Students returned to school yesterday, making today our first full day of instruction. So how did we begin in a Latin I class to grasp the language and culture we will be studying? We started by talking about the when and the where of it all.
The students discussed in small groups in what way it is important when meeting someone new to learn when that person was born and where he or she is from. As those small groups reported in the full class discussion, it would be important to know these things because they shape how people think and talk. People from particular times and places have certain ways of seeing the world, and it is important to know this in order to understand them better.
Did I mention that I have brilliant students?
They then returned to their small groups to discuss what, if anything, any of them knew about the when and the where of Rome. Full class discussion led to a timeline and a quickly drawn map of the Mediterranean world, and then I asked more questions. If the time period we will study is two to three thousand years in our past and the location is in the Mediterranean climate, what topics will we likely read about or not read about this year? The students concluded that we would likely study war, but not any product powered by electricity, that we would study clothing and food, but probably not winter gear.
In the movie Contact, Jody Foster's character encounters the unspeakable beauty of space. Watch the clip above from 2:39-3:30.
That is how I feel. There are no words. No words.
My Latin III class meets during the final period of the day. We opened with some vocabulary review for a quiz, moved into a reading and discussion of a political murder in 52 B.C., and ended with just a few minutes to review gerunds and gerundives.
WARNING! There will be technical, grammatical terminology in what follows! Beware!
One of my students, Meg, a sophomore, asked if gerunds were really substantive versions of gerundives. For those who do not know, a gerund is a verbal noun, and a gerundive is the special term we use in Latin for the future passive participle because of its similarity in form to the gerund. I was stunned. It certainly seemed so to me, and I began thinking of parallel examples, such as the transformation of the perfect passive participle into a substantive and then into a simple noun per se. I headed to my bookcase for my 1990 copy of Gildersleeve's and Lodge's 1895 Latin Grammar. A quick flip of a few pages took me to section 425, note 1: "The Gerund is the substantive of the Gerundive."
The bell rang, I tried my best to convey how pleased I was with Meg, but the raw excitement and joy made speaking a bit difficult. A few minutes later, my speech was rendered nearly incomprehensible by her classmate Becky. As I stood on hall duty, basking in the brilliance of Meg's observation, Becky came up to ask why, if the gerund is a substantive of the gerundive, it did not retain the future quality of gerundive, which is in essence the future passive participle. My mind began to spin, and as is so often the case when confronted with thoughts of this profundity, I began to stare into the middle distance as I formulated an answer. We realized together that the gerund does indeed retain a bit of the future flavor, if you will, in the various purpose constructions, for a clause expressing purpose necessarily describes what has not yet happened. For example, Caesar laboravit gratia vincendi, "Caesar worked for the sake of conquering," indicates that the conquering has not yet happened. Still, the gerund clearly has a purely noun function without any trace of the future, as in Natandum amo, "I love swimming." At this point, it seems, the substantive transformation from the gerundive has become complete and the noun has shaken off its participial heritage entirely.
No words. There simply are no words, neither to describe my nerdy joy in thinking about such things, nor to express my unbridled pride in, respect for, and admiration of my students. Who asks questions like these? Seriously, if you are an adult who is reading this, were you thinking at this level when you were in high school? Period 10, vos amo!
Driving to school in the morning is one of my favorite times. I get to listen to my favorite hair metal and classic rock CDs. Call it a some me time with the sound turned up to 11. This morning, however, I chose to turn off the music and call my wife to share with her a couple of stories from our Latin III class.
This class meets the last period of the day, so it would be natural to expect less than enthusiastic engagement with the material. It is a large class, so no one would be surprised if only a few really participated well. Neither is the case with this group of young scholars. They daily come in well prepared and with some of the most brilliant questions I have had the opportunity to hear.
For example, we have been reviewing some basic grammar at the start of the year. This is hardly the most exciting thing in the world, but recently one young lady asked why the present subjunctive almost sounded like the future. Her question stunned me in my tracks. She had moved from mere decoding of the language to picking up on its nuances and developing a feel for it. This led us to discuss the inherently fuzzy nature of the subjunctive mood, the reason why it contains no genuine future tense as the indicative mood does, and the sense of the very near future that the present carries with it.
As we explored conditional sentences yesterday, another student said that to her the passive voice in English reminded her of an adjective and wondered why. I was again rendered motionless and speechless for a moment by the depth her comment. We explored as a class the nature of the English passive system and how it is constructed by the copulative verb and a participle, which is, of course, part verb and part adjective, giving us essentially parallel sentences like The boy was defeated and The boy was tall.
So on my way to school today, I turned my rock 'n' roll down from 11 to 0 and called my wife. I had not had the chance to tell her these stories, and as we discussed the depth of inquiry and insight of which students are capable, the morning darkness gave way with the first hints of light, and I arrived at school charged up and excited, which is not a bad thing for a Friday.
At the beginning of the school year, I invite our Latin I students to complete a brief profile of themselves for extra credit. We display their work in the hallway just before back-to-school night so parents can get a sense of what their children will be doing in this class.
The directions are for students to include their name and a recent picture of themselves. They must complete the Latin sentence Ego sum _____ with the Latin term for one of the IB Learner Profiles. Even though the words on our resource page are in the plural and a singular is required to complete the sentence, I overlook the necessary grammatical error. This is, after all, a project within the first few days of school. They must then include the English translation of the sentence and a brief explanation for why they chose that particular trait as it would apply to them in Latin class. As always, the results show that our students come to school already prepared for the kind of reflective learning that will lead them to success.
Take Isaac, for example. He writes that he has "many experiences...which I will be able to draw on to enrich our Latin class experience." I like that. As I often tell people, Latin at North Central is a microcosm of a complete liberal arts program, for in it we explore math, art, geography, history, English, and performing arts, all in our study of the ancient Greco-Roman world. I can't wait to see what Isaac will "bring to the table!"
Then there is Magnolia. She sees herself as a thinker, one who can use her critical thinking skills to "make reasonable and ethical decisions." This would be an admirable quality in any adult leader, but it is even more striking when you know that Magnolia is one of our eighth grade students who come to the high school before their middle school starts to take advantage of our world language program.
Zach is open minded, not just in the sense of being willing to explore new ideas, but also by letting "others share their ideas when I am in a group." Many people talk of being open minded, but it goes to an entirely different level to be willing to sit back and actually listen as others share their ideas. Once again, this is a striking quality in one of our eighth grade students.
As with being open minded, many people like to say they are risk-takers, but how many actually take that plunge into the deep water? Carly is doing that not only by taking a new language, but by being willing to risk being wrong with an answer. I love that! The first step toward mature learning is not worrying about what people will think if you are wrong. With an attitude like that, chances are good you will be right more often than you imagined.
While there were many more wonderful profiles, we will conclude with a look at Noah's. As a thinker he is already expecting to reflect on the topics we discuss. Any true thinker must engage in reflection, and Noah's awareness of this proves that he is indeed the thinker he thinks himself to be!
With these and all the other wonderful qualities flowing into the mosaic that is Latin at North Central, it is no wonder that our students create the most amazing art with their lives!
School resumed for us on Monday, and once again the A.P. Latin class has taken the plunge into the work of epic literature that has captivated the world for two thousand years, Vergil's Aeneid. Before diving straight into the deep end, we dangle our toes in the water first with a couple of articles, one of which is Eric Ormsby's 2006 New York Sun review of Robert Fagles' translation.
As we were discussing the article today, we paused on Ormsby's line, "A successful translation of 'The Aeneid' must capture the supple Virgilian line without sacrificing the powerful momentum of the narrative." We talked about the challenges of translating even a simple, three-word sentence like Puella aquam portat, which has some twenty-seven distinct translations in English. When one takes into account the complexity of literary Latin, to say nothing of the poetry of an epic like Aeneid, it quickly becomes apparent that complete translation is impossible.
Enter Nick, a senior. He suggested that translation is rather like an asymptote. You don't remember that little mathematical gem? It is a line that gets closer and closer to a curve without touching it.
He was right, of course, but what I loved was his application of mathematical understanding to literature. It was the perfect blend of learning, the very thing we hope for in our students. I also loved it because his introduction of mathematics into our literary discussion led to a look at one particular line of Vergil's poetry via quantum physics.*
Interestingly, if you do a Google search on the word "asymptote," you will find that the second link is to a new journal of literary translation titled Asymptote, which takes its name from the mathematical term in recognition of the fact that "a translation may never fully replicate the original."
Nick's comment was brilliant, and fortunately for me, it was not atypical of the sort of thing I hear on a regular basis from the students in room A526. I would also suggest that my students are not unique. Many students are capable of this kind of thought and engagement, if only they have the background and exposure to the depth and breadth of learning that is their birthright as members of the human race, a birthright that continues to be secured by schools that commit to a well-rounded education in which STEM and liberal arts walk in the unity with which they truly exist in the natural world.
*So what was that all about? In Aeneid I.7 we find the phrase,
atque altae moenia Romae.
The adjective altae (high) properly modifies Romae (Rome), yet in sense it also connects with moenia (walls). Because of the flexibility of Latin, the phrase indicates that both the walls are high and so is the city. English, however, cannot quite accommodate this, and we must say either "the walls of high Rome" or "the high walls of Rome," usually opting for the former since it is grammatically accurate. The idea of quantum superposition states that an electron exists in all possible states until a measurement is made, causing the electron to resolve into only one state. The Latin in Vergil's line is like the electron in that it contains all the possible meanings. Translation is like the act of measurement, forcing the attainment of only one state.
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.
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.
