On Being Flexible

salvete! Magistra Kruebbe here. I'm making a short post today to reflect on the 7th grade class I just had.

I had planned an Embedded Reading today on the birth of Jesus story from the Vulgate Bible. I had created a document with three columns: original Latin, simplified Latin, and vocabulary glosses. I had worked for a few hours on making the simplified text, and I was excited for the chance to celebrate the joys of Christmas.

But then, I was chatting before class with one of my students whom I saw celebrate becoming Bat Mitzvah last weekend. I told her about the day's plan and asked her if she was excited for the reading. "Nah," she replied. She's the slowest processor in my class, and I realized immediately that I needed to change my agenda. I was going to lose her today.

I wrote: "Vote for today's fabula nova: the creation story from mythology or the birth of Jesus from the Latin Bible." The votes were unanimous. One student felt kind of bad for me when I told him that I had prepared the Vulgate reading for today. "Well, we could do it next week," he offered. Baby Jesus and I took the backseat to the new plan.

And just like that, we set off. "olim erat Chaos..." We've been working on the imperfect and perfect tenses lately, so telling a creation story helped them to hear a bazillion repetitions of erat and erant. Sentences like "Uranus erat in Gaea" and "infantes Urani et Gaeae erant in Gaea" helped them to hear how in functions with the ablative to mean both "in" and "on." Writing the dictionary entries of the names of the gods and goddesses allowed ample opportunities to work with the genitive, something that they've learned about but have never seen in our Cambridge text.

We got as far as Zeus freeing his siblings before class time was up, and the students were excited to continue to describe Zeus' children and their realms.

It was hard to scrap my lesson plan. I think about those teachers who were still using the same overhead sheets from 20 years before when document cameras were introduced at my high school. I remember feeling distrust about those overhead sheets. My teenage self wondered how my teachers could be so changeless.

I know that I'm guilty of being resistant to change sometimes. The way I was taught Latin was repeated without any modification from my high school Latin 1 class through the end of my graduate school experience. We always spoke in English about Latin, and always focused on how the grammar was working. Expressing my own ideas in Latin was never provided as an activity, and I can almost feel nostalgia over the lost experience of having communicated with my many witty professors in the language that they loved so dearly.

Labor Domi

As I moved to more mastery-based grading this year, I really wanted to change my expectations for outside of class work, but I didn't want to eliminate them completely.  The goals I wanted to accomplish were:

• Eliminate unneccessary, outside-of-class "busy work"
• Encourage students to think more deeply about what they personally would like to learn or about what they feel like they need to work on
• Encourage more Latin reading

In the first trimester, I tried an experimental system.  I gave students the freedom to pick which twenty assignments they would like to do or felt they needed to do.  In the end, I did require about five common assignments that I felt were necessary for all of them for one reason or another.

Additionally, I required each student to read twenty passages, chapters, short children's books, Legonium stories, whatever they wanted to read in Latin.  For this requirement, students could reread something we had done in class or branch out into something new.  In preparation for this, I organized all the books I have in my classroom, some purchased, some student-made into 5 reading level boxes to give them some guidance when making their selections.

I asked them to do two things after reading:

1. They had to post a picture of themselves reading or the reading to the class GroupMe text group.
2. They had to record the reading on the same spreadsheet that they were using to record homework assignments, but reading assignments required a summary in Latin.  

The purpose of the first requirement was two-fold.  Primarily, I wanted them to encourage each other to read with these little reminders that came in the form of pictures in the class GroupMe.  A secondary function was to remind me to give them feedback on their Google spreadsheets.  One thing that happened that I didn't anticipate was that students sometimes used these posts as reading recommendations, so they actually ended up starting a great conversation about what each student chose to read.  For instance, one student started reading the stories at Legonium.  When the other students saw those in her pictures, they became interested and brought it up in class one day.  After her ringing endorsement, the Legonium readings became incredibly popular in that class. 

The second requirement was designed as a way to keep records for both the students and for me.  Here's the spreadsheet we are using for the second trimester.  We are hoping it is a little more refined, plus the kids requested that we change the color scheme in order to make it easier for them to locate visually in their Google Drives.  I didn't realize how powerful the summaries would be as learning tools.

Here's a screenshot of the log of one of my most advanced level 5 students:


Note the entry for September 12.  She had written that Vergil told about "legatum Aeneae."  I suspected she just used the wrong word, so I commented on it.  I didn't require students to make corrections, but note that she did go back and substitute "legatum" with "iter."  I'm not interested in perfect work, but I was glad to see how the spreadsheet started a conversation and feedback loop between us.

Here's another screenshot of a log from a lower level student:

 I often wished I had more time to write responses to the students, but I think the act of reading and summarizing was enough to effect a great deal of learning.

At the end of the trimester, I asked for feedback on a Google form.  I got some great feedback from the students about the reading requirement:

"Readings gave me the confidence that I do know the language pretty well, and I also noticed the time it took me to read passages that are the same length went down."

"Reading new types of literature, like plays, have helped me see what more conversational Latin is like, so it's made me more comfortable with the language."

"More comfortable with words taking on multiple meanings, and am looking to recognize things as dative/abl. absolute etc. Realizing not to read from beginning to end of sentence, but look for how clauses are separated and move around."

"Reading the Aeneid has definitely expanded my vocabulary. Both texts have made me more comfortable recognizing things like indirect statements, purpose clauses, relative clauses and idioms. Writing the summaries of my re-readings have helped me to construct these things on my own." (from an AP student)

"It helps reading a passage that flows, especially with dialogue, so we can see better how to form writings of our own."

"The readings have helped me to understand new vocabulary and to recognize new sentence structures. This allows me to be more effective in other parts of the class."

I definitely learned a lot from the trial and error of experimenting with the readings, and I believe the students did too.  In the end of trimester survey, I asked them to reflect on their own time management, since this requires a lot from them.  Some said they managed themselves well and even finished up before the end of the trimester (I did offer extra credit for additional readings in case this happened), even more students noted that they would manage themselves better in the second trimester.  I'm also trying a couple of new things, like posting a reading assignment at least once a week on our online assignment postings to help students remember.  One piece of evidence that they are enjoying it and learning to manage the reading expectation better is the number of students who have been posting on class GroupMe's that they have been reading over the break.  Overall, I'm very pleased with the culture of reading and re-reading that this has started in my classroom. - Parva