So the Latinists sent some emails around to themselves a few weeks ago, including me in on the conversation, but the queue was jammed so I didn’t do anything as far as posting them here formally as articles, but the content is so rich that I thought I would just go ahead and post the whole discussion here with comments/reactions below and then you can follow the entire thread if you want – just get a pot of coffee going because there is a lot to absorb.
The beginning of the thread is John’s original post about Ethan, so that may ring a bell from a few weeks ago for many of us. I’m just going to take the emails from the various Latinists in reaction to John’s original article about Ethan and publish them in the comment fields below.
I suggest that there is a leitmotif in this conversation, I am seeing one anyway, that I could sum up in what John has written here:
…today was the first day in my teaching career that I was able to confront a resistant student without fear, without hesitation, and without anger, because I had made it my #1 goal to connect with students, and guide them using non-vebal communication. All the inner work I have been doing (summarized in my post on the blog last week) is paying off. Forget lesson plans, forget curriculum, forget grades. This is my curriculum: showing Ethan (and the rest of his classmates) by example what it means to interact in a human way with adults who take genuine compassionate human interaction seriously…..
If I may comment on what John said there –
THIS is what this work we are doing is about. Many of us miss this. We think it is about the method but it is only partly about the method. It is so much more than just sharing ideas and working together to develop things that work in our classroom like the absolutely revolutionary jGR; it is also a way of looking at our careers in a brand new and most fundamental way, in a way that can turn our careers around from having to play defense all the time (any career professional knows exactly what I mean by that term) and instead – delightedly – playing offense.
Playing defense in a classroom sucks. We are always reacting to things. There is no real peace in reacting to kids’ behaviors in that kind of way a goalie in hockey does. Playing offense, on the other hand, is a wonderful thing. We have the ball, the language we teach, and we can kick it around and actually score goals with our students so that they actually can see and appreciate all the excitement we want to share with them about the language and culture we are there in the classroom to represent.
This is what I see throughout the thread and commentary below – a discussion about what teaching really is. In an odd way, our Latinists may be doing more than just bringing a language back into play – they may also be bringing some of the core elements of thinkers who lived two thousand years ago as well. I mean, we are studying life here, and what is more expressive of life than human communication?
These dudes are bringing a rebirth of more than a language, if I may be allowed to even suggest that. Anyway, as I perhaps wax a bit overly philosophic here, you may want to read through these threads yourself and refresh yourself in their honesty and direct embracing of some pretty intense stuff that they (we) are all going through in our classrooms right now, in happy but confused reaction to the unexpected power we are finding in our comprehension based instruction.
John’s original email starts it off and then is followed by separate comments in the comment fields by David Talone, Bob Patrick, David Maust and Jeffery Brickler.