I’d been thinking a lot since I read this recent article on Eidolon, Why Students of Color Don’t Take Latin, by John Bracey. I’ve been teaching from Athenaze this semester, and it’s been a difficult transition from how I learned (Mastronarde’s text) and how I’ve taught in the past (Hansen and Quinn) to Athenaze. A lot of my own struggles come from the fact that I learned both Greek and Latin through a grammar-translation approach, and whatever else Athenaze is, it is not a grammar-translation approach.
Bracey describes the grammar-translation approach like so:
This approach takes a language that was once spoken comfortably by people of all backgrounds, social classes, ages, etc. throughout the world and renders it into a complex linguistic jigsaw puzzle that requires an elite mathematical mind to decipher.
This is a metaphor I’ve heard a lot about language learning–the jigsaw puzzle approach is disparaged in favor of the sort of pedagogical practices that are known to be effective in teaching modern languages. The problem for me is that I liked the mathematical jigsaw puzzle aspect of Greek and Latin. I was not particularly good at modern languages and puzzling out and decoding Greek and Latin was something I could do!
That, combined with a general tendency to replicate ourselves and teach the same way that we learned made me stubbornly resistant to a more natural approach (Bracey talks about “teaching with comprehensible input,” drawing on the work of Stephen Krashen). It’s hard to argue with his personal experience, though, and the facts he lays out. And the stakes, as he points out, are high — our time-worn approaches to teaching Latin exclude students of color, even as we talk about the importance of diversity.
I was still mulling these thoughts over when I listened to this episode of the excellent Itinera podcast (side note: if you’re a classicist who hasn’t checked this out, I’d highly recommend it! Host Scott Lepisto is doing great work!). Alexis Whalen, who teaches high school Latin in the LA area, is a big proponent of using Living Latin with her students. She uses elements of grammar-translation methods, but her teaching is heavily shaped by spoken Latin. I would highly recommend that you listen to the full podcast, but here is something Whalen said that I really liked
There are people who think that we shouldn’t be asking our students to read authentic Latin because it’s too difficult and it’s not interesting. I really empathize with that statement, because for some teenagers, it’s not interesting to read Cicero. But for some teenagers its really interesting to read something like Plautus. So, I feel like there’s a text for every context. Every audience.
As much as part of me resists integrating spoken Greek and Latin into my own classes, I have to admit that these two accounts have really struck me and made me rethink my resistance. I attended a Rusticatio (Rusticatio Virginiana Class of 2007!) and found it incredibly useful and also incredibly hard! I avoid these spoken/reading/comprehension-based approaches for precisely the same reasons that I gravitated toward the decoding-a-math-riddle approach to learning Greek and Latin — the alternative is hard. As a student, that’s fine, but as an instructor, I have to realize that that’s not enough. If these alternative approaches are demonstrably better ways for our students to learn, we need to think long and hard about how we teach.
Returning to Whalen’s experience, she raised a very legitimate concern with spoken Latin instruction:
I think that there’s a lot of people that are concerned that if we’re not teaching the grammar-translation method, we’re not helping our students succeed at the collegiate level, where they’re going to walk into an undergraduate classroom and be asked to parse a sentence, and so maybe the students who have done purely spoken Latin, purely active Latin…that those kids are going to be at a disadvantage when they get to the higher level Latin.
These people aren’t wrong but, at some point, I feel like we need to ask if the answer is might be that higher level Latin should be integrating spoken Latin. My limited experience with spoken Latin made me a better reader of Latin, no question. I was more sensitive to nuance and a far better (and more confident) sight-reader. If our greatest hesitation is because it’s hard, that’s not enough, and maybe we need to think harder about our language pedagogy. I know I’ll be (grudgingly) thinking about ways to use more spoken Greek in my Greek classes. Cornell has some great oral scripts they’ve put together to go along with Athenaze, and it might be time for me to start brushing up on mt vocab for a sick game of ὁ Σίμων λέγει (Simon Says) . . .
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