Photo courtesy of csessums @ flickr

I never expected this. When I was a kid, if you’d asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, ‘teacher’ would have been way down on the list, just above actor and professional clown. I hated the idea of getting up in front of people and talking, and teachers do that every day! Besides, with the exception of my mom and a couple others, most teachers seemed to be unpleasant, bossy people who did pointless things like making you do long division over and over on paper when you’d already been doing it in your head for years.

Yet, here I am, making up a lesson plan for my next class. And it turns out I like it. I still get nervous before every class, worrying that I’m going to freeze up or forget something important.  Or that I’ll be unable to get something across to them, and they’ll all give up and stop coming. The dread seems to be lessening a little with time, though. Of course, I don’t have to put up with a lot of the bad things most teachers deal with. All my students want to be there (or their parents want them to be), so no one is using my class as free day care. I also don’t have an administration looking over my shoulder and tying me up with a bunch of regulations from every level of government. So I realize I’m getting the good side of being a teacher without the bad of being an ‘educator.’

I’m learning a few things, too. For one, a lot of the talk about class size is nonsense. There are really only two different class sizes: singular and plural. You’re either working one-on-one with a kid, so you can figure out exactly what he understands and what he needs help with, or you’re standing in front of a group and trying to go at a pace that has the majority of faces nodding instead of looking puzzled. My daytime class usually has 11 students, and I don’t think it would make much difference if there were 20 or 30. We recite things like vocabulary and declensions together, so 30 people can do that as well as 10. If I had them take turns answering things, then class size might matter because each student in a smaller class would get to answer more often; but I don’t do that because to me that seems like an obvious recipe for boredom. So the only difference for me in a bigger class would be that the more faces there are, the harder it would be to spot the kid who’s getting lost. But that’s very possible with 10.  When people argue over class sizes in the 25-30 range, as if going from 25 to 30 is going to ruin someone’s education, it’s silly. A sea of faces is a sea of faces.

Related to that, I’ve noticed it’s not nearly as hard as I thought it’d be to tell who’s getting it and who isn’t. Students basically have three looks when you ask if they understand something:

• The relieved nod: The look that says, “Thank goodness, I’m still keeping up!”
• The honestly puzzled frown or head-shake: This student doesn’t get it and wants you to know that, so you’ll explain it further.
• The frozen head-tilt: This student doesn’t get it, but is afraid he should, so he’s trying not to commit one way or the other, while furiously trying to figure it out. So he gets this frozen look, like he doesn’t want to look confused, but he doesn’t want to lie and nod either.

The first two are no problem, because it’s obvious what they mean. There will always be students who don’t get something the first time; that’s why you ask. The third one is the dangerous one, because no one is saying “could you slow down and do that again?” so you have to judge by the faces. If you ask the question in the negative, like, “Is anyone having trouble with that?” the lack of response could make you think they’re not, when really they just don’t want to say so. So I’m learning to keep the question positive by asking if they get it; or make it impersonal, like, “Should we go over that some more?” That way, no one has to speak up and feel like the dummy for not getting it. They can agree in the sense of, “Yes, you should probably repeat that in case someone hasn’t quite gotten it yet.”

I’ve also learned that a real teacher beats a video any day. Since we have the video course, my original plan was to just play the video, and then answer questions and help them with the exercises afterwards. I figured Kids These Days™ would pay more attention to a TV than to a real person. I realized pretty quickly how wrong I was. Watching them watch the video, I could see how easily they got bored and distracted or missed things. I could keep pausing the video to explain and repeat things, but if I’m going to do that, I might as well do it all myself so they don’t have to switch their attention back and forth between two teachers. They can still watch the video at home to review, since it covers the same stuff; but I’m doing all the classroom work, and that’s working much better. They respond really well to flash cards and other interactive work that a recording just can’t do very well.

Having said all that, I’m still a long way from being good at this. I need to get better at making sure they’re all participating, so the more enthusiastic ones don’t drown out the quiet ones. I probably need to slow down sometimes, and keep in mind that it won’t hurt to spend some extra time on a topic even if they’ve all basically gotten it. The course moves slowly enough that there’s no need to rush. And I need to be better at keeping them focused on the subject, because even students who want to be there can get distracted and goof off now and then.

So far so good, though. Now I’m thinking about offering my services to teach Latin at John Wood (the local community college). That would be a different course and a very different pace, with its own challenges. I’d be able to use my lessons that I already wrote up for my web site, though, and I might even get paid!

I’m surprised by how much I enjoy teaching.  It’s even got me thinking I might want to expand into teaching other skills, like programming or webmaster work.  I always thought I’d hate teaching because I hate getting up and talking in front of people.  I’m sure I would hate the lecture-hall kind of teaching, but this isn’t like that.  It’s more like a lab setting or a conversation, with a lot of feedback, so it doesn’t feel like giving a speech at all.  I’m still a little nervous about it, but that’s because these people are trusting me to know what the heck I’m doing, and I don’t want to let them down.  And I don’t have the subject down cold 100% myself, so that’s a bit nervous-making too.

Whiteboards are really cool.  I scribble a lot of examples up there while I explain things, so I have to erase a lot to make room for the next thing.  Our whiteboard is probably 6′ x 4′ or so, and I probably cover it a few times during the course of a class.  Someday when I build my own office, at least one entire wall will be whiteboard, so I’ve got plenty of room to sketch things out.

Another surprise has been how easy it is to tell when someone “gets it.”  People just don’t stick their hands up and say, “Could you repeat that whole thing, because I didn’t get that at all.”  They generally look back and forth between the board and their book, or stare at the board looking slightly puzzled, trying to figure it out.  Then when they get it and it falls into place, their face kind of relaxes, and they might even nod a little.  So all I have to do is keep explaining things in different ways, trying to find a way that makes sense to them, until they’re all relaxed and nodding.  Simple, eh?

It occurred to me during the last class that learning a language (at least a heavily inflected one like Latin) is kind of like doing a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box.  You have to start with the corner pieces, then the edges, and continue working toward the middle.  Every piece gives you the foundation for the next piece.  Eventually the big picture comes into focus; but when you start, you don’t know whether the blue pieces are sky or water—you just know they go together, and you’ll see why later.

Learning Latin is like that: you don’t know why you have to learn this chart of endings or memorize two forms for each noun, but later it’ll make sense.  You have to start with one piece and get it right, without understanding how it will fit into the final picture.  Sometimes I pretty much have to say, “Just go with me on this, and I promise there’s a reason for it and it’ll make sense someday.”  I just have to keep them interested for a few more weeks until they can see some of those pieces fitting together.

So we’ll be continuing on pronunciation next week, and practicing by going through the prayers at the foot of the altar (the beginning of Mass) line by line, covering any tricky words.  I think the worst one is cithara, which is pronounced CHEE-tah-rah.  The word means harp, but to me it sounds like the name of the half-girl, half-cat heroine of an 80s Saturday morning cartoon.

Class is also moving to Tuesdays at 6:30pm.  As soon as I picked Monday, I found out some people couldn’t make it on Monday, which is about what I figured would happen.  So it’ll be Tuesday until further notice.  We’ll be reviewing last week’s material again, so if anyone was interested but thought they’d missed out, you’ve got one more chance to get in at the beginning!

Anyway, it looks like I’m going to get a chance to teach Latin to real people in person.  We’re going to start a second, slower-paced Latin class at St. Rose, which will start over at the beginning, taking more time to go over some of the concepts people are having trouble with, and probably taking more time to review some English grammar that you really need to understand if you’re going to get Latin.  My vague plan is to go as slow as people need to, and make sure they get it, so I hope people will ask a lot of questions and stop me if I get to going too fast.  I’ve done some tutoring before, but I’ve never taught in a classroom setting, so it should be interesting.

The class should start soon after the first of the year.  If anyone is interested who hasn’t been to Father Devillers’s class before, please contact me, as we need to determine what night would be best for everyone’s schedule.  We’re probably looking at Monday or Tuesday, but I’d like to pick a time that’s best for everyone.  People are also welcome to attend both classes, if they like.  I certainly won’t mind if I’ve got students smart enough to correct me if I make mistakes!  The rectory has the textbooks, which I think are $10 or $15.

I’ve also started putting the Latin Mass propers that I make up for Sundays and Holy Days on a side page here on my blog, free for anyone’s use.  Maybe I can save someone else the trouble of copying and pasting and proofreading that I’ve gone through for the past year.  We’re almost up to where Fr. D. started saving them last year, so I won’t have to do them most weeks, so I’ll have time to re-proof them and publish them online.

I remember the subjunctive being a tough one for our class in school, because the subjunctive is one area where there’s no simple translation in English.  Latin is very particular about separating things that have happened or will happen from things that might happen.  So you often can’t just translate the words literally anymore, but have to figure out what they meant and then find the best way to say that in English.  When you can translate the meaning of a sentence instead of the individual words, you’ve reached a different level.

I’ve only covered the active and imperative voices and the indicative moods, though.  That leaves the passive voice and the subjunctive mood, both of which have their own sets of endings, so I’ve really only covered about a third of the possible combinations.  The passive and subjunctive won’t take as many lessons, though, now that we’ve got the active indicative down.

Incidentally, when I was waiting at a bus stop in Chicago, I noticed a plaque on the bus stop that said Urbs In Horto.  That means “city in a garden,” but the H in Horto was kind of worn, so at first I thought it was “Morto.”  “Morto” doesn’t make sense, because mors is third declension so it would be in Morte, so I figured it out.  But just for a second, I wondered why they had a plaque up that said, “City in Death.”