TEMPESTAS

Chapter 16 of the popular textbook Lingua Latina finds the author very explicitly advocating for his own faith in the events that beset his characters. I'll admit that the manner in which Medus' prayer to Neptune is silenced is funny, but I'm not comfortable with a narrative in a Latin textbook offering proof of Christ's divinity, and so I've adapted the text to include a bit about other religions without giving primacy to any, and rather than allowing the textbook to feel preachy to my students, it'll provide a nice branching-off point to talk about religions under the Roman empire.

Just after Lydia prays to her 'dominus', prompting a dismissive response from her boyfriend, the runaway slave, I have the following:

Lydia: “sed dominus meus est deus!”
Mēdus: “iam satis deōs habeō, et Neptūnus me servāre potest!”
...
Lydia, tollēns manūs ad caelum, Chrīstum invocat, et Mēdus iterum magnā vōce Neptūnum invocat. Omnēs nautae, quī ex multīs terrīs sunt, deōs suōs invocāre incipiunt. Aliī Magnam Mātrem invocant, aliī Sōlem Invictum. Sed vocēs omnium vix audiuntur propter tonitrum.

Don't get me wrong: I would never censor an authentic text. But when a textbook author tries to slip in an inauthentic proof of his own religious beliefs (in this case making it clear that Christ is real and Neptune a figment) I have to draw the line. Nothing in my version prevents a Christian from assuming that Christ stopped the storm, nor does it instruct any of the other students that their faith (or lack thereof) is inferior.

Ancient markup language?

I've begun Rick LaFleur's methodologies class, and I'm sure this blog will see a resurgence as a result of my new focus on matters pedagogical. For anyone who's still following, Eric has been very busy being a professor and obtaining a proper degree (applause all around), while I actually silently left the blog some months back. I'm no longer affiliated with Bryn Mawr College, but the Campus Mawrtius is too much a part of me, so I've come back.

And the first thing I want to tell you about is something I found in reviewing a few sites for my first assignment: a ten year old program for creating your own Latin and Greek pages marked-up for Perseus-style glosses.

I can't believe I didn't know about this already, but now I've got ideas for how this might applied both to homework assignments and in mobile labs (i.e., laptops in the classroom). It's something I've always wanted to be able to do, especially with odd little texts that would never make their way to Perseus. There are contexts in which this is not a crutch, but a tool for confirmation or correction, and I'm looking forward to using it.

Seven Hills Mnemonic

I picked up Robert Harris's Imperium as a little bedtime reading and as I opened to the map of Republican Rome just before the start of the book my eyes passed over the first letters of Quirinal, Viminal, and Esquiline. In a flash I'd read them as QVE, and it wasn't a second before I read the top half of the map as CapitolinvsQVE.

The bottom half gave me AC Palatinvs, but putting these two together in that order didn't quite work, so I decided to take another tack:

What are the three most important hills in the city's history?

Ianicvlvm
AC Palatinvs
CapitolinvsQVE.

This has the advantages of (1) requiring students to memorize only three names (while they can more easily recall the others from the abbreviations), (2) using Latin conjunctions for the abbreviations, reinforcing a bit of the language, and (3) being somewhat visual. It gives the Seven Hills and the Janiculan, an important defense across the Tiber, read in a kind of S shape from bottom to top. I can't help but visualize a map of Rome when I recite this and follow a steady S-shaped trail (Janiculan, then Aventine, Caelian, Palatine, Capitoline, Quirinal, Viminal, and Esquiline).



You can also think of the first line as giving what's west of the Tiber, the second line naming the hills of the southern half of the city, and the third line those of the northern half of the city.

However you break it down, I think it may turn out to be effective and I plan to use it next semester.

O TEMPORA! O FVRES!

The Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC) said pupils are turning to websites and internet resources that contain inaccurate or deliberately misleading information before passing it off as their own work.

The group singled out online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows entries to be logged or updated by anyone and is not verified by researchers, as the main source of information.

(Emphasis added.)

Remember the good old days, when students plagiarized from BOOKS and actually PASSED the exams and wrote respectable papers? And then along came Wikipedia!

Isn't the real problem that students are passing something off as their own (and probably always have?)--not that they're now using a less reliable and more easily identifiable source?

Do we really want to hearken back to the days of unverified theft?

Google Books, however, is beginning to make it more difficult for the old school plagiarists.

NOTE: The best and easiest way to prevent plagiarism is to give students very specific guidelines with a personal response component. I would assign a set number of paragraphs (say 5), with limits as to where the student is expected to report facts or research, and where opinion and reactions should be recorded. Citations are a must. When reading 60 or more essays the uniformity helps in so many ways: you already know what belongs where, and have a better idea which bits should be checked on the internet for plagiarism. But next year I may use www.turnitin.com, as many other teachers do already.

New Latin School in Philadelphia

A really interesting article on the new Boys' Latin School in the Philadelphia Weekly. Here's the beginning:

An ambitious Southwest Philadelphia charter school uses an ancient language as a new formula for learning.

There are minefields on the path to maturity for every young person in this city. But for many young male Philadelphians, the danger runs deeper.

Young men in Philadelphia public schools are more likely than most to live with one parent, have a parent in jail, reside in drug-addled neighborhoods or experience violence. Students in too many Philadelphia public schools can’t be guaranteed basic safety, let alone a decent education.

Enter the Boys’ Latin of Philadelphia Charter School, a new college prep school at 55th and Cedar in Southwest Philadelphia with an ambitious plan to avert the tragedy that defines the city’s public school system. Boys’ Latin’s first batch of students—144 ninth-graders—occupy a 10-room temporary structure as they wait for contractors to finish renovations on the building next door.

Last year there were 11 murders within five blocks of where Boys’ Latin sits. “I worry about the students,” says teacher Paula Sahm, who lives in the Art Museum area of Philadelphia. “I’ll sit and watch the news, and if I even hear Southwest Philly, I get chills.”

Next to the trailer setup is the shell of a former school, once attached to Transfiguration Church, which was destroyed by fire in 2006. Boards cover most of the windows, and pickup trucks occupy most of the adjacent lot. But by next year the school building plans to house 300 Boys’ Latin students, with plans to grow enrollment to 600 by 2010.

The school's website is here.

Wise man say ...

multa legas facito, tum lectis neglege multa;
nam miranda canunt, sed non credenda poetae.

"See to it that you do much reading, and then overlook much of what you've read; for poets sing things to be admired, but not to be believed."

This comes from the famous Distichs of Cato. At least they were famous in past ages. Since it's been established that they were not written by Cato the Elder, they've lost their luster.

They were famous enough even in Byzantine that the great scholar Maximus Planudes wrote a Greek translation (I'm sure I've mentioned it before). It was for centuries a textbook, and was apparently used by Benjamin Franklin as a schoolboy, and later quoted frequently and published by him in translation (though not his own).

I should like to bring selections into the classroom early. The benefits are many: they offer authentic Latin with a long history of readership; they present the meter of epic in self-contained, digestible couplets; they offer a small, manageable context from which one might easily introduce new vocabulary or grammatical concepts; they are generally of intrinsic interest.

Few things are more memorable than maxims, and this collection has the additional merit of having influenced centuries of students, influencing the the makers of the middle ages and beyond. Is there any disadvantage in allowing students to share in this tradition, perhaps to understand the spirit of past ages? They need not agree, or take it as moral council, yet they may still feel connected to the past. And tis collection more points for discussion than "canis latrat" or "Quintus ad terram cadit".

Looking back where we began, I think some of my students could benefit from this advice today, as could many scholars who want to mine poetry for biographical or social data, or to apply theories and produce results.

Communicating in the classroom

Eighty-some years ago a Latin teacher by the name of Wren Jones Grinstead (and what a name it is) wrote a piece for the Classical Journal about the use of projects in the beginning Latin class.

By far the most interesting and provocative part of this most interesting article is the suggestion that we introduce our students to two characters whom they should always keep in mind: Romanus (who knows no English) and Barbarus (who knows no Latin). The argument goes that Language exists in a dualistic mode, between the first and second person, one aiming to be understood, the other to understand.

Now one of the chief reasons for the stiff and silly translations too often offered in our classes lies in the fact that the pupil does not visualize Romanus as the speaker of the Latin sentence, and then in turn make himself the utterer of the same thought to the English- speaking Barbarus in his own vernacular. Hence he is merely solving a puzzle, and his only criterion of success is the teacher's authority; whereas it should be found in the socialization of his own imagination. For the perennial query to the teacher, "Is this right?" the pupil should come to ask Barbarus (or Romanus, as the case may be), "Do you get me?"

This is shockingly good, and I plan to introduce these guys immediately.

(Grinstead, Wren Jones. "The Project Method in Beginning Latin." The Classical Journal 16.7 (1921): 388-398.)

Literature in translation?

I have long wanted a reader in classical literature in translation to build into the early years of my Latin language courses, but have come up empty. Several years ago in the course that put me on the path toward classics (a brilliant course called simply 'Humanities'), one of the two instructors lamented that there wasn't a better or more affordable set of anthologies than the little paperback Penguins by Michael Grant. If memory serves they were boring and scatter-shot to my young college brain, and even if they were not now out of print, I could not see purchasing them for high school students.

Surely I am not alone in wanting something like this to help contextualize the study of Latin, and to help communicate things like values that do not translate from the pages of introductory textbooks.

Has anyone a suggestion?

The times, they aren't a changin'

The following comes to us from "A Professional Debt" by Robert L. Ladd, published in
The Classical Journal, Vol. 30, No. 4. (Jan., 1935), pp. 203-211.

A bit of vocabulary aside this could have been written today.

During the period characterized by the supposed financial suc-
cesses of the twenties, when success was synonymous with the
acquisition of wealth, the subjects of the high-school curriculum
had to justify their position in the schools almost exclusively on
the basis of their practical value in the promotion of this material
end. Many and strange have been the activities of the classroom
to demonstrate the practical value of Latin. For the instructor in-
terested in teaching pupils the language the task has been well-
nigh impossible because of the necessity of making the process
painless, practical, and even delightful. In many cases these ac-
tivities of the classroom have deteriorated into a process of learn-
ing much about Latin and of learning very little Latin. Too often
this process has the same result as in the case of the little tot who
had been ill and was in need of a tonic. The doctor prescribed
quinine. The child was difficult to manage when it became neces-
sary to administer any kind of medicine. The mother seized upon
the happy thought of disguising the quinine by making a pill of it
and placing it in the centre of a luscious cherry. The little girl took
the cherry gleefully and went away eating it. With outstretched
hand she soon returned to her mother, saying, "Mother, I've eaten
the cherry, and here's the seed!" We regret that the essential tonic
of Latin is frequently returned to the teacher untouched, after the
nonessentials have gone the way of the luscious cherry.

Now, once you get past this it's very jarring to read about the threat of child labor laws flooding the classrooms with more students, and the 'problem' of what to do with leisure time now that all classes are seeing a reduction in work hours. Still, that opening is right on.

How do you make kids care?

Admittedly it wasn't an inspired decision, but the other day I started off some of my classes with a piece from Nuntii Latini on the reelection of Pervez Musharraf. I thought that having them work through a current event in Latin would arouse some interest, and expected at least some of the students to recognize Musharraf. Not a single student did, and they found the whole thing incomprehensible without careful guidance and a modern history lesson. One student even asked what 'Pakistaniae' meant, after he failed to find it in his Latin glossary.

So that was a failure.

Today I was reminded just a bit of some of the silly things kids like to hear about when we came across fenestra, and I taught them defenestration. There was so much joy and laughter upon learning a word that means 'to throw someone out of a window', and to be honest I was surprised no one knew the word already. I think maybe I expect too much from them and have missed out on teaching opportunities because of it.

I'd like to hear from anyone who has thoughts on things that capture the interest and enthusiasm of students, however small. Please feel free to comment here.

Latin Rules in Jingles

From the same issue, sent in by one Eva Johnson, a first year student at Ballard High in Seattle, we find a helpful set of rhyming couplets to memorize the dative with special verbs:

Credo, credere, to believe or trust
Faveo, favere, to favor all just,
Pareo, parere, to obey and do right,
Noceo, nocere, to injure in fight.
Studeo, studere, to be eager for a's,
Resisto, resistere, to resist low grades,
Persuadeo, persuadere, to urge or persuade.
To memorize these will be of great aid,
With all these verbs the Dative is used,
But by students of Latin they are often confused.

Any suggestions for other verbs?

The Pedagogical Value of Parody

This exceddingly entertaining time capsule is excerpted from B.L. Ullman's Hints for Teachers (CJ 19.5, p. 330):

Parodies
In the "Hints" for June, 1922, I pointed out that parodies had a distinct teaching value, in addition to that gained from the interest created by them, because they presupposed a thorough knowledge of the passages parodied and thus encouraged reading for thought. Miss Helen S. Conover of the Hillsboro, Ohio, High School sends the following Ciceronian parody by a junior in her school:

How long, O flapper, will you try our patience? How long will your wildness elude us? For what purpose do you display your lip stick so publicly? Do the laments of your mother, the growls of your father, the horrified countenance of your grandmother, and the bold glances of many men move you not at all? Do you not see that your tricks are known and your wishes are made harmless by the knowledge of all who know you? Do you think any one of us is ignorant of what dance hall you visited night before last, what time you came home last night, where you were, who was with you and what exciting lark you planned?

O the times, O the customs! The town knows these things, the families see them, yet they continue. Do they continue? Nay, they even grow worse and worse. Chic flappers draw flasks from wondrous corsages and mark with their eyes what man they are going to lure to ruin. But the brave fathers and mothers lift not one finger to prevent and think they have done enough for their children's souls if they give them more money than they ask for and more clothes than they can wear.

With a few changes it might be relevant today.

Teaching oratio obliqua: A to B, X to Y

In the April 1921 edition of B.L. Ullman's 'Hints for Teachers,' once a regular feature of the Classical Journal, I found the following in which we see that a current pedagogical concern (movement and active learning) was current nearly a century ago as well.

Ullman cites the 'difficulty in the understanding of continuous indirect discourse as we find it in Caesar' which is rooted in 'the failure of the students to understand its workings in English.' He recommends trying the suggestion of L.W.P. Lewis in Practical Hints on the Teaching of Latin (Macmillan, 1919):

He says (p. 64): "Begin with those Indirect Statements only which are clearly reported, and start with the English. The work proceeds like this:—Q 'What is an Indirect Statement ?' —A. (to be obtained) 'An Indirect Statement is a statement made by A to B and reported by X to Y.'

The basic procedure is simple: set two groups of students before the class to put the words into action.

Make A say to B 'The weather is fine,' and X report to Y in the form 'A told B that the weather was fine.' (Here we get a bit of the much recommended movement and action even in Latin.)

So far so good. Now Lewis wants to complicate matters:

Then have another set of boys out and let them arrange another example in whispers for themselves. Put a boy A in charge and he will arrange the parts, so to speak. He will explain what he is going to say to B and will instruct X how to report to Y the statement he makes. Then let them go through it for the class. I call it making a charade, and I always know when I am doing well, as if anything goes wrong in an ordinary lesson with a duller boy (the change of pronouns, for instance, is liable to give trouble, and the tense) there is sure to be a hand up at once with 'Please, sir, may I make a charade for him?' Lastly, we make our A, B, X, and Y report in all sorts of ways, so that the various reported statements begin with, 'He told him,' 'He told me,' 'I told him,' 'I told you,' 'You told me,' etc. Let there be plenty of it. The boys like it, and they soon get to grasp the pronoun changes and other points. Finally we give them the reported statement and let them get back to the original words spoken."

Ullman calls Lewis's book 'reactionary,' though useful in parts, and unsuited to American teachers. But activities of this sort, properly adapted, certainly have their use.

Liveblogging Homeroom

As I sit at my desk lethargic kids wander in and out. Only three have yet taken their seats and each is listening to his iPod, staring blankly at the agenda on the board. It's one day until the final exam and they're feeling uneasy (or worse) at the prospect of answering 250 questions and still having time left to write a translation unseen.

The coffee isn't bad this morning. The administration can't afford the best, but some kind soul among the faculty occasionally brings in little packets of half-and-half in abundance, and that makes all the difference. I suspect that somewhere a 7-11 manager is scratching his head: 'I thought I'd just refilled that.' It's a good thing, too, because it's helping me to forget my hunger and the fact that I haven't brought any money today.

So what's on the agenda today? We'll have no Channel 1, no school news broadcast either, because of the principal's noble effort of promoting reading every Wednesday morning. They'll probably read the latest texts from their friends.

But today it's review. Practice with verb tenses, cases of nouns, and a new game of team translation: the kids with the highest grades will lead teams, but may not write anything. This should help to keep the other kids active while the captains coach. Maybe we should call them coaches instead.

It's just about time for the Pledge, so I'm out.

Notes on Teaching Latin with 'Courses'

More than half a century ago Jacques Barzun wrote, in Teacher in America, something I feel strongly about everyday when I go to work and struggle to teach with the Cambridge Latin Course:

We have all had in our hands these little works, which start off "Wie geht's heute mit dir, teurer Hans?" and go on with chitchat, anecdotes, and pictures of Salzburg. This is chumminess misplaced. Let the teacher say "how do you do" and let the book remain what a book should be -- a systematic exposition of the subject, in which the student can find what he is looking for. Nothing is more exasperating than to have to wonder whether the subjunctive was given together with a description of Bremerhaven or later, with the sad story of Struwwelpeter. Besides, no student is better off for having all the verbs given in bits, half a tense at a time.

Instead of Bremerhaven we have the remains of Pompeii. We're not lucky enough to have Shock-headed Peter, but the ghost of a gladiator makes a brief appearance. The subjunctive will wait for the second or third year, along with probably the ablative and many other useful things. Instead of chitchat we have an unending stream of Latin in the vein of 'See Spot run': servus anulum conspectat. servus anulum capit. servus abit. *yawn*

The 'course' is useful if you have little more Latin than the book will teach you, and even less history and culture.

The problem with courses is that they're proscribed -- teach the genitive if you wish, but the kids won't see one for another year. Every time you step off the course you're bound to wonder whether you should ever step on again.

An Exhortation to Read Better

The following is from Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book. It can be found on pp. 6-10 of the 1940 edition of the book; it is here cited from the 1965 edition, the entirety of which is available online by clicking the title of this post. You can also find the link through the Wikipedia page for 'How to Read a Book'.

I did not discover I could not read until after I had left college. I found it out only after I tried to teach others how to read. Most parents have probably made a similar discovery by trying to teach their youngsters. Paradoxically, as a result, the parents usually learn more about reading than their children. The reason is simple. They have to be more active about the business. Anyone who teaches anything has to.

To get back to my story. So far as the registrar's records were concerned, I was one of the satisfactory students in my day at Columbia. We passed courses with creditable marks. The game was easy enough, once you caught on to the tricks. If anyone had told us then that we did not know much or could not read very well, we would have been shocked. We were sure we could listen to lectures and read the books assigned in such a way we could answer examination questions neatly. That was the proof of our ability.

Some of us took one course which increased our self-satisfaction enormously. I had just been started by John Erskine. It ran for two years, was called General Honors, and was open to a select group of juniors and seniors. It consisted of nothing but "reading" the great books, from the Greek classics through the Latin and medieval masterpieces right down to the best books of yesterday, William James, Einstein, and Freud. The books were in all fields: they were histories and books of science or philosophy, dramatic poetry and novels. We discussed them with our teachers one night a week in informal, seminar fashion.

That course had two effects on me. For one thing, it made me think I had struck educational gold for the first time. Here was real stuff, handled in a real way, compared to the textbook and lecture courses that merely made demands on one's memory. But the trouble was I not only thought I had struck gold; I also thought that I owned the mine. Here were the great books. I knew how to read. The world was my oyster.

If, after graduation, I had gone into business or medicine or law, I would probably still be harboring the conceit that I knew how to read and was well read beyond the ordinary. Fortunately, something woke me form this dream. For every illusion that the classroom can nourish, there is a school of hard knocks to destroy it. A few years of practice awaken the lawyer and the doctor. Business or newspaper work disillusions the boy who thought he was a trader or a reporter when he finished the school of commerce or journalism. Well, I thought I was liberally educated, that I knew how to read, and had read a lot. The cure for that was teaching, and the punishment that precisely fitted my crime was to having to teach, the year after I graduated, in this very Honors course which had so inflated me.

As a student, I had read all the books I was now going to teach but, being very young and conscientious, I decided to read them again- you know, just to brush up each week for class. To my growing amazement, week after week, I discovered that the books were almost brand new to me. I seemed to be reading them for the first time, these books which I thought I had "mastered" thoroughly.

As time went on, I found out not only that I did not know very much about any of these books, but also that I did not know how to read them very well. To make up for my ignorance and incompetence I did what any young teacher might do who was afraid of both his students and his job. I used secondary sources, encyclopedias, commentaries, all sorts of books about books about these books. In that way, I thought, I would appear to know more than the students. They wouldn't be able to tell that my questions or points did not come from my better reading of the book they too were working on.

Fortunately for me I was found out, or else I might have been satisfied with getting by as a teaching just as I had got by as a student. If I had succeeded in fooling others, I might soon have deceived myself as well. My first good fortune was in having as a colleague in this teaching Mark Van Doren, the poet. He led off in the discussion of poetry, as I was supposed to do in the case of history, science, and philosophy. He was several years my senior, probably more honest than I, certainly a better reader. Forced to compare my performance with his, I simply could not fool myself. I had not found out what the books contained by reading them, but by reading about them.

My questions about a book were of the sort anyone could ask or answer without having read the book—anyone who had had recourse to the discussion which a hundred secondary sources provide for those who cannot or do not want to read. In contrast, his questions seemed to arise from the pages of the book itself. He actually seemed to have some intimacy with the author. Each book was a large world, infinitely rich for exploration, and woe to the student who answered questions as if, instead of traveling therein, he had been listening to a travelogue. The contrast was too plain, and too much for me. I was not allowed to forget that I did not know to read.

My second good fortune lay in the particular group of students who formed that first class. They were not long in catching on to me. They knew how to use the encyclopedia, or a commentary, or the editor's introduction which usually graces the publication of a classic, just as well as I did. One of them, who has since achieved fame as a critic, was particularly obstreperous. He took what seemed to me endless delight in discussing the various about the book, which could be obtained from secondary sources, always to show me and the rest of the class that the book itself still remained to be discussed. I do not mean that he or the other students could read the book better than I, or had done so. Clearly none of us, with the exception of Mr. Van Doren, was doing the job of reading.

After the first year of teaching, I had few illusions left about my literacy. Since then, I have been teaching students how to read books, six years at Columbia with Mark Van Doren and for the last ten years at the University of Chicago with President Robert M. Hutchins. In the course of years, I think I have gradually learned to read a little better. There is no longer any danger of self-deception, of supposing that I have become expert. Why? Because reading the same books year after year, I discover each time what I found out the first year I began to teach: the book I am rereading is almost new to me. For a while, each time I reread it, that I had really read it well at last, only to have the next reading show up my inadequacies and misinterpretations. After this happens several times, even the dullest of us is likely to learn that perfect reading lies at the end of the rainbow. Although practice makes perfect, in this art of reading as in any other, the long run needed to prove the maxim is longer than the allotted span.

Greek Numerals - Easy as AIR

I'm still trying to get the hang of posting images with Google's Hello, but after seven attempts here's a little jpeg I made to demonstrate Greek numerals. (I came up with this while covering a study hall as a sub.)


Greek Numerals 

The system incorporates 27 characters from the archaic alphabet, which means the inclusion of digamma (or sometimes stigma), koppa, and sampi. You'll notice that digamma (based on semitic wau) looks similar to and occupies the same position as Latin f. Likewise, koppa with Latin q.

Using this chart is fairly simple. The mnemonic AIR (alpha, iota, rho : αιρ) will help you to remember that these three character represent one, ten, and one hundred. Since there are 27 charαcters, or 9 each for ones, tens, and hundreds, the system allows for numbers as high as 999 (sampi koppa theta).

Numerals are normally marked by a stroke to the upper right (α' = 1), but multiples of 1000 are marked by a stroke to the lower left (,α = 1000).

Remember that these are all multiples: iota is 1 times 10 (10), kappa is 2 times 10 (20). 11 would be iota alpha (ια'), and 12 would be iota beta (ιβ').

Who knew it was that easy?

AP Vergil

I am teaching AP Vergil this year, and I have a student who is trying to write in meter. I check his work, show him his mistakes, and he comes back with more mistakes than before. He is a rather smart guy, and he does not give up easily. I like to see his efforts, but I feel that somehow, his time might be spent better in other Latinic pursuits. I want to encourage him to pursue communication through other means until his vocabulary and his awareness of meter are more consolidated. So, I wrote a little poem for him in dactyllic hexameter. His latin name is Tertullus. I need some feedback.

Tu, Tertulle, loqui nunc visne aut scribere metro?
non facile est mihi simpliciter fandum vacuumque
verbum adipisci, verum est insanum modulate.

How's my meter? Have I missed anything? I am concerned about the use of "metro" and "modulate." Does the poem make sense to you? Any suggestions for word choice? Thanks!
Magister Coke

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.

Magister for a Day

Well, in answer to Coke's query, teaching didn't go bad at all on Friday. But I suspect it's part of the reason I haven't posted anything in a few days.

I came away from the experience with a nasty cold or flu or something which I might have picked up from my girlfriend, but I think the collective germs a few hundred middle and high school students added to the soup and aggravated what my immune system had been holding at bay.

That said, the day was largely a success. Only one piece of paper was thrown my way, and it missed. Most of the students were so polite that they actually thanked me for being there. But the one thing that really surprised me was how different two classes in the same grade level could be so different. When the tests were finished, one class sat and drew pictures quietly, another erupted into a party, and the third passed notes and cast sly glances my way as if they were up to something but nothing came of it.

I'll let you guess which class threw the paper.

I was a little disappointed in how I handled one class, but I think some of that had to do with the assignment. Not that I'm second-guessing the teacher. I'm sure it works for her. Students were put into groups of 2 and asked to translate 2-3 sentences of a short mythic narrative. The problem was that the students were only concerned with the sentences they had been assigned and made a number of mistakes that they wouldn't have made had they known the context. When I went through the text with them it was clear that those who hadn't gone yet were so focused on re-reading their sentences that they took nothing away from what came before. When I had occasion to correct mistakes and explain why they were mistaken I was very often met with confusion or absolute disbelief, as when students insisted that a third declension dative was a genitive because it didn't end in -o.

Again, it may have had a lot to do with the fact that I wasn't their regular teacher. They know that I'm not coming back tomorrow, that I'm not giving them a grade. They can slack off for a day when the teacher's away, and maybe their teacher has a way of pulling this stuff out of them that I don't.

But I felt that if I were given a class of my own day in and day out I could make some real progress. It wasn't at all terrifying, so I've passed that test.

Another crazy thing is going back to middle school or high school and realizing just how young these kids are. I seemed so much older to myself when I was their age. It reminds me of my youth, and those memories are downright comical now.

I have a few more days lined up already and will be on call if anyone needs a sick day. The department head has offered to help me find a job in the area if I'm interested, and if that turns into anything I already have ideas.

Coke was talking about bringing in real Latin and I think I would like to try the Colloquia of Erasmus among other things.

But that's a long way away.