Goals for 2018-2019

My department chair encouraged me to share a few personal professional goals for this academic year, so I thought I'd share them here:

These are all ongoing goals that I've had for much of my teaching career, but they remain central to my focus this year.
(In no particular order)


1. To improve my Latin speaking and writing fluency and improve my listening comprehension. This is a goal because I wish to be able to facilitate class discussion in Latin with greater ease. I know that, at some level, my students' range of input is limited to what they read in the textbook and what I am able to produce (write and speak). I plan to work on these skills by listening to Latin podcasts (shoutout to Quomodo Dicitur!), committing to writing passages in Latin that are interesting and relatable to my students, and (hopefully) attending at least one immersive Latin conference this year.


2. To plan and implement lessons that are engaging to ALL learners in my classroom. This goal is important because without lessons that have understandable and interesting content and activities that make all students participate, class time is boring (for all) and requires the use of discipline measures to make students comply. I hope to work toward this goal by paying attention to student interests, integrating technology, and holding space for each student to have a voice in the classroom. I am always open to new ideas and am eager to hear about what works well in other classes.


3. To facilitate a collaborative department culture with the colleagues in my department. I have mostly been a "lone wolf" at my previous school campuses. I was usually either the only (or, at BASIS, the only experienced) Latin teacher on my campus and have sought out collaboration and mentorship from a variety of sources. This year, I hope to be an engaged colleague, learn from the other Latin teachers in my department, and share insight from my own experience. I know that I have much to learn from both members of my department about different aspects of teaching and school life, and I look forward to developing a positive culture in our department. I know that I benefit from clear, direct communication and face-to-face interaction. Meeting with my colleagues once per 7-day schedule rotation will help us to work well together.

What are your goals for this year? I'd love to hear about them!

An Update from Across Town

Hello! I hope your first days or weeks of school are off to a great start! I wanted to write a short post today to give a little information about the new position that I have taken on this year.

I left St. Andrew's, where I used to teach with Parva and Situla, to join the faculty at St. Stephen's Episcopal School. My position here is different in many ways. I'm teaching three sections in the Middle School (Latin IA, IB, and II) and one in the Upper School (Latin I). The chair of the Classics Department is now teaching 7th grade English, and he will be mentoring me to assume his chair position in a year or so. The teachers at this school have used primarily the traditional Grammar/Translation (GT) approach and use Oxford Latin Course. I have never used Oxford and hadn't even read the textbooks until this summer as I was preparing for classes.

I plan to begin my year with more G/T than CI, since it's what the veteran students are familiar with and it's how the materials in our shared resources folder are written. With 4 preps, I won't have a lot of time to write new lessons that adapt each chapter of Oxford to fit with a hybrid G/T-CI approach like I did with Cambridge in the past. I also want the students to feel a sense of success and progress as they begin a new year, and I think that moving to a heavy CI-style of teaching would throw them off.

My Latin IA class, which is comprised of 8 sixth graders, will be the place that I plan to implement CI the most this year. The curriculum that I inherited doesn't use Oxford in Latin IA, so it is very open to student/teacher interest. The students will take the National Exploratory Latin Exam and the National Mythology Exam in the spring. Their previous teacher used Latin is Fun with this class last year, and I also plan to use this text as a source of vocabulary and grammar concepts, but there's no pressure to move at any particular pace or in any particular order. Latin IA is the class I'm most excited about, as it offers the most freedom.

I'm planning to use an Interactive Notebook with my Latin IA class so they can organize their vocabulary, writings, drawings, and grammar notes all in one place. I would love tips and ideas from other teachers who use Interactive Notebooks or Journals with their students!


Oh, and one final note about the challenges of this year: for the first time after 7 years of teaching, I am now a traveling teacher! I will teach all 4 of my classes in 4 different rooms.  This is going to be so challenging for me. I'm working on developing systems of digital record keeping in place of paper systems I've used in the past, and I'm relying extensively on Google Classroom to post assignments. It's going to be a year of growth!

Novus annus, novi status

When we started this blog two years ago, the three of us (Situla, Magistra K, and I) talked about wanting to use this blog to share teaching ideas with each other as we experimented with a variety of things including injecting more comprehensible input into our lessons.  At that point, we were all working for the same school, but on different campuses.  We realized that we all had a lot to learn together and from each other.  We also knew that our situations might eventually change, and we committed to the idea that we would still be willing to blog together come what may.

Things have changed a great deal in the last two years for us, and now the Triumfeminate is separating to teach in two different schools.  The change has caused me to start thinking about all that's changed and all that has stayed the same, so here's a list of a few of those things:

1.  As mentioned earlier, our Latin Department was absorbed into a larger languages department.  As predicted, that made it a bit harder for the three of us to collaborate - in addition to causing other turmoil.  Now, we'll be at two separate schools which will make it even more difficult to merge schedules, etc.

2.  All three of us have been through changes in our personal life, which always impacts your professional life in a job like teaching.  Speaking for myself, my home life has changed a great deal as I sent my first child off to college.  I think that change in the end made me a better teacher, but it does sometimes feel that my life and family are more scattered.

3.  Our professional lives have changed in various ways with shifting duties and responsibilities.

4. These changes have made it hard for us to maintain our commitment to posting every few weeks.  However, our desire to maintain the connection between us has made us recommit to each of us trying to share something about our practice at least once a month.

5.  Nothing has changed in terms of the respect and admiration we have for each other.  We still have lots to learn from each other and hope to use this forum as a way to do that - in addition to sharing our journey with others.

So, we start this new school year in ever changing circumstances, but I for one am recommitted to the idea of sharing and learning together.  And, I feel so lucky to be sharing this journey with two other amazing women.  - Parva