I need some feedback that says–hey, this is working for ME. Just continue what you’re doing because you make the class enjoyable.Įven though I have a sense that what I do on a daily basis is working, I’m human. I give total credit to Christopher Emdin for helping me develop this practice. Nothing I’ve ever done has helped such a solid sense of community in each class. This practice of starting EVERY class every day with 5 minutes of “brags and vents” led by a member of the class allows students to tell each other what’s doing on in their lives from the apparently trivial to the deep and serious. The fact that you have brag and vent discussions in class is also a stress reliever, and it helps the class get closer and more comfortable with each other. As a teacher of a language, I believe I can do nothing better but to hand on language learning skills to students who will then continue to use them to explore and acquire other languages. I am trying to improve my reading and writing skills in Vietnamese, and I sometimes use those same methods you use in class simply because they work for me.Ī long time ago, even though I am a classicist with all the credentials to prove it, I began to identify as a language teacher (not all Latin teachers do). On the other hand, when you find things that work for all kinds of learners, why not use them? I worry that even though there are dozens of practices and activities that are informed by CI, I tend to use a smaller subset over and over again and that doing so risks boredom. Some of the teaching methods you use such as drawing pictures with captions, writing prompts using our own words, and reading over and over have been very useful to me. You push your students to learn everyday while at the same time making it interactive so that students actually perform well in the language.Ĭhoosing to teach with a CI framework really changes almost everything about traditional Latin and language teaching, and the first criticism most of us have heard is some version of “you are dumbing down” Latin. Beneath her words in italicsare a few thoughts from me about why it matters. Here are ten things she told me about what I do in her own words, unchanged. Perhaps her feedback about my teaching is helpful to you, too. All of us who read this blog and participate in the LBP FB group help and influence each other. I teach with a team, and we all help and influence each other. I don’t do what I do alone–even if I were a singleton teacher. But, she also gave me some “data” if you will, some qualitative feedback about what I do and how that has impacted her. She wrote to say “thank you for what you do,” and it means the world to me. Her letter was one of those moments that all of us have if we teach long enough–a student giving us the feedback we’d like to have every day but which comes along once or twice a year if we are lucky. My hesitation has been that this comes from a letter I received recently from a student, and it is largely a letter of gratitude and appreciation for me. I hope that if you are pursuing a CI framed way of teaching, and if you have doubts about whether what you are doing is the right way or not that you may take some encouragement from this. To truly understand what is going on in these worksheets, go back and read the basics of Latin verbs here. Each set of these worksheets has isolated one tense (Perfect, Pluperfect, or Future Perfect), one mood (indicative), and one voice (active).I have gone back and forth in my mind about whether to write this post. No! I truly desire to learn the language, so I need to practice these basics so that when I get to later lessons that don't isolate each of the verb tenses, I won't be constantly guessing at which form that verb is in. because that's what I'm supposed to do to finish the assignment for the week, and that's what's important right?! Finishing assignments? I've been working through these worksheets with my 6th grader. If she can start to become comfortable with the way verbs are built, then as she approaches them in the Henle book in Challenge A, she will have no trouble adjusting to the work that comes her way. The purpose of the activity is to build muscle memory of these conjugations. So often I find myself working through the Henle 1 text and passing the little assignments that say, "Memorize #134 in the grammar." It's very easy to look at the concept in the grammar book and then move on to the exercise. This post may contain affiliate links. See my full disclosure policy for more details
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