John send an article posted by Bob Patrick over on the Latin Best Practices site yesterday. Thank you John. Here is Bob’s post:
When we spend our time talking about Latin, students learn about Latin. When we spend our time speaking in Latin, students learn Latin.
When we spend our class time talking about Latin, in English with an external view to Latin, students learn about Latin from an outsider’s viewpoint. When we spend our class time speaking in Latin, from within Latin, students begin to have a human experience inside of Latin that begins to be like their experience of English within English.
How else would you have your students experience Virgil, Ovid, Caesar, Jerome, Phaedrus, Erasmus or any of the writers of Latin over a nearly 3000 year period? Translate them? Why? Your fourth, or fifth, or sixth or seventh year students can’t even approach the best translations that already exist.
Wouldn’t the point of studying Latin be to read and understand Latin, in Latin?
Teachers of Latin, how do you spend your time? Talking about Latin, or talking to your students in Latin?
With deepest respect for you and the language we love,
Bob Patrick