Via Facilis

(ELVN Is In The Building!)

Vocabulary. How to get it? How to keep it?

Flash cards (self-made not store-bought) are effective, flexible, and travel easily and well. Wherever you are, you can pull out your flash cards and practice your vocabulary.

The writing out of forms again and again is also helpful. Saying vocabulary out loud is efficacious as well. Multi-sensoral rote memorization, in other words, works. And yet sometimes our students still don't learn their vocab.

Pondering this conundrum, I hit upon an unexpected but simple solution. I now require all my students to keep an ELVN: the Exclusively Latin Vocabulary Notebook. The meaning is clear: Latin. Period. No other subjects allowed.

When to use ELVN?
Every time students miss a vocabulary word in the course of a class.

What to write?
After a dateline, the full dictionary listing of the particular word

– even if students have written it down several times before
– even if they have written it down that very class.

The physical act of writing down the words correctly immediately after making a mistake prevents students from persisting in errors and solidifies memorization. The ELVN becomes a running record not just of how many times students have seen, and written down, a given vocabulary item, but precisely when they last saw it. Awareness of vocabulary becomes keener.

Bottom line: an ELVN-like tool acts as a vehicle for long term memory vocabulary acquisition.

One natural spin off of using ELVN is a non-quiz quiz in a game format. Recently, instead of having the students write out a vocabulary quiz, I asked them to take out their ELVNs. I then read out various words – "Give me the dictionary listing for 'tall'" etc.

If there is some doubt as to how well they know the word, they have to spell it out. If they get any part of the item wrong, they have to write down the whole listing correctly in ELVN. The activity is fast-paced and multi-sensoral – the students have to listen, speak, and write.

I follow up with a written quiz the next day. Multi-level learning, different approaches to the same material, afford students many different acquisition opportunities.

More tomorrow.

In the Fall of 2000-1, I returned to the school where I had taught from 1987-90.
The good news: Latin was still alive.
The bad news: It wasn't well.

The text I had put in place ten years before was still there.
But I no longer found it effective.

My initial, grandiose assessment was that the text should have been a breeze to understand. But my students did not come to the same conclusion. Time after time they wouldn't just get a translation wrong; they would merely take the basic translations of vocabulary items and put them side by side. This wasn't even a case of mangled permutations.

They had the vocabulary, but no idea what to do with it.
Their recognition of morphology was questionable, at best.
Their grasp of syntax was virtually nil (not even "nihil").
No wonder they found the text confusing.

Nonetheless, my denial persevered.

"How can they not get it?" I asked myself.
Myself was silent for a moment. Then it began to rant.
"The Latin of this book is simplistic. How could you possibly make it any simpler? Why should you even have to?"

Ranting came and went.
Reality set in.

"Should" was not the issue.

If I wanted my students to learn how to read with any understanding, with depth and breadth, the first thing I had to junk was "Should."

That was the first step.
And the most critical.

More in the next post.

Continuing from the last post,

So.
Reality had set in.
"Should" had been shown the door.
Or had I shown myself the door and left "Should" behind?

I had already begun to write my own exercises. But they were still missing the mark. I persisted in making erroneous fundamental assumptions, chief of which was that the students could read Latin even if they only knew vocabulary and their grasp on morphology was tenuous.

I could not state with any conviction that my students understood what they were reading.

The patient was hemorrhaging, not simply bleeding.

What to do?

Sometimes the best thing is:
--Go back to the beginning.
--Take the reading passages provided in the text.
--Break them down into sentences.
--Break them down into phrases.
--Break them down into fragments.
--Break them down,
--Break them down again.
--Break them down once more.

Okay.
And then...what?

Rebuild them?
I guess I could do it that way...

Wait. It can't be. That's too easy. That's ridiculously simple.
(Besides, I didn't learn it that way....)
--Build them back up?
--Build them back up!

Start with....
What?

The verb.

I have had epiphanies before. But none like this. It was a revelation that bowled me over with its simplicity.

The solution was so obvious, it couldn't be seen.

Start with the bare essentials of a Latin sentence.
--Then add.
--Then add to that.
--Then add to that.
--And so on.

The fundamental assumption I had been making was that the students knew basically how to read a Latin sentence. They didn't. They'd been asked to break down sentences and paragraphs. But they had no real awareness of how the pieces fit together in the first place. Thus when they broke down the sentences, their understanding of the sentences fell apart.

You build a building from the ground up, not from the top down.
This holds with the construction of the Latin sentence as well.

When I finally earned my Ph.D, a person stylizing himself as a citizen of the "Real World" (I still haven't figured out where, or what, the "Real World" is; then again, I'm a Classicist, not a philosopher), asked me what seems to be the inevitable, inane, insipid question for occasions of this sort:

"So what are you going to do with that?"
"I think I'll put it on my wall," was my blithe response.

I'd fielded that question so many times before that I had come to a point where I either had to skilfully craft a pithy reply, or run the risk of developing an insecurity complex. I opted for the former, finding it more entertaining (mentally healthier, too) than the latter.

"Put it on my wall" was also more accurate, and more comprehensible, than "I don't know." As it was, "I don't know" sprung from my failure to see the point of the question, not from a cluelessness on my part as to my professional destination (more later on "destination" vs. "journey"). Not that anyone claiming to be from the "Real World" had either a hope or concern of grasping that.

In the context of The Epiphany, however, "What are you going to do with that?" is not just a question. It's the question.

After all, once you've had an Epiphany, what do you do? Sign up for Epiphany Class? See a Revelation Specialist? Buy yourself a copy of Epiphanies for Dummies?

"Live into the moment."
A favorite quote of a friend of mine.
And a clear starting point.

In the wake of the epiphany comes a powerful, creative, wild force that has its well-spring, its epicenter, in your own understanding. It is a force terrifying and exhilerating, breath-taking and resuscitating, mind-numbing and mind-opening, deadly and revitalizing.

"Catharsis" only begins to get at its essence. This force doesn't simply bring your understanding back to life. It causes you to reconsider, rethink, recalibrate, restructure, rebuild everything you thought you knew, everything you thought you understood.

It is up to you to harness this power.
You're the only one who can.

As for how I harnessed the power of my Epiphany's Wake, my next post will tell.
Part of the answer is right in front of you.

I never knew that Epiphany even had a Wake.

Then I began writing this blog.

So there I was. Smack dab in the stormy wake of epiphany (Wake Epiphany? One of the Great Wakes, I guess). I had tapped into an endless supply of high grade energy. It was a sort I had never experienced: the more I expended, the more it replenished itself.

The energy jump-started my mind with low-gear intensity, thoughts bouncing off one another like affection-starved puppies. (Low-gear? Didn't he mean "high-gear"? No, he didn't. Why? Because low-gear is the where all the power is generated. The revs of an engine are exponentially higher in the low gear. And as we know, without low gear, there is no high gear.)

But Reality was still there.

How to bring that Epiphany to bear on my teaching? How to make it accessible to my 8th graders? To the rest of my students? Did I even have to?

I could still use the current 8th grade text, even if I didn't like it. It would serve as a vehicle for my new approach. For now, anyway. How long would "now" last? Indefinitely. Forever. It didn't really matter.

As it turned out, "now" lasted a week.

I wanted my 8th graders to have a strong grasp on syntax, vocabulary, morphology. Control of these would facilitate a deepening comprehension of Latin. Yet my difficulties with the current 8th grade text were:

1. the order of syntax presentation
2. the choice of vocabulary
3. the organization of the exercises
4. the fill-in-the-blank approach to morphology.

Not that I had crystalized and refined my thinking to that point yet. I hadn't. I was busy focusing my energy on the composition of building block exercises - the original material of the epiphany.

For all their simplicity, indeed precisely because of their simplicity, building blocks require a lot of thought. And although I had a basic understanding of how building blocks built, that was all I had. I felt like a toddler learning how to walk. I had the legs, knew that they would help me get around, but had no idea how to use more than the knees.

The vision was there, the method was lacking. In a previous post, I said that I would "start with the verb". When I think back to that time, when I revisit what (so I thought then) were just so many exercises and notes, I realize that I didn't actually do that. Not at first. That crucial refinement would come later.

The building blocks were a hit. The 8th graders took to this approach not unlike those proverbial fish.

It struck me as odd: this method was my invention. A very humbling feeling to know that you had hit upon an approach that opened up the language to anybody and everybody who had the desire to learn it. Still, I didn't do much more than write exercise after exercise, with thought pieces attached on how to understand additional pieces of syntax and morphology.

One day, late into the second trimester of my first year back at this school, my 8th grade students began to ask me when they could see my book.
"What book?"
"The one you're writing, Doc."
"I'm writing a book?"
"Uh, yahhh, you are." This last said with that somewhat mocking, quasi-Valley-girl tonality only a teen-ager - particularly an 8th grader - can fully empower.

Nonplussed, I went to my computer and opened the file.
And noticed that it was 59 pages long.
My students were right.
I was writing a book.

So much for my worry about how to make what I learned/was learning in my epiphany's wake accessible to my students. Kind of the 8s to point out that I already had.

That summer, I wrote the book.

And dedicated it to that 8th grade class.