ginlindzey

this was a note I sent to the cambridge list in reply to someone saying that her students are getting tired of just correcting translations day after day after day....

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I have delayed in responding to this from lack of time and trying to find the right way to approach it. (I've had a margarita so it no longer matters to me....)

To treat the stories in Cambridge as passages that should be translated night after night is to totally miss the philosophy behind the text, I think. This technique is not, of course, different from what many of us did throughout college. Studying Vergil? Translate the next 60 lines for the next class and we'll go over them. That sort of thing. With luck, you'd even get a good discussion, but otherwise it's quite a race.

And ask yourself this simple question and answer it honestly: Did you learn to READ Latin? Did you get to a point where you could pick up a text without any trepidation whatsover and without a dictionary or grammar in the vacinity and read the text, from left to right, line after line, like you were reading a good book? Because that, my friends, is what we are meant to do. It isn't a secret that's left to those with PhDs. It's something we can all learn to do. But we have to shed some basic assumptions that we all had bred into us from early in our Latin studies:

THESE MUST GO:
1) That the only way to insure that a student has understood every aspect of the Latin is to translate it into English.
2) That declining and conjugating are the only ways to learn forms
3) That the students who can't memorize declensions or can't connect noun charts with the words on the page really aren't meant to be in Latin anyway
4) That Latin is meant to be decoded, one word at a time, hunting for that verb.
5) That you can't understand Latin without putting it into English.

With that said, I ain't perfect myself and do too much Latin to English. However, I wouldn't dream of approaching CLC with "write out translation of the next story for homework". Certainly not for every story. I spend more time with my students trying to teach them to read from left to right, trying to retrain their brains to input Latin in Latin word order, to read with expectation. There is no converting to English if I'm not at least reading the Latin outloud phrase by phrase, demonstrating that you MUST go in word order, that there IS a logical sequence to the words, that a Roman won't leave you confused and hanging IF YOU READ IN WORD ORDER.

Some days we read together. Some days we read with reading cards and force everyone in the room to consider carefully every ending on the words. Some days I read the story to the class once or twice and then assign reading comprehension questions. Some days we do cloze (fill in the blank) translations. Occasionally I ask them NOT to translate but to read it a couple of times and write a summary (in English...perhaps I should do it in Latin!).

But to solely focus on that one tired and overused tool--translation--is to drive home that Latin can't be understood without English. Now, how foolish is that? There are phrases that I understand on a gut level--sometimes it's a wonderfully ablative absolute or some other brilliantly condensed Latin phrase that just doesn't go smoothly into English. So why do we constantly demand English? I do it too, I'm not saying I don't. What I am saying is that we must question how we were taught and ask ourselves whether it was really effective. Because I think you may have to admit deep down inside that you wish you could read better too. Page after page or Pliny's letters or Suetonius--wouldn't that be nice?

If your Latin education was truly effective, then you would be able to pick up any Latin prose and read it from left to right, page after page, with the same enjoyment as reading in a modern language. I can't do that. I don't think it's because I'm stupid or because the task is impossible. I think it is because I was taught by faulty pedagogical methods that are outdated and need to be abolished.

But as long as you convince yourself that English translations are the only way to go, well then, that's the only way you will be able to go. You'll have to leave your comfortable world of what you know, though, to venture out and find if there's something more to how we can teach Latin. And you will find that your classes will not weed out quite so many students if you do. It's not a matter of watering it down or demanding less. Rigorous academic standards can be maintained and more students can be reached if you use more in your bag of tricks than just translate the next story for homework and give a synopsis for all the verbs in the last sentence.

After all, while my colleague's students can decline any noun, my student (now in his class) internalized usage and thus can understand/read/translate Latin with a relative ease compared to his students. Can she decline an i-stem noun perfectly? Oh, probably not. Can she COMPREHEND what it means in a sentence?--and I mean comprehend as opposed to decode--you betcha, faster than his students I'm betting.

When I'm old and grey and my students return to me, I hope they can do more than decline a noun or conjugate a verb. Unfortunately, people who took Latin with me in high school can probably do little more than amo, amas, amat...