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I just posted this to Latinteach. I thought I'd bring my tirade here:
***
I agree that certification does not equal good teaching.
I agree that there are too many hoops to jump through for certification, and these hoops are often barriers.
I agree that school districts/corporations/whatever often make the problem more difficult.
I also feel we are constantly being blackmailed with "the program will close unless..." situations. I think people who would like to retire feel trapped. I think people who want to do something different, like teaching ESL, get a lot of flak from those of us who stay with Latin. This shouldn't happen. And if I suddenly decide I want to teach theatre, will you jump all over my case? (Don't worry... I'm not certified!)
And I think we have been talking circles when we talk about certification. Yes, I push getting people certified before leaving college just because it makes future career choices easier. But outside of encouraging people to get certified while in school because it's easier, I think that's all the influence we can have on the various certification processes.
NOW, what we CAN do something about is TEACHER PREPARATION. That's different. That's not about jumping through hoops nor is it about that golden ticket that make administrators think you can teach. This is about REALLY AND TRULY PREPARING TEACHERS for the reality of the classroom.
How many teachers have we lost NOT BECAUSE of the certification nonsense, but because their first foray into the classroom was nothing they were prepared for and they bolted and ran?
There has been a misplaced emphasis on the importance of being able to teach AP--do you know enough about Vergil, about meter, about Horace, teaching to the AP test, etc--and not enough on what we teach the most: LATIN ONE.
I don't care how brilliant you are with Vergil (and I love Vergil), if you can't teach level 1 Latin, you won't have kids in Vergil. You can't just wait to "weed them out"... you can't hope the kids that don't get it will go away. You can't just assume that some kids will never get it and then never bother to try to figure out why they don't get it. We absolutely CAN reach all the students. Almost all. I truly think so.
To do so, we need to revise our methods courses and, IMHO, to include a more in-depth look at pedagogy (Distlers _Teach the Latin, I Pray You_). I think we need to pull in Blooms Taxonomy and think hard about how it applies to all aspects of teaching Latin. Such an analysis may help you to understand why kids can do one sort of activity but another activity is suddenly too difficult. I think that the universities need to invest UP FRONT (freshman year) with, say, a 1 hour lab on how to READ from LEFT TO RIGHT using Dexter Hoyos' _Latin: How to Read it Fluently_. I think that universities need to invest in UP FRONT another 1 hour lab on oral Latin, both to perfect (so to speak) one's pronunciation, develop an ability to read fluently outloud in Latin, and to develop an ease with questioning and examining a text in Latin.
I think if we all filmed our classes this year that we could create the ultimate teaching video that methods profs could examine with their students that could lead to much profitable discussion, analysis, and more. And that is something we can ALL do. You don't have to feel like what you do is special or all that great. (If you do, fantastic.) But for a distance learning methods class to work (or alternative certification and the like), we need to make sure that future teachers are truly EXPOSED to what the classroom is really like. How can you discuss classroom management in the abstract if you don't see what students are really like? How can you know what good classroom management looks like if you don't see, well, mediocre classroom management in constrast?
How, indeed, can you dismiss a totally different style of book from the one you teach from if you have never seen someone teach effectively from the other? I am still seeing people graduate from universities, never having done more than looked at CLC, OLC, and Ecce, and have decided that grammar is the only way for them. Likewise, some who were brought up on CLC perhaps are overly uncomfortable with Wheelocks. A well-trained, well-prepared teacher can make both books sing, but one who is not well-trained or well-prepared will only be comfortable with what that person knows from his/her own experience. That's not an education.
There are people out there doing amazing things with TPR and I keep hearing names like Krashen and Rassias in approaching the teaching of Latin from a whole new direction. There should be exposure to this SOMEHOW before leaving the university. Surely a video of people using these new techniques would be helpful and enlightening and lead to further exploration.
What I would like to see discussed from now on is not teacher certification, though I encourage that because of No Child Left Behind, but TEACHER PREPARATION. And instead of wasting our time discussing how to deal with all the certification processes (which make us curse and scream half the time), I think it's time we took a hand in reforming teacher preparation. THAT is something we CAN do. We don't have to be stuck in this ditch like the cart in Ecce....
***
I agree that certification does not equal good teaching.
I agree that there are too many hoops to jump through for certification, and these hoops are often barriers.
I agree that school districts/corporations/whatever often make the problem more difficult.
I also feel we are constantly being blackmailed with "the program will close unless..." situations. I think people who would like to retire feel trapped. I think people who want to do something different, like teaching ESL, get a lot of flak from those of us who stay with Latin. This shouldn't happen. And if I suddenly decide I want to teach theatre, will you jump all over my case? (Don't worry... I'm not certified!)
And I think we have been talking circles when we talk about certification. Yes, I push getting people certified before leaving college just because it makes future career choices easier. But outside of encouraging people to get certified while in school because it's easier, I think that's all the influence we can have on the various certification processes.
NOW, what we CAN do something about is TEACHER PREPARATION. That's different. That's not about jumping through hoops nor is it about that golden ticket that make administrators think you can teach. This is about REALLY AND TRULY PREPARING TEACHERS for the reality of the classroom.
How many teachers have we lost NOT BECAUSE of the certification nonsense, but because their first foray into the classroom was nothing they were prepared for and they bolted and ran?
There has been a misplaced emphasis on the importance of being able to teach AP--do you know enough about Vergil, about meter, about Horace, teaching to the AP test, etc--and not enough on what we teach the most: LATIN ONE.
I don't care how brilliant you are with Vergil (and I love Vergil), if you can't teach level 1 Latin, you won't have kids in Vergil. You can't just wait to "weed them out"... you can't hope the kids that don't get it will go away. You can't just assume that some kids will never get it and then never bother to try to figure out why they don't get it. We absolutely CAN reach all the students. Almost all. I truly think so.
To do so, we need to revise our methods courses and, IMHO, to include a more in-depth look at pedagogy (Distlers _Teach the Latin, I Pray You_). I think we need to pull in Blooms Taxonomy and think hard about how it applies to all aspects of teaching Latin. Such an analysis may help you to understand why kids can do one sort of activity but another activity is suddenly too difficult. I think that the universities need to invest UP FRONT (freshman year) with, say, a 1 hour lab on how to READ from LEFT TO RIGHT using Dexter Hoyos' _Latin: How to Read it Fluently_. I think that universities need to invest in UP FRONT another 1 hour lab on oral Latin, both to perfect (so to speak) one's pronunciation, develop an ability to read fluently outloud in Latin, and to develop an ease with questioning and examining a text in Latin.
I think if we all filmed our classes this year that we could create the ultimate teaching video that methods profs could examine with their students that could lead to much profitable discussion, analysis, and more. And that is something we can ALL do. You don't have to feel like what you do is special or all that great. (If you do, fantastic.) But for a distance learning methods class to work (or alternative certification and the like), we need to make sure that future teachers are truly EXPOSED to what the classroom is really like. How can you discuss classroom management in the abstract if you don't see what students are really like? How can you know what good classroom management looks like if you don't see, well, mediocre classroom management in constrast?
How, indeed, can you dismiss a totally different style of book from the one you teach from if you have never seen someone teach effectively from the other? I am still seeing people graduate from universities, never having done more than looked at CLC, OLC, and Ecce, and have decided that grammar is the only way for them. Likewise, some who were brought up on CLC perhaps are overly uncomfortable with Wheelocks. A well-trained, well-prepared teacher can make both books sing, but one who is not well-trained or well-prepared will only be comfortable with what that person knows from his/her own experience. That's not an education.
There are people out there doing amazing things with TPR and I keep hearing names like Krashen and Rassias in approaching the teaching of Latin from a whole new direction. There should be exposure to this SOMEHOW before leaving the university. Surely a video of people using these new techniques would be helpful and enlightening and lead to further exploration.
What I would like to see discussed from now on is not teacher certification, though I encourage that because of No Child Left Behind, but TEACHER PREPARATION. And instead of wasting our time discussing how to deal with all the certification processes (which make us curse and scream half the time), I think it's time we took a hand in reforming teacher preparation. THAT is something we CAN do. We don't have to be stuck in this ditch like the cart in Ecce....
