IIII-OOOOOOO SATURNALIA!!!

[ginlindzey]

I am down to only one more day of exams.  I have to revise the Latin 2 exam, which I should be able to do this afternoon, and if that's the case, I will be DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE.

Ok, not really.  Because then there's the GRADING aspect of it.  *sigh*

But after this year, I will have materials for all levels of Latin.  I won't be constantly scrambling to make the next quiz or test or quia.com thing.  It is such HARD HARD work to be at that "new teacher" stage--and you are no matter how experienced you are if you haven't taught from a particular textbook before.

I am always grateful for the Spanish students I have in Latin 1.  I usually have a couple of seniors who have 3 or 4 years of Spanish in my Latin 1 classes, and each year one of those students tells me just HOW VALUABLE all my quia.com stuff is.  It's not the vocab stuff.  It's the grammar with feedback.  Anyway, it was so reassuring that it IS worth my time to make those things.  It takes hours to do so.  And, frankly, I often wonder what I'm going to do when quia.com goes away.  I hope it doesn't.  I hope it just keeps improving.

And in other news, I've joined Facebook.  I wasn't going to, but several things happened including a former student from my first year of teaching having a baby and posting a picture there.  So I joined.  We'll see if this is a mistake.  I told my students and explained that I wasn't going to ask them to be my "friend" because that's just too weird.  But if they asked me, I'd confirm it.  I get new requests every day.  There's that weird feeling like I'm spying on their world when I see comments they've posted somewhere appear in my friends list, or wherever it is that it appears.    I'm kind of hoping that students who need "tutoring" might get in a conversation regarding Latin there.  ha ha.  Wishful thinking.

I also warned some of my boys who push things to the limit that if they ask me off-color things in facebook I would take down my page because that's a public venue and it could damage my reputation and ability to be employed.  ha.

A lot of ha's.

Well, I better get to revising that one last test.  I'm looking forward to the holidays if only for having the time to sit and *think* about Latin and such, which I never seem to be able to do anymore!

Comments

[terrathree.livejournal.com]

I joined Facebook myself one year after a notice in the newsletter at NJCL convention about an NJCL group on it. Not long after, a few of my students found me there...at this point, most of my JCL members and a few other students have found me, though I don't point it out to them in class. It's proved useful for communicating with my club officers because that's the one site I can count on them to check often enough that I'll get a response! I like the Events feature too; I can set up club events there and send an invitation out to all the club members so they can add it to their calendars.

I have had a few kids practice their Latin conversation skills with me in Facebook chat. And a while back I discovered that you can set the interface language to lingua Latina! After that, when I pointed it out to one of my students, she gave it a try too and found that it helped her with vocab a little...it's a limited range of words of course, but all terms that the kids know very well from constant use, so switching them to Latin lets them make a connection.

Of course the side effect of all this usefulness is that when the kids "friend" you...you also get updates when you're logged in on what *they're* doing, and at times that is a little more than I really wanted to know!