ginlindzey

 Last year I tried having Latin free write days where for 7-10 minutes students would do a timed write in Latin. We used sheets with word blanks provided (5 per line) and word counts provided at the ends of the lines.

I had mixed feelings all year about what to do with them, how to provide feedback or whether to provide feedback. Written? One on one sessions? The effectiveness? Towards the end of the year I just stopped doing them. I didn't feel it was a productive use of their time or mine. There was no structure at all. If anything, I felt it allowed for the reinforcement of their own errors. Instructionally it felt poorly designed.  Yes, some students liked it and, yes, it did diminish their fear of trying to write in Latin since they had been doing it all year. But otherwise I didn't feel that it added to their learning.

Yet there is no question that while my students typically end up being strong readers of Latin, most of them couldn't compose worth a darn on the fly. It is something I don't really work on. Thus writing IS something I want to do more of. Somehow.

One of the things I enjoy doing from time to time is rewriting a passage of Latin to suit my own needs. I recall once rewriting a passage of Martial complaining that "friend" wasn't reciprocating on dinner invitations to make it about a "friend" not replying to my emails. I was mindful of the structures used in the passage and even tried to keep the meter (but that wasn't critical for my purposes), carefully monitoring my changes in vocabulary and how it affected other structures, etc.

This, I felt, was always a way to control and improve my writing. So I tried it Friday with my Latin 1s.

I demonstrated via this Google Slides Presentation what sort of thing I wanted. In it, you will see the story "amicus" from CLC Stage 2. It's a short, simple story. I pointed out grammatical structures/forms we had been discussing (Nominiatives vs Accusatives, prepositional phrases, action vs linking verbs, etc). Then on the next slide is a story I had created using the name of a student in one of the classes. I pointed out how I had started with the "amicus" story and used only one change per sentence until incorporating those changes led to something more interesting (story-wise). For instance, when I decided the father needed to curse at both the cook and his daughter, I realized the story line was about how the cook apparently had tried to teach the man's daughter (my student) to cook but that she was still a horrible cook. In the process I stole some lines from other stories like "in triclinio" and even "Cerberus" to fit my needs. In other words, I didn't have to stick tightly to "amicus;" it was just a guide and a starting place.

The challenge for the assignment is using ONLY what you know and what you have seen. The rules were: 1) You could NOT use any vocabulary we had not seen either in the book or elsewhere (greetings and such we had worked on before starting the text) this year. 2) It could not be rude.

The students had the last half hour of class so there wasn't a rush. There was time to think and have fun. We used the same paper that I had made up last year for automatically counting words, and most students wrote between 40-60 words. Of course the results weren't perfect (they are students after all), BUT I felt there was a lot more right and productive about writing like this than just a loose free write. And the students seemed to enjoy it.

I think I will keep using this kind of writing for the rest of the year to see what happens. If you try this as well, let me know how it works for you and your students.

P.S. I am not declaring that free writes or timed writes are bad; only that I felt they didn't work for me. My spoken Latin isn't fluent enough thus my students don't get a 90% exposure to comprehensible input, which I feel they would need for this to work well. I am simply positing another possible writing activity that isn't just composition from English to Latin.

Good Friday has clearly been a day to sit and think about Latin. Or to sit and avoid writing tests and such. Whatever works.

I just wrote a long reply to a posting on the Best Practices list and then followed it with a reply about composition on Latinteach. Here are both:

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ON BEST PRACTICES:

> Another good find from the TPRS list. This site lists 103 things you
> can do with students before, during and after reading a story. Check it
> out:
>
> http://www.readingrockets.org/article/82
>
> Bob

Thanks for this.

Of course, I always find the greatest things working against many of these things is that dreadful enemy, TIME.

Like many of you, I'm sure, I've done the pantomime/acting one. On my own I will write haiku--with an attempt at it being truly meaningful, not just the right number of syllables--after reading some Catullus or Martial. I think Latin lends itself nicely to this tightly compacted form of poetry.

So many of these would be great to do and in fact I intend to consider doing but I would want them to be written in Latin. I've had my students do some writing this year. It's been really amusing (see http://drippinglatin.livejournal.com) and I think worth doing. I only with that I had MORE TIME to do such things!

Some of these would make good topics for essays--#31. Fictional Friends: Who of all the characters would you want for a friend? Why? What would you look for?--You could have the student argue for a particular character and quote the Latin and provide a translation (yeah, AP style, sort of...consider it pre-AP style).

I like #34. Dear Diary: Keep a diary as if you were a character in the story. Write down events that happen during the story and reflect on how they affected the character and why. Now this could be done in Latin--but in CLC, not every story has the same characters.... Perhaps there could be something more like a fly on the wall aspect to it instead?

Or how about #45: Write into: Find a "hole" in the story where the character disappears (off camera) for a time and describe what they do when we can't see them. That has possibilities.

I'm often brainstorming on how to get students to read stories outside of class (have NOT thought of a good way to do this that doesn't require a lot of grading or pop-quizzing on my end of it). I'm wondering if #57 might help here. #57: Reader Response: Pick the most important word/line/image/object/event in the chapter and explain why you chose it. Besure to support all analysis with examples. So, perhaps you'd ask a student to pick a line or a sentence in the story, provide a good translation, and then describe why they think it is the pivotal sentence in the story. Then, maybe, the next day there could be a discussion of the sentences chosen and why.

I'm coming back to the diary idea. Bob, I know you have students keep a reading log. I'm wondering whether if students had to write Dear Diary entries in Latin based on each story AND if I counted such things for a quiz grade, if they would actually keep up with the work?

Something that's not here, but worth putting in, is the film scenario. I've written about this elsewhere and am planning to use it with my Latin 3's towards the end of the year with a bit of Vergil. The idea is that you basically give a frame by frame description of how you would film a scene, based on the Latin--word choice, phrasing, whatever. Here's an article I wrote on it, gosh, 10 years ago: http://www.txclassics.org/ginny_articles2.htm

Anyway, just thought I'd throw out my 2 denarii worth.

***
ON LATINTEACH
> Does anyone have a strategy to encourage students to use the Latin they have learned
> through their textbooks, etc. rather than what they want to say in English in composition
> activities?
>
> Lisa Auanger

Yes, I have them write stories for the characters. I am perhaps a bit liberal with what I allow, but I think the students have enjoyed it a lot. I do a fair amount of modeling, showing them that when I write new stories for their tests (something I've been doing this year, the first year I've done this I might add), that I start with phrases used in a story already, check the vocab list, and remember that I want others to be able to read and understand it.

Here are stories written by my students that I posted just last week.

http://drippinglatin.livejournal.com.

I have to have two or three days to do this, because we do lots of edits in class. But the students actually seem to WANT to know how to do it right. They care about this far more than a simple English to Latin exercise.

Try having them change the point of view of a story or have them write a letter to a character in the story, perhaps offering advice.

OH OH OH. You know what might be hysterical? (I may have to do this!) What if they had an advice column in Latin? Oh, I guess they'd need to know subjunctives (you should, you would, you could). Ok, I'll file this away for Latin 2/3 stuff.

I hope this helps.
***

I am reminded of a passage in Fahrenheit 451 which has haunted me all this year, the passagae in which Faber says that not only do we need time to read books but leisure to think about them. I feel I'm always at my best when I have time to just sit and brainstorm creatively about things. I have *lots* of good ideas, many that I never use or execute well because of time or circumstance. But those ideas are there--WHEN I HAVE TIME TO JUST SIT AND THINK.

May you all have time to sit and be creative!