The Magister

Magister is Latin for teacher. I chose the name myself, and have taught under it long enough now that it no longer feels like a choice.

The language came earlier, at twelve, in a Catholic seminary: the Immaculate Conception Apostolic School, in New Hampshire, and later the College of Humanities, in Connecticut. There, Latin was not a subject so much as a climate. We prayed in it before breakfast, and some mornings said the whole Mass in it. We sang it, too, in Gregorian chant, which turns out to be a grammar lesson set to music, whether or not anyone singing it notices. We argued about it in class, the way other boys argued about baseball. I read Cicero and the rest of the Roman canon and did not think any of this was remarkable, which may be the only way anyone learns anything difficult: not yet knowing that it is hard.

University came after, at California State University, Long Beach, in Classics, Philosophy, and Literature. I came out the other side with three honors to my name, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, and the Golden Key International Honour Society, though only one of them turned out to matter for this story: Emerson held a Phi Beta Kappa key too, and gave one of the society's most quoted addresses, at Harvard, in 1837. I read that speech in a college classroom without any idea I would later put his name over the door of a Latin academy in Seoul. Nobody consults you before arranging these coincidences.

Two formations, then, arrived by two different roads: one by immersion, at twelve, and one by grammar, later. I have never had to choose between them. Both still show up in the room whenever I teach.

Emerson Academy began in Seoul in 2015. Latin took it over almost immediately. In 2023 the academy moved online entirely, and what remains is Emerson Latin LLC: an institution with no lobby, no bell, and one instructor. I still teach every course myself, which started out as simply how the academy worked and has stayed that way past the point where anyone would call it a plan. There are Latin tutors in Korea now who were not there in 2015, a few of whom trace their own interest back to a lesson of mine, secondhand, the way these things travel. I notice this the way a man notices a plant he once watered doing well on its own, with some pride, and no further claim on it.

Emerson said the whole job better than I ever will: "The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil." I have tried to build an academy around that one sentence.