There's a book called Latin for Americans, and I used it once. I didn't find that it lent itself well to teaching a comprehensible language, but rather a lot of vocab and grammatical principles. Generally speaking, most kids don't learn straight grammatical principles very well. Most students - I like to use the car analogy: I can drive my car, but I don't necessarily want to know how it works. Most students are like that with language. They want to drive the language, but they don't want or need a lesson on the engine. It will alienate them, and they don't progress. I've made that mistake enough times. I want to teach Latin to everyone, because they're all capable, they want to, and more than that, they have the right to learn it. So I've called this Latin for Everyone, because my goal here really is to learn to be able to teach every one of my students. Including the one who, right now, refuses to take his headphones off and insists on sleeping no matter what I do. I will learn to teach that kid.
I'm sitting at a Comprehensible Input workshop presented by my county. I'm listening for beautiful nuggets of wisdom that are either new or that I need repeated, and there are always many when we learn from our communities.
Really, I guess, I'm starting this for myself because sometimes I do things that really, really work, and then three weeks later I want to try them again but have forgotten how to do them, and that's frustrating. Sometimes I also want to catalog things that don't work, and I want to remember that, too. This year I taught a class possibly more memorable than any other I've ever had because it made me cry more than once. They didn't want to listen. They didn't want to participate. They didn't want didn't want didn't want and so I devolved into grammar instruction in a method as CI as I could make it, because they wouldn't believe that listening would teach them anything. So for the first time ever, they aced grammar sections (which meant almost nothing to them, I'm pretty sure, except the ten who listened) but couldn't manage the stories that some of my Latin I students could read, because they refused to pay attention to it.
If nothing else, I guess, it illustrates the point: we can't learn language just through grammar. We don't learn language by memorizing grammatical principles. Ablative absolutes stopped being a useful shortcut and became 'let's get rid of because' and sounded scarily like math to me. Scarily. And most kids aren't good at math. All kids are good at talking (which, actually, was that class's problem anyway).
My mother always said to me, "Arianne, people, especially difficult people, come into your life to teach you something, and until you learn it, they aren't going to go away." My fifth period is going to be one of those groups, I think, that stays in my life until I understand how to teach them because they deserved to be taught this year, and I didn't succeed, acceptably, in teaching them.
So, about me?
I've officially been teaching for four years. I went through college in a traditional grammar-translation program (and I loved it), but then I hit a turn in my road that's pretty unusual in the Latin community (at least for now). I was lucky enough to learn to teach in a comprehensible input program, from a very good comprehensible input teacher in a classroom full of (God love them) kids who were very forgiving. I got lucky because a lot of CI teachers have to make their way here through a method that not only taught them, but that they've become used to using in their classroom, but, fascinatingly or not, I think the mistakes I've been making are almost the same. I imagine that reveals something about teachers. I've done these:
1. Expected way too much from my students
2. Not repeated myself enough
3. Not gone slowly enough
4. Presented something and then never gone over it again, but thought they knew it
5. Didn't ask enough questions
6. Didn't ask them what they thought of my lesson
7. Not setting up rules carefully enough for my CI classroom to function without distractions, or with little distraction.
I'm creating this for myself so I remember these things, but also because - as Keith Toda said on his blog - there aren't a lot of voices in CI Latin, and even though I respect all of the people who are writing on this topic, well, the more voices = the better. I guess it should also be said (because I've been reading Spanish blogs, too) that CI is for everyone, too. That what we say about Latin is applicable across the board - anyone can do this. Anyone should do this.
So without further ado, these are some lessons I know about right now that I hope I will be able to apply:
1. This kid, let's called her Jamie B, sat down for our first timed write, she sat for five minutes, and I swear, she wrote nothing. Nothing. I sat next to her desk trying to get her to write something. Nothing. She wrote nothing. I couldn't figure it out. We'd just spend two weeks going over this freaking story, and she couldn't write anything. She finished honors Latin II last week, and she wrote fifty words. Now. Zev B wrote 241, so comparatively, I'm unimpressed. But Zev B was writing three zillion words from the beginning, and Jamie B wrote nothing, and she was ECSTATIC at this progress. Me, too, and I told her so. Jamie also had an 82 in this class because she has a tendency to refuse to ask questions, and she likes to sit next to her friends and chat, or use her cell phone, or do her physics homework. She wants an A. She wants an A desperately every semester - she's that kid - and I want her to have an A, but she had an 82 after the final, and there wasn't a lot I could do.
So Jamie, annoyed either at herself or at me, said to me, "But I learned to lie" (one of her problems is that she always tries to tell me the truth, and she doesn't always know the words she needs to do that, so I've been trying to encourage her to lie when she needs to in order to use the things she knows how to use - we're required to give district speaking assessments), and she plopped herself down and talked to me for five minutes straight about Hannah Montana, Zac Efron, and a kid in her class who annoys her. I have never heard Jamie talk that much at all in two years. I was going to just sort of put up with it for a second (because she'd been lobbying for an A and that annoyed me, even though I legitimately like Jamie), and then I realized this was going to be a thing, so I grabbed the computer and feverishly started typing everything she said. I have a record of it, it's about a half page long, and that thing is going to be part of my graduation present to her because I am so stinking proud of her. I showed it to her, and her eyes got wide, and she floated out of the room without even asking about the A.
Kids aren't going to do things 'til they're good and ready to do the thing, and then it'll happen. And I can't get mad or frustrated (at them or at me) for not doing it until they're ready. You can prompt and push and question, and they can accept that, but they won't do it 'til they're ready. Jamie used ut (so that - it introduces a subjunctive) several times. She missed the subjunctive, but she's getting the concept in their. John F gets the subjunctive when he uses it. Who cares? Jamie will get there when she's ready to do it - she's moving that way, and that's the point. If she doesn't move, she won't get there. Let's care about the movement.
2. Tricia W mentioned to me that she finally feels this semester like the things we did last semester are entering her permanent memory, her ability to do things immediately rather than by pushing herself. This is a phenomenon I've noticed a little bit - that they won't really use stuff from the current semester unless it's immediately relevant to them. I need to stop worrying about whether or not they can use what we did last week and start thinking about the progress they're making. I need to be prepared for the fact that I probably won't really start hearing past tense until next year; ablative absolutes aren't going to sneak in until they've heard me use them a lot. They are going to get there if they keep hearing it from me, if it keeps being repeated. I need to remember to keep using the things I want to hear from them, and they'll use them, too. For those things to make their way not just into learned memory but also functional memory takes more time than I want it to, and for it to occur to them to speak more deeply takes some time, too. They remember that they can say this and that, but they won't always think about the places they can take that. They need that from me. I can't expect them to do it on their own.
Anyway. Those are the lessons I'm working from right now. Getting ready for a summer of learning how to teach better, and trying to find new lessons in the space away from teaching, and in the real world. You should come with me.
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