When Students Lead

It was a simple warm-up activity.  I put a verb on the board for the students to conjugate in a particular person and number.  Recently, I have been inviting students to go to the board to put up their answers as they felt led to do so rather than raising their hands and waiting on me to call on them to write their answers.  Today, however, that took a different twist.

After a few students had begun writing their answers, one young man just stayed at the front.  He sat in my swivel chair and gave occasional directions to his peers.  When we got ready to discuss the answers, I told him to stay where he was and lead us.  He invited a friend to join him, and together they led the class in a discussion of the forms.  Classmates offered corrections when necessary.

In his poem "Horatius," Thomas Babington Macaulay describes the Etruscan army marching on Rome and uses a phrase that I have often found applicable in teaching.  He says the army was "right glorious to behold."  This was the expression that came to mind as I watched these two young men show great leadership in guiding our class through the activity.

I was so impressed that I asked if any student would like to lead the discussion in the next class, and one of our young ladies stepped to the plate.  What impressed me this time was how she handled a difficult question from one of her classmates.  Rather than turn to me, she said, "Let me get my notebook."  Another student joined her in trying to answer their classmate's question.

Am I proud of these students?  You could say that!

Who's Your Juno?

Our Latin I (Latin 1/2) class has started an IB-MYP unit that is exploring the legend of Aeneas.  This foundational story for Roman history comes back to us in AP Latin when we read Vergil's Aeneid, and the version in our Latin I textbook is our introduction to it.

Today we read that the hero of the story, Aeneas, had fled from Troy with a small band of refugees.  The Greeks were winning the Trojan War, and Venus had told her son, Aeneas, to take a small band and flee.  Their mission was to find a new homeland, but Juno, the queen of the gods, held a grudge against the Trojans and brought them endless trouble as they sailed the Mediterranean.

After we had translated our story from the Latin and had drawn maps to detail where Aeneas traveled in the Mediterranean, we paused for something different.  A key component of the IB-MYP is reflection, and our guiding question for this unit is, "How do I handle unexpected obstacles to reaching my goals?"  I asked the students to spend a few minutes jotting down who was their Juno.  I suggested that their Juno might be a particular person, a group of people, or even someone from the past, someone who had made a hurtful comment that has lingered in the mind.  I also asked them to write how they had dealt with this Juno.  I pointed out that not everyone has a Juno, and this was fine, too.  I also stated that no one would need to share anything he or she did not want to.

After they had taken a few minutes to reflect, a few students in each of our Latin I classes did choose to share.  For one person, her Juno was people she had thought were her friends, but really were not.  She chose to dissociate herself from those people.  Another student said she herself could be her own Juno by doubting her abilities.  She dealt with that by thinking of the bigger picture.  Other students took a different approach.  One said that his Juno was personal laziness.  One said her Juno was the challenging schedule of athletics.

As is always the case, two things came of this.  Students thought in broader ways than I could have imagined, and Classical literature provided the raw material for important understandings of life.

Something Better

Heu, regni rerumque oblite tuarum!
Alas, you who are forgetful of your kingdom and your affairs!  (Aeneid 6.267)

As we read this line yesterday in our AP Latin class, I was struck by how appropriate it is for many of our students.  Teachers will be quick to think, "Ah, yes.  This is indeed a great line about students who fail to study and do their homework."  Yet I would say there is more here than just that.

Let's start with some context.  In the Roman poet Vergil's epic Aeneid, he tells the tale of a Trojan hero who sails from the burning remains of Troy with his family and friends.  This band of refugees flees across the Mediterranean en route to new homeland in Italy.  Blown off course by storm of divine origin, they land in Carthage where the hero, Aeneas, meets Queen Dido.  An affair begins, also prompted by divine machinations, and Jupiter finally sends Mercury to tell Aeneas he must leave and get on with the business of establishing the Trojans in a new home.

All of us, like Aeneas, become distracted from our true mission.  This is true for the ancient hero, the modern adult, and the child in the classroom.  Many of us may rail against the temptations of technology, but let's face it.  There is a lot of fun stuff out there!  I was on the moon when the lead singer/lead guitarist of my favorite '80s hair metal band retweeted my tweet about their new album recently.  Imagine, then, the challenges our students face when it comes to a choice of:  a) study for the quiz or b) text a friend while listening to music and updating Facebook.

Yet if we are simply offended that they have failed to do the work that we have assigned and if our response is solely from the perspective of "you should do this work because it's good for you," then we have missed something greater, something better.  I am reminded of the scene in Braveheart in which, just after the battle of Stirling, William Wallace has been knighted by the Scottish nobles.  They want him to declare his allegiance for one of the clans in their bid for kingship against the cruel English monarch Edward the Longshanks, and the room erupts into arguments and accusations.  Wallace shouts in reply, "You're so concerned with squabbling for the scraps from Lonshanks's table that you've missed your God-given right to something better."

Education, including the hard work of study, is about helping students discover the glories of creation.  Think about it.  Snow, quasars, atoms, the Fibonacci sequence, dactylic hexameter poetry, democracy, verb formation, hypertext markup language...are you kidding me?  The world is an amazing place, filled with natural and human-invented wonders that stagger the imagination, and education introduces children to such a place.  But wait!  There's more!  Education is also about helping students discover and develop their gifts for making their own contributions to this miraculous world, this marvelous play called life.

Coming back, then, to missed homework assignments and the failure to study for quizzes and tests, we see that not doing such work is not just a dereliction of duty, but rather a missed opportunity.  Mercury reminds Aeneas that in his distraction with Queen Dido he has not just forgotten his duties, he is missing out on the kingdom destined to be his.  A missed assignment, while seemingly nothing more than a workbook exercise not completed, is actually much more.  Because homework and paying attention in classs and group work and class participation are all part of education, students who fail to be fully engaged are ultimately cheating themselves of their right to something better.  For Aeneas, the destined kingdom lay across uncertain waters.  The kingdom for our students lies all around them.  It is theirs for the taking, if only they will.