Latin Teacher Selected to Attend Prestigious Institute

Maureen Gassert, who teaches Latin at Westminster, has been awarded a full fellowship to attend the prestigious Klingenstein Summer Institute for Early Career Teachers this summer.

The institute is sponsored by the Klingenstein Center for Independent School Education at Teachers College at Columbia University and gathers 75 teachers in the beginning years of their careers from across the country and the world for an exploration of teaching styles, educational philosophies, educational issues and personal development. It meets for two weeks in late June on the campus of Lawrenceville School in Princeton, N.J.

“My goal is to learn more about becoming a better teacher,” said Maureen. “I also look forward to spending time with other teachers talking about teaching.”

Maureen was appointed to the Westminster faculty in 2009. During her first year on campus, she started the Junior Classical League and led efforts for all of her Latin students to take the National Latin Exam, on which seven students earned awards. Most recently, she supervised 36 students in their participation in Classics Day activities at the College of the Holy Cross, where she is an alumna and double majored in Classics and musical performance.

Prior to her appointment at Westminster, Maureen taught Latin for two years at Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island. She also spent six weeks at the American School of Classical Studies Summer School in Athens, has taken a Vergilian Society tour of Egypt and attended the American Academy in Rome’s Classical Summer School on a Fulbright Scholarship. This summer, following her participation in the Klingenstein Summer Institute, she plans to tour Turkey with the Vergilian Society and then attend an AP Latin teachers’ conference in Rome.

Maureen says she was “destined to become a Classics teacher.” As a child, her parents read her Greek mythology as bedtime stories, and both her grandfather and her great grandfather were students of the Classics.