Hi Ginny, I can totally relate to what you are writing about here. I came back to Classics grad school after years of living abroad and really working on fluency in LIVING foreign languages (Polish, Italian), where of course you don't translate into English: you're too busy actually communicating with other people to even think about English!
Anyway, on my first day of my first seminar in graduate school we had been assigned a chunk of Augustine's Confessions. I LOVE AUGUSTINE. So when the professor asked for a volunteer at the beginning of class to read the first passage, I raised my hand, and started to read. I thought I read beautifully - after all, I love Augustine, and related very strongly to what he was talking about in that passage. Then, when I was done, I looked up and the professor had her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing (you know that look), and as soon as I was done, she actually burst out laughing, as did the other graduate students in the class: IN ENGLISh, she said, you are supposed to read it in English.
That pretty much summarizes how I spent the next six years in grad school learning almost nothing that was actually helpful in my eventual teaching of Latin. Luckily, I was earning money by teaching Polish, and what I learned from teaching Polish gave me tons of skills I could apply to Latin (it has even more cases and way more complicated morphology than Latin does... yet even very stupid people in Poland speak Polish perfectly, ha ha).
I can totally relate to this!
Anyway, on my first day of my first seminar in graduate school we had been assigned a chunk of Augustine's Confessions. I LOVE AUGUSTINE. So when the professor asked for a volunteer at the beginning of class to read the first passage, I raised my hand, and started to read. I thought I read beautifully - after all, I love Augustine, and related very strongly to what he was talking about in that passage. Then, when I was done, I looked up and the professor had her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing (you know that look), and as soon as I was done, she actually burst out laughing, as did the other graduate students in the class: IN ENGLISh, she said, you are supposed to read it in English.
That pretty much summarizes how I spent the next six years in grad school learning almost nothing that was actually helpful in my eventual teaching of Latin. Luckily, I was earning money by teaching Polish, and what I learned from teaching Polish gave me tons of skills I could apply to Latin (it has even more cases and way more complicated morphology than Latin does... yet even very stupid people in Poland speak Polish perfectly, ha ha).
:-)
Laura Gibbs (bestlatin.blogspot.com)