Someone wrote in [personal profile] ginlindzey 2008-07-16 07:58 pm (UTC)

I can totally relate to this!

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).

:-)

Laura Gibbs (bestlatin.blogspot.com)

Post a comment in response:

This account has disabled anonymous posting.
(will be screened if not validated)
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting

If you are unable to use this captcha for any reason, please contact us by email at support@dreamwidth.org