Finally getting the chance to teach

Teaching has been great so far. I don't mind the extra cash (which will soon enough cease to be extra and will have, somehow, to pay the rent). But my favorite part is when I can bring something to a lesson unplanned, moments when I can spontaneously bring to the students things from my experience with real Latin that has relavance for what they're learning and which actually catches their interest. I like to tell the girls about derivatives, word formation, or the relationship between Latin idiom and the romance languages. For example, the 8th graders were surprised to learn that egregius literally describes someone as standing apart from the flock, and the 10th graders should remember the impersonal use of placet with the dative now that they know it survives even today in French (s'il vous plaît, from si vobis placet).

Just yesterday I started tutoring a local high schooler who's already taking Latin and French and studying Italian and German on his own. He had been begging his father for some time to find him a tutor in Greek. I've started him on Chase and Phillips, and after the first session he's doing lessons 3 and 4. When I showed him the conjugation of eimi he recognized the formation from the cognate forms in Sanskrit.

This is going to be fun.