Textbooks and Non-fiction

I'll up and admit that I found chapter 4 of Daniels and Zemelman to be a slog. The initial part of it was useful, but really wasn't anything I hadn't seen before (then again, I looked at the articles before reading the chapters, so that quite likely colored my opinion of the chapter in question), and the list of suggested classroom library materials, while quite lengthy and an excellent jumping-off point for most areas, did not really have much to offer the foreign language teacher (with the possible exception of Guns, Germs and Steel).

Chapter 3 of Daniels and Zemelman was, in my opinion, more engaging, although I quickly grew tired of the "Textbooks are bad, and here's why" tone of the chapter. They did offer suggestions for how to fix the problem, but I feel that they could have achieved their purpose with a tenth of the words used had they employed some Tacitean brevity.

The articles, unlike the text chapters, did give me two "Ah-ha!" moments. Allen provided some very good evidence that read-aloud time is not something for younger students, but can be successfully used in secondary classrooms. And Harvey had an an excellent quote (Which in essence is, "The primary purpose of education is to enhance understanding) and detailed the creation of "Wonder Books," which are a question log, which will hopefully spur students to seek answers to those questions and/or give the instructor items to work into lessons that will be of greater interest to students.

Tangentially, the readings featured a book called "The Year 1000" and didn't mention Emperor Basil II the Bulgar-Slayer, who really spiced up that time period.

Text Structure and Access

I don't mean to start off on a sour note, but I summed up the majority of the first chapter of BBR as, "standard introductory tripe." The only noteworthy thing in the entire passage was the list on page 27, which had already been covered in greater depth by our other readings.

Moving over to the D&Z selections, we were first shown that the authors' definition of "strategy" could mean one of four different things, which is not something that English usually permits its vocabulary words to do. Once I got past that initial moment of disequilibrium (and wondered why they didn't tidy that up with different terms for each definition), the authors gave us a veritable avalanche of reading strategies for student use before, during and after reading assignments. I was particularly interested in the Anticipation Guide, RAFT and Dramatic Role-playing. How I'll manage to work those into a foreign language classroom on most days, I know not. But I'm aware of them now, and can be pondering it.


The second D&Z chapter on making text readings more accessible flowed quite nicely after the first one (how to help students read them). The main take-away I had was that educators are often under great pressure to cover "everything," but we have nowhere near enough time for that. The primary work-around to the issue is the identification of "fenceposts" which are the biggest, most important ideas and concepts and hit those hard and thoroughly. I can see this being of more use in a history or literature class than a foreign language, or at least in my Latin class. If I had to use a visual metaphor, I would say Latin is more akin to a tower; nearly everything builds off of the first few concepts learned at the beginning of study.

Web Resource: Numen

Numen is a very, very handy electronic Latin word-study tool and dictionary. And as an added plus, it is completely work-safe. I would say any student who is capable of working an internet browser with a degree of competence is capable of using it. This, unsurprisingly, will be quite helpful to Latin students, although I would prefer to 'hide' it until students reach Latin III (as the dictionary will not only give you the word's definition, the principle parts, it also gives textual citations for where the word is found and has an option to show every single form...which is something Latin I's and II's do not need to see so soon). You can enter up to 50,000 words into the word study tool at a time, which will then give you the definitions and parts. It also features a handy little English -> Latin tool, which only allows one word at a time, but does give a multiplicity of definitions for your word you want to see in Latin. For those who miss how things used to be, there is an 'old-style,' browse-by-letter dictionary function as well.

It has an option to create an account (which is free), and upon registering, you can create decks of electronic flash cards with words you've looked up to drill yourself with. This, unsurprisingly, is very handy.

The site is not very commercial at all, with no advertisements that I noticed. On the whole, the site is quite easy to navigate, but it has been rather unresponsive at times recently (possibly linked to server issues, or just my ISP being distinctly unhelpful).

I would say there is no adult supervision needed, beyond monitoring students to keep them from typing dirty words into the English -> Latin tool and learning some words that they don't need to know.

Post Secunuds: Types of readings, text sets, and proses

Rather unsurprisingly for a book about teaching teaching reading skills, chapters 3 & 4 of the Torvani text were about cultivating reading understanding (holy verbals, Batman!) in students. Torvani's third chapter touched a bit on Gardener's multiple "intelligences" (quotations because I'm obdurate when it comes to redefining words) with the writer's observation of how vocational instructors may not be able to easily read a passage of, say, Shakespeare, and comprehend it as easily as an English teacher can, but they can quite easily take a technical text and build a model/determine if their components are usable whereas someone like me would be hopelessly outmatched. Torvani managed to get the vocational teacher to (after a bit of Socratic prodding) describe how he went about reading and thinking about what he read. This mental modeling is an invaluable skill to have, as we (hopefully, after we get licensed and all that) will be experts in our fields -to some degree- and will have long since internalized how we go about solving problems in our fields. If we model what we did when we were in our students' shoes years and years ago, we will be able to more effectively train them how to tackle problems (academic) in our classrooms. This will also humanize us, as to most students, which will hopefully build up a friendly rapport.

Or a respectful one at least, as I cannot help but think of Tiberus' quote, "Oderint, dum probent," or "Let them hate me, so long as they respect me."

The fourth chapter of the text followed along with the "theme" of the previous one, but focused on finding alternatives to textbooks. I can get behind this in some content areas, but the creation of "text sets" does not seem to lend itself very well to Latin. Or at least the grammatical parts of it. I can find stuff about culture, mythology, history, etc, but short of pulling introductory-level materials from a variety of other Latin textbooks, it seems that my work will be cut out for me with finding alternatives to the "hardest" part; the linguistic stuff.

Looping back to the initial part of Torvani's fourth chapter, Bakken and Whedon's short piece on the problems students have with textbooks was one of these-type moments for me. Students learn how to read a certain type of text, get confident and then are punted at textbooks (which have an entirely different style, more often than not) with no training and we wonder why they get burnt out on reading. This is something for us language teachers to keep in mind, as I doubt any textbook will have a narrative-style lesson or chapter explaining what an indirect object is and how it is used. Having thought about it for a little bit, however, this may be dealt with as simply as making sure to identify three 'steps' in learning a new bit of grammar: Identification, formation, and then translation; corresponding to the introduction, action and conclusion of a story.

The jury's still out on how to make that exciting, though.

First Post: Ch7 and associated readings

The first chapter in our text was about building a "Community of Learners," a term which I used to roll my eyes at as it initially struck me as something of a buzz-phrase (and then I discovered it was essentially what I want to do in a classroom, and quickly revised my opinion).

I enjoyed the apology about starting the chapter about starting with research, as to be perfectly honest, I feel that we could crack the most hardened of terrorists and other similar malefactors by sitting them down and forcing them to read academic research papers. Having said all that, the biggest thing which I took away from the chapter is that the social cognitive theory works. Seeing as my CSEL could have been summed up as, "SCT is awesome and everyone should use it," I was quite contented.

Finding ways to link readings/what is learned in the class and connecting to my students were two more items I took away. I try and do the later (asking about things going on out of class, small talking when appropriate, and such) but the former is a bit problematic in early Latin classes, as most extant authors (if not all) require a student to go through Latin III at the least to understand, and reading inscriptions are something which even I have trouble with, given how condensed the accursed things can be. The chapter suggested working in mistakes intentionally, as well, to keep students engaged and thinking about the material in addition to showing that I'm human, just like them (which is something I've done unintentionally a few times), and reading aloud in class, which is how I prefer to do translations (I say it in Latin, student repeats, then translates).

As for the two other articles, I made note to remember to co-opt ELL's to translate questions and some answers into their native languages to help them work on their English-native tongue skills and give me excuse to do some comparative linguistics for the class, and to find ELL's a "buddy" to work with. The word gap piece, however, was something I had to slog through initially, due to my aforementioned dislike for reading academic research. It did become interesting, but it didn't really answer any questions, nor float any hypothetical solutions.

NB: 23,000,000 bytes of information is equal to almost exactly 23 megabytes.