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I had a rant on Latinteach this a.m. Well, not really a rant, but a passionate bit of writing. Well, I'm listening to opera, go figure, so passion goes hand and hand with it.
Just a random question, that really doesn't need answering, but does anyone ever pay attention to the music I list? Pretty eclectic sometimes... My youngest, age 11, actually is interested in opera because of the music memory program at school. My Greek grandfather and his son/my uncle were opera buffs, so I believe it may be in the blood. On the advice of JBuller, classicist and dean somewhere down in Florida, I bought an opera's greatest hits for my son, and I find I'm enjoying it.
So anyway, back to Latin. Here's what I wrote this a.m.:
****
>Unfortunately, as long as the College Board expects students to
>"translate as literally as possible," we are at cross purposes. And,
>as long as we have administrators who expect passing scores on the AP
>exam, we will "translate as literally as possible," warts and all.
I don't disagree with this--how could I? But it doesn't mean that during class translation is the only tool we use.
It doesn't mean that we hunt the verb, it doesn't mean that every day we say "get out your translations", it doesn't mean that. AP only controls us if we let it. We can teach our students to be good readers of Latin AND high performers on AP tests at the same time. I'm sure of it.
My AP student that I inherited is used to working off of photocopies, of writing the meaning of every single word above the Latin, of taking the Latin apart. Because I can't work with him every day in my 3-way split class, this is a hard habit for me to break. But I encourage him that what he SHOULD be writing/drawing if he does anything, is phrasing marks and arches, and if necessary, write vocab in the margins.
In an ideal world I would have recordings of the passage for him to listen to (or I would just be there) and every single day I would read from the beginning of Baucis and Philemon, the story he's working on, so every day he would see it all together, as a passage, as a reading, as a story, as a piece of art--and not the word for word glossing.
My niece took two AP classes from the marvelous Mrs Jo Green here in Austin.
(My niece was the incredibly brainy type who skipped whole grades and graduated early--early, and with two AP classes....) ANYWAY... I remember asking her one day about a certain Catullus poem, and she immediately spouted it off IN ENGLISH.
That was when it first struck me. When even the brightest of our students study their ENGLISH translations so that they can regurgitate their English on the tests, we are doing something wrong.
For the last two years I taught the sea serpent scene in Vergil to my 8th graders. Every day I was reading all or portions of it in Latin to them, very dramatically (demonstrating what good stuff it was) and I was probably very close to having it all memorized because I was reading it so often!
I can still hear in my head....
parva duorum
corpora natorum serpens amplexus uterque implicat
AND BECAUSE I KNOW MY MORPHOLOGY and actively use it when I read, forcing myself to metaphrase if I begin to get lost, I can translate that accurately.
When I work with my AP student, I am working on teaching him phrasing, teaching him how to pay closer attention to the morphology, and thus how to create meaning more easily and accurately so that when he DOES have to do some sort of translation, he can.
Instead of "write out a translation of the next 20 lines" we should be teaching them--especially by modelling--to read through those lines, ALL THE WAY THROUGH, two or three times if necessary to get a feel for the phrasing, and to let certain things jump out at us--whether it's a participle or some sort of nominative or something like parva duorum corpora natorum, or that the verb is 1st person singular or suddenly jumped to present tense OR WHATEVER. Maybe mark the phrases, form the connections, then look up vocab if needed, etc. AND IN THE END, READ THE WHOLE DARN THING AGAIN. And read it all over again the next morning before class. And you know what? That would probably take less time than writing a translation, and give them a FEEL for learning how to READ REAL LATIN, instead of just quickly jigsawing together another bunch of Latin words.
My apologies for going on for so long. I guess I just feel that some of us are so lucky to have gifted students, truly gifted students who long to learn how to do things right, who look around at their colleagues in Spanish and French who are reading whole stories, and want to know why they can't do that too.
We need to teach the reading skills. The more we focus on that, the better their written translations will be. English teachers know this. How do you improve vocabulary and writing? GET STUDENTS TO READ MORE!! But we aren't doing this in Latin, are we???
Well, I have to go to school now to face 300 benchmark essays from my English classes. I felt I had to do something for Latin first.
***
And off I go to Dripping Springs. I've been listening to a recording of Wuthering Heights in the car (by Patricia Rutledge) and it is sooooo incredibly well done that I can hardly wait to get back to it.
Wish me luck with the English; it keeps me from Latin so the faster I face it and get over this mountain, the sooner I can get back to Latin.
Just a random question, that really doesn't need answering, but does anyone ever pay attention to the music I list? Pretty eclectic sometimes... My youngest, age 11, actually is interested in opera because of the music memory program at school. My Greek grandfather and his son/my uncle were opera buffs, so I believe it may be in the blood. On the advice of JBuller, classicist and dean somewhere down in Florida, I bought an opera's greatest hits for my son, and I find I'm enjoying it.
So anyway, back to Latin. Here's what I wrote this a.m.:
****
>Unfortunately, as long as the College Board expects students to
>"translate as literally as possible," we are at cross purposes. And,
>as long as we have administrators who expect passing scores on the AP
>exam, we will "translate as literally as possible," warts and all.
I don't disagree with this--how could I? But it doesn't mean that during class translation is the only tool we use.
It doesn't mean that we hunt the verb, it doesn't mean that every day we say "get out your translations", it doesn't mean that. AP only controls us if we let it. We can teach our students to be good readers of Latin AND high performers on AP tests at the same time. I'm sure of it.
My AP student that I inherited is used to working off of photocopies, of writing the meaning of every single word above the Latin, of taking the Latin apart. Because I can't work with him every day in my 3-way split class, this is a hard habit for me to break. But I encourage him that what he SHOULD be writing/drawing if he does anything, is phrasing marks and arches, and if necessary, write vocab in the margins.
In an ideal world I would have recordings of the passage for him to listen to (or I would just be there) and every single day I would read from the beginning of Baucis and Philemon, the story he's working on, so every day he would see it all together, as a passage, as a reading, as a story, as a piece of art--and not the word for word glossing.
My niece took two AP classes from the marvelous Mrs Jo Green here in Austin.
(My niece was the incredibly brainy type who skipped whole grades and graduated early--early, and with two AP classes....) ANYWAY... I remember asking her one day about a certain Catullus poem, and she immediately spouted it off IN ENGLISH.
That was when it first struck me. When even the brightest of our students study their ENGLISH translations so that they can regurgitate their English on the tests, we are doing something wrong.
For the last two years I taught the sea serpent scene in Vergil to my 8th graders. Every day I was reading all or portions of it in Latin to them, very dramatically (demonstrating what good stuff it was) and I was probably very close to having it all memorized because I was reading it so often!
I can still hear in my head....
parva duorum
corpora natorum serpens amplexus uterque implicat
AND BECAUSE I KNOW MY MORPHOLOGY and actively use it when I read, forcing myself to metaphrase if I begin to get lost, I can translate that accurately.
When I work with my AP student, I am working on teaching him phrasing, teaching him how to pay closer attention to the morphology, and thus how to create meaning more easily and accurately so that when he DOES have to do some sort of translation, he can.
Instead of "write out a translation of the next 20 lines" we should be teaching them--especially by modelling--to read through those lines, ALL THE WAY THROUGH, two or three times if necessary to get a feel for the phrasing, and to let certain things jump out at us--whether it's a participle or some sort of nominative or something like parva duorum corpora natorum, or that the verb is 1st person singular or suddenly jumped to present tense OR WHATEVER. Maybe mark the phrases, form the connections, then look up vocab if needed, etc. AND IN THE END, READ THE WHOLE DARN THING AGAIN. And read it all over again the next morning before class. And you know what? That would probably take less time than writing a translation, and give them a FEEL for learning how to READ REAL LATIN, instead of just quickly jigsawing together another bunch of Latin words.
My apologies for going on for so long. I guess I just feel that some of us are so lucky to have gifted students, truly gifted students who long to learn how to do things right, who look around at their colleagues in Spanish and French who are reading whole stories, and want to know why they can't do that too.
We need to teach the reading skills. The more we focus on that, the better their written translations will be. English teachers know this. How do you improve vocabulary and writing? GET STUDENTS TO READ MORE!! But we aren't doing this in Latin, are we???
Well, I have to go to school now to face 300 benchmark essays from my English classes. I felt I had to do something for Latin first.
***
And off I go to Dripping Springs. I've been listening to a recording of Wuthering Heights in the car (by Patricia Rutledge) and it is sooooo incredibly well done that I can hardly wait to get back to it.
Wish me luck with the English; it keeps me from Latin so the faster I face it and get over this mountain, the sooner I can get back to Latin.
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