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.