Amy Rosevar teaches Latin at Creek and remains the figurehead of the program. In the Latin department, Rosevar teaches AP Latin, Latin 3/4 Honors, and CP Latin. For each of these subjects, she is the sole teacher. Now, she’s been awarded the 2024 Merens Award for her achievement in the field.
Rosevear has won several awards in her 21 years of teaching; she was named the Most Outstanding Latin Teacher in 2008, the Colorado Latin Teacher of the Year in 2019, received an Ovatio from the Classical Association of the Middle West and South in 2015 and received Teaching Excellence title at the Pre-Collegiate Level in 2020.
According to those, he’s always willing to put in extra work with other Latin teachers at the Colorado Classics Association, which helps advocate for the study of classics.
She found that Latin was the route for her, so she taught that instead of biology. This turned out to be a good choice for her, resulting in her becoming an award-winning Latin teacher.
“When I went to college, I was planning to be a biology major and be a geneticist. But when it was in a chemistry class freshman year I had this whole epiphany of how this isn’t what I wanted, and that I’ve always wanted to be a teacher as a kid,” Rosevear said.
Rosevear was awarded the Merens Award because she has been elected to two terms as secondary-level president due to her leadership in the Colorado Classics Association being in office with President Jared Polis.
“She deserves this award and what she’s won,” Colorado Governor Jared Polis said in a press release about the award.
While Rosevear teaches Latin at Creek, she also works with college students and other Latin professors to help promote Latin to students and communities. She tries to keep her work outside of Creek separate, but she hopes to also use her awards to bring in new Latin students.
“I’m trying to appreciate the awards as a way to promote and celebrate [Latin],” Rosevear said.
Rosevear isn’t the biggest fan of attention but tries to get it to help her. Even in her attempts to be humble, she still tries to get news about the Latin program out to the upcoming students. She believes that the way to get the Latin program out to students is for students to tell each other about it, and it helps that she’s an award-winning teacher.
“The awards have been a challenge for me because it’s just weird having outside attention. I don’t even try to brag them to students because I just don’t think they need to know, but I might try to use them to bring in students to Latin,” Rosevear said.
Rosevear believes Latin is important to any student’s future education, especially because it can help with spelling and grammar, as well as history subjects. She likes to teach Latin because it can help students in other areas of life.
“It’s the basis of about 60% of our English words. So when you learn Latin, you know those word roots that can help you learn more advanced English words,” Rosevear said.
Rosevear being an award-winning teacher demonstrates to her colleagues and students her success, but besides all that, she has worked for everything she has gotten and hopes to affect new students every year with her teaching.
“To see all that work lead to something and impact [students’] education and be something that they will hold on to feels special,” Rosevear said.
