A question for anyone with some wisdom to offer…
For my junior class, I had aimed to move into Caesar’s de Bello Gallico. My thought was to create embedded readings and work slowly through selections from the text. This seemed to be going well, but the fact of the matter is that the previous 2 years of Latin for these guys was mostly Latin for the New Millennium, followed by some work in Dooge’s Latin for Beginners, with a focus on parsing and dissecting of everything we read to churn out a workable translation (this was simply the result of me teaching how I had been taught). Since most of last Spring I told them that everything we were doing was aimed at getting to Caesar, I am having a hard time not following through on this. But… they just don’t have the vocabulary base or knowledge to work through these passages without supplying 40+ words, and they don’t know any other way to deal with Latin than to go word by word and put it into a cobbled English translation. I have been their only Latin teacher, and so I feel very responsible for the totality of their Latin experience and knowledge (which at present, seems pretty crappy).
I find myself slipping back into old habits, wanting to just explain the grammar, but its mind-numbingly boring for them and me. I want this year and next to be time well spent for them, but I also don’t want it to just be a new way of rehashing everything from the past two years. While I was extremely excited to come upon TPRS and this PLC rather late in the summer, I feel like I’ve bit off more than I can chew. I don’t have anywhere near a fully developed sense of TPRS methods, nor have I been able to see it in action except in videos, and my syllabi / grading policies / etc. are an odd mix of my old methods with all of this. I am convinced that CI is how I must teach, but it is proving extremely overwhelming right now, and I’m struggling to find a set rhythm for the day to day workings of my class. Not to sound completely desperate, but does anyone have thoughts or advice?
Kevin