About
Nathalie Roy

When I was in the 4th grade, I desperately wanted to be a paleontologist - I dug up anything and everything I could, read the Childcraft Encyclopedia volume on prehistoric animals nightly, had a collection of rocks, and kept a human femur in my bedroom (the heirloom of a distant relative). One summer day, when my mother told me that "they had already dug up all the dinosaurs," I was crushed. I accepted the reality as it had been presented and moved on to other interests.

In college, in a beginning Latin class, I was once again intrigued with the thought of studying the past, but this time, through literature. I've been teaching Latin ever since. Teaching kids how to read and enjoy the literature of the ancient Mediterranean world was exciting to me, but my lessons about ancient Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius were always my favorite. After years of teaching Latin, something was missing for me. I found myself living for the Girl Scout meetings I led for my daughter's troop in which we got to make things, build stuff, and learn by doing. In my Latin classes, we were on a strict track leading to Advanced Placement so we had very little time for hands-on projects. No matter what method I tried (CI, reading, grammar-translation), Latin was always about the minutiae of language, and I perceived, in myself and my students, the need for something more comprehensive.

And then everything changed. A few years ago, when STEM found its way into the school where I had taught for decades, I decided to try offering an elective that I myself would want to take. I could include all the weird Roman archaeological stuff I wanted to research. That's how my Roman Technology class was born. In this class, we reproduce the products and processes of ancient Roman daily life through experimental archaeology. By using the methods and tools of the Romans, students learn how they lived and thought about their surroundings in a very hands-on way.

I now teach at a school with a diverse student body enthusiastic about STEM and making. I've developed another class called Classical Myth Makers in which we use classical mythology as inspiration for maker projects. Students interpret many different aspects of mythology by making objects from the stories.

Although I still teach Latin, Roman Technology and Myth Makers are the major focus of my work. Students of any educational background can take these classes and be successful.

And I still question my mother to this day about that dinosaur conversation, but she has no memory of it. Why she told me such an untruth I may never know. But the better question is why I believed her. If students have no idea what they are capable of, they may never find out. My classes help kids figure it all out through hands-on discovery of the classical world.