David is another SoCal teacher in our group:
I am in my eighth year of teaching Latin at California High School in Whittier, California. Cal-High is a public high school of just over 3,000 students, mostly Latino/Hispanic and has a variety of programs including a number of “Academies” for kids to specialize in a particular vocation such as business, culinary arts, automotive technology etc. Whittier is about 30 minutes east of Los Angeles, Quakers originally settled it in the 1800s and its most controversial twentieth century claim to fame is that Richard Nixon attended Whittier College. My family lives in Whittier too; my wife and I have two kids, ages 1 and 4. I love living close to my school because I feel connected to my students that way and get to see them often at community functions.
I never imagined during my high school or college years that I would ever be a foreign language teacher, and certainly not a Latin teacher. During high school I was a 4 percenter and liked the “hard-work” part of being a student. I always admired people who knew foreign languages and wanted to be able to speak another as well. I took Spanish for three years in typical non-CI classes and didn’t have great success with it for all the usual reasons we’re all familiar with. I felt, based on my experience in high school that learning languages for some might be of some ease, but it was a difficult task for me.
I went to college at Biola University, a Christian liberal arts school near Whittier and decided to take Biblical Greek for my foreign language requirement. Biblical Greek was definitely “hard-work” and I was in 4 percenter paradise for two years making flash cards and parsing verbs. But in this case, I had a stronger motivation and connection to the culture since I was a history major focusing in particular on ancient world and the early church. I started experiencing some success at decoding Greek into English and it was a thrill that also motivated me to take a summer of first level Latin with two friends at another university.
Over the next few years I graduated with a history major and Social Science Secondary teaching credential. I was a substitute teacher, played in a rock band, built some instruments in my father’s woodshop and got married, all while looking for a full-time Social Science teaching position. Finally, one day I subbed for a Latin class at Cal-High and was enlightened to the fact that Latin was actually still taught in high schools. I learned that the teacher at Cal-High was planning to retire in a couple years and I decided to get my credential and take the job. Over the next couple years I went back to school in the evenings at Cal State Long Beach, while teaching first Special Education and then Latin after the current teacher retired.
So there I was, teaching a foreign language but I had never had any classes or experience in language pedagogy or linguistics. I had not done student teaching in a language classroom, nor I did I even consider myself a fluent speaker in ANY foreign language. Therefore, I taught Latin for five years as I had been taught, in the “grammar-translation” method of classical languages in which vocabulary, paradigms and grammar rules are memorized and then one is expected to start translating texts into English. There is little emphasis on speaking, and almost never an opportunity for self-expression in the language. There is little personalization of the CI in this method or emphasis on staying in the target language – English is always used to interpret the target language. For more on this method and common obstacles that Latin teachers face, take a look at John Piazza’s post:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/08/07/john-piazza-on-latin/
This paradox, that I think mainly teachers of classical languages suffer from, of being a foreign language teacher, but not being able to actually speak the language with any proficiency, made me uneasy. I often felt like I was a phony, or that I wasn’t actually teaching a language at all. I felt I needed to always convince the kids that people actually had communicated in Latin… but no, I could not communicate like that or teach my them to do so either. Or I made them and myself and them believe that learning Latin was somehow a sort of language “exercise” that needed to be taught differently, but this was not very satisfying either. So because of these feelings I began to try and develop some proficiency in the language myself, for which I found many great resources on the Internet, and I searched for better pedagogy that might help make learning Latin more accessible and interesting for my students.
That searching, which began eight years ago, started me on a journey of learning through much trial and error what it means to acquire language. In the beginning I never even anticipated that my students or I would ever really communicate in Latin or be able to express ourselves in Latin; it just wasn’t a goal since reading of ancient texts was the only goal I had ever known. But over much time I realized that interpersonal communication, personalization and self-expression were essentials in the formula for true language acquisition.
This was both exciting and scary, because as I said before, like probably 95 percent of Latin teachers out there I had no experience in real interpersonal Latin discourse, oral or written. On the Internet, I learned of other Latin teachers that felt like I did. I found the Latin Best Practices Listserv, started by Bob Patrick and John Piazza to be a lifeline for me, and became acquainted with TPRS from Blaine’s book, from TPRS in a Year and now from this blog which has now taken my classroom to a whole new level of CI.
By starting with what I was able to manage: very easy structures and scripted stories I developed my language profieciency as I practiced each period with my students. I made tons of mistakes, but made this one of our class goals and always pointed out that I made the most! I told them it was the only way that I or they could learn a language was to just keep trying, listening, practicing and having fun. I also noticed that when I became a learner with the kids and invited their feedback frequently, they felt empowered and were more willing to cooperate in class and patient when lessons sometimes didn’t go well.
After a year of heavily scripted stories, I experimented with more open ended stories and PQA and as I got more experience, my vocabulary and confidence grew. I also develped a better feel for how to make room for the kids to participate and focus on them in class rather than just always pushing my agenda or the book’s agenda. As a result, our classroom has become a positive place, there is much laughter, and I look forward to experiencing my students’ creativity, input and acting abilities in the stories. I have experienced less attrition in the upper levels and my program has grown from 120 to now 180 and this year I had two sections of Latin 3, something that has never happened before!
I have a great situation at my school. I have a lot of freedom to structure the class as I like since I’m the only Latin teacher in the district. Although I’m the only language teacher at my school that uses TPRS (we have 5 Spanish teachers, 1 French and 1 German), my department is always interested to hear about the techniques I’m using and there is a positive interchange of ideas in our meetings.
I also have supportive administrators! They have all helped the Latin program grow by careful scheduling and by letting me recruit kids for my classes. Recently our new principal observed my Latin 1 class (my most CI-filled class yet) and I gave him some literature ahead of time and a letter explaining how a TPRS class worked. I taught a lesson for him that used some PQA from the name cards and later in the block period we did “He Talks Too Much” Even though I got a little nervous and went a little faster than I would have normally done, he thought it was great and we spent the whole post observation conference talking about TPRS pedagogy. He had his junior-high aged daughter sit in on my class last week because he’s trying to convince her to come to Cal-High – that really let me know that he values what I and my kids are doing!
I value the community on this blog so much. This past year it has helped me completely overhaul my classroom discipline and now my classes have the structure that actually allows for CI to really take place on a large scale. I often choose to read the blog before I do my lesson planning, because I know that it has such a strong, daily effect on my thinking and attitude toward teaching and my kids. Thank you and I look forward to posting more often!