one prof's approach to Latin

The following was sent to Latinteach [http://nxport.com/mailman/listinfo/latinteach] by AM of Tufts U and is reprinted here with her permission. It is a look at a university class, a typical class where students are most likely just trying to get their foreign language credits done and over with, and who already have had certain notions about Latin ingrained in their wee heads, like we've all had done. Read this and then I want to comment on it:

***
I'm teaching Latin 3 this term. It's a class of about 12 (it's at 9:30
in the morning; most people *really* preferred the 1:00 section!),
including some people who started Latin here at Tufts and some who took
it in high school and are continuing here. Prior background therefore
all over the map.

I assigned the new reader by Ann Raia, Cecelia Luschnig, and Judith
Sebesta, "The Worlds of Roman Women," [http://www.pullins.com/Books/01303WorldsofRomanWomen.htm] because it looked like a good
variety of writing about daily life, especially women's life. There are
lots of notes including vocabulary, grammar, and historical or cultural
background.

Yesterday we were to talk about a selection from Quintilan (Inst. 1.4,
6), where he says children should hear good Latin right from the
beginning, so their nurses and especially their mothers should speak
well; he also points out that this is not unreasonable, since various
women like Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, have been highly eloquent.
The passage is about 90 words long.

I split the class up into 3 groups of 4 and asked them to discuss what
assumptions Quintilian was making -- what cultural things or values he
was taking for granted and assumed his readers would, too. (Remember,
this is a college class; in their other classes, they are used to
asking questions like this about a text in English.) I figured we'd
spend about half the period in groups, then come together for global
discussion. I planned to circulate through the groups to be available
to answer questions -- in particular, if there was a point of grammar
they couldn't work out together.

So far, so good, right? Sounds pretty normal.

But I got to the second of the three groups and one of the students said
there was *no way* she could answer questions like that with reference
to the Latin passage. From the introductory note, sure. From a similar
essay in English, no problem. But not from a text in Latin -- she would
look at it and simply not understand anything, even if she could say
something intelligent about the grammar of every word. General
agreement within the group. The other groups quickly stopped their own
discussions and started listening in.

I pulled the groups together and asked them if they felt they had read
the text. No, not really. Did you understand it? No, not really. Did
you translate it? Sheepish assent from some of them; I've been trying
to get them to avoid translating, and certainly never to write out a
translation. (Hoyos, Rule 5, Sub-Rule: "Do not translate in order to
understand. Understand first, *then* translate.") But even the ones
who turned to translation as an approach to the text did not feel they
understood the result.

Turns out that nobody in the class believed in the possibility of
understanding Latin. They all thought that what you're supposed to do
is translate Latin into English -- period. Latin class is all about
grammar, nothing else; if you're doing a unit on Roman culture, or
Quintilian's assumptions about women, you have readings in English for
that. Now I'm *sure* that their previous teachers probably never *told*
them this, and in fact some of them were probably given something very
much like Hoyos's Rules from their earliest exposure to Latin. I've got
students here who started out with Ecce Romani or the Cambridge Latin
Course as well as the ones who learned from Wheelock in our own
program. But somehow, they all seem to have internalized the idea that
a Latin text is a puzzle to be decoded, not a communicative act.

Most of them were quite willing to *try* the strange new things I was
asking for, but they generally felt they couldn't possibly do it.

Class ended in a state of general aporia.

I figured it couldn't hurt to try something new. This morning I brought
in the first two paragraphs of the Perseus story from Ritchie's Fabulae
Faciles. (On line in a zillion places, notably at Project Gutenberg.)
I glossed a couple of words I figured they wouldn't know, in Latin, and
appended a handful of questions like "quis est Perseus? estne vir an
puer? quis est mater eius?" -- reword-the-text type questions rather
than deep literary points.

I started by saying we were throwing out the previously announced
homework assignment. (One of my classes last year suggested that if
they get the homework a day or two in advance, they can budget time
better; I thought that was pretty reasonable, so ever since I've tried
to put tonight's assignment *and* tomorrow night's on the board at the
start of each class.) I'd been using a grammar review book along with
the reader, but I think at the moment its exercises are too hard and are
encouraging bad habits. Instead, they are to summarize the whole
Perseus story by writing one Latin sentence for each of the 11 Latin
paragraphs; I gave them a link to the on-line text. I then passed back
homework and collected the next set, then said something like:
"Incipiamus. Decem minutas habetis; legite hanc fabulam et respondite
ad inquisitiones quas in papela invenietis." Although I give lots of
Latin examples and paraphrases in class, I usually speak a lot more
English. They were a bit surprised to hear two or three connected
sentences that were obviously instructions they were supposed to follow,
but any student knows that when the professor hands you a piece of
paper, you just start reading what's on it -- so that was easy enough.

At the end of the 10 minutes, I said, and wrote on the board, "Licet
vobis respondere aut latine aut anglice." Then we went through the
story sentence by sentence paraphrasing it in Latin. Quis est Perseus?
Est filius Iovis. Cuius casus est nomen "Iovis"? Ita, est genitivi;
quid est casus nominativus, casus rectus? Ita, Iuppiter. Scitisne
omnes Iuppiter? Bene. And so on for the rest of the class period.

I was afraid they would panic, but in fact they were enthralled. Most
of them even tried to formulate answers -- even questions! -- in Latin.
I didn't use any English myself, but I drew lots of pictures. (And I
made some grammatical mistakes, but I just kept blasting on through;
this was not the time to be fussy about it.)

In the last two minutes, in English, I explained that they'd just
*understood* a whole bunch of Latin, coming at them too fast to be
translated. See, guys, you *can* do it. I plan to discuss the rest of
the Perseus story more or less similarly in the next class, then perhaps
return to the Quintilian passage they were having trouble with, and have
them work on expressing it in simpler Latin. If it takes two class
periods to do that for a 90-word passage, so be it; I don't have a set
curriculum I have to cover in this class, I just have to help them learn
to read better.

Half the class came up to me afterwards with the most enthusiastic
thanks. I was very surprised. One poor fellow (who is actually one of
the best-prepared, from what I've seen so far) said this was the *first*
class he'd *ever* had in which he'd heard Latin being spoken!

Here are some of the conclusions I'm drawing from this:

-- I need to speak the language in class a *whole lot* more, both here
and in my beginning Greek class. (harder, since I'm less practiced and
less confident about speaking Ancient Greek)
-- I need to find or concoct materials for extensive reading. I don't
think I can just send them to the library or the web, since (a) most of
what they'll find has a fairly large vocabulary and English notes; (b)
it's hard for them to assess what's easy enough, and if they guess wrong
they're apt to assume the problem is them, not the level of the text.
Maybe I'll see if there's anything suitable in one of the old Dauphin
books that I can copy.
-- Then I need to make a bridge between Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles and
the rest of Latin literature. Perhaps the King Arthur bits from
Geoffrey of Monmouth would be a good place to start.

Am I missing anything here? Am I about to traumatize this class
utterly, or ruin them for further Latin study? Or is there a chance
that they really will learn to read? What have you guys done with this
kind of class?

My syllabus is at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/~amahoney/lat3_f05.html ,
if anyone's curious.
***

Now here's the thing: if we start training ALL FUTURE TEACHERS to teach in this manner, not necessarily every day, but that it is part of the teacher's bag of tricks, then we could begin to change how Latin is viewed by students, educators, parents and administrators.

The only teachers and professors that we can change right now are those that already know and feel that teaching the way they are teaching just doesn't feel right somehow. Those that have decided that they know it all and are doing it the only way it should be done, like my colleagues who think it's more important to perfect declining a noun than learning how to read in word order, will not be receptive to change.

But the new teachers and new students ARE and WILL BE receptive.

You have to ask yourself, do you really want your classes at the advanced level to be about nothing more than going over the previous night's lines?

Do you want to be the only language teacher on campus that does not have as his or her goal to develop a lifelong learner? And, I might add, developing a lifelong interest in the Romans or in writing English well is NOT THE SAME as being a lifelong learner of Latin. I'm sorry, it doesn't count.

And, yes, we have it difficult because even if you go to Rome you aren't going to speak a lot of Latin unless you run into Father Foster. You might read a bunch of inscriptions though. I sure did. Loved noting the vowel and consonant shifts in the later ones. But the written literature, well, that can be found with ease online. But how many of our students know that there's more to Latin than just Vergil, Caesar, Cicero, Ovid and Catullus? How about later Latin? There's tons of it online just waiting for people to read it. Focus Press and Bolchazy-Carducci have made a wide variety of readers available.

What Latin have you been reading in your spare time? (I can honestly say I've been reading some epigrams, albeit in a Loeb, but reading the Latin all the same and broadening my vocabulary in ways that would probably shock my mother. ha!)

And let me just add that utilizing Latin to comprehend Latin by means of questioning or just working on the art of reading from left to right isn't just a chick thing, even though it seems to me that the main proponents of it might well be female teachers and professors (I'm thinking of NancyLl and AnneM here, as well as myself). We're not trying to be touchy feely. Perhaps it's because we aren't afraid to look the fool if things go wrong? I don't know. I always figure that I can't learn anything unless I take that big risk and try something that is quite a reach.

Here's what I do know. I know that I grew up on drill and kill memorization of forms. I never was taught how to read from left to right. I always felt that perhaps I just wasn't that bright since I couldn't really read Latin. No one disillusioned me of that either. It was stumbling upon the writings of Dexter Hoyos and what eventually became _Latin: How to Read it Fluently_ (found here: http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~glawall/cane.htm) that made all the difference for me and my whole view of what I really could do with Latin.

And the process of retraining students, like Anne is trying to do above, to overcome their prejudices and learn to READ the Latin will never be easy. BUT it will be REWARDING because in the end you won't have just covered the lines, you would have read literature.