Self-Identification, Practicing Phrases, and Discretion

My ones are learning about family. In the course of learning about family every year, I sit down and have a conversation with my kiddos. In it, I tell them that we're going to be discussing things like parents and siblings and familial relationships, and that they get to define their families however they want to. If they have people in their lives they aren't blood-related to but they think of as family, that's a-ok by me. If they have a sister but don't like her, and they don't want to disclose that they have that sister, fine by me. They can disclose or not disclose whatever they want, include or exclude whatever is meaningful to them. I think that's a really important conversation to have, since

(a) it emphasizes the value of their autonomy,
(b) reminds them that we see/respect them as people before anything else and
(c) asks them to be respectful of everyone else in the room and their autonomy as well. Also,
(d) it doesn't call anyone out. When I was in high school, my feelings about my family were very complicated, and there are things I wouldn't have wanted to answer. When we give them power to make that call on their own and don't put them in a position to have to say things they don't want to talk about, we emphasize that that's something we value.

On which note...

Here's an activity I love.

I really want a lot of reps of potius quam, malo, conor, soleo, debeo and possum with my ones at the moment.

So I wrote on the board ______________ potius quam _____________ malo.

I indicated myself and said, coquere potius quam currere malo. Any kids who feel the same way were supposed to stand. You then have options: acknowledge that there are a lot/a few, call on a couple and ask some questions (what do you like to cook? have you ever tried running?), or just acknowledge it and have them sit.

I made a few similar statements. i prefer to eat breakfast rather than lunch. Etc. Then I started calling on kids, and they'd make statements. Wearing Vans vs Jordans. Petting cats vs petting dogs.

Then I changed the phrase: ______________ conor, sed non bene possum. 

Cantare, I said, conor, sed non bene possum. (they made me demonstrate, and then they agreed.) Some stood, some didn't, we discussed. Then they made statements about themselves (voluntarily), and those who identified with those statements stood.

This is a great icebreaker, warm-up, bell-ringer, end of class and I have ten minutes kind of activity. You can do it to introduce something, to get reps of an idea, etc. And because kids really like to talk about themselves, it doesn't get boring. Change up your statements and keep them novel, and it gets everybody involved. This is good material for a quick quiz at the end of class if you spend time really using this to do PQA. This is also great fodder for PQA (either in the moment or later).

And there are endless things you could ask them to talk about. Just today:

______________ possum, sed me non delectat.
_______________ potius quam ____________ malo.
_____________ habere volo, sed non habeo.
______________ conor, sed non bene possum.
______________ debeo, sed non soleo.
______________ mihi est.

Story Mapping and Comprehension

Story- and character-mapping are techniques I use a lot with my students. We've done it to track how a Roman play works and what characters have to do with each other, and we've used it to keep track of the movements in a particularly confusing text, and we've used it to create a visual for how an epic flows.

Most recently, we've mapped the entirety of Jason and the Argonauts to think about the impact each character has on the journey.

Generally when I have them do this, my requirements are:

1. Put a bubble on your page for each character you're including.
2. Write a short summary of what that character is (for jason, for example, you might write heros, filius alcimedes, lanam auream eripere voluit). In lower level classes, this can be short phrases or even things lifted directly from the text. In upper level classes, it can, too! Or you can ask them to write something of their own devising.
3. Connect that circle by lines to any other character to whom they relate (for jason, that's a lot of lines. in a play, for example, the leno will have many fewer lines connecting him to many fewer people).
4. On the line, write how these characters interact/what their relationship is.

For Jason, I also asked them to include why that relationship was important. For example, Jason and gang wouldn't have gotten through the Symplegades without Phineus. That's an important bit to include on the line.

Other types of story maps:
-murals
-plot points
-when events lead to other complicated events
-detailing movement in a story that has a lot of it (think Cambridge stage 12)

I have fifty of these in my classroom, on account of all of my twos have done this for Jason, and they did it in pairs. These are great tools! For creating, for reference, and eventually for what we did this week: writing. I spread all fifty-someodd of them down the hallway and gave my kids their journals. They've been reading about Jason for a Long Time (tm) now, and so they had an hour. They could look at any story map they wanted to from any class period, move around however they wanted. And they wrote the story of Jason and the Argonauts, organized in any way that made sense to their brains, for an hour.

Every one of them.

It's not a bad assessment, either, and not a high-output one for those of you who are working with texts and TCI and trying to figure out how to assess in a way that's not rote memorization and also isn't high-output.

Y'all, my classroom looks different now: flexible seating

This is my fifth year deskless! I distinctly remember myself, a colleague, and a student carrying desks out of my room to a trailer. We got our workout that day. We've had chairs for the last four years - just chairs - but this year I'd been reading a lot about flexible seating, and I got to thinking:

A short list of handy-dandy brain breaks we've been doing and have liked

Brain breaks are an incredibly useful tool in the classroom, especially (god sixth period, or first period) when your kids are full or fidgety - and you can do them target language. Here's a short list of ones I've done so far this year that have worked for me. Let me know if there are any you do, too, that work, and I'll put 'em on the list!

Things That Foreign Language Teachers Need To Do More

There are a lot of things that push us to get better as language teachers, and many of them are things we forget we can do, or forget to incorporate on a regular basis. The ideas listed below are either things I've done to great success or have seen other people do with great success, and that I think really need to happen more.

On Fidget Tools

I have a small basket of fidget tools - a couple of cubes with various sides (one that clicks, one that rolls, etc), some tubes with marbles in, some metal interconnected rings, a plastic twisty thing, a silicon thing you can stick your fingers in, and a couple spinners. They were all pretty cheap (so's the quality, if we're going to be honest) - I got them for a dollar each at wish.com, which means it took thirty years for them to get here, but that's okay. I'm doing a dry run.

See, I think the fidget tools are actually really important. A few years ago, I let a kid borrow my kombaloi beads I got in Greece because he could. not. focus. unless he was playing with something, and when he had those, his attention span got longer, his participation level went up, and his grades went through the roof. He just had too much body to deal with, so once he chilled his body out, his mind could work. It was great.

And then the fidget toys happened. I say toys intentionally, because although they are tools, I have a lot of kids who just like playing with them (which I get - so do I), but they became a huge distraction in class. Kids passing them around, throwing them, getting up in the middle of class to show them to other people.

So I put my basket of fidget tools out last week, and my classes and I had a very serious conversation, and they seem to be respecting it so far. We'll see how it goes next year with the new crop of children coming in. But here is the gist of it, and why it is so important to me (it is important to note that focus issues/mental illness/etc and physical disabilities should not be equated, but in this circumstance, I think it's helpful for students who have trouble conceptualizing what a real focus issue might be to give them a disability they can immediately imagine):

I said, guys, imagine that one of your legs is much shorter than the other, and so every time you stand, your hip hurts and you cannot run and play, and you also cannot do things the same way other people do. You are at a real disadvantage, and that is not your fault. It's just that you're in pain, and you are unable to get around it to do the other things you have to.

But then someone hands you a cube, and you can put your foot on that cube, strap it right on, and then your hip doesn't hurt anymore. You can suddenly do things that you could not before.

But then everyone likes your cube, so then everyone has a cube, which is great until they start throwing them or playing with them or getting shiny ones with flashing lights. Teachers get fed up with this, and they start taking them away, because classroom distractions don't help. Eventually, there's a classroom-wide and maybe school-wide ban on them because they're so distracting. And this is fine - kids might be annoyed that they can't play with the thing, but they'll get over it. It isn't a big deal.

Except you. Because you needed that block to be able to do things like anyone else does, and now the only real tool that was helping you do that is something you can't have anymore, so you'll go back to being in pain and two steps behind.

There are students who actually need the fidget tools, people who have trouble focusing their minds or controlling their behavior without something to focus their physical energy into. When you disrespect the tools they use to help them with that and appropriate them as your toys, you put their very real coping tools at risk. If you are disrespecting those tools and using them such that they are a distraction, you are part of the possible outcome that they get taken away, and then that the people who need them lose a tool that's very important to them and their success. Please don't jeopardize someone else's success.

Anyone who wishes to use the fidgets may. Even people who don't need them can benefit from them, and I'm a fan of that. I am not going to restrict access to them. But if I catch you disrespecting them, you will personally lose access to them so that the people who need them don't. Thank you for contributing to the community of this classroom by making sure that everyone has access to all the tools they might need to succeed in their learning and in their lives.

The Latin iPad

My colleague Natalie and I came into the windfall of an iPad when my grandmother decided to update hers. She was going to get rid of it, so we asked for it so we could have a dedicated Latin department iPad.

And we have made great and joyous use of it.

Some things so far this year that I highly recommend:

Using language classes to teach other ideas

Every year for the last six years, I've sat down with my twos and threes and asked what they want to study curricularly the following year. Then I spend the summer putting together that curriculum. This year, for the first time, a student suggested the American Civil War. It didn't get voted for, so that won't be part of our curriculum next year, but it did spark a really interesting conversation about the things that are reasonable to learn in a Latin class.

The answer is: anything. It's a language, so we can talk about anything we want to. In the last year, we've done science experiments and hypotheses (Celsus proposes a lot of cures for a lot of things, so we hypothesized what they would actually do, and then we tried them all and kept notes on our experiments, comparisons, etc.), math (if we know how many people are in a contubernium and century, etc., can we figure out how many people are in a cohort?), history, reading, and art. I try very hard to touch on all the school subjects as often as I can.

Materials

Small update:

If you check the materials section, you'll see that the three existing gorgeous chapters of Hobbitus Ille, by Anthony Gibbins, are there. You should also go check out Legonium, also one of Anthony's masterpieces, with its sheltered vocab, great storylines, and beautiful pictures.

If you are NOT currently a member of the Teaching Latin for Acquisition facebook group, I highly recommend it. The beautiful Ellie Arnold (Helena) is administrating a database of an incredible number of readings and activities for CI Latin teachers.

A unit in my classroom, part 3

The next week of magic class looked like this:

Day 1
We re-watched each of the clips, and I began to use the vocabulary in the types of sentences and sentence-strings in which they were going to see them in the original text. 

The previous night, I had written three summaries: one of each video. I included statements in the summaries that were blatantly false, and others that could be interpreted as true or false, depending on how you read them. They are at school, but on Monday, I'll attach them here. I put one of them in large letters up on the screen (you could do this with a projector, a doc cam, or just by writing) and had the kids sit in pairs with one facing the summary and one facing away. The first student began to read, slowly, to the second student. When the reader read a lie, the second student pointed rudely (on instruction from me :D) and said, "Mentiris!" That student then had to provide the correct information. The reader then had to begin at the beginning of the sentence and read it correctly.

When I hit the bell, the two stood up and switched roles, whether they'd finished or not. They then began again at the start of the passage. It gives students who are struggling a little more with the listening to then have the chance to read the passage for themselves, and it provides repetition for both of them.

After they'd read the passage the second time through, I got up and read the passage, and they got to call me a liar. It meant that I heard various corrections for various errors, and the kids got to hear how other students interpreted various statements. Then we voted on which correction we liked. At the end, we all read the corrected one together. We got through two of the three.

Day 2
We did a running dictation of the third summary - Hocus Pocus. In pairs, student select a runner and a writer. I post the text down the hallway (I always post two copies in opposite directions so it doesn't get overly crowded in the hallway). The runner runs down the hall, memorizes everything they can in the first sentence, and brings that information back to the writer. The writer writes all of this. The runner's job is finished when s/he has conveyed all the information in the first sentence. The two then sit and illustrate that sentence.

Then, they switch jobs. The writer does the runner's job and the runner the writer's.

Any time the group had questions, they sent a runner to me. I sat in a centralized location so that
(a) the kids always knew where to find me and
(b) it never appeared that I was too busy to talk to them, because I was surrounded by a group.

When they finished, I checked their work for spelling, missing words, etc. The first group to get their work to have no errors at all got either a Jolly Rancher or two extra points. (you'd be shocked at how many wanted the jolly ranchers.)

Day 3

We read through the dictation together, and anyone who still had errors corrected them. We made sure everyone understood the whole thing. Then I gave them a quiz. They had two choices:

1. Find four false statements and write down the false information.

2. Find four false statements, and rewrite the sentence so that it's true (but not by just putting non).

If they chose the second, they got 1.5 points instead of just 1.

Day 4

I told them about Apuleius and Quintilian (Latine). We talked about where they were from - which meant discussing Carthage, directions, etc. briefly - and interesting stories. I explained to them what the story The Golden Ass is, because we're going to read selections from it later, and we talked about how Apuleius was accused of bewitching an old woman. We discussed the Apologia, what an apologia is, and how, precisely, he got into trouble. We acted out what Apuleius was accused of doing (bewitching an elderly wealthy woman so she'd marry him).

Then, I asked them to, with a partner, read the brief text from Apuleius' apology, out loud. Then we re-read it together and asked any questions. Then together in their partners, they - in their own words - made a list of the things that Apuleius felt the Romans felt defined a magician. I asked them whether what Apuelius had written in that sentence represented his opinion or peoples' opinions, and they felt, due to existimant, that he was representing others' opinions.

Then I asked them what was on their lists, and we made a collective class list of Apuleius' definitions of a magician. We then reread it and we asked the following questions:

1. Quis est?

2. Quid magus agit?

3. Quid ille pollet?

4. Quomodo?

5. Cur?

They said it helped them separate out the sentence and tell specifically what was going on.

Monday, we'll read Quintilian's version, and we'll make a Venn Diagram suggesting what Apuleius thinks, what Quintilian thinks, and where those overlap. Then, we will look at statements in partners or small groups and determine whether:

(a) fieri potest

(b) veri simile est

and 

(c) patetne sententia?

A unit in my classroom, part 2

All the stuff that we more or less pulled off in five days - and it did actually take a little longer than that, because on Friday, they'd earned lots of PAT, so we only had eight minutes of class - is easily stretchable into two weeks. In some of my upper level classes, it did take longer, and we just took our time with it and enjoyed ourselves.

Friday, the eight minutes of class essentially amounted to the weather and days of the week. After that we played Versipellis. I need to post on Versipellis, because it is the best game I know, and the kids are obsessed with it (credit to Keegan Potter for it). Friday, therefore, is not included in my plans, so day 5 is really day six...and actually is going to be day seven, and you'll see why below:

What a unit looks like in my classroom, part 1

I've been asked to post some information about a Latin III/IV unit I'm doing right now, so here's what it looks like:

Last May, I asked my Latin II and III students to throw out some ideas of topics that interested them. They gave me a list of twenty-seven ranging from Roman-occupied Britain to fairy tales. Then they voted, we tallied the votes, and we ended up with:
magic
military
sports and games
mythology
fairy tales

'Data' tracker

This year, I gave my Latin I students a template that looked like this:

I've never been much of a numbers-minded kind of lady, but I do like to know where my students feel they are - which, to my mind, is frequently more important than where they actually are. My mother always used to say, "Arianne, it's not what you say, it's how you say it." For students, it often doesn't matter nearly as much what they know as how they feel. This template lets me see a few things:

1. how long it generally takes a class to get a certain piece of information comfortably. Some things take longer than others.
2. which things I'm teaching more and less effectively.
3. how my students feel about a topic, and what they want reinforced.

It also lets my students note, over time, their own progress. They forget, when they get really good at something or when it becomes natural to them and other stuff becomes the struggle, where they came from. As we do this over time, they get to watch themselves make progress, actively, and remember that at some point they didn't feel that way.

I collect it on Fridays, look through it, make any notes I need to make (e.g. first period can greet people but is having trouble with the weather), and then give it back on Monday. I don't grade it. It's for them. The last box we will fill out after we've moved on to something else, because then they've had time to digest and they're no longer in stress mode trying to internalize the information. It lets them - and me - see what they feel like when they've had a break from direct focus on something.

Preferred Activity Time

This is something Bryce Hedstrom has talked about in great detail, and it actually comes from Fred Jones' book Tools for Teaching, which I highly recommend.

Preferred activity time is spent, as it sounds, doing activities your students prefer - but the catch is that they have to be activities you're happy to spend the time doing. I.e. they still need to have curricular value.

We manage our classrooms in a lot of ways - teaching our kids the daily routines so that you don't have to clean up your disaster of a classroom every day, because kids know where things go. Walking around your classroom while they're working to keep disruptions to a minimum. Individually speaking with kids who do cause disruptions. But so often we resort to punishment for behaviors contrary to what's expected. Why don't we reward them for behaviors we do want them to exhibit? Well, that can be hard. First, how do you reward them? Second, how do you choose which behaviors those are? You can't look at at kid and say, "I'm so proud of you for not throwing that pencil at Jasper today!" Who does that? So you identify the most important and most time-saving things, and you work with those. Here's how my kids earn preferred activity time:

1. If they're all in their seats when the bell rings, they earn a minute.
2. If they're all silent when the bell rings, they earn a minute.
3. For every three minutes the upper levels spend in the target language, they earn one minute of PAT. For the first years, we begin with every minute gets them a minute.
4. When they hustle, they get time. For example, I gave them three minutes to set up the chairs in pairs the other day. They used 48 seconds of that. The remaining 2 minutes and 12 seconds were added to their PAT.

They lose time when they choose to waste time. If it had taken, for example, 3 minutes and 15 seconds (which would have been egregiously unnecessary) to set up the chairs, they would have lost 15 seconds. If they choose to use time exhibiting inappropriate behaviors - we're telling a story, and they choose to constantly hold side conversations - they lose the amount of time they spend doing that, until they've done it three times. When it's happened three times, we take a different tack called omission training, and for that I refer you to Mr Jones, whose book is spectacular.

Imagine my second period has earned 29 minutes and 18 seconds. 30 minutes before the end of class (this gives us about a minute of buffer to set the classroom back up if necessary and follow leaving procedures) on Friday, we stop and select a game. These are games I offer them, so all of them are to my liking. None of them will waste time, and I'm happy to relinquish those thirty minutes to playing those games. We then spend the remainder of the class playing that game, and whatever didn't get done on the other portion of Friday will get finished Monday.

When they earn an entire class period - this is cumulative. Two weeks ago, they earned 27 minutes. I put this in my spreadsheet, and then I added the 31 minutes from this week. They've now got more than a class period in saved up time - we will spend it celebrating Kindergarten Day on the closest Monday. On Kindergarten Day, they can bring snugglies, we sit on the floor, if they want to bring a mug, they can use my electric kettle for hot water and can make tea or hot chocolate, and I will spend the period reading them a story in the target language. They love this because they feel like they're doing no work when in fact they're doing the best kind of work - being totally relaxed, utterly safe, and getting nothing but input.

(we're doing this Monday. we're reading Doomsday in Pompeii because it is Volcano Day - August 24th. Doomsday in Pompeii is a book in English, so although I will be looking at English words, I will read aloud in Latin. I am spending part of this weekend translating about 2 more pages than I think I'm actually going to need and taping over the English so it's not quite as stressful for me Monday. normally I'd read a book in Latin, but I don't have any kids' books in Latin about volcanoes. yet.)

fREADom

I gave a presentation this morning on reading and reading skills. Below please see links to the dropbox location of both the PowerPoint and some notes to hopefully help it make sense. :)

Powerpoint
Notes

Putting together my classroom

All links in this post will take you to where you can get those materials, if you should want them. Most are free, but the expectations posters, alas, are not.

This is one of my bookshelves. I'm working on installing rain gutter on my cork board as well. Both of these things allow me to display my books cover-out. Studies indicate that kids are more likely to want to read if they can see the covers of the books, so I have displayed my books that (a) are light enough to put in this and (b) have interesting covers. Those that don't have interesting covers or are too heavy (or don't have pictures in them) are displayed on this bookshelf:



                 


This bookshelf is painted so that it's graded by level. Blue is beginner, red is intermediate (which is a HUGE range), and yellow is advanced. The top shelf is for dictionaries and songbooks.

 This is my corkboard. On the far right, I have our class calendar. This includes everything from JCL events to stuff we've scheduled actually in class. The middle is my Craig's List. I'm teaching mixed level classes this year, but let's be honest - all classes are mixed level. This whiteboard (they make stick-on whiteboard!) allows me to write phrases or synonyms that allow kids to use the words they know or try to level up if they want. The left is divided in two - memoranda and roganda. There's a basket with little papers, and there are pushpins on the cork strip above the board. Memoranda are things kids have asked me to do and are reminding me to do by writing me a note. Roganda are questions that are either off-topic or that the kid didn't want to ask in the moment, and so they pin them to the board. I will answer them on the paper and pin them back up, or find the kid if they write their name on it.


This is my board. The center is for use, the left is for club info, and the right is for weather. Posted along the board are my question words. Each poster has the word, colored, in huge font (at least 90 pt), the word in English smaller in a less interesting color, and pictures that you could associate with the word. I add words as my kids ask me to, but right now, they are to where, from where, where, when, what time, to whom, who, what, whom, whose, where, what kind, how many, why, how. I may have forgotten a couple.




This is my costume corner. I have a massive collection of stuffed animals hung on chains, which are attached to the wall using massive command hooks. (all these are findable on amazon) All my fruit and small plastic toys are in the hanging blue and maroon boxes, which I got at Home Depot. I sewed a piece of fabric to the back and slid them through a dowel rod, which I put on the wall using massive command hooks. There is a smaller hook with fly swatters on. On the table, there is a football helmet that doesn't fit in a box, and a box of cool and intriguing props (ranging from cat toys to I don't even know what). Underneath the table there are milk crates that are zip-tied together. Each is labeled, in Latin and English, with the type of clothing in it. To the left there is a hat box (hats are very important to my students. this also includes wigs and beards). Behind the arch (which represents all buildings all the time), there is a giant urn I got for twelve dollars that contains my foam swords. Above all of that, there's a green do you understand? poster, and it shows them how many fingers to hold up depending on how much they understand.

 These are my expectations posters. One shows what I want them to do in class (sit up straight, respond when I call on you, etc.), and the other is what they call my level up poster. If you're earning a zero, you're not here. If you're earning a 1...etc.

These are my file cabinets. The left hand one is my teaching materials - glitter, ribbons, extra paper, printer paper, classroom decorations, paint, etc. The chest of drawers is paper plates, miscellaneous paper, club files, cleaning supplies, etc. The right hand is the art buckets. You can see art buckets on top of it. I got the buckets, as well as the jackets around/in them, also at Home Depot (pretty cheaply). There are nine (enough for each group of four to have a bucket), and each has markers, scissors, colorful paper, sharpies, glue sticks, colored pencils, etc. The green drawers on the right hold my socks (so we can erase white boards), mini white boards, markers, games (like story cubes and Jenga). The tall tubes of colored paper are in a cheap folding laundry bin I got from Target for five dollars years ago. This way, I always have butcher paper, and they have a place to turn butcher paper projects in.







This is my idiom wall. I have found, especially in reading, that having knowledge and comfortable use of idiom is unbelievably helpful. Each week, each class chooses one, and I put it on the board. Every time someone uses it correctly, they get a piece of candy. I add idioms throughout the year, so the wall never gets stale.

This is my weather board. I include the day of the week, the time of year, and the weather itself. We do the weather daily at the beginning of class. It allows us to practice all three tenses (yesterday was, today is, tomorrow will be...), and we get used to questioning, and we get some basic idiomatic vocabulary in. I made all of these in Word and laminated them at the school, and then I stuck magnet tape on the back. You may note that I have two the moon is shining. There is no good reason for that.

If I had a superpower - visualizing stories

If I had a superpower, it would be this: I'd love to be able to hold out my hand and just project at will, in the air, images or videos of whatever I happen to be seeing in my mind's eye at the time.

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.

Learning Locutions

The more locutions the kids hear over and over and have access to, the more locutions and idioms and so forth they start to add to their regular vocabulary. To this end, I've put up an idiom wall. Each week, each level chooses an idiom which becomes the Idiom of the Week. The kids, when they use it correctly and in context, get a treat. This means I go through candy very quickly, but it also means that kids are falling all over themselves to use idioms correctly - which means they get committed to memory very quickly. This week, Latin II is practicing excidit mihi and Latin III has nisi fallor. If you use a denarius (or somesuch) rewards system, that would work nicely for this, as would a number of other systems.

Locutiones Latinae

I have found in my journey in Latin speaking that the most difficult thing for me (other than, good heavens, convoluted clauses within clauses) has by far been speaking Latin. We tend, especially as tirones, to start speaking English but using Latin words. It's a really easy thing to do, and it's a harder thing to do to start acquiring real Latin. I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but hours and hours and hours of input is the only real way to do that - for us or for our students. Sometimes, though, a list of nice idioms can help, so I'm putting forth a small list here of idioms I've found to be useful, ways we can start saying things more Latinly, if you will - either with our students or simply ourselves.