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.