A Queen of Monsters, or, on the importance of phrases

I have a small confession, which is that I once forgot that 88 in Latin is not expressed as eighty-eight but rather as two-from-ninety and accidentally taught my kids the wrong number, and did so in a phrase that gets repeated a lot, such that my embarrassment is fairly palpable at this point. Especially since I eventually came back from my flight of fancy, remembered, confessed my sin, and now get ribbed a lot for it. And then we took performance finals, and one of my kids said it, absent-mindedly, anyway.

Which only serves to illustrate my point.




My children, for the most part, are never going to remember what the plural possessive for the second declension is. They just aren't. They aren't grammatically-minded for the most part, and that phrase is stultifying. You know what they do remember, though? The Queen of Monsters. (they also remember The Builder of Houses and, more perplexing, The Racetrac of the Dead.)

Teaching our students phrases isn't just a way to get them to remember a particular phrase, although it's great for idioms and so forth (like miles, which in Latin is the sort of cumbersome milia passuum). It's also a spectacular way of getting them to remember a form in context. Last year, my ones did a MovieTalk with a video called Monsterbox (it's adorable, and I highly recommend it). We did not name the two main characters, but because I was teaching queen and builder, we called them Queen of the Monsters and Builder of Houses. Those two phrases got used repeatedly because they were the main characters in the film. Today, I was working with a student and we were reviewing something that required, as mentioned earlier, a plural possessive in the second declension, and I chanced that he might know, since he's one of Those Kids.

Unsurprisingly, he didn't.

And then I said, "How do we say of the monsters?", and right off his tongue, no thought necessary, tripped monstrorum. Which is exactly correct.

Does that sometimes result in misuse of forms? Yes, but so does any kind of learning. Our children aren't and won't be perfect and will misuse forms for a long time no matter what we do. It does, however, form a permanent, contextual imprint of a grammatical structure, and that is an imprint we can use to our advantage, to further cultivate use of the language. When a structure becomes about meaning instead of grammatical form, it is a million times easier for them to use, and two million times easier when it has a context, and that context was a compelling one.

As perhaps demonstrated by my brief inability to say eighty-eight miles an hour and my students' consequent razzing, enhanced because they remember the phrase so well.

Update: We were thundering barbaric murmurs the other day, and one student was not thundering to the satisfaction of the rest of my students. We learned the phrase quadam vi because it shows up in a reading, and about six kids yelled at her, "QUADAM VI!"

She thundered.

The other thing teaching phrases does is to provide them with ready-made, usable language that trips off the tongue, because it has a clear use and context. It helps them move out of the Tarzan phase much more quickly. If they had had only quaedam and vis (which, incidentally, they do also know), it would not have (a) occurred to them to say that to her or (b) been nearly as easy to do so.