requiring or not requiring principal parts, etc.

[ginlindzey]

The following is from a post I made to the Latinteach list in response to someone saying they were thinking of only making students learn the 2nd and 3rd pp only. I kind of waffled on a bit, as usual, but that's what I do.

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>1. The first principal part is what they will need to look up a verb in a dictionary.
>2. With irregular verbs, you can't always predict the first principal part from the infinitive. "Ire" -- io?
>3. If they don't learn the fourth principal part, how are they going to recognize it when it is used adjectivally, or in an ablative absolute; and how are they going to read the perfect/pluperfect/future perfect passive? Perfect participles are only predictable in the first conjugation.

I don't teach all the principal parts right away with CLC, but once the infinitive is learned, then I do require the first 3 and expose them to the fourth and eventually require the fourth. 

But with that said, I may switch to teaching all four once I get to the infinitives, esp now that I'm teaching high school and my pace is doubled. 

I do agree with the above--students need the first form for dictionary work, whenever they do that. And in fact, they'll eventually need all the forms in great measure because of how Latin has traditionally been taught and organized in grammars and references. And that's fine. 

I don't, for instance, teach full declensions until all have been met, but I also do NOT leave the students with nothing to "hang" endings on. I have the model sentences that I use that have been discussed in the past. (For more on that, search the archives or my blog or wait for another posting on it.) I do not leave students trying to organize and sort endings on their own. They need help with organizations. 

Likewise, I don't just say "memorize the perfects" before we do principal parts (since they start appearing by stage 6) but give them a mnemonic device to recognize them (vLsux-ed; L=long vowel).
But eventually, I do noun charts and principal parts as their knowledge of how the language works expands. I show them that if they master one chart (basic endings of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd) that they can handily deal with pronouns and other such things. 

With verbs on quizzes I will ask for the 1st 3 principal parts for the first few stages in dealing with infinitives and such, but once participles are being snuck into the stories more as we near stage 20, I do require 4th principal parts as well, and certainly by that time they have been taught how to use a dictionary and look up principal parts as needed--or, more likely,--how to think backwards to guess what the probable 1st principal part is. 

But here's something else to consider: just because whatever text you use doesn't introduce a form at a certain time doesn't mean you shouldn't teach it. However, making students memorize something without USING IT in some form or fashion means they probably won't retain it. This is where ORAL LATIN comes in handy, as well as written instructions that you could put on the board or on your agenda. At least, if nothing else, tie derivatives to it. Just SUPPORT what you teach and require. 

Anytime I decide I want to rock the boat and do things my own way and NOT the way of the book, I ask myself: 1) is it necessary now? 2) when it is necessary, will it be a problem to teach then or would it be better if they saw it now? and 3) IF THE STUDENTS LEAVE ME and go to another teacher, will they be able to cope? That is, I used to NOT teach full declensions in Unit 2 but just did my funky sentences, but the end result was that they weren't fully prepared to deal with how their new teacher at the high school taught. So was I being fair to them by teaching them in my own way? I now use the Endless Noun Ending song once all the cases are met. They hate learning it at first and having the endings in an abstract chart really bothers some students, so I also still use my model sentences. They like those because they tie morphology to meaning directly in the context of a sentence--the bare charts do not.

I know that if students leave me they may end up with teachers that want them to be able to decline or conjugate anything. Most of my students should be able to do those things, but they are not the focus of my teaching. I focus on building reading skills and tying morphology and vocab straight to the readings--not things to be learned in isolation. And while from time to time this year I pondered whether, especially with my Latin 2's and 3's using Ecce, I should do more work on forms and such, my students told me that actually they learned so much more from me than the previous teacher--and I can only guess that was because I was looking at the whole language and not just the pieces. It's not that I didn't require an understanding of endings; I just didn't require much in the way of composition. (Something I want to ponder this summer.)
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For new/future teachers, such things may have never even been an issue for you, or you never considered not learning things the way you did learn them.

For instance, if you learned Latin via Wheelock's Latin (http://www.wheelockslatin.com), the whole idea that you *wouldn't* learn all the details of vocabulary probably never crossed your mind.  Surely being able to discern whether you had a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd declension noun and then to decline it is something *crucial* to the learning of Latin, esp at the beginning. Surely learning principal parts is also *crucial*.

Maybe.

I don't say to ignore them and let students *absorb* them.  But consider the number of people who always thought that Latin was way too difficult, too many endings to learn, too much to remember, too much to decode--and, ohmigosh, translating is the worst!  There are always students who say they'd rather just do transformational exercises and skip the readings.

BUT WE ARE TEACHING LATIN TO READ LATIN.  Yes, we are.  So consider what it is you really need to read Latin at particular levels.

Do you need to be able to fully decline a noun in order to read simple Latin?  To fully conjugate a verb?  3rd person is the most frequent verb ending in Latin texts--can't we just learn that first?  And, of course, the answer is yes.  Plenty of more modern courses--CLC, OLC, Ecce, and Oerberg's _Lingua Latina_.

The real question in my mind is do you know how to teach *reading*?  What do you do to support learning how to read Latin in word order, left to right?  Because let's face it: most anyone can do the rote memory work of learning declensions and vocabulary.  This is why so many Latin 1 classes are full to overflowing.  If that's what you  focus on, that part is easy.

But what happens to those kids who can't put it all together on their own?

Far easier, I think, to teach reading skills from day one when the sentences are short and easy.  Too easy to think it matters, really, but it does. You don't start lifting weights with the heaviest you can lift.  You have to build your strength.  THIS is where you learn WHY those endings are important. THIS is when you learn to SEE THEM and understand how to interpret them AS YOU SEE THEM.

It doesn't need to be a secret code, because if you do treat it that way, you will never have students who can pick up the pace and READ!  Otherwise they will just be slogging through X many lines at night, stressing, never feeling like they know the language.

Ok. That was me.

That was me...I was good at learning all the forms, all the details, etc, but no one taught me how to read. No one showed me the tools I needed to  practice to get better at reading, to get faster, to gain proficiency.

So I've really rambled on this one.  But it all goes back to this:  when you are a teacher and you are deciding what to teach and what not to teach--whether it's principal parts or declining or whatever--you must always have THE BIG PICTURE in mind.  What you decide for Latin 1--whether you are teaching high school or middle school--must include what you would want all of them to know for Latin 4.  You have to treat them ALL as if they will ALL go on.  You can't save critical things to teach later to just the bright kids--like accentuation and syllabification.  Those are skills that must be mastered BEFORE hitting Latin poetry.  AND they are skills needed for meeting ANY new text--you can't absorb a new word in context and fix it in your mind if you aren't even pronouncing it right.

In other words, you can't separate any of it from reading.  None.  READING is what ties it all together and should help shape your opinions and decisions.  

And that's enough of my rambling.