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This morning I participated in an online meeting for developing the framework for the new certification test for Latin. When the ExCET was put in place in 1987 it was supposed to have an oral Latin component. A framework for an oral examination was developed but never put in place for fear that it would be the hurdle that would keep otherwise qualified Latin teachers out of teaching. I have always been a loud, vocal proponent for the oral examination framework being used. I'm usually shouted down.
There was a time, back before the mold in the house and the gang fights at Porter and the move to teaching at Dripping and my son's minor emotional problems turning major, that I thought about and wrote about and spoke about changes that need to be made in teacher preparation. I'm trying to think why now...why was I so driven? I guess because I had watched several middle school Latin programs close in the Austin area within a few years of each other. One school in particular that actually managed to stay open went through several teachers before they found someone stable to keep the program going. One teacher was new, green. Nice guy and probably knew his Latin, but had no experience with CLC and probably wasn't truly teacher material. And I think people saw and knew this during his student teaching. The next teacher just wasn't suited to middle schoolers and left under, well, unfortunate circumstances. What both of these people had in common was a love of Latin, but not a love of teaching or students.
Teaching is a hard job, one of the most difficult and challenging jobs around. You have to want this. It isn't about how much you love Latin. It's about how much you love teaching Latin.
Anyway, I suppose it was after those incidents that I started to seriously consider teacher training issues. Discussions ensued at CAMWS, TCA, ACL and other places...wherever teacher training was discussed. We discussed all the problems that many had experienced with their own college Latin classes/curriculum. We discussed what prevents colleges from teaching the courses future teachers need most.
Numbers, of course always plays a key roll. Even in large classics departments, like UT, only a couple of students a year are declared as future teachers. You can't provide courses for just two people. You can't change curriculum for so few. And I once wrote proposals for how someone who declares to want to teach could help themselves and how their professors could help, even if the choice of authors provided in a given semester couldn't be changed. But I didn't mean to go into that now.
This was supposed to be about oral Latin, especially since it looks like we may well be getting an oral component now to the new certification test. Finally. I never thought I'd see the day.
So, what do you do if you are, for instance, changing career and getting certified and haven't been exposed to oral Latin of any sort in a long time? Or, what do you do to train yourself? Or, how would I conduct an oral Latin workshop?
I have my pronunciation worksheets and such that I do at the beginning of the year. Are they a good thing? Are they just the thing that gets my students a stage/chapter behind everyone else's?
But if I were to do a workshop... (this is all just thinking outloud, seemingly useless since I know it will probably be some time before I could ever do such a thing)... or if I were to advise someone who needs to work on their oral Latin skills, what would I do? What would I tell them?
Start with truly working to understand how to divide and accent a word if you don't have someone who can model the Latin for you. Of course there are various online pronunciation guides and audio files now, with Wheelocks being at the top of the list as far as quality.
But after that, it's practice. Practice doing everything out loud. Get a Latin 1 book, esp one with a lot of stories like CLC or Lingua Latina, and read outloud. All the time.
I suppose, though, that just reading even English outloud has to be a comfortable thing for a person. And I suppose I'm just rambling aimlessly now, having lost my purpose and train of thought while my mind is racing with thoughts of how much I have to grade or how much quia there is to do, etc etc.
Anyway. I suppose I'm just glad that we are going to see changes in the certification test. I just want to be thinking and ready for those who are going to want help in mastering their oral Latin for the section on that.
There was a time, back before the mold in the house and the gang fights at Porter and the move to teaching at Dripping and my son's minor emotional problems turning major, that I thought about and wrote about and spoke about changes that need to be made in teacher preparation. I'm trying to think why now...why was I so driven? I guess because I had watched several middle school Latin programs close in the Austin area within a few years of each other. One school in particular that actually managed to stay open went through several teachers before they found someone stable to keep the program going. One teacher was new, green. Nice guy and probably knew his Latin, but had no experience with CLC and probably wasn't truly teacher material. And I think people saw and knew this during his student teaching. The next teacher just wasn't suited to middle schoolers and left under, well, unfortunate circumstances. What both of these people had in common was a love of Latin, but not a love of teaching or students.
Teaching is a hard job, one of the most difficult and challenging jobs around. You have to want this. It isn't about how much you love Latin. It's about how much you love teaching Latin.
Anyway, I suppose it was after those incidents that I started to seriously consider teacher training issues. Discussions ensued at CAMWS, TCA, ACL and other places...wherever teacher training was discussed. We discussed all the problems that many had experienced with their own college Latin classes/curriculum. We discussed what prevents colleges from teaching the courses future teachers need most.
Numbers, of course always plays a key roll. Even in large classics departments, like UT, only a couple of students a year are declared as future teachers. You can't provide courses for just two people. You can't change curriculum for so few. And I once wrote proposals for how someone who declares to want to teach could help themselves and how their professors could help, even if the choice of authors provided in a given semester couldn't be changed. But I didn't mean to go into that now.
This was supposed to be about oral Latin, especially since it looks like we may well be getting an oral component now to the new certification test. Finally. I never thought I'd see the day.
So, what do you do if you are, for instance, changing career and getting certified and haven't been exposed to oral Latin of any sort in a long time? Or, what do you do to train yourself? Or, how would I conduct an oral Latin workshop?
I have my pronunciation worksheets and such that I do at the beginning of the year. Are they a good thing? Are they just the thing that gets my students a stage/chapter behind everyone else's?
But if I were to do a workshop... (this is all just thinking outloud, seemingly useless since I know it will probably be some time before I could ever do such a thing)... or if I were to advise someone who needs to work on their oral Latin skills, what would I do? What would I tell them?
Start with truly working to understand how to divide and accent a word if you don't have someone who can model the Latin for you. Of course there are various online pronunciation guides and audio files now, with Wheelocks being at the top of the list as far as quality.
But after that, it's practice. Practice doing everything out loud. Get a Latin 1 book, esp one with a lot of stories like CLC or Lingua Latina, and read outloud. All the time.
I suppose, though, that just reading even English outloud has to be a comfortable thing for a person. And I suppose I'm just rambling aimlessly now, having lost my purpose and train of thought while my mind is racing with thoughts of how much I have to grade or how much quia there is to do, etc etc.
Anyway. I suppose I'm just glad that we are going to see changes in the certification test. I just want to be thinking and ready for those who are going to want help in mastering their oral Latin for the section on that.
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Date: 2009-02-01 12:30 am (UTC)I would want there to be an oral Latin tutorial online, where I could hear as well as see things. There are oral Latin programs, but they're few and far between and it's not necessarily possible to get to any of them (and "in a long time" in your sentence could be replaced with "really, more or less ever" for a lot of people...). I'd want it to have both classical and ecclesiastical pronunciations, with a description of the differences and the possibility of doing either alone or both together. I'd want it to have good metadata so a Google search was likely to turn it up, and also to be mentioned in a lot of teacher certification prep booklets. I'd want it to include both all the basic sounds pronounced in basic words (possibly the basic words used in the relevant appendices of the major textbooks), and make it easy for me to hear things that are similar back-to-back so I could get used to the differences. I'd also want it to have some more advanced stuff covering dramatic/expressive readings of passages, and some sense of handling meter appropriately.
The point being, if only one point can be extracted from that, it shouldn't be on paper. It has to be oral itself.
'
Date: 2009-02-01 06:17 pm (UTC)There are some things online. The Wheelocks page has some good audio files, etc. There were some really good oral drills made on cassettes (before CDs became the norm) for John Traupman's Lingua Latina.
What I would like to do, hahahahaha, if I ever had the time and could get permission would be to develop oral Latin stuff for CLC. At least for reading passages dramatically. But one would say that the CDs already exist and they aren't bad.
I just know from trying to do an oral Latin thing with a couple of teachers one summer that just explaining the rules isn't enough. Of course, it's kind of weird trying to get experienced teachers who are already self-conscious about pronunciation to act like students, especially when not in a workshop environment. I dunno... I couldn't drill them how I wanted to. It was sort of like trying to teach my grandmother to suck eggs, as they say.
I do remember one of them being totally stunned at the ease in which I can pick up a CLC story and just read it, sounding totally natural as if it were my own language.
Re: '
Date: 2009-02-01 06:22 pm (UTC)Podcasts are possibilities. My friend MV makes podcasts even for parents so they can pick up some Latin while their children are learning. So cool. She does truly cool stuff. I wish I were still teaching middle school so I could do cool stuff, or just Latin 3 and 4, but if I turn over Latin 1 and 2 to someone else I'm afraid my numbers will drop. Perhaps I'm a control freak.
These things I know to be true: 1) you have to want to improve your pronunciation skills--YOU. No one can force you or tell you you should. You have to want to. 2) you have to read outloud all the time and do everything outloud. 3) you can start with the Wheelock CDs and at least do repetitions on the vocabulary and forms.
There aren't any Romans around to talk to. Very few people will want to meet with you for oral Latin stuff or will have the time. YOU have to want it and to MAKE situations for oral Latin for yourself, like reading out loud or playing cards in Latin--even solitaire--outloud.
Definitely this needs more thought. And time. Time is something I no longer have. That elusive bugger slipped out of my control some time ago....