(Part of a series based upon Stiles, The Anatomy of Medical Terminology (Radix Antiqua 2015; ISBN 978-1-988941-240)
Once upon a time an eminent scholar of Renaissance Latin,
reinvented as Dean of Humanities, horrified a rump of beleagured Classicists by
suggesting that we open up, for example, our fourth-year Virgil Class to
students with no Latin. That way, she
explained (and by now we knew she wasn't joking), in addition to the one or two
Latinists we'd normally get we'd draw maybe twenty or more literature and
history students, and the Dean's Office would be able to look more kindly down
upon us.
I am embarrassed now that our closed-mindedness shut us
off from the possibilities she was raising.
The work involved would of course be immense (starting with thinking our
way outside of the obvious boxes); but if we could imagine our way into a
course wherein two completely disparate student groups could manage to achieve
(perhaps different) course credit out of the work they and we did in one and
the same run of classroom hours, we would truly be onto a new thing. But how to even begin?
Once upon a completely different time my mother and
father attended high school in Veteran, Alberta; the time this was upon was the
late 1930's, and the teacher, a Mr. Garvey, taught all subjects to (and here is
the point) all grades of students at once.
For this was the famous "one-room-schoolhouse" of western
Canadian myth (the road to and from which was uphill both ways, especially in
winter, when it was at least five miles longer than in summer). My parents were not notably disadvantaged by
this experience; in fact they emerged better able to read, write and calculate
than most first-year university students nowadays--in particular, they emerged
very well-read, and (my father especially) possessing a large repetoire of
English poetry, declaimable at will.
Could some version of a "one-room-shoolhouse"
work for Latin teaching? What if we
began by narrowing the scope, and
restricted the schoolroom to Latinists (so much for the Renaissance fantasy),
while opening it to Latinists at all different levels?
Once--and this is my own experience (so that it seems to
me more "down in" than "up" and "on" any
particular time)--I taught for three summers in a row what I called Intensive
First-year Latin, and what my best cohort (a bunch of English Literature
students) called Latin Summer Camp. That
particular offering became locally famous for the season because many of the
students spent whole days together outside the classroom (and here is the point
of this particular anecdote) working on the material, in small groups of four
or five, and becoming objects of some wonderment on campus.
This was all an outgrowth of what we did in the
classroom, where they spent nearly all their time working in groups, all at
more or less the same rate, on the readings and exercises furnished by our
textbook. My time was divided among the
groups, in a rotation: I sat in with one group for one exercise set or one
section of continuous reading, doing the usual questioning, critiquing and
mini-lecturing as they worked their way through the sentences (one at a time,
also in rotation); then I moved to the next group, interrupted them, and made
that lot go back and do the same set or section with me as I had just done with
the first group. When I had thus worked
my way around the room to the first group again, I made them go back to where I
had left them at the end of our first session, and we then did the following
set or section together. In this way,
during the two hours of class-time I got to work through all of the material
with each group, each group had to work through all the material twice, and
each student got not only lots of "stage time" but also lots and lots
of feedback, both from me and from her peers.
There were a few simple rules. No student could do with me the very sentence
she had previously done in the unattended group. All students were expected to spend at least
two hours of "homework" time outside class for every hour in class
(hence the random groups of Latinists decorating the landscape), and each
student was expected to come to each class having already worked through the grammar
and exercises behind the material we planned to get through during class.
The first rule encouraged a nearly unbelievable degree of
concentration upon those group members not "performing" at any given
moment, since there was no way of predicting who would be called upon to deal
with any given sentence "in front of the prof," as well as a great
deal of cooperation between members, so that they actually worked through most
of the material "together" rather than separately. This cooperation extended into their time
with me, so that they helped each other even in my presence; and ultimately it led
most of them into doing their homework together, often outside in public (where
among other things they did a great job--by their highly visible enthusiasm--of
promoting the study of Latin!).
With practice, these processes quickly came to work very
efficiently. A surprise to me was how
incessantly each group hummed along; I would occasionally leave the room, just
to see if anyone noticed (no one ever did)! My own work with them involved less repetition
than one might expect given the situation, further indicating to me how
independent the groups were of one another. In effect, each was a separate unit, with
different strengths and weaknesses, ultimately even working through the
required material at slightly different rates, so that towards the end of term
I had to adjust my "rotations" (not often, and not by much) to ensure
that we all finished more or less together.
A surprising revelation to all of us in this context was
that, as the groups "matured"--as they became more confident and
competent, in particular as they became better at mutual self-scrutiny within
the group--we found that it didn't actually matter much whether I was there for
all of the sentences in the set of exercises or sections of reading we were
working through; in another sense altogether, I could as it were "leave
the room!" Or--and here is the
point--I was free to work more with whichever group might most need extra help
at any given time.
Taken together, all these aspects of the experience showed
me how a "one-room-schoolhouse" might work for a roomful of Latinists
actually operating at substantially different levels of learning. In its simplest version, I envision a minimum
of three groups. Although an ideal group
size is between four and six, so long as there are enough students at any given
level--say four beginners at a minimum, at least three in second year, and two
or more at third-year and up, the different groups would be able to function in
the same classroom in pretty much the same way as did the summer students I've been
describing.
There would be two major differences. First, since they would all be working
through different materials, the teacher would have three separate
preparations. Is there a Latinist among
us (the professoriate) who could claim this to be onerous, with a straight
face? I hope not! More seriously, my own experience suggests
this wouldn't be a problem at all; occasionally my groups would get "out
of synch" for various reasons, but once they realized the onus was on them
to show me both where they were and where we needed to go back to every time I
materialized in their unit, all was well. As they progressed they also got very good
answering my initial utterance every time I showed up, namely, "any
questions?"--with specific requests: "we were wondering...."
The second major difference grows out of the very fact
that markedly different levels of knowledge would be featured in our putative "one-room-schoolhouse,"
allowing us to also experiment with adaptations of another excellent feature of
that old system, namely, using "big kids to help teach the little
kids." A "rule" I laid
onto myself, and didn't tell the students about, was that in the first week or
so I worked hard to "tweak" the groups, trying to ensure that each
contained a roughly equivalent mix of strong and weak students. This led to efficiencies within each group,
such that the stronger students, by helping the weaker ones, actually learned much
more than if their contact had been limited to occasional in-class exchanges
with me.
Expect further details in later posts, about what this
course might look like in the real world, and suggestions about how it might be
integrated with an existing Latin program, and about some of the arguments that
would need to be made to both Deans and Unions.
For now, the relevant point is that we could solve at
least three "Latin problems" this way: students could begin their
studies as early as the beginning of May (as they currently can at only a few
institutions), and--much more importantly--they could study for-credit
year-round, accomplishing two years worth of traditional Latin work during one
calendar year of elapsed time. Thus someone
starting in May could have credit for two full years of Latin by the end of
April, while a September starter could be entering third year the following
September.
These considerations would be especially beneficial for
anyone whose Latin epiphany ("that's
what I need to learn!") didn't arrive until the third or even fourth year
of undergrad life, as well as to all those students who currently get
discouraged at the end of August by the dismal shape of their own fading
memories of the Latin they last looked at during the April final (many of whom
therefore "cut their losses" and don't continue).
Meantime the Dean would be happy because the overall Latin
retention rate would be better, because Introductory Summer Latin (if
previously taught at all) would have more students than before, and because--best
of all--the summer teaching of second- and upper-year Latin to a few tiny
coteries of students wouldn't cost her anything extra!
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