Curriculum
2018-19 Syllabus & Latin Program Mission & Vision
Unless you’re an island of one, a program Mission & Vision is a good idea to keep the department heading in a similar direction, even if things don’t start out that way. I put a lot of time into crafting the document last spring, and just had some help from my admin for the final touches. Once that was squared away this week, I could hand in my 2018-19 Syllabus. Let’s unpack all that…
Pisoverse Summer Additions: Recently Published Works
June & July have seen several additions to the Pisoverse. With the low unique word counts and numerous cognates included throughout, the novellas now provide over 28,700 total words for the beginning Latin learner to read! That’s with a vocabulary of just 360 unique words across all texts! Here are the latest publications:
NTPRS 2018 Takeaways & Presentations
These are my updated presentations from the conference:
No-Prep Grading & Assessment 2018
Questioning Is Core
Optimizing Your Classroom Setup For MGMT
Here are my own takeaways organized by presenter, whether a) directly used by them during the conference, or b) inspired by something similar they did that got me thinking and I’ve adapted:
Learning Latin via Agrippina: Released!
This is not an audiobook with sound effects or music. It’s not just narration. It’s definitely not repeat-after-me.
This release is part of a new series of audio, Learning Latin via, planned for other Pisoverse novellas. This series assumes a listener with ZERO prior Latin can maintain comprehension and confidence while listening to any book! If you listen to this while following along with the novella (or maybe even without the text!?), you WILL start to pick up Latin.
The audio to accompany Agrippīna: māter fortis is the first offered in the series. There are over 1500 Latin messages, some of which are comprised of 10+ words—none of that isolate word-list, or “repeat-after-me” stuff! This contains 6 hours of Latin! Each chapter has the following 3 tracks:
How Simple Is This Text?
Following Carol Gaab, and M & M (i.e. Mira Canion & Martina Bex), here’s a quick post on how I’ve organized the Pisoverse. While those authors have hundreds of titles to address, I have just 8, and they’re much smaller in scope. After all, I write novellas, not novels. Still, there is method to my madness…
Input-Based Strategies & Activities
**Updated 9.30.23**with Reverse Questioning
**Here’s the list of older ones I stopped using**
When choosing the class agenda beyond the Talk & Read format (now Talk, Read & Reread), it dawned on me years ago that I couldn’t remember all my favorite activities. Thus, here are the input-based strategies & activities I’ve collected, all in one place, and that I currently use (see older ones above). Everything is organized by pre-, dum-, and post- timing. You won’t find prep-intensive activities here beyond typing, copying, and cutting paper. Oh, and for ways to get that one text to start, try here. Enjoy!
**N.B. Any activity with the word “translation” in it means translating what is already understood. This should NOT be confused with the more conventional practice of translating in order to understand.**
Continue reading30 Hours & First Novella
With students meeting 1x/week—this year only—we just had the 30th class of the year. I compared this to our calendar for next year, which is as if it’s October 9th meeting every day of the week. Now, with constant reminders of routines (since at least one week passes from class to class), and typical testing/school interruptions, and Northeast snow, those 30 class hours could amount to fewer total hours of input (25, 20, 15?!). Total input hours is tough to calculate, though, so we’ll just stick with 30 for the purpose of this post! What does that mean for reading? Cue the first novella…
Pimsleur: How Much Input?
Preparation for a road trip down to New Orleans only meant one thing: 5 Pimsleur language learning courses checked out from our local library! To be clear, Pimsleur courses are not effective in the long run, but there’s input nonetheless. Still, how much input is there…really?
Can-Do Statements vs. Objectives vs. Agendas
Here’s some clarification on related ideas that are often confused:
Magister P. 