Here is Corrado’s bio and thank you:
This is my first year as a teacher. I am at an “urban” high school on the north shore of Boston, teaching five classes of Latin 1 to mostly freshmen. I am the only Latin teacher in the school, although there is another HS in the district which has a thriving Latin program that is taught using traditional “drill and kill” methods. I knew at the outset that this year would be challenging for many reasons, and thus far, it has been, although not always in the ways I had expected. The best part thus far has been the students themselves, getting to know them, playing with the language with them. Some of them even try to speak with me in Latin outside of class, which is such a thrill. The worst parts are administrative issues, some which I think might improve eventually and some which I will have to live with if I stay where I am currently.
The teaching at the school is supposed to be “research based”, which means that (theoretically) you are not only allowed to modify and adapt teaching strategies to conform to current research, but are expected to do so. This should be good news for me as a Latin teacher who wants to teach the language using the methods that all credible sources support. But it is hard for me to see how teachers—especially new ones who are particularly vulnerable—can comfortably pursue what they know the research shows: the individual teachers in each department are all expected to be teaching in alignment with one another, and the process of deciding what is taught, how it is taught, etc. is driven by the department heads and the senior teachers. So I have thus far been in the odd and confusing position of being told to teach according to ACTFL standards on the one hand (because as a department that’s what we claim to be doing), and then on the other hand being told by my DH and other teachers that I need to focus more on conjugating and drilling vocabulary lists and less on reading simple Latin passages and asking comprehension questions. If anyone starts looking seriously at my methods, they are bound to notice a disjunction between the way I teach Latin and the way that the living language teachers teach Spanish and French. I am worried about what will happen in that scenario.
I am trying to keep a low profile this year while also still giving students as much input in Latin as possible using CI methods. I don’t always feel like I am successful, though. I have a terrible textbook that I have been vaguely directed to “lean on as a crutch” for my first year (so I am forced to teach bizarre, disjointed vocabulary units), and (like most teachers I guess) I face an endless barrage of PLC meetings and mentoring sessions and benchmarks and common core templates and common assessments, etc., none of which really seem to have ANYTHING to do with what the research shows regarding FL acquisition.
I have yet to attend any TPRS/CI workshops, but I am hopeful that I will find time to do so in the near future. Lately I have been feeling a little crushed with all of the demands of my first year. I am also still genuinely excited by what the future holds for me as a language teacher—I know in my bones that this is important work. Positive feedback from some of my students has helped to keep my spirits up. My favorites: “I feel like I understand Latin better than I understand Spanish,“ and, “I just get what you are saying in Latin when you say it. In my French class I have to translate it into English in my head.”