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.