Classical World

I. Introduction

First, an apology. Latin teachers tend to an oracular style. At least mine all did, and they included the likes of Dorothy Robathan, Shackleton Bailey, David Ross, and some other less well-known but equally learned folks from my large public high school in Hartford, Connecticut. That oracular certitude is one reason why I have loved the language ever since the day I first met and memorized the declension of femina. A dead language with no human speakers to mess things up and teachers who confidently pronounced "right" or "wrong" imposed the order and beauty of a Bach fugue onto the chaotic relativism of other humanities courses. Latin was geometry, but with words. A friend who once told me, "This is the humanities! That means you can't be wrong," had to make an exception for Latin.

With no particular teaching philosophy intended, I seem to have carried on the tradition of my teachers while teaching Latin in some shape or form since the birth of my eldest son. That baby recently celebrated his fortieth birthday; needless to say, I was a very young mother. So, dear reader, forgive me if in this essay I talk like a Latin teacher.

I belong to the privileged generation of students who learned Latin from teachers who really knew Latin; in other words, I belong to the generation (perhaps the last) when elementary college Latin courses at "good" schools were not taught by graduate students. It is a troubling paradox that the best introductory college Latin teaching happens at small colleges without a graduate program. At the Howard classics department where I work, elementary Latin classes are considered an honor to be entrusted to senior people, and that, in my opinion, is the way things should be. We all know that the first rule for success in teaching anything is for the teacher thoroughly to know her subject; this is most critical for beginning courses when the teacher's job is to lay down a firm foundation for all future work in the field. The very best Latinists in a department should be teaching elementary Latin. The choice of one textbook over another really doesn't matter very much so long as the book's avoirdupois does not discourage portage. What does count is what's in the teacher's head; that is the sine qua non and the easy part. You can't teach what you don't know. You also cannot and should not teach what you don't love. Nor should you teach students whom you cannot love. Indeed, love is the trick in all this, not merely the yeast, but the major ingredient of the whole process. No matter where it starts—from teacher to subject to students and back round again—love alone makes real teaching possible.

There again: the oracular sound bites. As my captatio benevolentiae implied, talking about Latin does that to me. Otherwise, I am quite a nice modern person, riddled with all of the relativism and uncertainties that characterize twenty-first-century humans. I only know what I know, and for me this has turned out to be the study and teaching of Latin.

A rock-hard foundation in elementary Latin is critical if students are to read and understand real Latin. And that firm basis requires memory work, laying in a healthy stock of vocabulary and forms. As it turns out, memorization (not to speak of grammar in any language, especially English) is an alien, indeed radical concept for today's American college student. Most students who arrive at college don't do very well on Latin placement exams and must start over from scratch. When it comes to Latin, if indeed Latin is taught in high school, too many teachers seem to be spending too much time building manicotti Parthenons at the expense of conjugations and declensions.¹ [End Page 49] After a high school sojourn in fancy computerized classrooms apparently assiduously devoted to avoiding memorization, most college students are sadly out of touch with the powers of their own minds—a machine more wonderful than any high-tech device yet invented...