ginlindzey

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??? :-)

So, I've spent most of the summer so far working on my Aeneid syllabus and making materials I want to use for this year.

Basically I'm creating a lot of work for myself.  In some ways.  But I have two aims in mind: 1) have LESS work to do for AP during the year so that it will be almost all pleasure to teach, and 2) create ways to help all of my AP students be successful.  And, yes, I could just blow off this summer, and just kick it all into high gear next school year, but I want to be able to go to my Tae Kwon Do class this year (I didn't all of last year, and I really missed it).

The first thing I've done is revised my syllabus to fit with next year's calendar and to switch the assignments from being weekly to daily. That is, I've gone through and broken down the lines by day, scheduled quizzes, review, and enrichment activities.  If we can't do everything, so be it.  It's not set in stone.  What my students need will really guide me.  I even added topics covered for each week so that I can see at a glance when we get to X doing Y in the story. 

Of course, revising my schedule in this kind of detail has been time consuming, but if you don't have to cheat (that is, because you are new and really need to use someone else's syllabus to get you off the ground and running), it is so worthwhile.  I'd like to think that if I were doing a masters of teaching in Latin that this might a sort of project that I would do.  (I have no idea what projects MAT programs do, outside of the CANE resource materials.)  And I don't just mean revising my syllabus.  I'm thinking about the whole student.

High school students, unlike college students, in general don't own their textbooks thus they cannot write in them.  I know there are some people that would never write in any book.  I know there are some that would cram English above every line of Latin.  I do not do the latter nor would I ever advocate that.  HOWEVER, I would definitely advocate marking phrasing and whatnot, and for particularly difficult lines make notes in the margins.  This past year I really wanted my Latin 3 students to see phrasing and therefore typed out all the stories we read in Unit 4 (but only Unit 4 of CLC), double-spaced it, and gave it to the students to write on.  The idea was that we'd use ONLY the book in class (clean text) but that they could study from their notes. It worked ok. 

So, one of the things I'm doing is copying and pasting the lines of Vergil from www.thelatinlibrary.com into assignment sheets that would last for each week. (Of course, this will probably need tweeking each year; will this be worth it?)   What I want is for students NOT to TRANSLATE every damn word onto paper.  This is NOT a class on turning Latin into English.  I want to promote READING.  I want to help students develop READING skills and to do so help them learn to see phrases and clauses and THE BIG PICTURE while keeping mindful of all the details.  I'm also creating a reading log that they will need to maintain for a homework grade.  If I punch holes in these sheets and continuously encourage careful storage of them, then students will have created their own review materials to cram from before the exam.  My students this last year had, well, nothing but quizzes and tests to look at.  Not good enough.

I'm also including on the print-outs small sections in bold to be translated into good English PLUS prepared for oral recitation.  Oh, and scanned.  Weekly.  I'm going through a website that has all the old AP questions in order to target passages that have been asked and may well be targetted again.  So the passages that will be key passages for review come exam time should be the passages that they are the most familiar with.  Sounds good in theory, at least.

Finally, I'm working in at least essay prep (if not full essay writing) in some compare/contrast stuff--previous AP questions that asked for students to look at two passages.  I'm also going to do this with comparing a passage and a work of art or some famous person's translation.  I want to mark these passages too (in italics or something) on the sheets of text I'm working on. 

I know I can't do it all this summer, and in fact I really need to turn my attention to something else I want to do with my level 1-3 classes this year (more in another post), but to me it's all about finding a way to teach successfully.  One might say that I'm doing half the work for the students, that other teachers would just make the students write out or type out the lines themselves (I know of one teacher who does).  But these are students that also are in extracurricular activities and other AP classes.  This isn't like college where students are in classes for a few hours each day and have the rest of the day off to study and prepare.  I poured HOURS AND HOURS into preparing my lines for my Latin classes in college.  HOURS AND HOURS. 

I'm into reality.  I don't want my students saying to me that they like Latin until AP because AP was soooo much hard work.  I want them to think of it as challenging, but not impossible.  I want them to feel like they've accomplished something grand, you know?

Anyway.  That's what I'm doing this summer.

Saw the doc today; he's seriously concerned about my sleep deprivation.  No joke; me too.  He kept asking how I could lighten my load.  He kept saying he knew other teachers that didn't work as hard, surely.

Yeah... well....

Would my tests be easier to grade if I made them all scantron? Sure.   Done in 5 minutes in the workroom with the scantron machine.  But is that truly best practices?  

How come living well means not teaching well if you have a full load?

Sure.  I could switch.  Might take some time to change over the tests but I could switch.  But....

How would all multiple choice prepare students for AP?
How would all multiple choice encourage students to reread their stories?
How would I really see true mastery of the material?

Because I can tell you what, just because a person can decline a noun doesn't mean he can read a sentence of Latin.  Just because a person can recognize the right answer doesn't mean he could have come up with that answer on his own.

Backwards design, right?  They say that's the best way to design what you are doing--thinking about where you want to be and design backwards.  OK, my end result is supposed to be, what, a 5 on the AP exam.  So what skills do you need?

• an ability to translate accurately and literally a seen passage of Latin 
• an ability to read and reread a large quantity of Latin, and then reread it again--because the exams requires that you have a serious grasp of all the literature read
• an ability to comprehend an unfamiliar passage of Latin that is not related to Vergil
• an expanded vocabulary keyed towards Vergil
• a solid grammar base that would allow you to differentiate, for instance, tenses and cases quickly and easily
• an ability to write essays (but frankly I let the English department develop those skills; I just fine-tune them for the needs of the exam)

I look at that list and can think of MORE things I need to be doing and not less.  MORE.  For instance, at the beginning of the year I really tried hard to make students use a reading log.  But I never had time to grade them or enter the grades.  I was too busy grading quizzes, tests, or making quizzes and tests for other classes, or quia.com material.  However, if I did have more time and did use those reading logs, for those that don't fake the log (yeah, yeah), it would be really beneficial.  Students won't do something unless they have to even if they know it would be good for them.  So the reading log, I feel, is necessary.  PLUS it would develop the HABIT of REREADING previous stories.

How wonderful it would be if all AP Vergil students, instead of freaking out at the number of lines in the current assignment and diving in, actually took the time to reread the previous selection before starting the current one?  It would certainly develop the bigger picture--plus Vergil seems to repeat specialized vocabulary relatively near each other.    But this habit is almost too late to form if you wait until the students are seniors.  Better to start it sooner.  

The other thing that I do to encourage rereading of stories is including seen passages on the tests.  I (foolishly?) provide a choice of 4 passages, so if they reread at least one or two stories they should be able to find something they are comfortable doing.  I always hope that the knowledge of those selections being on the test encourages students to continue to reread the stories, even if only the night before the test.

And it's this presentation of seen passages that helps me to see whether they can translate or not.  If they mess it up in class when it was homework, fine.  That's ok by me -- if they learn from it.  On the last test I gave to the Latin 3 class I included a passage we had a "pop" quiz on (that I didn't count--it was that bad!) that was over an extended indirect statement.  Two students chose that passage to demonstrate that if nothing else they HAD paid attention. Fine.  Great even.  They gave me the details they hadn't given me before, the kind of details and literal precision that AP is after.  

SO THAT'S ALL GOOD.  But if I could find a way to keep up with the reading log, that would be better.

The ability to read a sight passage and answer questions... well, I guess I could turn that into multiple choice/objective.  Currently I have short answer -- both Latin and English -- to make sure students truly are understanding the Latin and not just guessing randomly.  From the style of question I can see whether they get concepts of case or even subject/verb agreement, not to mention general comprehension.  On my last Latin one class I could easily tell who had general comprehension because they laughed at the story.  (I had written a great one, I admit.  Luck, most assuredly!)   Admittedly the sight passage will be multiple choice on the AP test, but I feel that I can determine a lot about how a student is doing by the kinds of answers the student writes down.  Did they get the write word for a Latin answer but just not put it in the right case?  Did they not understand the question altogether, or did they understand the question but not the passage?  All sorts of things. 

But I guess if something had to go, I could rewrite the tests to have multiple choice for those sections... that would save some time in grading.

As for developing an expanded vocabulary geared towards Vergil, well, there's still LOTS of room to go here.  I'm only beginning to ponder the situation.  The more Vergil I read with the AP girls this year, the more I realize that CLC really has LOTS of Vergil vocab built in.  Some scene we were reading in Latin 1--LATIN 1--had some words that were just in the Vergil we're read recently, words that the girls stumbled on.  

I'm starting in Latin 3 (but have been inconsistent--and this will all need redoing on quizzes next year) to have a section on the vocab quizzes for old vocab they should still know.  It's strictly a matching section, and I really only began this when we began Unit 4.  Perhaps a little late to be doing this.  Even the Latin 2's have noticed that they aren't retaining vocab.  So this is something that perhaps I need to start including on their vocab quizzes.  The question in my mind's eye is usually WHICH WORDS?

I have toyed with words that show up in the current story.  But would it be more efficient (surely it would?) to just simply state that there will be matching vocab that will pull from X stage and Y stage?  Yes, most likely.   I do have a master vocab list for Unit 1 and Unit 2, though I haven't handed them out in recent years.  But perhaps these would be good lists to give to Latin 2 and 3 students at the beginning of the year?  And I wish I had a list for Unit 3, one done like *I* would do it--with macrons and all.  (Hmmm.... I suppose this could always be a standby project for my aide when I don't have her typing up Vergil vocab....).   Ideally what I would do is mark all the vocabulary that is on the Vergil high frequency list and target those words, whether they showed up in the current reading or not.  And if I pulled on two stages, I could do one from a more recent stage for reinforcement and one from an old stage for review.  Yes?  Not a bad idea.

(Of course, I'm always full of good ideas that I can hardly find time to put into practice.  And this note was about how to cut back on what I do so I can get more sleep and find time for exercise before I literally kill myself from stress.)

(And now I'm thinking I have the topic for a paper for presentation next year regarding vocabulary acquisition, which is always a hot topic for conversations among Latin teachers.)

Grammar.  That's where I'm falling down, I think.  I don't do enough hardcore drill and kill.  I focus a lot on being able to see the phrasing and that seeing the phrasing is far more important than knowing all the words.  Clearly students don't believe me.   One girl, bless her because she tries hard but gets easily discouraged, had written vocab all over a sheet of the Latin story (printed out for marking phrasing with notes for vocab on the side), demonstrating that she had looked up ever single damn word.  She did.  She had worked HARD.  She was virtually in tears when she (as well as most everyone else) had bombed the little pop quiz that focused on the indirect statement because she couldn't make heads or tails of it.  She sees the trees but not the forest. Lots and lots of tall, scary trees.  And I do have a grammar section (multiple choice) on my standard tests at all levels; I have noticed that this is the section where people are dropping the ball, especially on things they really shouldn't be blowing.  I no longer drill the neverending noun song with the Latin 3's.  If they don't know their noun endings then they know what to do.  They have the link to the song, there are drills, etc.  They can practice on their own. 

I have conjugating and declining drills online.  I don't require declining and conjugating for homework because, honestly, WHEN would I have time to grade them?  But this is a problem I think I have to figure out.  I think that Latin 3--that stepping stone to AP Latin--must be where we refine all knowledge of declining and conjugating and such.  I tried to teach the Latin 3's (only 7 of them) how to do a synposis earlier this year but finally gave up because only 2 seemed to get it and in a split level class I started to think that it wasn't the best use of my time. But that was a cop-out.

I'm thinking that next year--and I have to find a way (find some more time?  ahahahahhaha) to grade these THE WHOLE YEAR--all vocab items must be declined, conjugated, or put in a synopsis (where applicable).  Little details keep slipping by the AP girls--and that's my fault for not having reinforced the detail work in the past.  But they've been in split-level Latin for 3 of four years.  All three with me, at least.  

So, not a place to cut, but one to expand.  One to find MORE time for.  

I know one thing that eats up a bunch of my time is the creation of the quia.com materials.  But I think they are critical for mastery in some cases, can act as a private tutor for students, is a resource that's available 24/7/365, and once made is still there.

I confess that there are times... times when I worry about ALL THE TIME I've invested in quia.com and what will eventually happen to it if something happens to it.  I've come to rely on it entirely too much in my teaching and my review of material for students.  It's probably why I have as many students move from level 1 to level 2 Latin.  We'll see how many Latin 2 go to Latin 3 next year.  And God Almighty what will I do next year?

They'll have to have a cut off.  3 Latin 1s, 2 Latin 2s, 1 Latin 3 split with AP again.  I doubt that they will be getting another Latin teacher, or if they do, will it be one I can convince to do things my way?   What levels to give?  Lower levels while I develop upper?  Give up upper and relax, so to speak, with lower?

And what about my doc?  HOW can I do less than I do now?  What's the result?  Will students learn the Latin if I didn't do what I do?  Wouldn't more fail?  Wouldn't my classes be smaller? 

I don't know how to not do what I do.  I can only think of more to do.  More that needs tweaking.  Today is an inservice day and I had no  one to meet with for vertical teaming this morning.  This, I suppose, is my vertical teaming.  With personal commentary.  Probably TMI. 

If I gave up anything it would be doing JCL.

In a heartbeat.

Tomorrow morning will be the last day of the conference.  It's been enjoyable, it really has.  We have come together as a group and had a lot of fun the last couple of days.  And slowly people have been REreading.  Maybe what I'm doing is rubbing off.  After our classes today, we were all sitting in the lounge reading our lines for tomorrow.  Well, I considered myself reading, everyone else said they were translating.  No matter.  I sat off from the group, reading along, often flowing ahead of them but then I would get bogged down a tiny bit and slow up or I'd be listening to them explaining and reexplaining the Latin to other members of the group and forget what I was doing.  

And I realized something....  years ago a friend, Donna Jacobson (sp?) and I were in college and in a Livy class together.  I knew I was in over my head, that I really hadn't had enough Latin--or rather, didn't know how to read prose.  I remember going to a review one night, I think upstairs at the student union (don't know why I remember that....), and Donna was more or less leading it.  I remember struggling with long sentences and clauses and whatnot, and it just seemed so easy to her.   I'm now where she was, and my companions here are where I was.  They are a bright group.  They know their grammar and whatnot.  But I *see* what the Latin is doing more easily.  I truly think a great measure of that is reading in word order and reading whole sections not just one line or two at a go.  I read far enough through to see who's doing what to whom, to see that I started a sentence with a nom pl and it ended with one too.  In fact, I feel so at home with what Latin is doing with word order for effect and suspense, I've gotten to the point that I really and truly do not want to translate it into English most of the time, because most of the time what's in the Latin is really and truly lost.

Last night we had our Roman meal which we cooked together and then ate with a fair amount of drinking going on during both.  I then taught Greek dancing, followed by just all sorts of dancing.  It was mainly just me and another woman, basically dancing to whatever was on and not caring that we were out there by ourselves.  A great time was had by all.

Tonight we went out for Italian and stuffed ourselves to the gills.  When we came back, we read Miles Gloriosus, which complements the Aeneid nicely because the soldier claims to be the grandson of Venus!  I had never read Miles and I ended up being given the lead slave role.  It's been a loooooooong time since I had a part in a play reading, probably since college.  It was a nice transportation back in time.

My card playing has been a big hit--and in fact, this was exactly what I've always wanted: to have a group of adults/teachers who had full command of Latin grammar and such who could take my basic card-playing script and adlib when comfortable.  We played the other night and we played again this afternoon when the network was down and couldn't do much in the computer lab.

I have the evaluation to fill out and I have a lot of thoughts that I would like to include.  Constructive things.  I might be listened to, who knows.  After all, we did read the passage as a whole before we started reading today and then read it again afterwards.  What it lacked was dramatic performance/emphasis.  I know I'm a bit egocentric about reading.  As a teacher, I want to read first because I want the students to know what it SHOULD sound like, with emphasis and drama, so to speak.  Then when we read together, I read WITH them and we ALL read.  And if it isn't dramatic enough, I make them read it again if we have time.  

While it is important to call on people individually, this also means others will be left out.  Choral reading, I think, is key to building a true comfort level in reading.  (I wonder if that's true....)  

But my point was, I think last night I actually had made these suggestions about reading before and after to one of the profs.  I had had a fair amount of wine by that point and had done a lot of Greek dancing, so my memory isn't the best.  If this suggestion was heard and tried, then I really should lay out a plan of action, some real suggestions that might make this a truly superior workshop.  It's already way up there because of the size (small) and personal attention.

Anyway.  Time to go to bed.  I'll have to work on the evaluation in the a.m.  And pack.  And everything else.

The first part of the following is from a conversation/email I was having with one of my very first students from 1988. The email came from out of the blue, and we ended up in a discussion about reading Latin. Her words will have > in front of them, mine will be the rest (as I'm sure you can tell). She said:

>It's just that I don't get people who simply can't
>remember endings.

Some people don't have much in the way of phonological awareness. My students, for instance. If they have never learned/mastered how to sound out a word in English, they are totally lost. They wait until they've seen the word/heard it so many times that they have immediate recognition. But to sound out a word they've never heard (in ENGLISH as well as in Latin) is beyond them--and it terrifies them. They won't do it. They try to get away with not saying it, but I usually force the issue.

Now here's what happens. If they can't sound out words, they can't think in syllables. If they can't see syllables, they can't see the morphology. I teach a lot of "rigorous reading" techniques and even give extra credit for such things as circling tense indicators and personal endings, but--as the set of papers I was just grading demonstrated--I can talk about the tense indicators, we can do examples, etc, but if they have to see it for themselves on their own, most of the time they can't or won't. They think it's too much effort and assume guessing will be good enough to get by, and that's all they want to do (get by).

So part of it is mastering the endings, but more of it is even noticing that they are there or perhaps having the ABILITY to notice they are there.

>That's interesting that you call hunting for the word
>and reading them out of order "decoding." That makes
>sense I suppose, but I wonder if, cognitively, the
>brain cares or not whether you read the end/middle of
>the sentence first or not, as a procedure.

YES! OH YES!!! OH YES IT DOES!

When I quit teaching you guys way back when, part of it was because I felt I was doing something wrong. Really wrong. Everything seemed fine on the surface, but it wasn't. And I couldn't figure out what. When I read an article about sight-reading vs decoding by Dexter Hoyos, I figured out what was wrong.

You want to read something good on reading Latin, get his book, _Latin: How to Read it Fluently_ from here: http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~glawall/cane.htm (look toward the bottom of that page).

How will you ever read at a normal speed if you are forever looking for the main verb 10 lines down in Caesar's sentences?

How about this--find the main verb:

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

52 words long. Main verbs are 41-42 and 44.

Did you hunt for those main verbs, or did you read it in word order? (And did you recognize the preamble to our constitution?)


Does
>reading and comprehension require reading in the right
>direction? Do you truly get a more genuine
>understanding of the meaning by being able to read in
>the direction the Romans wrote? If so, why?

How many articles do you want on the subject??? :) Where to begin, where to begin...

>What if one were REALLY GOOD at reading the verbs
>first and putting the sentence all together in the
>wrong order? (Granted, he/she wouldn't be able to read
>aloud in any sort of way that would be good for other
>Latinists.)

A periodic Latin sentence has everything in the order of the narration in prose (for the most part). This is one reason why the glorious ablative absolute comes first because its action has already happened.

But here, take these lines from Vergil which I'm going to try to recall--

post ipsum auxilio subeuntem ac tela ferentem
corripiunt spirisque ligant ingentibus.... (I think that's right...)

Here's what's happening. The ipsum is referring to Laocoon, the dude that said, "I fear Greeks bearing gifts" while pointing at the wooden horse. Post is referring to what has just happened in the previous sentence, which is that his little boys were just attacked by twin sea serpents (for his blasphemy about the Trojan Horse). It happened so fast he could hardly do anything. The previous line had the snakes gobbling them down in seemingly one bite right at the end. Think poor little mousy being constricted by a ball python.

So here he is, IPSUM auxilio subeuntem--he himself going up with help--ac tela ferentem--and bringing weapons--CORRIPIUNT--THEY (the twin snakes) SNATCH. That is, even in Vergil we've got coming first the things that are happening as time unfolds--the direct object (Laocoon) who is desperately trying to run up and save his kids but WHILE he's doing that (those present tense participles) the snakes get him too and bind him (LIGANT) with their huge coils.

You think these lines would hit the brain in just the same way if you picked around? IMPOSSIBLE! The density of Latin is just amazing to me--so much packed into so few words. I LOVE THIS STUFF!!!

My 8th graders are attempting (attempting is the crucial word) to write a film scenario over the 20 lines of this scene. Lots of help from me (dragging them through it). But this stuff is DYNAMITE SCIFI!!! It truly is and Vergil wrote it just as well if not better than any screenwriter could have done. My GOSH this is damned good stuff in EXACTLY the word order it was written--especially for the poetic effects. Take it out of word order? WHY BOTHER TO READ IT IN LATIN THEN? Pick up a translation!

***

That's where I left my email conversation with my former student, and that's how I really feel about it. Some of the Vergil stuff has been discouraging with my students but if nothing else each day I find I love this stuff more and more and find Vergil more impressive than the previous day. Each day I am more and more convinced that we do our students a serious disservice if we don't teach reading skills--reading from left to right--as well as accurate pronunciation so we can read OUTLOUD. It's criminal, really, but so many teachers figure their students will never get to real authors that they decide it's unimportant. Or that's the excuse they use, or that they don't have time for it, or that no one else does it, or they don't know pronunciation.

If they don't know how to pronounce Latin, WHY THE HECK NOT? Can't they open their Latin dictionaries and read the pronunciation rules? Can't they PRACTICE THEM religiously? Or is that too much work? And if it IS too much work, then WHAT RIGHT do they have to complain when their own students balk at assignments and decide it's too much work? They don't. Shabby teaching gets shabby results. Well, good teaching sometimes gets that too. ha.

Program closing? Well, what have you done to make your program rich and exciting and vibrant? Latin isn't like codliver oil. You can't just take it because it's good for you. And if you are teaching Latin because of the word building/power and aids for English grammar, get out of teaching Latin. This is mean and this is probably something I'll regret and erase later but, really, get out of teaching Latin. You don't understand what you're supposed to be doing. IT'S A LANGUAGE! A language for speaking and reading and even writing. It's not about damned SAT and GRE scores.

Teach it to read, teach it to read it outloud and to be amazed--BLOODY WELL AMAZED--at the power in Vergil's words or the depth of Catullus's AND CONVEY THAT TO STUDENTS or just leave the profession. Because if you're just a word power teacher in disguise as a Latin teacher and looking around you and wondering why your program is shrinking, it's because you're not teaching it LIKE A LANGUAGE.

And I think I better stop there. That's quite enough passion for one night.