Verbatim

When RobertPondiscio wrote “How to Get a Big Vocabulary,” I knew it was just a matter of time before my defenses would weaken, and I would have to start spouting off about the beauty of language, Latin, etymology, and classical roots. I can’t help it. I get excited about these things. I teach Latin, English, and writing, and my happy place lies at the nexus of these subjects.

Just when I thought it was safe to take a break from grading my students’ writing assessments and see what’s happening on the internet, Core Knowledge blog reader John Webster had the nerve to ask specifically for a Latin teacher’s opinion on the value of Latin, and Robert had the unmitigated gall to publicly provoke me into a response to John’s comment.

@Robert (comment 30). Here in Minnesota, I know of several public schools that offer – require – Latin. They’re called charter schools, and all of them are also Core Knowledge schools. Yet another reason why some alleged supporters of Core Knowledge who oppose all charter schools are in no practical sense real friends of Core Knowledge. My two kids, 9th and 7th grades, study Latin and do the obligatory grumbling about having to learn a “dead” language. I rely on the authority of teachers I respect that Latin helps in developing literacy and vocabulary skills, but I’ve never read anything addressed to laypeople why this is so. Anyone know of any articles/essays that explain the value of Latin, or can any Latin teachers in the CK blog audience explain this value in a practical, meat-and-potatoes way?  Comment by John Webster — December 27, 2012 @ 8:07 pm

Before I get all in a twist about the word “value” as it relates to anything I teach, (Latin valere, to be strong, vigorous, in good health, to have force) let me begin with the low-hanging statistical fruit, all thanks to Bolchazy-Carducci, the publishers of the textbook, Latin for the New Millennium:

1. Studies performed by the Educational Testing Services show that students of Latin outperform all other students on the verbal portion of the SAT.

2. In the District of Columbia, elementary school students who studied Latin developed reading skills that were five months ahead of those who studied no foreign language and four months ahead of those who studied French or Spanish. Two years earlier, the same students had been excluded from foreign language classes because of substandard reading performance.

3. In Philadelphia, students in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades received 15 to 20 minutes of daily instruction in Latin for one year. The performance of the Latin students was one full year higher on the Vocabulary Subtest of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) than the performance of matched control students who had not studied Latin. 

4. Sixth-grade students in Indianapolis who studied Latin for 30 minutes each day for five months advanced nine months in their math problem solving abilities. In addition, the students exhibited the following advances in other areas:

·      Eight months in world knowledge
·      One year in reading
·      Thirteen months in language
·      Four months in spelling
·      Five months in science
·      Seven months in social studies

But the fun part – the “value” – in learning Latin has nothing to do with these statistics or test scores. It lies in the evolution of our language, the stories revealed through etymology, the history of our culture articulated through the words we preserve and the words we discard.

As Robert’s post points out, a big vocabulary does not come from sheer memorization. Anyone who has ever been subjected to an 11th-hour SAT prep course knows that. It comes from a deeper understanding of word origins and repeated exposure to novel words through reading. If I know that the Latin acer means “sharp,” I can deduce that “acid” has a sharp taste, an “acute” angle is sharp, “acrid” is a sharp smell, and an “acerbic” person has a sharp wit.

I am all for the memorization of vocabulary; in fact, my school teaches vocabulary using a lovely series called Vocabulary from Classical Roots and my students memorize their share of vocabulary lists. However, if we want our students to achieve true depth and breadth of vocabulary, it’s worth spending some time among the Romans. A working knowledge of Latin is worth more than the weight of its word roots. It is an exercise in reverse-engineering our own language in order to understand how all the parts fit together to create a whole.

And as for the greatly exaggerated rumors of Latin’s death? Latin teachers squall and writhe in horror when confronted with this rumor as evidence of Latin’s obsolescence, but I couldn’t care less. In arguing for the relevance and necessity for the continued study of Latin, I call on Charlotte Higgins, chief arts writer at The Guardian.

The  most frequent charge laid against the door of Latin – aside from the absurd accusation of elitism – is that it is useless. Why not learn Mandarin, people ask, or Russian or French? For me the pleasure of Latin is precisely because – aside from the points sketched above - it is “useless.” Latin doesn’t help to turn out factory-made mini-consumers fit for a globalised 21st-century society. It helps create curious, intellectually rigorous kids with a rich interior world, people who have the tools to see our world as it really is because they have encountered and imaginatively experienced another that is so like and so very unlike our own.

I couldn’t agree more. My students can “amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant” with the best of them, but they can do even better than that. They can tell their friends Amy and Amanda where their names come from. They understand how amare meandered north and became amour. They can become enamored, have inamorata, wax rhapsodic about their first paramour. They will know what Catullus meant when he lamented that odi et amo, and take solace in Virgil’s observation that omnia vincit amor.

Latin is alive and well in my classroom, thank goodness. My mother likes to remind me that she was the one who forced me to take Latin in seventh grade, and like John Webster’s kids, I moaned and groaned about having to study a dead and hopelessly irrelevant language. But thank goodness for my mother’s stubborn insistence. My students are far more accomplished readers, writers and students of the world for their years spent among the Romans.

Sic Semper Tyrranis et Aspergillis Fumigatis.

I took a [very] informal poll, and it turns out that people in regular, non-dorkish professions never experience this.

People run up to me in public and toss out Latin phrases, with huge grins of excitement, expectant, waiting eagerly for approbation.

My husband is an infectious disease doctor, and people never approach him in public and holler the names of fungi or bacterium. People never run up to him and yell "Pseudomonas aeruginosa!" or "Aspergillis fumigatis!" as he's topping off his morning coffee.

But this happens to me. It happened to me this very morning, in fact.

Our town's Fire Chief accosted me this very morning in the Lyme Country Store with "Good morning, Jess. Hey! SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!"

And then disappeared into the next aisle, in search of a breakfast sandwich.

And this isn't the first time this has happened to me.

It's pretty predictable - I get "semper ubi sub ubi" a lot, paired with a guffaw, from former Latin students with a sense of wit. Sometimes I get "semper fidelis," which is a little weird, as I was never a Marine. Once, at the library, I got "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!" and I'm rather sure that person had no idea that they were hailing me with a jaunty greeting from a World War poet, "It is sweet and right to die for one's country!"

Is this something that only happens to Latin teachers, or do teachers of other languages get this treatment as well? Just wondering.

NB: Apologies for the re-post; I've been pretty sick and the words slowed to a trickle. There's not much interesting in the ones I was using, either: "cough," "popsicles," "sleep," and "phlegm."

Lahey and the Swan

On this, my fourth day of summer "vacation," I am coming up for air.

School actually ended over a week ago, but I agreed to teach a rock climbing camp the week after school got out. I had been dreading the commitment, but the fifteen lovely students enrolled in the camp ended up re-affirming everything I love about teaching, and we all had a great time.

But every moment I belayed those kiddos, watching them twirl and laugh at the end of ropes strung from the rafters of our gymnasium, I could hear deadlines ticking away in the background. Lovely deadlines, deadlines I asked for, deadlines I worked years and years to earn, and gladly accepted, but deadlines that render the concept of a summer vacation quite moot.

Amid the writing deadlines, I also have to design a new course this summer, and the next couple of weeks are dedicated to that project. However, what I really can't wait to get down to is the writing. The lovely process of steeping myself in research, organizing notes, and banging out the words.  

I still have not figured out how to balance all of it, but I have figured out how to say no to the stupid details that matter less than my family and the words I long to craft. Painting the house. Tending to the gardens. Rebuilding the chicken coop. Fixing the garage door.

The fact that those projects need to be dealt with drives me nuts.

In the meantime, I have decided to keep tutoring Latin over the summer. It's one of my favorite hours in the week because the students are a mom and daughter pair. The daughter loves mythology and Roman culture, and the mom loves the grammatical Latin. This week, we reviewed the second declension endings and looked at some Roman and Greek art. I showed them some photographs I took last year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and asked them to identify representations of the gods based on their symbols, postures, and outfits. It was great fun. At the very end of the hour, the daughter (age 11) asked me a question about the story of Leda and the swan (who was really Zeus, all dressed up his his feathery finery in order to seduce Leda) that I was hard pressed to answer.

"But how did Leda get pregnant by a swan?"

Fortunately, her mom took the reins. She smiled and said, "It's a myth, honey. Sometimes you just have to let go of the little details."

I think I will heed this wise mom's advice on the story of my summer. The next couple of months is just going to have to be about the big picture, not the details.

If Leda could produce Castor, Pollux, Clytemnestra, and Helen all in one concentrated nesting session, I can certainly buckle down for a season in my own nest and produce a couple of articles and a completed book proposal. Leda's creations managed to inspire timeless stories and one even led to the fall of Troy. Certainly I can take down a deadline or two from the comfort of my nest.

When a Man Teaches Latin

This Latin teacher thing. It freaks me out sometimes. My Latin teacher in middle school and high school was, well, a stereotypical Latin teacher. She was five feet tall, gray-haired, and insisted on teaching Latin as a spoken language. Because being able to speak Latin is about as useful as being able to speak Klingon, so drill those verbs! Harden those consonants! Roll those Rs!

I shelved the oral Latin for a long time, but then I moved to Italy during my Junior year of college, and as I had only had one semester of Italian before I moved to Siena, my French and Latin helped me more than my sad, elementary Italian. I asked for French bouteilles of water and inquired as to where I may find the tonsor who would cut my Roman hair, but at least I was close and could (mostly) be understood by the Italians in my neighborhood.

When I returned home to the United States, I had a challenging semester ahead. I had to catch up on some of my comparative literature requirements. I signed up for intermediate Latin so I could take at least one class that offered the chance of an easy-ish ‘A’. My Latin teacher was a very bored graduate student, kind of cute in his dorky way, but so traumatized by his 4-year sentence in undergraduate hell that as long as we showed up and didn’t debase him with our improper pronunciation (Drill those verbs! Harden those consonants! Roll those Rs!), we passed.

So when I interviewed for my current post and gleefully informed my now-boss that I’d studied Latin in middle school, high school, and college, she asked me to teach Latin as well as English.

(Note to self: some skills are better left un-shared.)

The good news is that I only have to teach my students enough Latin to prepare them for Latin II in high school. The bad news is that I have to know far more than the simple Latin II material in order to answer challenging questions from my students.. As Latin teachers are thin on the ground in my neck of the woods, I have come to depend on my colleagues across the world to help me understand the whys and wherefores of the Latin language and ancient Roman world.

A while back, I posted about the wonder of the Latin teacher listserv and the weekly Latin teacher digest. I have learned so much from these seasoned Latin teachers and thanks to them, I am not afraid of the hard questions. This week, I was intrigued by an email that fell into my inbox from one of the Latin teachers, mostly because the subject line included Marilyn Monroe. A Latin teacher – Steve Perkins, from North Central High School in Indianapolis – shared his methodology for teaching Latin poetry according to the alliteration, themes, and rhythms of popular culture and song lyrics. This particular email was about a Roman poem’s resemblance to the specific pronunctiation of Marilyn’s p’s and t’s in her “Happy birthday, Mr. President” performance, but I was even more fascinated by comparisons between rock and Rome.

As I was curious, and love a good cultural literacy tie-in, I emailed Steve and asked him to elaborate on the connections between popular music and Roman poetry, and he sent me a brilliant email describing his top ten hits. He teaches Horace’s Odes III.10 and Ovid’s Amores I.9 to the melody of Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” particularly the line “sleep all night in the pouring rain if that’s the way it had to be.” He explains that both poems feature a man “enduring the harsh weather by spending the night on his beloved’s doorstep.” According to Steve, this type of poetry is sometimes called paraclausithyron, which comes from the Greek words meaning “door” and “to lament.” He will bring in the 80’s hair band Whitesnake if he has to, but he admits that 1987 might render the band a bit dated. You know, as opposed to 50 B.C.E.

He goes on to explain that he teaches Ovid’s Amores I.9 and others with Pat Benetar’s “Love is a Battlefield,” Horace’s Odes I.25 with Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May,” and Caesar’s De Bello Gallico I.8 with the film Boys ‘n’ the Hood. Thanks a semester with Sir Christopher Ricks, my first poetry professor, I teach Bob Dylan lyrics during my poetry unit, but Horace and Rod Stewart? Brilliant.

My favorite of his suggestions is a reference to the band Deep Purple in the midst of  The Aeneid II.246-247, the section about Cassandra during the Trojan War. In Steve’s words:

“Cassandra was the priestess of Apollo who, after she spurned his love, was cursed that she always foretold the truth, but that no one would believe her. I bring in the title song to the 1973 album Burn by Deep Purple. The lyrics run, ‘The city's ablaze, the town's on fire.  The woman's flames were reaching higher.  We were fools, we called her liar.’ Cassandra was known as a firebrand, and in fact, Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote a novel called The Firebrand, which is a telling of the Trojan War from Cassandra's perspective. Although the lyrics of the Deep Purple song support my interpretation quite well all the way through, I have had emails with the song's author, David Coverdale, and he says he was not inspired by the Cassandra story.”

Dude. Steve’s no outdated, gray-haired, Latin teacher with a penchant for oral Latin. This guy is my new hero.