durus est mundus latinus.
latinus durus est.

I have been entertaining my brother. He banned me from using the internet so we came to talking. He is a research physicist in Switzerland/his own world and has not been reading my blog avidly like brothers should. He has, instead, been concentrating on very small things - nano-somethings. I can do the etymology although that doesn't really help..... However, I told him all about it. About how there are some very frightening people out there who are more trigger happy than me. Now I may say rash things to journalists and inadvertently post this and that but the whole 'shot in the back of the head' comment was surely one in the foot for you. I think all and sundry can now see the maniacal side to the CLC fan club.

I wrote a while back about how the PE departments failed us Leeks at school. I asked him what he thought might have made a difference. What became apparent was that, given half a chance, he would make very sure that people like him - quite sporty, quite competitive, quite determined, wholly unsuited to contact sports - would be nurtured, encouraged and sent down the running/cycling club. He said he always surprised his teachers in those (for some highly humiliating) bleep tests. He would be running away on his own, top of the bad-at-sport class while the cornish pasties and curly whirlies wilted around him. 'If only someone had taken me aside and given me a bit of advice, a bit of encouragement, I really think I could have been a runner.'

'But what about the curly-whirlies/cornish pasties?' I said. 'Teachers have a responsibility to them too.'

Now my brother secretly wants to be a teacher. Life takes him elsewhere for the moment but I wouldn't be surprised if I saw him interactive white boarding away in a decade from now. That and encouraging little athletic types to run round the football pitch. Quite how he would solve the problem of those who don't see the point is one for Boxing Day.

But isn't that something. How true it is that our own experiences always inform how we teach. I had a dreadful time with Latin. It was always a load of wishy hogwash, we read stories that had something very vaguely to do with the ancient world, but by the time I got to university I was hideously ignorant. I remember in my first year, my tutor asking whether I saw an illusion to the Judgement of Paris in the text we were reading. I had no idea what he was talking about. Oh dear. But subsequently I have ensured that I fill my lessons as much as I possibly can with as much 'real' literature, art history, and archaeology as I can. I have nightmares (along with Caecilius coming at me from behind with a pistol) about my students being as ill-informed as I was and this induces me to give them what I never received.

It is similar with the language. I really do appreciate the CLC approach. It certainly has its advantages. But for me it just doesn't answer the brief. In two years, students have to be able to translate fearing clauses, passive periphrastics (YES), indirect statements .. very hard .. and much else besides. I arrived two years ago at a school that used the CLC and the students were like very frightened owls scrabbling in the dark which they knew they should be able to see in but didn't for the life of them know what they were looking for. I was the same at school and indeed throughout university. I wanted it all to be clearly spelt out to me and it never was.

Furthermore, I wasn't given any practical tools to get me out of sticky situations. I was very good a coming out with lit.crit. re. word order, enjambment, tricolons etc and I also appreciated it. But faced with unseen text (more on the value of that another day) I didn't really know where to start. Which sees me return to my now maligned mantra .. find the verb, who's doing it, when. It does not mean that we must not at any cost ever read anything in any other way. I shall leave the prescriptive fundamentalism to you. But let me give them the helping hand I was never given. Decoding devices do not render the text meaningless. Quite the reverse. I love Cicero like the next man but I can't do anything with it if I can't understand it. In an ideal world, I would read it like the next homo but I can't and neither can my students. So let me deliver to my students my tips of the trade. The verb search is a tool that I give to them for moments of Latin misery. And believe you me, there can be many of those in today's harsh Latin world.



Post scriptum .. for those who are sitting there thinking, 'Oh dear. She is a silly girl. She has forgotten about the curly-whirlies etc,' I have two things to say in response.

1.) Classrooms are complex places. We must do as much as we can for everyone but I must not tell you everything as you will get very bored. I try and cater for everyone. My point is that our experiences inform. This does not mean dictate.
2.) I may not even have had that conversation with my brother, I might only have included it to make a point. Which I have made. Not that is enough.