Latin... Isn't that, like, a dead language?!?!?

I spend a lot of time around people who don't teach Latin. I can't help it... there are not very many of us out there (and I am the only one in my district), so I am forced to associate with people who teach crazy things, like Spanish, and English, and History.

But I sure do learn a lot from them.

At the end of last year, I spent a lot of time thinking about putting my own stamp on the curriculum that I taught. I had finished my first year at a new school, and I was itching to make some changes - to apply what I had learned from teaching in Illinois, and what I had learned from the students last year. So, I decided to do something drastic. I decided to get rid of my textbooks.

Ball and chain gone. I'm free!
(and quite literally... I had been using the same textbook for 19 years, both as a teacher and as a student)

Um...


Um...


But wait. So how do I know what to teach?

I started to think about what my end goal was. After years of high school Latin, what will my students have to show for it?

I fell in love with Latin because, let's face it, its a perfect blend of art and technicality on paper. You read it like a language, but you can also analyze all of the different components and really understand writing on a much deeper level when you discuss things like word order, and case, and word choice. And, well, the Romans are pretty violent. Which makes it kind of interesting.

I want my students to have a similar experience with the language I have dedicated my entire life to teaching. But, increasingly, I have started to become frustrated with traditional textbook decoding methods - even those that I have designed myself. The kids still make the SAME mistakes, over and over again. After 3 years of Latin, no one knows what a predicate nominative is. They can't produce the language in any meaningful way, and, let's face it half of them get super frustrated because translating takes too long. And they cut corners and give up.

Besides, no one takes a language to learn to translate. It's like taking a computer class to learn to hunt and peck on a keyboard. You get the right answer eventually, but its neither efficient, productive, or fun. Hunting and pecking makes Latin into the horrid monster "dead language," the one that "...once killed the Romans, and now is killing me."

So, there's that problem.

Also, why do we wait until the 3rd or even 4th year of Latin to actually read Latin???

Also... why isn't this not required for Latin teachers to read?

All questions that were going through my mind all summer as I put together a set of readings. Nothing felt right... until I had a conversation with my friend. And then my life changed.

But that's a story for tomorrow.