ginlindzey

So I got sidetracked from writing lesson plans to post in my various Google Classrooms and whatnot by the delightful discovery of a new reader for Latin! The book is called Pluto: fabula amoris.  Read more about this here: http://pomegranatebeginnings.blogspot.com/p/publications.html.

However, I was disappointed.  No macrons.  This is a book meant for level 1 Latin students and yet no macrons.  Well, instead of my rewriting all my thoughts on the topic, let me just copy and paste from the rants I had on the Latin Best Practices list:

***
This is terrific except....

OK, I'm sorry, but I'm going to be a pain in the ass here.  WHY aren't there macrons?

When I learn new words I really like there to be macrons because Cicero isn't around for me to ask, "Hey, how do you pronounce this?" and I certainly don't want to slow down my reading by looking stuff up in a dictionary.  I had this argument some years back with an editor at Bolchazy-Carducci.  She said that at some time we are all weaned off macrons and certainly you're not going to find them in serious author texts.  True.  I pointed out that I didn't need them for endings.  I knew my noun endings.  It was the new vocabulary words that I was meeting in context and therefore could construe meaning but didn't know how to pronounce the word--thus to be certain I wanted macrons.  I want to hear it in my head as if I am saying the word aloud, which I may well be doing.  (Reading aloud keeps me from translating into English/keeps me in the Latin.) And I certainly don't want to discover later that I've been pronouncing a word wrong and have to UNteach it.

And let me say again that I am totally THRILLED to see a novella, at a good price for a school purchase, at Amazon.  And may there be many, many more.

But no one is setting type by hand anymore. There is no good reason to avoid including macrons (unless we ourselves are unsure of our pronunciation--and that is another issue altogether). We are in a glorious digital age which allows us to type our documents with macrons (I have MS Word keys scripted so I can type ALT and the vowel and get my long marks that way). And we as teachers should be learning and teaching our vocabulary with accurate pronunciation so that when we go to write the word we know where the long marks go because we are saying it correctly.  Know what I mean?

This isn't about memorizing where the macrons go.  This is about tasting the words when you speak them and knowing them intimately because of that.  This is OUR language!  We are the keepers of this language and we should be doing our utmost to deserve this honored position as guardians.

Let me add that I don't count off for long marks if my students don't use them, but I encourage them to learn them, and I explain that if you just listen to how you say the word and have learned the word, you can write the word accurately because you have internalized what is long and what is short.

So can I please encourage the use of macrons because they are not a crutch; they are our secret way to have Cicero whispering in our ears on how to pronounce new words when we meet them.

Thus endeth the rant.

Oh, and congrats to our budding authors!

***

[Then I felt the need to reply to a comment on this, on why we really need to teach them, on what value they have in the overall acquisition of the language.]:

***
As TEACHERS we should know exactly how words are pronounced as best as our knowledge and evidence allow. How a word is pronounced is represented by long marks.  Those macrons aren't learned separately from the word.

Consider when Nancy/Annula Nostra is teaching: she ALWAYS writes with macrons because they represent the correct sound of the word.  We don't have to demand this from our students; they will understand why we do it (or we can explain it to them). I don't require it of my students but I do encourage it. When I do Patibulum/Hangman I use it--just as Annula does.  When I did dictation recently with my Latin 4s I was impressed with how well they did, especially with vowel quantity. I demand high quality from myself (which I do work at conscientiously) and when they are transcribing what I write, it is because they are hearing it and understand it is part of the language.

I can pick up a text without macrons and feel like I can read most of the words accurately--only unsure of those words that are new to me. It provides a pleasure of the mastery and the sound of language. Why would we not want this for our students?

Read what Rick LaFleur says in Wheelock's Latin.  Off the top of my head, I believe it goes something like: Vowel length is important because it is the difference between cape and cap (that silent e), <something else>, and sheet and sh*t....  Vowel length can change the whole meaning of a word!

Consider sōlum vs solum.  One is “of suns” while the other is “the ground.” It may look very similar on the page but is sounds different.  There are so many others that are similar.  People think they are hard to distiguish, but if said correctly they are not hard to distinguish at all. Not at all.

Why should we only be picky about a few endings versus all of them?  Why does the base of the word not get consideration? After all the endings are easy enough to master, internalize, and apply.  But what about the bases of all the new vocabulary?

Let students make mistakes!  Mistakes are how we learn.  But shouldn't we hold ourselves to a higher standard? EVEN IF IT MEANS WE HAVE TO RETEACH OURSELVES so that we can set a good example?

That my Ille Hobbitus and Harrius Potter don't have macrons doesn't bother me.  I mean, I would rather they had macrons because there is so much vocabulary to acquire. But it is of a level of Latin that I don't expect macrons.

However, anything we make for students--anything--should have macrons.  We should always be modeling the best Latin that we can.  It is the only way we can have that great seance with Cicero, Caesar, and Vergil in the same room!

And just because you were never taught formal pronunciation in school--high school or university--is no excuse.  If we started not teaching something just because it wasn't in our Latin Methods/Ed courses, well, we'd have to throw out most everything we do.

***

In closing, let me add that I purchased the book from Amazon before I ranted.  I am so pleased to know people are writing books.  I think I need to be writing Latin books.  I certainly have started novels in English that never went far.  A story in Latin might be a totally doable thing for me.  Put my money where my mouth is.

Ah.  Internet is working, school is out, and I'm already working on AP.  I didn't give as many vocab quizzes as I had wanted to in the spring--I didn't get them revised and the kids were burning out.  Whiners.

haha

When we were reviewing before the exam, I realized that I had picked some really good passages on my passage quizzes that targeted good examples of grammar commonly found in each author.  But at one point, when I was starting to say things like indirect statements are more common in Caesar, I started realizing how many indirect statements come up in Vergil. Ok, not like Caesar's... but then again, worth looking at.

In fact, worth doing some comparisons.

So as I'm going through and revising Vergil vocab quizzes, I'm looking at indirect statements.  I haven't gotten very far, but I am enjoying this.  I'm a nut; I like making lists like this and thinking about what the author is doing and why.

I haven't gotten very far, but I'm excited about looking for them.  I just have two from book 1.

1) progeniem sed enim Troiano a sanguine duci
audierat, Tyrias olim quae verteret arces;            
hinc populum late regem belloque superbum
venturum excidio Libyae: sic volvere Parcas. 1.19-22

2) Interea magno misceri murmure pontum,
emissamque hiemem sensit Neptunus 1.124-125

Both have examples of esse being understood.  And even with just two examples I am already asking myself whether Vergil uses more passive infinitives.  I haven't thought about it before.

I do know that constantly asking myself (or students) "What is -que connecting?" is truly important in seeing (in the 2nd example) that a participle is really an infinitive.  I have to confess, though, that I sat staring at regem belloque superbum for quite a while tonight, thinking to myself that I didn't like where that -que was coming, thinking it should be on regem and trying to reconcile that it was ok where it was.  I feel like I'm not seeing something because thinking about -que steered me clear on way too many occasions this year.  In fact, I just  loved seeing the phrasing unfold in front of me.

Last summer at this time I was studying Caesar with Andrew Riggsby, and I felt the Latin was unfolding beautifully in front of me because I was seeing the PHRASING which even the grad students were missing.  But I still have farther to go, more to learn, and in learning I find the sorts of things my students need in order to see Vergil as something that can be read as opposed to something that is painfully and slowly decoded.  If that.

I miss writing.  I miss having time to think out loud in print.  Maybe I can write more this summer, though this is really just for my own benefit.  Does anyone really read this??? :-)

And the discussion continued.... (see previous entry):

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> You have to convince the professors it is in their interest
> to care about how well they teach. It is not, really, now, so they
> will not care to waste valuable tenure-track time improving their
> pedagogy.
> After they get tenure, sadly, many professors don't care about either.

Actually, I don't think there's enough attention to pedagogy to begin with for professors to form a valid opinion of how well they teach. I think MOST
*do* want to teach well and assume that when students don't do well it is a lack of effort. Part of this is because of an inability to understand where for the average non-classics major the disconnects are happening. After all, those of us who ARE Latin/classics majors rarely had these "disconnect"
issues.

Many who care also feel there is a lack of time in order to address all the woes in any given class--whether it was inferior teaching in a 506 beginning Latin class or at a high school or wherever. It is a matter of covering the syllabus, in great measure and to say that the professors don't care about how well they teach is to simplify the problem.

But when the pressures of employment put a greater weight on publishing, yes, that takes priority and questions about how to improve one's pedagogy shift to the bottom of the stack. No question.

But let me add this. Earlier this year an OU prof contacted me and said that for the first time he had used a reading card and the concepts of metaphrasing with a student who had been having trouble putting it all together. The student was so amazed at how using the reading card helped his comprehension and ability to understand how morphology works that he couldn't help ask WHY the prof hadn't shown them how to use a reading card sooner? So to me, part of the problem is just getting the right tools in the hands of professors.

I swear, if all profs had as required reading Dexter Hoyos's _Latin: How to Read it Fluently_, I think they'd see a marked increase in translation/reading in their own classes. It should stand on the shelf right next to any Latin dictionary and grammar as books that must purchased for any serious (or even not so serious) student of the language.


> Another problem, especially on the pre-university level, is that most
> schools do not stick with a Latin teacher who has generated
> complaints, etc., his first year.

Depends what the complaints are; depends whether the Latin teacher himself has taken an honest look at what he is doing and decided whether there was anything he could have done to improve the situation.

There are teachers at my school that receive continual complaints, and, frankly, I think they are deserved. The man who is the head of our ISS (in school suspension) said to me earlier this year that he has never heard anything bad about me from the students, that they respect me.

Is it because I load them up with easy A's? I don't think so. But I do think it is because the students know I am fair, that I try to provide a variety of ways to learn a particular topic, and that I'm not so rigid in my teaching that it's either a "do it my way or fail" situation. Rigid teachers who do not try to understand that teaching is COMMUNICATION will get the complaints in general.

Especially if
> there is no real solid constituency for the Latin program in the first
> place.

And that is something that each of us must create, and you can't create that by saying Latin is good for you like cod liver oil.


> I have never been a traditional 'student teacher'. Is this a valuable
> experience for those who do it? My sense has often been that in
> fields like Latin, many teachers trained primarily as education
> students, who have often very little course background in their
> subject itself, are not necessarily the best people to train teachers
> in any case.

It depends where you are. At UTexas the methods courses are done in the classics department in conjunction with the education department. And, yes, I think it is a valuable experience, especially if you are lucky enough to get place with a good teacher. I had three observers last semester, one from the UTeach program who did in fact teach a half dozen classes. It was a good experience for her; I set her up for success most of the time but the last time I set her up with something I knew would be a problem so that she could see where she had a weakness. No, the class itself wasn't a disaster, but I knew that there is a trick to doing comprehension questions, especially in Latin, and making sure that THE WHOLE CLASS stays with you.
She was losing kids right and left, and once you do that, you lose control of the class.

That's not something you can learn in a book, and it is better to experience that and be able to discuss it with someone who KNOWS what happened, what went wrong and why than to just go home at the end of the day and feel like a failure because you don't know what happened and why.

Student teaching can be valuable if done right.


> Not sure you have made a convincing case that good fluid oral reading
> skills are more important than reading the literature as literature
> and with grammatically correct understanding.

I dare say that every time I listen to NPR's short story theatre (whatever it's called) that I am hearing literature being read outloud. I dare say that Cicero was meant to be heard outloud--that his phrasing and word choices were made particularly for the ear not the brain.

Yes, I can read Shakespeare to myself, but those speeches are meant to be heard. There is no life in them without the voice.



> Students have been being taught to read Latin for 2000 years.
> We know how to do so.

BUBULUM STERCUS.

We have taught NOTHING BUT DECODING FOR DECADES IF NOT MORE. Nothing but futuens decoding and you know it. HOW MANY BOOKS written by reputable authors have instructed students to FIND THE SUBJECT THEN THE VERB? HERCLE!
Latin was not meant to be this way because you damn well cannot read more than 60-100 lines at a go if you are constantly finding every damn subject and every damn verb and disentangling sentences that should be left alone!

WOULD YOU TELL a social students class to find the subject and the verb in this sentence? Is it necessary? Doesn't it ruin the construction of this?:

We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.

Fine. Go ahead. Let's decode the damn thing. WHAT A WAY TO LEARN ENGLISH.

Have ANY OF YOU discussed at any time with your undergraduates how to read EXTENSIVELY in Latin? Or is it just intensive reading nonstop? Is it a wonder that so many people getting BA's in Latin look at their modern language colleagues and wonder why they can read whole novels at a go and we can't?

Not so during the age of Galileo or Copernicus; not so during the age of Columbus. They were fluent. We know nothing of that sort of fluency.

Do not say that we've been learning to read Latin for 2000 years. We've done nothing of the sort certainly during the last 100 or so years, or more people would have greater fluency.

> There is, as you say, not enough time allotted to do all these things,
> and even if the average school or college chose to give that time to
> us, the extra required work here would doubtless motivate many current
> students to say no thanks.

And I think that is bubulum stercus yet again. I think 1 extra hour a week for a reading/pronunciation lab would be invaluable in the years ahead of that student. I think they would look back and be eternally grateful.
Where are we going to run them off to? Spanish? French? Where the oral component is still considerably more? Oh please, that's just a lousy excuse for someone looking not to consider the cost efficiency of doing this, because in the long run you would have a higher quality of undergraduate and graduate student, not to mention future teachers who would then produce better students more interested in signing up for Latin. But perhaps the big picture is lost on you. It's lost on many people, I think, who feel that change is either bad or inconvenient or who don't think they'd have anyone in the department who would be qualified to teach such a lab because everyone's pronunciation is sloppy. Now how sad is that?

I say, make an effort, not an excuse.

> We have to get those students to enroll and then to stay.
> How do you suggest we do that, with today's millennial kids?

Be a good teacher. How do you think I manage the enrollment I have?


> You need to demonstrate that changing our Latin pedagogy in the way
> you suggest will result in sustained significant increases in student
> counts.

Fine. Come to my school. You know, before the district closes it because of our low population. I have a larger Latin program than the middle school across town which has almost double the population. That school has all the middle class/upper middle class kids, I have the lower class kids. The difference is the teaching style.


> Yes, I suppose it would do that. It would almost certainly not do
> anything to improve knowledge of grammar, especially in a poetry
> context.

Bubulum stercus yet again.

If I am keenly aware of pronunciation then I am also keenly aware of my morphology. If I am keenly aware of my morphology and have spent a fair amount of time reciting Latin outloud, I become even more keenly aware of phrasing. The end result is a higher understanding of word order and phrasing in Latin without the need to pick the damned poem apart.

I don't need to pick apart the preamble to the constitution to understand it, but it certainly helps to say it and hear it aloud to absorb the more archaic phrasing. I feel the same way about Shakespeare.



> It is not at all as simple as buying into a theory such as Bloom's.

You don't have to "buy" the theory. It's not evolution. It's a simple progression of cognitive development and you could find similar descriptions I'm sure in any textbook on psychology. Or just have children of your own and note the difference in their cognitive abilities at certain ages. Become a doctor of pediatrics; medical school could tell you the same thing regarding the cognitive development of young people.

Or would you rather blame all failures in your classroom on the students?


> Anyone who is raised to speak it, and lives in a culture where it is
> spoken daily. Not necessarily
> *anyone* else, though.

Why?

> Surely you have seen students in Latin classes who lack, at least at
> the time they were taking it, the je ne sais quoi necessary for Latin
> success.

The only thing I really see in my students that cause them to do poorly is a lack of support at home and an enthusiasm for learning and education.
Nothing else is outside of their reach. But I dare say what happens in my classroom takes back stage to child protective services entering a home because the mom is a crack-cocaine addict (last year), or the boy whose sister died in a car accident this year. I guarantee you that I did not have his attention in class after Christmas, nor did I ride him hard for that. They are kids first, and my students second.


> I do not know how old you are,

FORTY. 41 in May (May 23rd for any of you who feel I have earned a present.
Feel free to pitch in together on an OLD...)

or what your educational
> background was before you first stepped into a Latin classroom as a
> teacher.

A student at a decent public high school. Private religious school for K-6.
UT--summa cum laude 3.94 GPA in 1987. Phi Beta Kappa. Nothing really special about my education except that I was your typical conforming female student. My parents had college education, but nothing special. No academicians in my family, no doctors, no lawyers. Not in the last generation at least.

Nor do I know how you did as a
> rookie teacher.

I taught high school in San Antonio at Roosevelt H.S. 1987-1988 and ran away screaming because I over did it and never got any sleep. Took off a dozen years and did a variety of things including desktop publishing and writing a novel that (gratias Deo) was never published and traveled/lived in England.
Became editor for the Texas Classical Association in 1992, I think, and was editor for 10 years of a semiannual journal and a semiannual newsletter, received awards for same.

I do know you were allowed to progress into
> veteran status,

No, I spent much of those dozen years, especially once I became editor, in trying to learn what I felt was wrong about my Latin education. It was in
1994 that I discovered an article written by Dexter Hoyos in Classical Outlook that changed the way I felt about reading Latin and the possibility of my really learning how to read Latin and not decode it. We corresponded for a while after that, then he sent me what became _Latin: How to Read it Fluently_ and I did my best to help him find a publisher. It is a shame that Bolchazy-Carducci didn't want it as is, but that means you can purchase it more cheaply from CANE. Anyway, I only reentered teaching in 2000. This is my 6th year at my middle school. So, only a total of 7 years altogether. But I also make a point of going to conferences and workshops, being open minded about my eduation, willing to go against the current if I think my ideas are valid, etc.

I have gotten to veteran status because of my determination to be a truly good teacher, not because I managed to float along until I arrived. No one served it up to me on a silver platter. I have constantly examined what I do in the classroom, constantly questioned it, and constantly sought for ways to improve upon what I do. Research of its own.

and not too frustrated by the parents, grade
> inflation, wretched student behavior, that also causes many good
> teachers to bug out today.

Who says I'm not frustrated by parents? Oh please, don't get me started there. But I don't let one or two parents ruin what I do.

As for grade inflation, I am guilty of this to a certain degree. I was discussing on another list recently what I do for extra credit--how you can get a boatload of extra points on any of my vocab quizzes which have the words in context by doing what I call rigorous reading: circling tense indicators, singulars, plurals, etc before writing out your answer. It's sort of like showing your work in math. The end result is that I have higher grades on the initial quiz portion before the extra credit gets added on. That is, I am teaching them a test taking skill or a good study technique. I am happy to reward it with extra credit because they think they are getting away with something, but in truth they are becoming more detail oriented as students. And I can teach this technique to any dullard in the room. Yes, I probably have some grade inflation, but not because I give curves or ludicrous extra credit reports and whatnot.

Student behavior? I manage my classroom well so that there is little downtime from the moment they walk in. I structure everything I do to limit downtime and the end result is little in the way of "wretched" behavior. Oh, yes, I have my disruptors but such is the nature of the beast.

Notice that by changing MY OWN behavior I am also able to change student behavior and student productivity.


> We have not even mentioned the remuneration.

No. Why bother? My pay isn't horrible but it isn't great. In general, though, it's a safer place to be than technology with all the layoffs there.
I have the same holiday schedule as my children and can go study in the summers if I so choose. Not too many jobs offer that. I don't have to pay for after school care or endless summer day camps because I can be with my kids, and that saves me a fair amount of money right there.


> Obviously... but today, parents and administrators generally absolve
> students of all responsibility.

Not necessarily. But if you come off as an anally retentive authoritarian classroom tyrant, the administration may well side with the students. After all, teaching is all about communicating WITH students.
***

Perhaps I got carried away; perhaps I was a bit rude in this note. The other person in the discussion is probably a talented classicist, but certainly not one to note his own weaknesses or that any problem in the classroom could be his own fault. Even still, I probably should not have attacked him as I did at times, but ... oh, well, no buts about it. I want to say he deserves it, but do any of us really? We are all blind to our own faults.

Ok, some of us are all too aware of our own faults: I know I'm pretty full of myself sometimes.

But there is a real "people quality" needed in teaching. You need to remember that doceo takes two accusatives--the person you are teaching as well as the subject matter. You cannot teach Latin without students, and to decide that all students are miserable little wretches to me means that you have forgotten that they are people. And that has to come first.