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This was a comment--NOT mine--on Latinteach:
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As the study of Latin becomes available to more and more people other than "the intellectually elite" I think we will find that other people have other interests and goals driving them to study the language. We may no longer be able to assume that one's goal is to study the ancient authors. I have heard textbook writers say that Latin should only be studied in order to understand English better. My particular chief interest is in speaking the language. I believe that in order to survive in the 21st century, where the interest in modern languages is such a challenge to the very survival of Latin programs, we must become more flexible in our outlook toward the study of Latin.
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Earlier today I was thinking about how I often hold back on how I feel on Latinteach about various topics in order to remain polite. I know I'm getting pushy about some things and truly do hold back, sometimes quite a bit. That happens when you turn 40 (the pushy part). Then it occurred to me. This is MY blogsite. I'm not inflicting myself on anyone; people choose to come read my ramblings on their own accord.
But what is written up above bothers me a bit. Now let me state that I have been to a session at a conference by the person who wrote it. I like the person who wrote it and I respect what she does do with the elementary students that she works with. Practically a mini-immersion course. I've seen a video of her little class in action. And it is something that would be absolutely great to do with really young kids and I admire it.
And for all that I promote oral Latin, I cannot see any reasonable reason for SPEAKING LATIN to be anyone's chief interest in teaching the subject. Who the heck you gonna talk to outside of the people at the conventicula, Father Reggie Foster and a handful of Latin teachers who are daring enough to venture out into serious oral Latin? My kids don't even want to hear me play slugbug in Latin or let me play cards in Latin.
There is no basic need met if you are studying Latin just to speak it. I can't imagine you'll ever truly reach a level of fluency that someone learning Spanish or French would. And when would you use it? Would you ever need it for basic needs, like catching trains across Europe or purchasing food?
What the heck are you going to talk about?
Now, using oral Latin/spoken Latin to talk about stories in Latin and to aid in the comprehension of stories in Latin is a good thing. I believe in it. I'd like to be free to work on a masters in a place where that's what takes place. (Does Davidson College have a masters???) (Will my kids ever grow up?)
In the meantime, we are studying Latin with the goal of reading Latin. That is the only real conversation that can be FULLY justified. And I'll tell you what else. I think anyone that shies away from this real goal can't read the real literature comfortably and would rather just stay with simpler Latin. I think too many of us got through college and have our little degrees and know that we cannot read Latin, certainly not like we can read a book in English. We can't and we know it and we hide it.
And if the universities would just start instituting reading methodology courses in their freshman years to train students to read from left to right and to read EXTENSIVELY, this might not be the case. We might be graduating people who have BA's and can READ.
Because that's my theory. My theory, which could be way off base, is that the people who really are afraid to teach literature courses secretly know that they can't read well--they understand all the forms, love the derivatives, love JCL, love everything else--but they really never learned how to *READ* Latin and thus they don't teach literature. They don't want to read the real stuff because it makes them uncomfortable. Some are petrified to look at real Latin. And these are the teachers who teach their students to chant all the forms, often with the accents on the wrong syllables (because they end up accenting/emphasizing the endings and thus are accenting last syllables), to decline all the nouns, to conjugate all the verbs, but NEVER TO PUT IT ALL TOGETHER, especially if the real Latin sentence is more than a couple of lines long.
On Blooms Taxonomy, they are stuck in lower level cognitive thinking mainly, and have never stretched themselves to do the higher level thinking.
I also think that these sorts of teacher are limited by their own faulty education, where just about the ONLY disambiguation technique learned was hunt the verb or subj/verb agreement. They never learned any of the disambiguation techniques that Dan McCaffrey teaches and has written about. They never learned to read from left to right OR THAT IT WAS POSSIBLE TO DO SO IN LATIN. They never learned how to metaphrase or anything.
They like Latin and perhaps love Latin but really can't teach how to read Latin and, sorry folks, that's what all the course descriptions say we are about. READING LATIN. Otherwise there is NO JUSTIFICATION TO OFFER IT as a language course. We could teach word power or grammar or whatever, but not Latin unless we really want to READ REAL LATIN.
I could go on but I won't. I might have offended someone and I am sure I will feel sorry for that later.
IF I just knew how to get the universities to start listening... that we have GOT to start teaching people how to read from left to right instead of just covering lines in class.... it can be done. I can see how to go about doing it. I bet evaluations would be written that it was an extremely useful if not the most beneficial class that student took that year.
But how do you teach those university dogs new tricks?
And by the way, I do NOT teach Latin as an elitist course. Certainly not at my school. Nor do I say that we must read Vergil or Ovid (but I love them both). I would be happy as a clam to teach ANYTHING written in Latin. Classical, medieval, whatever. I'm game. We have a thousand years worth of material to choose from. READING is how we communicate with those authors. Not up to it? Well, then, let's just teach those guys in translation and stop messing around with Latin. As so many administrators and others tell us, it's useless and dead and unnecessary. Speaking it just to speak it is fluff, unless you combine that with improving your comprehension of written material.
These dead guys won't speak to us any other way. And frankly, I can talk to you guys more easily in English. Why burn energy doing it in Latin? Maybe as a party/parlour trick, but that gets old after a while....
****
As the study of Latin becomes available to more and more people other than "the intellectually elite" I think we will find that other people have other interests and goals driving them to study the language. We may no longer be able to assume that one's goal is to study the ancient authors. I have heard textbook writers say that Latin should only be studied in order to understand English better. My particular chief interest is in speaking the language. I believe that in order to survive in the 21st century, where the interest in modern languages is such a challenge to the very survival of Latin programs, we must become more flexible in our outlook toward the study of Latin.
****
Earlier today I was thinking about how I often hold back on how I feel on Latinteach about various topics in order to remain polite. I know I'm getting pushy about some things and truly do hold back, sometimes quite a bit. That happens when you turn 40 (the pushy part). Then it occurred to me. This is MY blogsite. I'm not inflicting myself on anyone; people choose to come read my ramblings on their own accord.
But what is written up above bothers me a bit. Now let me state that I have been to a session at a conference by the person who wrote it. I like the person who wrote it and I respect what she does do with the elementary students that she works with. Practically a mini-immersion course. I've seen a video of her little class in action. And it is something that would be absolutely great to do with really young kids and I admire it.
And for all that I promote oral Latin, I cannot see any reasonable reason for SPEAKING LATIN to be anyone's chief interest in teaching the subject. Who the heck you gonna talk to outside of the people at the conventicula, Father Reggie Foster and a handful of Latin teachers who are daring enough to venture out into serious oral Latin? My kids don't even want to hear me play slugbug in Latin or let me play cards in Latin.
There is no basic need met if you are studying Latin just to speak it. I can't imagine you'll ever truly reach a level of fluency that someone learning Spanish or French would. And when would you use it? Would you ever need it for basic needs, like catching trains across Europe or purchasing food?
What the heck are you going to talk about?
Now, using oral Latin/spoken Latin to talk about stories in Latin and to aid in the comprehension of stories in Latin is a good thing. I believe in it. I'd like to be free to work on a masters in a place where that's what takes place. (Does Davidson College have a masters???) (Will my kids ever grow up?)
In the meantime, we are studying Latin with the goal of reading Latin. That is the only real conversation that can be FULLY justified. And I'll tell you what else. I think anyone that shies away from this real goal can't read the real literature comfortably and would rather just stay with simpler Latin. I think too many of us got through college and have our little degrees and know that we cannot read Latin, certainly not like we can read a book in English. We can't and we know it and we hide it.
And if the universities would just start instituting reading methodology courses in their freshman years to train students to read from left to right and to read EXTENSIVELY, this might not be the case. We might be graduating people who have BA's and can READ.
Because that's my theory. My theory, which could be way off base, is that the people who really are afraid to teach literature courses secretly know that they can't read well--they understand all the forms, love the derivatives, love JCL, love everything else--but they really never learned how to *READ* Latin and thus they don't teach literature. They don't want to read the real stuff because it makes them uncomfortable. Some are petrified to look at real Latin. And these are the teachers who teach their students to chant all the forms, often with the accents on the wrong syllables (because they end up accenting/emphasizing the endings and thus are accenting last syllables), to decline all the nouns, to conjugate all the verbs, but NEVER TO PUT IT ALL TOGETHER, especially if the real Latin sentence is more than a couple of lines long.
On Blooms Taxonomy, they are stuck in lower level cognitive thinking mainly, and have never stretched themselves to do the higher level thinking.
I also think that these sorts of teacher are limited by their own faulty education, where just about the ONLY disambiguation technique learned was hunt the verb or subj/verb agreement. They never learned any of the disambiguation techniques that Dan McCaffrey teaches and has written about. They never learned to read from left to right OR THAT IT WAS POSSIBLE TO DO SO IN LATIN. They never learned how to metaphrase or anything.
They like Latin and perhaps love Latin but really can't teach how to read Latin and, sorry folks, that's what all the course descriptions say we are about. READING LATIN. Otherwise there is NO JUSTIFICATION TO OFFER IT as a language course. We could teach word power or grammar or whatever, but not Latin unless we really want to READ REAL LATIN.
I could go on but I won't. I might have offended someone and I am sure I will feel sorry for that later.
IF I just knew how to get the universities to start listening... that we have GOT to start teaching people how to read from left to right instead of just covering lines in class.... it can be done. I can see how to go about doing it. I bet evaluations would be written that it was an extremely useful if not the most beneficial class that student took that year.
But how do you teach those university dogs new tricks?
And by the way, I do NOT teach Latin as an elitist course. Certainly not at my school. Nor do I say that we must read Vergil or Ovid (but I love them both). I would be happy as a clam to teach ANYTHING written in Latin. Classical, medieval, whatever. I'm game. We have a thousand years worth of material to choose from. READING is how we communicate with those authors. Not up to it? Well, then, let's just teach those guys in translation and stop messing around with Latin. As so many administrators and others tell us, it's useless and dead and unnecessary. Speaking it just to speak it is fluff, unless you combine that with improving your comprehension of written material.
These dead guys won't speak to us any other way. And frankly, I can talk to you guys more easily in English. Why burn energy doing it in Latin? Maybe as a party/parlour trick, but that gets old after a while....
