancient Roman civilization. Alice and I both enjoy antiquing (aka, “junking”!) and spending time at our little cottages in Apalachicola and near Little Switzerland on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Life is good – vita est bona – and I’m one of those very fortunate folks who ended up in a profession that I truly love and truly love sharing.