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.