Not Your Average Instructor

In the front of the classroom, Jennifer Lockett leans against the table that supports her Macbook. Her thin frame is clad casually in blue jeans, a green sweater, and tennis shoes; the screen on the wall shows a slide titled “Orphism—cosmology to explain human nature.” The class laughs (she just called a book on the history of math a “page-turner”) and she quickly sweeps her shoulder-length, light brown hair behind her ear and returns her hands to her pockets before replying:  “People killing each other over the knowledge that the square root of two is an irrational number? How could that not be fun? I know, I’m nerdy…”

Lockett’s bookishness isn’t news to the students; in class she frequently gets excited over things many of her students couldn’t care less about: architecture, statues, pottery, and stories from ancient Greece and Rome. Lockett is a classical archaeologist and anthropologist; she knows Latin and Ancient Greek, has been on multiple field projects in Europe, and considers herself a Romanist (though she prefers the Greek language to Latin). Her nickname (and web address) is Indiana Jen.

Lockett admits that she fell into anthropology. Originally she wanted to be a marine biologist; she had always had an interest in sharks, and even memorized all their Latin names in elementary school. After graduating high school a year early, she enrolled at the University of Miami, but struggled through her first semester in an honors biology course for science majors. In the spring she took an introductory anthropology course that spurred her to change her major.

She had already planned on double-majoring in history because she was always a history buff, so the switch to anthropology (and her specialty, archaeology) wasn’t too drastic. “My professor was great… She made me work hard, but I always felt like I learned a lot as a result.” The professor Lockett speaks of was Linda Taylor, a primatologist. “I know that she is still there.  A year ago, a student worker called me to ask for a donation… we ended up chatting for a while as she was an anthro minor.  I asked her about Dr. Taylor and she said ‘Yes!  I'm taking her Primatology class right now!  I love her!’  So, apparently she still has a strong, inspired following.”

Lockett is also gaining a following. She currently teaches part-time at both Texas Christian University and Tarrant County College; this fall she taught a five-week course through the TCU Extended Education program. She also substitutes at Fort Worth Country Day school, usually for her husband’s Latin class. A self-described “techno-whore” (especially when it comes to Apple products), Lockett records all of her lectures and posts them as podcasts on iTunes—she is listed right above J-Lo. So far she has 36 subscribers: “I get emails from people who listen to my lectures all across the country. Some people tell me that they play them for their family so they can discuss it together.” Reviews on iTunes support her claim to fame:

“Jennifer Lockett is one of those lucky few—and lucky for her students, too!—who knows her stuff and can present it in a cogent, comprehensible, and interesting way. A pleasure to listen to!” (Corvinus)

“TCU is so lucky to have someone like Ms. Lockett to teach the course” (…)

“Lockett should charge money for these lectures” (Tim from Chicago)

Despite Lockett’s web-recognition, she is not even considered a professor since she teaches part-time and doesn’t have a doctorate; her official title is ‘lecturer.’ She doesn’t plan on becoming a full professor because it requires publishing research. “I really like doing research, but the publication part is such a pain… I like the teaching aspect of my job, and publishing takes away from that.” Still, she hopes to be able to teach in Fort Worth for a long time and is uncertain about going back to fieldwork in the future.

Lockett’s first experience in excavation came as an undergrad during the summer between her sophomore and junior year. “My teacher was against me studying the classical world because she thought it was cliché and hard to get into, so she encouraged me to focus on New World archaeology.” So, Lockett went to Belize and studied Mayan civilization in a six week field school through UT San Antonio. She enjoyed the work, but when she went to Europe the next year she fell in love and couldn’t think of studying anything else.

That year Lockett was 19 and studying at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland for her junior year (she wanted to go somewhere English-speaking, “Or at least they called it English”). For her month-long spring break, she took a solo tour of Europe. She prefers to travel alone so she can follow her own whims; she didn’t even plan the trip but just got a train schedule. “I literally train hopped for four weeks—I was on my own.” In Vienna her stay was much shorter than she wanted because it was so expensive. However, she did get a chance to visit Mozart's apartment and grave marker (Lockett has been playing the piano since she was 4).

In Rome and Prague she stayed much longer than intended. Rome was her favorite destination, though she arrived too late the first night to get a room at the hostel and had to sleep on the porch with two guys from Australia. Lockett realizes now that some of the things she did at 19 were perhaps reckless, but at the time she enjoyed them. “Everywhere I went I knew there was a chance I could be robbed, but Romania was the only place where I actually felt in danger.” She had a weird experience there: she rented a room in the apartment of a lady who used to work for the dictator Ceauşescu. The woman’s cardinal rule was that Lockett must absolutely not bring other Romanians home, and she told Lockett stories about bad things that had happened to other girls who lived with her. On the bright side, there was really good beer in Bucharest for only 5 cents a pint. “Students make fun of me and say I travel based on the cost of beer. That’s not true, though I do know how much beer costs in most places.”

Lockett has been back to Europe many times for varying lengths, from a weekend vacation to three or four months if doing fieldwork. In 2001, when she was in graduate school at UCLA, she worked on the excavation of Horace’s Villa near Licenza, Italy. Other than independent studies in Eastern Europe and the near East, another major excavation was East Lokris in Greece, about two hours north of Athens. “I never found things that other people would think are cool,” Lockett says in reference to pottery and other artifacts that help the team determine a more specific age for a site.

Although Lockett likes to complain about how Egyptologists find all the cool stuff (like solid gold statues), she has been very happy with her digs. Like Lockett’s classroom discussions, things that are exciting for her may not be exciting for others, but according to her there’s more to fieldwork than what you find. “There’s something incredibly satisfying about manual labor… when you’re doing field work you get up at 5am and work until 7 or 8 at night.” Her satisfaction with labor and long days may have been ingrained during Lockett’s childhood in Virginia: “I used to spend my summers on my grandparent's farm.  It was a working farm, and we were 'working' kids…  I can milk a cow and I've been kicked by one.  I also know how dangerous hogs are.”

After finishing her master’s at UCLA, Lockett worked as a paralegal. Her father is a lawyer, so she found legal work throughout high school and college; in Miami, she worked for a firm that represented race car drivers. She made really good money in Los Angeles, but called the job “boring, tedious, and the number of guilty people I helped build a case for is disgusting.” She moved to Texas in 2005 when her husband was offered his job at Fort Worth Country Day, and she lucked out on a position at TCU. She sent her resume in a week before the fall semester began and didn’t expect to hear anything, but the anthropology department had been close to canceling a class due to a professor’s illness and took her up on the offer.

Lockett jumped in and ever since then TCU has been good to her as an adjunct faculty member. She has been able to create her own courses and, since she is the only classicist in the department, there’s no danger that a full time professor will take over her class. Of course there are drawbacks: the lack of job security, low pay, and no benefits. In the future such considerations may lead Lockett to switch to teaching high school, though she doesn’t want to leave the less-censored college level behind. “At the very least, I would like to teach the occasional course here at TCU even if I'm full-time elsewhere.”

For now Lockett has plenty on her plate. She is a big dog lover and has just adopted a bullmastiff named Dixie, so a lot of her free time is spent dog training. She still loves her small dog—a terrier mix named Boudicca after the warrior Queen of the Britons. She’s also a mentor in Big Brothers Big Sisters, and every summer spends seven weeks in Los Angeles as the academic dean of the Center for Talented Youth summer program through Johns Hopkins University. Students go to her for discipline issues. Lockett says “I make socially awkward children cry… which for these kids is by saying I’m going to call their parents.” The program is for gifted middle school and high school children and “it’s basically a place where they can go and be nerdy and accepted.”

Lockett’s father now works for Universal Studios so when she visits her parents in Florida she gets free tickets to the park. Her favorite theme park is Gatorland: “My husband and I are both fans of edutainment, and it’s very edutainment-y.” In her leisure time Lockett likes to play video games, even (as nerdy as it sounds) World of Warcraft. “I’m not as addicted as I could be. There are other people I know who really need to move out of their mother’s basement in that regard.” As an anthropologist she thinks pop culture is a big part of society, so video games and TV shows fascinate her, especially ones like “Heroes,” which feature social concerns (for example: genetic engineering). “You want to know something horrible that I can’t stop watching? ‘The Pick-Up Artist.’ It says a lot about human behavior and our society.”

Society and culture are Lockett’s main interests, which is why she studies the classics. “Every aspect of Western Culture has its roots in the Ancient World… my aim is to encourage students to think critically about the world around them as well as their own lives—the way we construct our society, how we view the people around us, our philosophical and spiritual explorations, etc.” Unfortunately, Lockett’s area of study is slowly disappearing from schools. TCU does not have a strong classics program; the university only offers a minor in Classical Studies. There are also no courses in Latin, a language which is both a gateway to Greek and a means to help students score better on exams like the GRE. Lockett believes the Classics are not only interesting, but essential to success in academics and life. She needs your help to keep the ancient world alive. Take her Classical Archaeology class next semester-or just listen to the podcasts-and find out more.