Latin in danger/where's the real problem

This was from a discussion on the Latinteach list. I think sometimes we don't realize that Latin closures aren't just due to not enough Latin teachers OR ignorant principals/administrators. We are, in fact, often our own worst enemy because of how we promote Latin.

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> In Rogueclassicism for 7th I read an article about Latin being in
> danger.
> Throughout the articles, Latin was referred to as being ancient.
>
> Even if you do not go along with me in saying that Latin is still in
> active use today, I ask colleagues to correct such comments and expand
> their defence of the language on the grounds that more Latin is
> available to us
> since the Romans than during. Latin is worth-while studying
> for Erasmus
> and Buchanan, never mind Cicero and Virgil.

I don't disagree with you in general, but what we are required to teach in our curricula is, in general, the ancient authors.

The arguments against the usefulness of a dead language are faulty because I know that most students who take Spanish, French, German, American Sign Language, etc etc will rarely use it after school. Sad but true. So isn't that useless too? My siblings both took Spanish. To my knowledge neither developed any proficiency. I certainly have heard more Spanish from my mother than my siblings. They haven't traveled anywhere (to my knowledge) where they actively used it, and they certainly never spoke it to each other.

I went to Rome and read monuments voraciously. When I'm around someone who likes using oral Latin, I even try to speak it (badly, I might add).

Do we need to make Latin more relevant somehow? More demonstrably useful?
Let's admit it, the majority of our students don't sit around reading Latin in their spare time. Perhaps because we don't make teaching explicit reading skills--both intensive and EXTENSIVE--we are shortchanging our students and thus stunting the opinion of Latin's worth.

But for anyone who has watched The West Wing, we have seen a fictional president who can spout Latin AND understand the significance of history, can ask why the Romans could say CIVIS ROMANUS SUM and command respect and fear, and yet we cannot do similar. The West Wing, certainly the early seasons, demonstrates what truly good writing is all about. My favorite opening sequence is from the episode "Galileo" and if I ever teach English, that episode will be played when I try to explain what good writing and good speeches are all about. But I digress.

And for all of my love of Vergil, I'm beginning to wonder what I missed by not reading much Cicero (to be remedied this summer), and taking the time to understand inside out what the Roman training for speaking was really like.
I'd love, for instance, to take a course on declamations....boy, can you imagine doing that in Latin now??!

We have to market the ancients and frankly we aren't doing as good a job of it as I think we could. We take the easy road, and give people what we think they want: SAT verbal scores, and thus a more likely acceptance to the college of the student's (parents') choice. So what.

A couple of years ago I had discussed putting together a Why Latin brochure based on why it is important to read Latin in the original, to understand that translations just don't capture all that is in the Latin. And in these quotes we could include medieval and Renaissance Latin. And you are right, these eras are well worth reading, but we are never going to get students to read them PLUS the required authors unless we think about how to train our students to read extensively.

And part of that will be teaching them to abandon looking up every darn word in the dictionary, as well as having to parse every single structure the first time it's met. Read and reread sentences and paragraphs to get the whole feel, to get the gist. Reread and realize the context tells you more than you think, gives you the vocabulary more often than not.

And then we need to make a wider variety of easier texts available--perhaps some of the later Latin. Should students not have reading logs/journals like they need in English class?

Is it Latin that's in danger, or is it outdated teaching styles that have failed to recognize the true problem--that an ability to conjugate and decline and parse and recognize English derivatives does not guarantee an ability to truly read Latin?

Food for thought.

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The discussion continued, and I added this after people expressed their concern at my unemployment (and could I please move to their area?!):

Thanks to all of you who have emailed to express your concern for my unemployment. If I could move, if I were single, you know I'd pack up and move to wherever was the best offer. Ha! But family reasons keep me here.

As I have spoken elsewhere, the real problem with program closures is not the ignorance of administrators, nor is it simply the lack of teachers. It is how we have dealt with the teacher shortages for the last decade or more.

Any time a program is without a teacher and one cannot be found, classics departments look at their grad students and convince one to step in. But the thing is, a love of Latin does not make you a good teacher. It can mean you are eventually a good teacher, but it's not enough.

Worse than that, middle school programs (often the ones that are vacant) are assumed to be undesirable either because the level of Latin is too low or the discipline issues too great. It is considered a fluff job, but the most damage can be done at this level. If you don't set a firm foundation with the basics, then those students will do poorly at the high school level. And if they struggle in Latin 2, how many of those kids will end up in AP Latin?

I am living proof that you can teach middle school Latin, teach it effectively, and even teach it to inner city kids. It takes understanding classroom management AND cognitive development. Grad students know their Latin, but they don't know classroom management nor cognitive development in most cases. So we who send those grad students out SET THEM UP FOR FAILURE.
And often we lose a future teacher in the process. THIS IS WRONG.

We need to be actively recruiting from our students during National Latin Teacher Recruitment Week. And, if we know our university programs just can't offer the training that is needed because of constrictions out of their control, fine. Send those students to the ACL Institute, a Cambridge Workshop, etc.

I'm doing a preconference workshop at ACL in a few short weeks (eegads!!!) with Nancy Llewellyn called Teacher Prep. We intend to cover EVERYTHING that we think a teacher really needs to know but doesn't necessarily get the training for.

So if you know of a grad student that has been talked into taking a teaching position, encourage him/her to come to ACL. It can make the difference between having a stop-gap measure or a lifelong teacher of Latin.

And if you are a trainer of teachers at the university level, there will be a panel discussing certification issues from the university standpoint that is being led by Elizabeth Keitel of APA and which I will also be involved with.

There are no job openings nearby here in Austin because we have closed 2 middle school programs in the last 4 years. It's about to be 3 programs. One program has been on the edge of closing for a half dozen years because inexperienced, unprepared teachers were put in the classroom who didn't know how to approach middle school teaching. When programs close in a large district, it effects the others. We are a community and if we don't take care of our community we eventually hurt ourselves.
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Just this morning I met with the local Latin teachers. We were planning for next year, discussing certamen workshops/tournaments, area JCL (and who was writing which test), state, other issues. JCL doesn't have to be your *thing* and you don't have to do it big at your school (hey, I never did because I have family issues that come first, but we did play certamen, etc). We can't put on good tournaments unless we ALL work together. When teachers in big cities are not involved with their colleagues in the planning and executing of JCL functions, everyone loses.

But let me also add that having a Latin club and going to tournaments and such give you an opportunity to network with your parents and to build stronger ties to your students. If you don't have this because you don't want to do JCL, then don't complain when your program is under threat.

I'm serious.

A program nearly closed at the rich school district a few years back and the current teacher of the time came to me in a panic (via email) asking for my help. I knew him only because he taught my nieces. He never went to a Texas Classical Association meeting (which are usually here in Austin), never took kids to competition (though he would have had winning teams with the talent he was pulling from), never went to any conferences of any sort that I know of. Nothing wrong with bringing home a trophy every now and then or writing an announcement about how students did at the weekend tournament in order to keep Latin in the public eye.

As teachers we serve students, parents and the community. If you are only teaching Latin because you love it and teaching is the only job where you can indulge what you love even if it means you have to "put up with" students, then you are in the wrong job.

And I've said it before, better to have fewer good programs which give Latin a good name than more poorly run bad programs that make people write articles about why anyone would want to student a dead language.

more on how we promote Latin and thoughts on Cicero

I was mildly taken to task for my pro-ancients stance in my notes to Latinteach/previous blog entry. What about those who enjoy learning more about English? Grammar, derivatives, etc?? What about people who take Latin for those reasons??

Well...I probably stuck with Latin to begin with for all of those reasons. I liked finally understanding who/whom. Once I really started paying attention to derivatives, I liked that too. I liked morphology. I liked the secret code aspect.

I HATED TO READ. Ok, maybe not hate, but I never felt inspired about it. Which was ok, because I never felt that inspired to read things in English when I was in school. Oh sure, I was a good little student, but I wasn't doing a lot of reading for pleasure--certainly not like I do now. I mean, now I have two or three books going: I'm rereading Course of Honor (Lindsey Davis), reading a bit of Cicero in translation, reading Lingua Latina (in Latin), and I have an article somewhere I wanted to read about creativity being a habit of the mind.

When I was younger, I wasn't that interested. I was usually doing creative stuff. I did some calligraphy; I played piano (not that well, but well enough to enjoy it myself); I rode my bike all over San Antonio. But I didn't have my nose in a novel all that often. Short stories, maybe. Scripts maybe as well. But nothing long.

And here was all this Latin to read. Except that we weren't reading Latin, we were decoding it or translating it. We were NOT reading it.

So I clung to what I liked because I didn't know there was anything else to like.

And I fear we have a generation or two of Latin teachers who probably were probably not much different in their approach toward Latin. I know colleagues that don't want to teach advanced Latin because they are no longer comfortable with it, if they ever were. Oh sure, if they had hours of free time like they had in college to translate every single word, carefully parsed, into English. But we're all adults now with frantic lives, for the most part. Ok, mine is, that's for sure.

So we have people who stick to this love of Latin for its side benefits of helping English. And I can't help but wonder if this is because they never got to where they could really ENJOY *READING* Latin? I'm not there yet. Hey, I'll be very honest about that. I can't just sit down and easily and comfortably read any Latin author. Oh, I read Martial in small doses, but in a Loeb. (Mind you, I noted one that I'm sure is translated wrong--probably artistic license--but I wouldn't translate it that way.) Reading...who gets to a point with a BA in Latin who can read with comfort? Who has been taught explicit reading skills for Latin? Oh, I suppose the people at U of Michigan are teaching it, but I haven't seen anything of the sort at my alma mater, but then what do I really know?

I know this. I know if we taught Latin at least with a goal of learning to read from left to right, learning to read sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, and not word by word, stopping to grab a dictionary the first time we see something new, we might develop readers. I know if we could figure out how to get students writing sooner as opposed to doing exercises and forms we might also build up more linguistic confidence.

There might be all sorts of side benefits from Latin, but the ONLY WAY we can really sell a DEAD LANGUAGE (and no one get their knickers in a twist because I've called it dead!) is if we talk about the importance of communicating to those who are dead as well. The wisdom of the ancients shouldn't come in sound bites that can be printed on posters. The secrets of true communication shouldn't be revealed (or attempted to be revealed) through translations.

And as long as we're teaching our students to do no more than 10-20 lines of independent reading at a go, we'll never do more than teach sound bites.

With luck I'll be at a new school next year. I might even have to teach out of a textbook different from Cambridge. One thing I know, I have to do things differently myself. I can't just talk the talk. If I want students to write more, I have to figure out how to make that more doable for them and still gradable for me. I want to do a reading log, in Latin. Not sure how. Now sure how to grade. Not sure of anything.

I do know we do ourselves no favors by not facing these issues honestly. If the goal of a French class is to ultimately get a student to a point of fluency that would allow him or her to function in France--to read newspapers, literature, hold conversations, and write--then we need to consider similar.

I haven't read much Cicero. Suddenly I'm interested. Can you imagine writing letters to Cicero? Why not? You could pretend to reply to one of his letters taking on the persona of the person he wrote to. How about discussing some philosophical thread in Latin? Picking apart a defense in Latin?

Oh, I don't know. I suppose I'm rambling now.

I do know this: we can't settle for the same. I want my students to be SIGNIFICANTLY SUPERIOR Latin students compared to what I was. I want them to feel able to take more than one Latin course per semester at college. I want them to learn how to READ READ READ.

And then let them be whatever they want after that. Doctors, lawyers, politicians, graphic design artists. But let them form a PROPER opinion of what Latin is about, not that it's only for SAT scores and English skills. Otherwise, guess what? We LOSE all the arguments for keeping Latin. Because SAT scores and English skills can be had elsewhere.

But learning how to READ the language and communicate with those from centuries gone by who want and need to speak, THAT is our argument.