Bryce Hedstrom has a great document for interviewing teacher candidates if you happen to find yourself on an interview committee. I’ve created a list of questions from the other perspective. Asking even just a couple of these should give you some great insight into the prospective workplace.
1) What is the goal of the [school]’s language program? ACTFL Proficiency level? Is there a different goal here for Latin?
**Updated 2.28.18 with the Universal Language Curriculum (ULC)**
The bad news; there isn’t one for Latin. The good news; we do have a list of Most Important Latin Verbs. More bad news; most teachers new to CI don’t know what to DO with the list, yet this is what they crave, and NEED the most. It makes perfect sense. There just isn’t time to create a realistic curriculum from the ground up, or tons of Embedded Readings while we’re just getting used to the idea of CI from reading blogs, articles, and research, let alone honing our craft when it comes to delivering understandable messages.
The role of a curriculum changes when a skilled CI teacher is able to use more student details to drive content, and can create teachable moments ex tempore. There’s also the case for non-targeted input which leaves a curriculum optional. STILL, all that’s advanced stuff, and this is about getting teachers help who crave it most.
Some support.
Although I’ve heard recently that some teachers have ditched TPR at the start of the year in favour of beginning storytelling immediately, I will continue to start with TPR since I really haven’t exhausted the possibilities. There’s an updated, or “evolved” version of TPR anyway, which I find is more powerful and I’d like to get some experience with that.
So, I’ve been working on an essential list of classroom vocab (remember, “shelter vocab, unshelter grammar!”) to use with the most important verbs…about the closest thing to the high-demand curriculum that’s needed.
Access the TPR Word Wall here.
Update 10.08.15 DO NOT attempt to work through the TPR Word Wall as a curriculum to complete. Like EVERYTHING we teach, when something loses steam, move on. My pattern has been to work on a verb or two, then get some details from a student with DISCIPVLVS ILLVSTRIS, and read, give a dictātiō, etc. For reference, I am just past the 8 hr mark with my (online) classes, and haven’t begun storytelling.
Despite the obvious physical barrier, teaching CI online is not very different from the brick and mortar setting (e.g. use words students know, establish meaning of new ones, talk about compelling things, don’t force speech too early, etc.). The format for online teaching, however, typically involves an element of asynchronous “independent work” that most closely resembles traditional drill and worksheet exercises, which we know does very little, if anything for language acquisition.
You may have read that my new “one grading system to rule them all” essentially has a single standard, Proficiency. This is because I am no longer convinced that students need to practice anything in order to acquire a language. If you believe students need to practice, SBG will work for you, but I don’t buy it, and neither does VanPatten. This concept is so utterly counterintuitive to traditional language teachers, you probably need to spend some time thinking things over before developing your teaching philosophy.
**Updated Expectations Rubric**
This grading system is the result of my experience combining common weighted grading categories (e.g. Homework, Unit Tests, Quizzes, etc.) with Standards Based Grading (SBG), and a Classroom Management (adaptation of Robert Patrick’s D.E.A.). Despite overall positive outcomes, the combination had its drawbacks. Besides, the longer I teach, 1) the less explicit instruction I give, and 2) the more streamlined/simple my practices become. From what I’ve learned from veteran teachers, this is a normal progression for a teacher, but I seem to have skipped about 10 years of trial and error. This new grading system is extremely easy to use as a teacher and extremely clear to understand as a student.
Reading without consciously translating into one’s native language is assumed to be a part of language acquisition, yet is taken for granted and difficult to assess. Through a Speed Reading program, students are encouraged to read chunks of words rather than individual word-for-word-translation. This aligns with how we focus on teaching the most frequent structures rather than isolated word lists. In addition, students find this reading program compelling due to the personal competitive nature.
Take a minute to read the Speed Reading Process (my adaptation of Blaine Ray’s adaptation of Paul Nation’s program).
If you like the idea, all that’s needed to begin is a set of reading passages (perhaps parallel class stories), accompanying document with 10 comprehension questions, and a table showing reading speed per passage. You will need the following files:
Following the initiative of Chris Stolz, Mike Peto, and Mike Coxon, I’ve scanned some student work to share. These 10min timed Fluency Writes are all from Latin I students with anywhere from ~20 to ~100 hours of Latin. The word counts range from 41 to 117, though aren’t necessarily all linear with respect to class time in Latin.
I made a silly decision at the start of last year. While the expression for “my name is” in Latin comes out as “nōmen mihi est” (lit. name for me is), I really, really wanted to introduce students to adjective agreement early. As such, I chose “nōmen meum est” (lit. name my is). Results? My students still have adjective agreement issues, which is normal, but there’s more. Sadly, they also don’t know “mihi” very well, which is a much more frequent and useful word.
Since I began teaching a language, it’s been pretty hard letting go of the graduate school generic UbyD planning mindset, and spending less time working on administrator-desired posted Objectives (see Terry Waltz’s answer for this). These and various other educational processes sap our time that otherwise should be spent on honing our craft, and really, really getting to know our students and their needs. The hardest, but perhaps most fruitful thing to let go is the Lesson Plan, and just discuss something non-targeted in Latin. I know, it sounds crazy, right? Read on…
Despite holding a B.A. in Classics, it wasn’t too long ago that I failed to read Latin with any remote sense of fluency. I’m not being self-destructive either, that’s just an accurate statement. This is unsurprising since my experience was mostly translation-based (just like nearly every other Classical language learner), and we had very little time to read anything, much less for enjoyment. That all changed in 2010 when I stumbled upon Oerberg’s Lingua Latīna, the Latin textbook written entirely in Latin. I vividly remember exclaiming to Ken Kitchell about how I had just read more Latin in those 35 chapters over the course of a month than I did with him over the course of my entire undergraduate study! I hope he was not offended. Is Lingua Latīna high-level literature? No, but my translation speed of the classical canon wasn’t exactly anything to tout, either. So if Lingua Latīna wasn’t the best work of Golden Age Latin literature, what was it?
Magister P. 