Growing up, Jonathan Roberts (PPE ’13) was the glue among his brothers. The oldest of four boys, Jonathan held them all together by defusing many of their disagreements. He did so using his nascent talent for translation; he could often clearly “translate” what each brother really meant and thus dispel the root misunderstandings.
This was a promising start for a future entrepreneur and forward-thinker in the area of second-language-acquisition.
The son of American missionaries, Jonathan was born and raised in Aguascalientes, Mexico, northwest of Mexico City near the center of the country. When he started elementary school, his Mexican teachers initially thought he had a learning disability. In reality, he just knew English far better than Spanish, since his parents spoke to him primarily in English at home (Spanish was his mother’s native language but his dad’s second). This issue was soon resolved, however, as Jonathan quickly improved his Spanish and adapted to learning in a second language.
He lived in Mexico until age 18, when he moved to New York City to attend The King’s College. The city hadn’t drawn him there. Instead, he’d been drawn by the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics core curriculum and major. When Jonathan returned home for Christmas after his first semester at King’s, his brother Joseph noticed how much he’d changed: he was taller, with longer hair, paler after his absence from the Mexican sunshine, and most notably, he’d matured at an accelerated rate.
Contemplative and book-smart, Jonathan nurtured his gifts at King’s but also sharpened certain mundane skills that didn’t come as easily to him—such as his sense of direction, which he honed while learning to navigate the big city and subway system. Nonetheless, to this day, he still would rather read philosophy than buy shoes or book a flight.
Jonathan’s love for the conceptual and all-things-humanities—philosophy, history, religion, and literature, as well as those works’ original languages—led him after college to work for two years at a Great Hearts Academies classical charter school in Phoenix, Ariz., where he initially taught history and literature.
After his first year, Jonathan eyed an opening for a position teaching Latin. He had taken his first Latin course in his junior year at King’s with Professor Timothy Windsor. Great Hearts offered him the Latin teaching position on the conditions that he also teach Spanish that year and complete a Latin intensive at the University of Arizona to prepare.
While teaching both languages, Jonathan was struck by how much more progress his Spanish students made than his Latin students that year. Why was this the case? He knew that each class’s curriculum employed a different method, but it wasn’t immediately clear why the two methods produced such different results. The answer he discovered would eventually guide him to his current pioneering efforts in language education. First, however, he had more to learn.
Jonathan had been planning to attend graduate school for a while. His affinity for philosophy, Latin, research, and teaching suggested a possible future teaching philosophy at the college level. In 2015, he left Great Hearts and accepted a full scholarship to pursue his Master of Arts in Philosophy at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Jonathan enjoyed aspects of his studies, but he tired of colleagues’ entertaining or embracing philosophical positions in the classroom that they wouldn’t seriously consider in any other context. For instance, one contemporary view with classroom cachet is ethical expressivism—the view that there are no moral facts, properties, or relations, and that moral sentences and terms refer instead to a person’s attitude or feeling of approval or disapproval (e.g., “murder is evil” just means “murder makes me feel indignant”). Jonathan doesn’t think anyone actually lives by views like these.
Another factor discouraging his potential career in higher education was the abundance of admin work, such as committees and faculty meetings. Though Jonathan graded while at Great Hearts, he found that the amount of grading in college classes reached an entirely different level.
But though his two years at UMSL discouraged Jonathan from a career in philosophy, “teaching stuck” as something he enjoyed, especially teaching languages. Jonathan’s graduate courses sharpened his skill in reading primary sources in Latin, including the work of 17th-century English Reformed theologian John Davenant, who developed views on predestination, infant baptism, and atonement, among other things, and on whom Jonathan wrote his master’s thesis. During this time, he was also teaching Latin at Veritas Scholars Academy.
Jonathan was struck by how much more progress his Spanish students made than his Latin students that year. Why was this the case?
Talent for Translation
By Celina Durgin
Struck by the disparity in progress between his Latin and Spanish classes, Jonathan Roberts adopted an unconventional method of teaching ancient languages that focuses on reading and appreciating literature.
THE KING'S COLLEGE MAGAZINE
Jonathan completed his M.A. in 2017 and moved to Moscow, Idaho, where he met his now-wife Anna. (Jonathan and Anna welcomed their first child in June 2021.) He continued on to teach Latin, aptly, at the Davenant Latin Institute, a Latin education program of the Davenant Institute, which is an educational organization that promotes the Protestant tradition. He stayed with Davenant for two years, and in his second year, he ran the entire program: he directed the program for a year, managed other Latin teachers, and continued teaching Latin himself, all in collaboration with the Davenant Institute proper. Around this time, he realized that he wanted to find a way to broaden his pedagogical scope to include teaching Greek and Hebrew—and not simply for aspiring theologians to understand the sources of their tradition, but for anyone to be able to enjoy the riches of great texts that can only be fully appreciated in the original languages.
Hence, the stage was set for Jonathan to found his own language institute. By now, he had embraced a method of second-language-acquisition that would become his institute’s official pedagogy. His now-preferred method is to emphasize meaningful, practical usage—taking the same approach he used with his Spanish class back at Great Hearts, but applying it to ancient languages as well, which are rarely taught this way.
Jonathan points to linguist Stephen Krashen’s notion of “comprehensible inputs” for the theory behind this approach.
Krashen writes, “Language acquisition does not require extensive use of conscious grammatical rules, and does not require tedious drill”—welcome news to anyone who has spent hours upon hours drilling Latin conjugations. Students should, among other things, read long passages from classic works in the target language, focusing more on general comprehension than word-by-word accuracy.
And there’s the rub: people typically learn modern languages like Spanish through meaningful interaction in varied contexts, such as stories and songs, whereas ancient language education typically hyper-focuses on “the forms of their utterances,” in Krashen’s words, rather than “the messages they are conveying and understanding.”
When a student of Latin instead focuses on comprehensible inputs, he will read the word navis and immediately see a ship in his mind’s eye, rather than first translating navis to the English ship to understand it.
“His mission is to change the way these languages are taught and to increase ancient Greek and Latin literacy.”
Jonathan lived in Mexico until age 18, when he moved to New York City to attend The King’s College.
In 2019, Jonathan partnered with his friend and former Latin student, Ryan Hammill, to found the Ancient Language Institute (ALI). It currently offers online-only courses in Latin, Koine Greek, and Attic Greek to remote-learning students around the country. Jonathan now divides the course load among himself and three teaching fellows. He says that ALI will begin offering Hebrew in the fall of this year.
ALI students range in age from middle schoolers to graduate students to young professionals who are interested in reading texts in their original languages. ALI has taught students at New Saint Andrews College in Jonathan’s current city of Moscow for the college’s distance learning and dual credits programs.
Jonathan credits his Krashen-informed pedagogy for much of ALI’s early success and growth. He also credits the flexibility and reach his online-only programs afford. In June 2020, he spoke to Forbes about the relevance and usefulness of the online model, especially in a COVID world.
Ryan, who runs the marketing side of ALI, identified a few key ingredients of their business model. One is market opportunity. Interest in Latin courses has increased over the past few years, but online information about Latin courses hasn’t increased at the same rate, and so the ALI website has low competition for its search engine audience. But at the end of the day, “people sign up again and again for our classes; marketing alone doesn’t do that,” Ryan noted.
The most important ingredient is simply that “Jonathan has skin in the game,” Ryan said, “both because he’s paying the bills and also because his mission is to change the way these languages are taught and to increase ancient Greek and Latin literacy.”
Despite this disruptive approach, Jonathan ultimately wants to do for ancient language pedagogy what he did for his brothers growing up: to clarify the underlying issues. Why learn to read Latin? The grammar-heavy approach to Latin would seem to suggest certain answers: to learn problem-solving; to prepare to learn other languages; to identify English word roots.
Jonathan believes that when educators know how to teach ancient languages, they can better justify why they’re teaching them. When they know that assigning Virgil, Aristotle, and Ovid in the original Latin or Greek is more effective than rote memorization or contrived translation assignments, it suddenly becomes clearer why students should study Latin or ancient Greek—namely, to actually read them.
