meaty comments

[ginlindzey]

I posted the following on the CLC list earlier. I was hoping it would encourage more similarly "meaty" or useful posts, but really there's only been a flutter of "how I get my students to remember the participles." Is it me, or didn't the original poster want true HELP with using CLC Unit 3? I hear this problem all the time. The stories are longer, the students get frustrated, the teachers don't have ideas about how to truly teach the bigger concepts. That is, for many teachers there's just the endings/morphology and then the sentence, with the idea that if you memorize everything you can "decode" everything. But that's not enough. You have to help build structure. And here, in my reply, I'm talking about how to really internalize whole participial phrases, or so I think.

Is it just me?

Anyway, here was the initial post and my reply:

> This is my third year teaching, all three with the CLC. I love Cambridge,
> but I hope to learn strategies to become a more effective teacher
> (particularly with respect to the Unit III "green" book). I also hope to
> contribute to discussions from time to time, especially as I gain more
> experience.

I confess that the more I teach from CLC, the more I appreciate the artistry of Unit 3/the Green book. I like how it introduces participles; I like the progressions in development of clauses and phrases that are equivalent to "after he said/heard this" from postquam through many variations until you get to ablative absolutes. Part of me wants to write at length about all that I find neat in this book, but perhaps it would be better if you ask something specific--some particular aspect that your students don't get.

For instance, I demand that they be able to tell identify and of course accurately translate a present active, perfect active, and perfect passive participle. For present participles, I will often write preseNT [sic] to remind them to look for NT or NS. For perfect ACtive [sic] I tell them to look for ACcusative [sic] objects (and will only include on tests/quizzes perfect active participles that have accusative objects, and explain that of course they do not always have to have one, but when one is there you know for sure without looking the word up in the dictionary that it is a perfect active participle). For perfect passive participles, we say that they are "passing by" to remember that it has a/ab ablative of agents or ablative of means.

Also, for warm-ups, I will have them metaphrase whole participial phrases to get them used to them coming as a chunk or unit, and will often require the whole phrase to be translated on a vocabulary quiz (my quizzes are in context). To metaphrase, we use the placeholding sentence, "Someone verbed something (to someone)."

So, for instance, I might have the following:

1. Memor, togam praetextam gerens,
2. rex, e balneo egressus,
3. libertum frustra resistentem
4. templum, a fabris Romanis aedificatum, (*2 ways)

So the above would be:

1. Memor, wearing a toga praetexta, verbed something. (That is, the whole phrase is the subject.)
2. The king, having left from the bath, verbed something. (Once again, the whole phrase is the subject.)
3. Someone verbed the freedman resisting in vain. (The whole phrase is the direct object.)
4. a) The temple, built by Roman craftsmen, verbed something. (If the neuter is acting as the subject....)
b) Someone verbed the temple, built by Roman craftsmen. (If the neuter is acting as the object.)

As for the "progressions," you might want to see something I wrote for CAMWS a couple of years ago, a portion of which I posted here: http://ginlindzey.livejournal.com/2010/04/01/