Building More Effective Student Skills

Both of the week's readings had enormously helpful titles, and got me tuned in on exactly what I should be looking for in them.

The Sinatra article, however, did not seem terribly useful in my particular field. There was (is) a trove of good information in it, such as making sure to discuss text organizational patterns before, during or after reading something and the benefits which that will confer on students, but in the Latin classroom, we just don’t do that much “deep” reading. Of the six major patterns identified by the author, I could see the Compare/Contrast (aka the not-Venn Diagram) be used the most for grammatical differences between English and Latin or comparing contemporary culture/politics to those back in the day, so to speak. The Persuasion Map wouldn’t get much use until Latin 3 at the earliest, but most likely Latin IV, when the class has reached the grammatical mountain top and is fully capable of handling authentic Latin.

This was the first image I got after Google image searching "Authentic Latin"
Vae.

In the BBR reading, we found a list of strategies to build Study Skills. Once again, I found them all quite interesting, but (again) of rather limited use in my field. The PLAE method, however, is the exception. It is primarily a self-management strategy and as such, is very general and applicable in not only the academic realm, but real life as well (illustrated quite ably by the example of asking oneself if they have everything which they need before leaving home for the day). The RAFT could be quite useful in a “simulation,” so to speak, where students assume the roles of Romans and are assigned a dilemma/historic event on which to remark upon (which was a staple of Roman higher education, actually) and be a break from the centuries-old direct grammatical instruction.