A few skills that any Latin student will gain in their first year of Latin would be learning a ton of vocabulary and charts on nouns and verbs which would fall under Blooms Remembering bar. Students will gather many words and learn how to chant noun declensions as well as verb conjugations. With these words and charts students will be able to explain why these words need the specific endings, why a plural feminine word needs a plural verb and adjective. That these endings allow a student to see what role the word plays in the sentence. With this knowledge students will also see and understand how the syntactical form that Latin takes circles back to English. How verbs have to match their nouns as well as the adjectives. By applying this understanding of specified endings and agreement students will have a better grasp on the English language. After memorizing the different forms a noun takes in each case or how each ending changes in a verb conjugation students will be able to pick out from texts which words are connected and in agreement, therefore making translation and understanding the text that much more understandable. Students will only have to analyze a text for these specific endings and they will be able to give a loose translation of the text. With these application skills first year students can then look at these same texts and support their translation with their understanding of the endings and their uses, they can evaluate how the sentence or text should best be translated and give evidence for that decision. With all of these skills first year students should then be able to create their own works of writing, simple but still using endings and vocab and rules and other pieces of knowledge they have gleaned over the year.
In the book I am reading, When Dead Tongues Speak, by John Gruber-Miller, I was surprised how forward he was in naming the different issues a first year Latin may face, or even a senior teacher. The first thing he talks about was how as new teacher himself he was faced with the problem of having a purely grammar based Latin course. Taking Latin for a little more than ten years now I also was in this grammar based mindset for my future students. The problem he stated was that no student could fully grasp the material and the language from such a route, by making Latin so foreign from other languages in that it was not spoken anymore, he set his students up for below par in learning a language. In addition to taking away from students experience, the standards for Latin would also not be met. The standards speak of the need to educate ones students on the culture, the way in which they can apply this new knowledge in their own culture and the like. These standards also brought up some challenges that I will face in my future classroom. How can I teach my students about the culture, using texts and artwork that requires more than 1 years of Latin to decipher. Where can I find simple enough examples for my first year students to use without confusing them with advanced knowledge needed to understand the examples. Another problem being how can I make for them an opportunity to take this new knowledge and apply it to their other studies. maybe looking at poetry that is a predecessor to current or more modern poetry. Aside from the problem of having a grammar based course and addressing the standards other things that I quickly found issues with as a future Latin teacher were how to work with my students different learning skills, some being auditory, others visual, hands-on, etc. How could I take each of these different learning practices and try to reach them all or most in a language. Auditory and visual not so difficult, hands-on, a little more challenging to address. But by running into these problems I also began to think about possible lessons that could meet these needs. Like making a piece of artwork that embodies a Latin saying or Roman ideal. Another problem I came across in the reading was how could facilitate a communal environment with “dead language”. Maybe add some conversational Latin, but where does put my students? They couldn’t go outside the classroom and just start conversing in Latin, no one would understand them! How could I develop a sense of community in the classroom that could translate into other aspects of my students lives. These are the sorts of questions and problems I came across after reading the first chapter in Gruber-Miller’s book but hope to reconcile with further reading and experience.
image: http://epltt.coe.uga.edu/index.php?title=Bloom%27s_Taxonomy
Ms. Smith 