ginlindzey

I'm looking at a really nice rubric designed by a colleague for grading student notebooks/organizing notebooks. It includes sections for mottoes, vocabulary, culture notes, myth notes, and grammar notes.

My first gut reaction is what does this REALLY have to do with learning Latin? It rewards conformists and punishes the disorganized, and has nothing to do with mastering Latin.

Of course, it does make me think about whether I teach enough mythology or culture, and how I really have never gotten that down--when to stick in the myths, when to teach what about Roman history, etc. BUT...but...when a student of mine is trying to get into college, the professors will be most interested in whether that student has learned his/her morphology and whether he/she can really READ LATIN. You can read a book on mythology; you can read a book on culture or take a course on Roman history.

But the notebook.... yeah, I've been thinking about what I'm doing for notebooks, if I'm doing anything for notebooks. With my middle schoolers I simply had them keep a folder with pockets and brads. Any sheet/handout that was important and needed to be kept all year was printed on colored paper, had holes punched in it, and was put directly into the brads of the folder. I could then say, "Turn to your green motto sheet" or something like that when the sheet was needed.

Everything else could go in the pockets and they could toss anything that wasn't in the current chapter. I kept all tests; they kept quizzes if they wanted. (I kept the tests so they didn't circulate and so I could show dear mommy or daddy if the need arose. I tossed them at the end of the year.)

There was a nice simplicity to this. We never wasted time on administrivia, ya know? I've gone through file drawers before and thought to myself how nice that I was so organized (not exactly my usual mode) but WHY WAS I KEEPING ALL THAT STUFF? You know, we are a bit anal as teachers sometimes with what we put our emphasis on (like organizing notebooks instead of developing reading skills).

Or maybe I just don't want the hassle of trying to force kids to be organized.

Mottoes we keep on a sheet and I use to "send off" the class at the end of class. They learn them more that way than by having them on a sheet anyway. (Is having a section in a notebook on mottoes a way of proving to someone that you indeed taught X?)

As for grammar notes, so far I don't do much. I try to get students to use grammar immediately. The book has good explanations. On rare occasion I do have them write down some notes, but that's usually to introduce something new and after we've talked about it, read it, used it, we rarely refer to those notes. Noun and verb charts and that sort of thing would be on a colored sheet in their brads.

But what about culture and myth? Yeah, well, I guess I better start thinking about that. I usually do the main Olympian gods and some monsters and couples, but I'll need to start doing more. I guess I better take a good look at my NLE poster/syllabus.

And besides, WHEN WOULD I GRADE A NOTEBOOK? If you are a new teacher especially, this is something you always need to think about. If you give an assignment, how and when will you grade it? Because if it's going to keep you up all night or soak up your weekend, forget it. Esp for something that has nothing to do really with Latin and everthing to do with conformity. (Ok, there I go being prejudiced against this--and perhaps I shouldn't be so mean about it because there is nothing intrinsically wrong with having students keep notebooks--that is, I'm not really trying to knock those of you readers who have students keep notebooks.)

I've used a warm-up spiral for the last couple of years to good effect and mastered the grading time--I check them when students are taking tests. I ask them to have their spirals out but closed and I go around the room, gathering one row at a time, checking them, and then putting them under the students' desks.

Now, I've been debating about having the high school students have not just a single spiral notebook but a 3 subject spiral. The first section can continue to be for warm-ups. That worked well. That was useful. The second and third sections could be for vocabulary and notes of any kind if I feel so inspired.

Vocabulary... vocabulary... Oh, I have given lots of thought to vocabulary. Back last January I have my students do these vocabulary organizing sheets so that they could see for themselves--via organizing--the different declensions/conjugations, etc. Yeah, I never followed those up. Should I try using those all year this year? Maybe. But it became one of those things that a) I had to remind them to do and b) I had to think of how to grade. I thought at first I'd just have a quickie quiz that would be something like, "Write down the 4th entry on 2nd declension neuter, the 8th entry on 3rd conjugation verbs." But then it occurred to me--what if the students did NOT fill out the charts right? I'd be punishing them for accidentally putting adjectives where nouns went, and so forth. So I dropped the charts. It was going to be something *I* would have to go over in class and I didn't have that kind of time to devote to it. There has to be another way....

I also debated about doing vocabulary cards like my friend does. She has all the kids bring in flashcards for the first day of the chapter, then they go through and add more grammar details and such together. I would add sentences in Latin, I think, or maybe some pictures, TPR stuff, plus derivatives (man, I never did enough with derivatives). Then she plays a game with them which would help them learn the vocabulary.

And if I want to go to more direct Latin comprehension, what am I going to do about my Latin/English vocab drill at the beginning of class? Probably continue as long as things like the AP are about going from Latin to English....

Next week I'll be at that Foreign Language Institute at Austin College. I'm going to experiment on myself with regard to vocabulary. I'm going to take a spiral with me and instead of just making a list of the vocab words I have problems with, I'm going to write down the sentence(s) it appears in in the book and then try to compose some of my own using the word, or maybe define the word in Latin. All Latin, mind you. And this is the sort of thing I'm thinking about for the vocabulary section of the spiral.

I want to tell my students that I don't want to be the kind of teacher that points to their notebooks at the end of the year and says, "Look how much you've learned this year!" I want to be the kind of teacher that can hand them a Latin text at the end of the year, have them read it to me, question them on it, and then smile and say, "Look how much Latin you've learned this year."

Well, the CD has ended so I guess it's time to stop rambling on and go do something productive with my day.