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.
Michael, you know full well that you can find 5 million books of (neo) Latin readings if you just do a quick internet search. Or ask Sandy, Dr. Craig, or your mentor teacher. They may not be authentic Latin, but they are scaled to your students' reading level. Seriously, don't resort to inscriptions. That's just cruel.
ReplyDeleteI see the word gap article as indicative of the US's need for a social and structural overhaul (not that we'll ever get it...) There are too few supports for those in poverty and too much catering to those with money and/or power, and that creates terrible gaps in the social strata. We, as a society, need to support education, advancement, and careers for all our citizens, not just the few and the wealthy.
Michael,
ReplyDeleteI chuckled at your honest thoughts about reading academic research paper. For most people, academic research paper is probably something more fun for the researchers to do and write about than for reluctant students to read about as assigned homework! Also, yea, a lot of academic research papers really don't offer any solutions or any complete pictures.
Your plan to work with ELLs sounds pretty ambitious to me. On top of planning and grading, it would be pretty admirable to learn in depth about another language and culture just to teach Latin more effectively to the ELLs. I know that's what all education books/articles say (that you should do all this for ELLs), but it really is a lot of work (even if they claim it's not a lot of work). When you do encounter an ELL, he/she would be lucky to have an instructor like you (although my guess is that ELLs won't start taking a foreign language class unless they become fluent or near fluent in English)!