This question I aired at a Keynote conference in January 2016. Think back to your last year of university…
How do undergraduates operate?
Compound adjectives were especially popular:
- Self-directing
- Time-rich
- Resource-ready
- Single-minded
To these were added (perhaps optimistically):
- Committed
- Solitary
- Tenacious
- Assertive
- Critical
Undergrads are also hunting the big picture- they are able to join the dots between bits of knowledge, and that’s the buzz of higher education.
Then I said, call to mind one of the exam classes you taught last year.
How do school pupils operate?
This one took a bit of thinking actually- we know really well what they do, but how they do it and all the additional pressures can sometimes drift out of our view.
- Under duress
- Spread thinly
- Juggling subjects & skills
- Learning ‘knacks’
- Doing more than thinking
- Distractable
- Collaborative- willing or not!
- Without fluency
- Less visibility of the big picture
How can those differences be problematic?
When I went from teaching English to Classics, I was was really anxious to re-boot old university knowledge and I wanted to prove myself primarily as a classicist. And a good classicist is forensic, meticulous, and possibly a completist- at least about their fields of specialism.
It took time and reassurance to appreciate that becoming a good Classics teacher would mean having the confidence to leave behind some of that old knowledge and those university skills in order to create new knowledge.
What new knowledge does a Classics teacher have to create?
1. What pupils find difficult
- The awkward 3rd conjugation
- Putting indirect statements into English
- 3rd person pronouns- especially se/ suus
And all the rest…
2. How much of the story to tell at what stage
When you introduce the accusative case and the idea of a direct object, would you also explain the accusative for time how long, or the accusative of respect, or accusative supines?
Knowing what to put in view and what to keep concealed is also the art of effective questioning, resource design and so much more.
3. What pineapple tastes like
I once heard this excellent analogy: ‘Doing an unseen translation is like eating a fruit salad. How could you expect someone to learn what pineapple tastes like, when they’re tasting so much else at the same time? How can you expect your pupils to handle e.g. participles, when they’re handling conjunctions, and indirect objects, and so much else at the same time?’
Fruit for thought, that. There’ll be a standalone post coming soon on ‘How to make the most of unseen translation?’
The key thing for now, though, is to identify what strands of language-learning you want to tackle, and plan your activity to maximise those. Minimise the other elements by e.g. using really familiar vocab. The question has to be: how will an exercise achieve its outcome?
4. How to show not tell
‘How do you get a group of wary teenagers to interpret Latin poetry for themselves?’
That was the starting point for another Keynote session I worked on: and it was really, really interesting. I’m writing a post on ‘What does good practical criticism entail?’ but for now, here was what we covered:
- Start with some English
- Know how the Latin works
- Create time and space for discussion
- Discuss how to discuss effectively
- Creative translation
- Ugly but accurate written analysis
5. How to hook them in the first five minutes
The virtuoso classicist and teacher Gilbert Highet wrote in 1950: ‘The business of the teacher is to pass currents of interest and energy through the facts, while they are being learnt and afterwards, so that they melt, fuse, become interconnected, acquire life, and grow into vital parts of the minds which hold them. One excellent way to do this is to demonstrate how apparently remote facts are organically linked…’
And I’m sure you have lots of other pupil-bait you could share below (please do!). Here is one I’ve used when teaching Germanicus and Piso ( CLA Prose Lit B 2020 & 2021 ):
Answers on a postcard (or in the comment box below…).
