Writing Workshops in a Latin Classroom

Would the writing workshop approach work in your discipline? How might you organize a workshop?

Incorporating other disciplines into ones subject area is difficult, not necessarily in relation but giving adequate time that other subject to strengthens students skills and knowledge (Content Area-Writing; Daniels, Zemelman, Steineke). Writing is an essential aspect of language, especially Latin, yet this writing happens in Latin, not English. So for my classroom I would have to be deliberate in how I go about doing a writing workshop. I have a few ideas as to what sort of projects we could do but the hard part would be to encourage strong writing while at the same time relating it to my content-area.

One possible project would be writing a response to one of the Pliny the Younger’s letters. This would be great practice for students to first translate the letter and understand what is being said. I would give instruction on how to write a formal letter to a friend. The response would be in english but students would have to follow the typical format for letter writing. I would have them take this a step further and have them delve into what is happening in the letter or response. Perhaps start research on the Mt. Vesuvius eruption, what sort of place Pompeii was, what a historian might write about about this incident. I see a lot of other projects stemming form this reading and singular workshop on writing letters. I would follow this day up with another letter writing workshop but instead of letters between friends, a business letter. Possibly one between senators. I would expect my students to use their prior knowledge they have, from pervious lectures, on Roman elite society and the senatorial politics.

Another possible writing workshop I could do would be on an ancient artifact, a research paper that could be published in an archeology journal. I would first start the students by letting them choose an artifact ( vessels, clothing, coins, etc) and then have them research the background of that particular artifact. This would be a workshop that extended beyond a day or two, probably a final project/paper. I would create deadline benchmarks for students, when to have the background info by, when to have your argument for the usage of the artifact by whom, a thesis and intro, primary and secondary sources, a rough draft and then a final draft.

Writing workshops can be daunting but starting with singular projects, taking a day or two to complete is easier to swallow and will not interfere too much with current lesson plans. I find this somewhat exciting and I look forward to using these same ideas in my classroom.

image:http://quemdixerechaos.com/2012/12/04/translatingplinypt4/

Day 1 of Reading Latin for Comprehension Lesson Plan

Here is a potential reading and writing lesson plan for chapter 1 in Ecce Romani I

Lesson Plan reading and writing

image:http://www.amazon.com/ROMANI-LEVEL-STUDENT-EDITION-HARDCOVER/dp/0131163701

Writing Crisis in our School Systems?

Is there a writing crisis in this country and how might you use a strategy or two to get students to write to learn?

What many people talk about in the writing crisis are how students are not writing like they are, or used to. There is a disconnect between current writing styles and what are being taught or are expected to be taught in schools. Students are not interested in the writing done in class because it is not related to the writing they are doing outside of class (Content-Area Writing; Daniels, Zemelman, Steineke). Students are writing constantly, blogging, texting, journaling, social media (Facebook, twitter, etc.), even fictional writing on different sites. Students are writing, and many are writing well, just not in the context of classroom writing. This is where the crisis lies. I remember a comment my AP Language and Composition teacher in high school made on the first day of class, “I do not want to receive an email in ‘text language’ from you [the class] or your parents.” She then proceeded to show us an email from a previous student’s parent which was written in text message format. The class laughed and we moved on our merry way of “writing by the law” in her classroom. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed this class and the teacher but I cannot help but think about how pertinent text messages are to any other prose we read in the class. Writing is writing, whether it be classical prose, poems, novels or even a message of 140 character limit (twitter).

Another aspect of this writing crisis is preparing strong writers for the work force, students will not find interest in these in class writing exercises and therefore not develop the strong skills to write a memo, or an e-mail, or even a business letter. All of these skills are needed in the work force but if students are not getting the interested in the usage of these skills then they will not practice them in their everyday writing let alone in class.

In my area of teaching, the classics, specifically Latin. I can fall into this trap of requiring students to write poetic epics like Homer or Vergil, or write prose in a similar fashion to that of Caesar or Cicero. Yet knowing how to summarize an entire book from the Aeneid in 140 characters covering all the key points is just as difficult. Helping students develop these skills in writing, and preparing them for the future, can be done in the context of a text message or Facebook post. Limited word count is just as important as content of the writing. I have heard, quality over quantity many times in my writing career. Why cannot this quality be in less than 500 words?

Some strategies I might implement in my Latin classroom would be: Fictional dialogue between the gods or goddesses, this would be based off of reading on particular deities and a students prior knowledge. What this dialogue could tell me is where the student was influence in terms of the gods and goddesses personalities (were they heavily influenced by Ovid or other contemporaries) and how well did they get the personalities of these characters across, was the dialogue clear in who was speaking, what type of dialogue took place, etc. Other ways to help students build these skills could be in a writing project that slowly builds throughout the year, or morphs with new material. I may have them write a fictional piece but then research the main ideas they address in the writing, or even have them write a persuasive paper on a particular aspect from Roman history, like the treatment of women, how slavery worked or even the laws of inheritance. I can see a lot of aspects where I can incorporate different styles of writing into my Classical classroom.

image http://forums.shoryuken.com/discussion/155340/umvc3-forum-off-topic-thread-you-down-with-ott/p262