In order to get the language study I need for my degree, this summer I took an undergraduate Latin intensive through the Classics Department at UB. With two weeks to go in the second section of the class, I’m taking the time — actually cutting class right now — to write a little something about it.
First of all, I’m incredibly grateful to the student instructors, both in a situation similar to mine (PhD students earning their way through by teaching) who allowed me to audit the classes for free. If anything in the following appears critical of them or their respective approaches to teaching the class, let it be known first that I’ve learned a great deal about my own shortcomings as a teacher by watching them work. Mostly, what I want to get down here is just what the title of the post says: the “back to school” aspect of sitting down every day with a dozen or so undergraduates as a more or less ordinary student. All names have been changed to protect the innocent etc.
Full disclosure: A long time ago, during my undergrad years at Wayne State, I thought it would be a good idea to take Latin — and I bombed. I ended up putting off the language requirement till almost the end of my studies, when I squeaked through in Spanish. So it’s hard for me to blast the students too much. Having said that, as the class started, I was fresh from a semester of grinding out Anglo Saxon in a grad-level independent study, and from the big medieval congress in Kalamazoo, where I heard stories of students spending ten hours a day doing Latin, sleeping in their cars with books propped on knees, and so on. So I was eager for intense study. And this is a summer intensive. We meet every morning, five days a week. Here goes.
My first teacher, Francine, is incredibly young, energetic, and full of enthusiasm. From the very first moment of class she has us greeting each other in Latin — “Salve, Nate!” etc. — standing up to write things on the blackboard, getting in front of the class to act out the very basic scenarios that help us learn the ABCs of Latin syntax. She also gives out prizes. Lots of them. Pencils, erasers, little plastic army guys, kazoos — during the class we’ll all accumulate a collection of these, for recognizing parts of speech, successfully translating exercises, guessing vocabulary words and so on.
The students at first glance are the usual suspects one might expect. Francine asks why they’re taking Latin, and the responses are varied and interesting. One wants to go to law school; one intends to major in medieval history; one’s a linguist; one wants to do classics. Then there’s me — my interest here is medieval literature — and a much older fellow named Michael, who is also auditing this class through some kind of senior program. Michael later explains to me that he always wanted to study Latin, but his long-ago undergrad program at nearby Fredonia was so restrictive that he could not find the time to do it. Along with us, the classics and linguistics students gradually establish themselves as the most diligent in the class.
Insight no. 1: Nicole Diver perhaps said it best in Tender Is The Night: “Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they do–they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.” It’s always been one of my favorite lines in my favorite novel, and I’ve gradually found that it doubly applies in the student-teacher relationship. Perhaps because we tend to be so preoccupied with our students, and because as grad students we spend a lot of time continuing seminar conversations after class, we imagine our students do the same. They don’t. I’m struck by how quickly the students, with the exception of a boy and girl who clearly knew each other beforehand, simply disperse during breaks and after class without so much as a glance at one another.
Although sad, it’s also, strangely, a bit of a relief to discover this. As a teacher, it’s easy to feel like either the students are bonding in hatred of your class, or hurrying in fear and loathing to get away. The reality is, they’re probably just busy and they don’t know each other.
Insight no. 2: Otherwise known as the “dative incident.” Francine likes to get us up on our feet, moving around, shouting declensions and writing down forms on the blackboard. We also frequently play a vocabulary game, in which we toss a stuffed dragon around and the person who catches it chooses a vocab word to define, until we’ve gone through all those written on the board. These tactics seem remedial and even silly, but they’re actually pretty effective. On this particular day, we’re all standing in a circle around Francine as she makes us repeat over and over the various forms of a particular noun and what they’re used for. After many such rounds, she turns to a female student who has been standing right in front of her, points to a word and says “So what’s this?” It’s the dative form. We had just gotten done shouting it, staring at it. The student gropes around for a moment, blinking as if seeing the word for the first time. It becomes clear she doesn’t know.
I realize then and there that the glaze we see over our students’ eyes is not personal, and it’s not because our lessons are too boring, the information too complex. Some of them simply exist in a state of disaffection and even the most enthusiastic teacher will not break them out of it. Or it will take time (see below). I suppose it might be like a permanent, ingrained sort of attention deficit — they’ve learned how to ape paying attention without really paying attention at all.
Insight no. 3: The carrot or the stick? In the English department’s comp program, we talk a lot about “stakes,” as in, making sure students understand what’s at stake in terms of basic requirements like coming to class, being on time, and doing homework. Sadly, if they don’t believe there are consequences for not meeting the requirements, many won’t. I’m used to having to spell it out to students, sending stern e-mails, giving “the speech” one time during the term. Clearly, Francine is not. She instead approaches this issue with all carrot, no stick — as far as I can tell. After a pretty tough quiz in week 3, she implores the class to actually do the homework; also, she greets students with effervescent cheer, even when they’re 20, 30 minutes late for the 2-hour class, sounding overly thankful (it seems to me) that they’ve come at all.
Surprisingly, it works. Sort of.
The class never really gels into a cohesive, punctual, fastidious unit. But then, what class ever does? Yet she manages to keep pretty much everyone from dropping, and through sheer enthusiasm and encouragement, many students whom I thought would never come around are at least treading water. Even the female student who blew the “dative” question becomes pretty decent over time. Francine’s ability to bring some of these students relatively up to par, and keep them engaged, is impressive. At the same time, the class could’ve moved much faster if she’d simply written them off and focused on those of us who were doing the homework every night — which is, I tell myself, what I would’ve done. Easy to say since it’s not my class.
Insight no. 4: Motivation, motivation, motivation. This is related to the question of stakes. If all students were motivated, we wouldn’t need to remind them of penalties, probably wouldn’t need grades. The students who are the strongest are those who have a clear sense of what they’re doing in school and how this course relates to their academic goals. Because they tend to be further along in their studies, they also have a track record of doing the work. You can’t teach this and you can’t force it. The linguistics student and the classics scholar in my class, while undergrads, understand the importance of Latin to their majors, and so they excel. For everyone else, it’s not that meaningful.
Probably the best thing of all would be to convince students of the through-line of whatever it is they’re studying with their life and their college careers. But I imagine it takes a remarkably talented and insightful teacher to do this. I still remember the first time I taught Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. I made the mistake of asking a student if he saw the relevance of writing an essay on what he imagined would happen to Nora and the other characters after the end of the story. “You mean the relevance of a bunch of imaginary people from 100 years ago?” He had a point. If the students don’t see it, they don’t see it. At least Francine’s enthusiasm and energy give me some useful ideas to go alongside my usual motivational tools — i.e., grades, penalties for absences, pop quizzes, etc.
Insight no. 5: Some students perhaps aren’t ready for study at this level. This is the elephant in the room, the academic equivalent of saying, “Yes, actually, that dress does make you look fat.” But let’s face it. We live in a world where going to college is pretty much the norm. Even in the hazy yesteryear when I graduated from high school, this wasn’t necessarily the case — plenty of kids went to trade school, joined the military, or went into a tech training program to go work for one of the Big Three — hell, some of them just took off and bummed around and became musicians or theater people. And these were smart people, by and large. Today, whether it’s because there are no good jobs or you need to stay on mom and dad’s insurance or it’s just the thing to do, everyone’s going to university. Great. Gives people like me a way to work through school. But some students simply don’t belong here yet.
It’s not a knock on their intelligence. It’s just that the work ethic isn’t there. Their personality isn’t formed. They’re not yet sure what they want to do in life. Whatever. Take Jacob, a nice enough kid who really struggles through Latin 101 but, with Francine’s help, manages to hang in there to some extent. With all the attention and energy she gives him, simply by meeting her halfway he probably could have eked out a C, though his heart and his head clearly are not in it. Somehow he does pass, and winds up in Latin 102. Without Francine, however, he completely fades. Whatever nascent skills he had in 101 — whatever enthusiasm — these gradually fall away. By the middle of the term our new teacher, Patricia, rarely calls on him; by the last couple weeks he’s taken to showing up 90 minutes late for a two-hour course — and then only, it seems to me, in order to catch a ride with a buddy who’s also in the class. Talking it over with Michael and the linguistics student, Pete, one morning, Pete says “I don’t get it.”
Conclusion: I don’t get it, either, but I remember my own nightmarish experience with Latin many years ago. I was not a good student; I barely belonged in college, and if someone had suggested I wouldn’t be any worse off if I took a year or two to go work on a fishing boat in Alaska, as I fantasized about doing, I might have done it. As it was, shame made me drop the course. But I recovered, became a pretty good student, and graduated in five years. I don’t think students feel that sort of shame anymore — and really, nothing can expose your ignorance like falling hopelessly behind in a language class — so it’s tougher than ever to use embarrassment (for not showing up, being late, not doing homework) as a motivational tool. But there are students like this in every class, and it makes class chemistry, and how the teacher manages it, all the more important.
That is, it’s just as frustrating from the students’ perspective as it is from the teacher’s when a class goes off track. I feel the morale sink when a bunch of kids waltz in late, disrupting the lesson as they find seats and unpack their things; I sense teeth grinding around me when someone stumbles over basic things he or she should have down cold. On the other hand, when things are clicking, I recognize it’s because the instructor is setting the tone, but the right blend of students — and it only takes one or two to mess this up — has risen to meet it. I’m not sure what all this means in terms of what I’ll do differently in my own classes. But it’s given me lots to think about.
Tags: School by dhadbawnik
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