Ancient Romans and I.B.

Our Latin 5/6, or third-year, class recently completed a project in which they were given a list of famous Romans.  Each student picked one and presented a poster that included the person's name, life dates, and the I.B. Learner Profile  that he or she thought best fit that person.  After all thirty-three students presented, several things became cleaer.

First, our students have a great way of looking at history.  Some of the profiles they picked were obvious.  The student who chose Cicero said he was a communicator, and the person who chose Cato said he was principled.  Others were not so obvious.  The person who chose Sulla also said he was principled, on the grounds that he had a clear vision for what Roman morality was supposed to be.  Students who picked the same person did not necessarily use the same profile.  As you can see from the picture, one student saw Cloelia as a thinker, but another saw her as a risk taker.

An interesting feature of this project was that the thirty-three students who presented on twenty-two different Romans overwhelmingly chose the risk-taker profile for their person of choice.  After the students had finished their presentations, I asked what they thought this said about the Romans.  There many good responses, including that the reason these particular Romans was famous was because they needed to take risks to achieve their fame.  Then I asked the students whether it could be possible that the tendency to see the Romans as risk-takers was more rooted in our own culture's celebration of this trait.  Unlike the ancients, who saw community identity as more important than individual indentity, Americans tend to value individuality and daring, bold action.  Unfortunately, the bell rang just as I asked that question, so we will have to see where that discussion takes us in the days ahead.

Finally, I am impressed with how good these posters look!  Not only did our students present great material, they did so in an attractive and compelling way.  I am genuinely looking forward to grading these projects!

Education for the Future

Today our second-year Latin students looked at a period of Roman history in which the people of Rome had expelled their king and were in the process of establishing a republic.  Rather than reinvent the wheel, they sent a commission to Greece to study the laws of Athens. This group returned to Rome, and a larger commission set about the work of codifying Rome's first laws.  The year was 509 B.C.

As we talked about the value of seeing what others have done and then building on that, I suggested that this is in fact the principal reason why we study history and languages.  The purpose is not a test, whether A.P., I.B., or E.C.A.  We learn from the past and we learn from other cultures so can expand on their achievements and continue the grand human adventure.

To illustrate this, I shared with them a link that a former student had shared with me over the weekend.  This former student earned a double major in physics and mathematics with a minor in Classics at Purdue and about a week ago successfully defended his Ph.D. in nuclear physics at I.U.  The article he shared was this one, which describes recent developments in chemical, DNA, and protein analysis at the University of Illinois that have made use of a discovery made by the ancient Romans.  Somewhere in the 4th century A.D., the Romans created a form of glass that appears a different color depending on whether light is passing through it from the front or from the back.  Researchers at Illinois are now using this technique to make chemical, DNA, and protein analysis able to be understood by the naked eye.

This is what learning is all about.  This is why we offer Latin.  It is why studying Classics, which is the field of ancient Greek and Roman studies, is as relevant today as ever.  While education is never about something as trivial as a test, nor is it even principally about getting a job (that is what training is for, and while necessary, it is quite different from education), it is about making connections and helping students see how to build upon them.  In 509 B.C. the Romans knew this and sent a delegation to Greece to study its laws.  In 2013, we continue their story.

Back to School Night

I love back-to-school night!  It is so much fun to talk about a subject I love and students I enjoy with interested, enthusiastic parents.  If any parents have other questions, please contact me.  Be sure to follow @NCLatinClub on Twitter and join our Facebook group North Central Latin.  It is going to be another wonderful year, and I look forward to working with you all.

The Look of Leadership

This afternoon our Latin Club officers met for the first time.  They were elected in the spring so they could hit the ground running this fall, and did they ever run!  I started the meeting by asking each officer to share what Latin Club could be this year.  After hearing some great, broad ideas, I put three activities on the board that we do ever year.  I then gave them a challenge and left them alone.  Their challenge was to give a broad skeleton to their ideas and to put together some details for August and September.  I strolled down the hall to give them their space.  When I returned, I expected to find six teens engaged in conversation.  What I found was that and more.  My board had been filled with ideas, and genuine leadership was emerging from within the group of officers.  My biggest challenge was to keep the smile from leaping off my face.

This is an extraordinary group of officers.  I cannot wait to see where they will lead us!

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Students Owning Their Education

Let's get this out of the way at the beginning.  Yes, it is true.  A student brought me a bottle of bacon soda today.  Yes, that is exactly what you think it is.  It is carbonated soda pop flavored to taste like bacon.  The tast was only slightly better than the smell, and the smell was...well, never mind.

I love it when students have fun and enjoy school.  Yet as enjoyable as all the bacon-soda-silliness was, nothing could have thrilled me more than the discussion I had with our Latin V students today.  Our school is large enough to offer seven languages (Latin, Hebrew, German, Japanese, Chinese, French, and Spanish), and in most we offer five years of study, since many students begin their language study as eighth graders who come to our school during the first two periods of the day.

This year we have a significant number of Latin V students preparing for the I.B. (International Baccalaureate) diploma, and they meet during the same period as our Latin IV students who are preparing for the A.P. (Advanced Placement) exam.  Today I spent a bit of time with the Latin V students, prepared to discuss ways of approaching the material, since I will not be able to work with them directly every day.  To my pleasant surprise, one of the students had come in with notes she had made, a brainstorm list of ideas on how to engage the material.  Her ideas, expanded in collaboration with her peers, were excellent, and we are going to follow what they have designed.  These are intelligent, creative young people who clearly have taken ownership of their education.  I could not be more proud.

Great First Day!

If Alexander the Great had enjoyed a first day as general of his army as great as our first day of school, he would not have been content to conquer the world, but would have set his sights on the stars.  As always, it is great to see returning students and to meet our Latin I students.

An upper level student asked me how things went with our first-year classes, and I remarked that the laughed at my jokes.  While it is nice to have an appreciative audience, my pleasure in the reaction was about much more than mere accolades for a comedian.  Laughter indicates a sense of comfort, and on the first day of school, one can hardly ask for more.

A fun and exciting year stretches before us.  There will be the things that legions of Latin students have come to expect...the Spartacus slap, ancient weapons of mass destruction, and life lessons wrapped in laughter.  There will also be new things for all of us to explore.  Some of the students laughed at my excitement over our new technology, but in a couple of classes I paused to encourage them never to lose their sense of wonder.  It is true that I am easily amused.  This is because I find the world an endlessly fascinating place and take true joy in even the humblest discovery.  Hopefully all of us in A526 can taste a bit of that wonder this year.

National Club of the Month

I just received a copy of the Torch, the newsletter of the National Junior Classical League.  As most of you know, we are not just an isolated high school Latin club.  We often refer to ourselves as NCLC, or North Central Latin Club, but we are actually the North Central chapter of the Junior Classical League.  The NJCL has been around since 1936.  Composed of local and state/provincial chapters across the United States, Canada, and Australia, it is the largest Classical organization in the world today with over 50,000 members.  Our state chapter is the Indiana Junior Classical League, or IJCL.  North Central's club regularly achieves Century Club status with more than one hundred members.  Last year we were the largest chapter in the state.

In the current issue of the Torch, I read that we were selected the national club of the month for December in the 2012-2013 school year.  Congratulations to all Panther Latin students!

New Tech

Room A526 is getting back into shape for another year of Latin. Centurion Gaius Crastinus and legionary Publius Sempronius Tuditanus have taken up their places in opposite corners of our room, ready to protect the Republic once more. What our authentically armed and armored mannequins may find strange is the cool new technology at the front of our room.

Our room, along with all classrooms at NC, now has an incredible new projector mounted above our whiteboard. It displays everything from my computer much more sharply than before. I tried it out with a scene from Gladiator today, and it looks fantastic.

Ho, hum, you say. Big deal, you say. But wait! There's more! We now have four speakers mounted in the ceiling for strong, clear surround sound. No more of Mr. Perkins turning up the volume to max on cheap plastic desktop speakers that distorted the sound even as they amplified it. Picture and sound combined give us an almost theatre-like experience.

But wait! There's still more! We also have pens that allow us to write on the board. No, I am not talking about our dry erase markers, although we still have those. These pens will interact with whatever is displayed. They are like a combination of mouse and pen. For example, if my desktop is displayed, they can be used to drag icons.

Okay, that's pretty cool, Magister P., you're thinking. But I haven't even gotten to the REALLY cool part! Each teacher has received an iPad. I can interact with my desktop and what is being projected onto the board from anywhere in the room via the iPad. I also send what is on the iPad through the projector for display. Think about it. There we are, talking about some point of Roman history, poetry, mythology, philosophy, politics, military, art, architecture, or whatever, and you have this brainstorm. You remember some great image you once found while researching a project for another class. I hand you the iPad, you call up the image, and we are all seeing it projected almost instantly.

I think the Romans would have appreciated all this. They were the onese gave us the technological innovations of arches made from concrete. I think they would have loved what we are using to study their world.

Welcome Back!

Welcome back, everyone!  I hope you all had a great summer!

There are some new and exciting things in store for Panther Latin this year, including this blog.  In addition to our website, our Twitter (@NCLatinClub), and our Facebook group, we now have a blog where I will update students and parents on what is going in on in the world of room A526.  Any student or parent who wishes to leave a comment here must fill out a form, which you can obtain from me.  This will allow us to keep barbarians from spamming our comment box.

Check back often, as there will be many highlights to post throughout the year!