The Fall and Rise Of Student Engagement

I told my A.P. Latin students today that they were a reason for getting up in the morning.  Their emotion-laden response of, "Awwww!  Mr. Perkins!" was sweet, but this post is for adults, so let us move past sentiment and on to the reason for my perfectly honest comment.

We were reading Vergil's Aeneid and had come to the part in Book I in which Neptune calmed the sea after a storm unleashed by Aeolus, god of the winds, had churned it into a maelstrom.  In line 154 the great Latin poet wrote, "sic cunctus pelagi cecidit fragor," which literally comes into English as, "thus all the crashing of the sea fell."  The key word in this tale I am about to tell is cecidit, a perfect tense form of cadere, meaning "to fall."  Katie, a junior and one of our Latin club officers, suggested "subsided" for this word, but immediately said that this translation indicated a change over time, whereas the Latin word described something quick.  I was stunned at her appreciation for such nuance and rewarded her with a piece of colored duct tape.

A short aside is needed here.  Several years a student said or asked something brilliant, and I wanted to acknowledge it with a small gift.  Having nothing of value in my room, I ripped off a piece of grey duct tape from a roll I just happened to have with me that day and offered it as the award.  It was something of a joke, but the students thought it was cool, and soon I began receiving rolls of the adhesive.  We have had lime green duct tape, silver duct tape, and glow-in-the-dark duct tape with ghosts and bats.  There has been tie-dyed, paint-splatter, and candy-striped duct tape, and now receiving a piece of the stuff to put on a notebook has become the most desired achievement.

But back to the story.  Katie had raised the issue of finding just the right word to translate something, and although we were a bit behind in our syllabus, it was a moment that could not be passed by.  I distributed various translations of the Aeneid and instructed the students to find the passage we were reading.  We then made a list on the board of the verbs that the translators had used to render cecidit into English. 

And then the lid simply blew off.  We talked about how "subsides" is present tense even though the Latin is perfect, but that such a translation is justifiable as a historic present.  We discussed how three different translations chose "fell silent," which retain the basic sense of the Latin verb, yet add the word "silent," and that this, too, is justifiable, for "to fall silent" is an English idiom.  We observed that "abated" makes a one-verb to one-verb equivalency and maintains the perfect tense, and we talked about how "subsided," "died down," and "grew quiet" all contain a sense of change over time, just as Katie had observed about her initial suggestion.

I pointed out that they were all reasonable translations, and then I asked them which they preferred.  Nicholas liked the single word "abated" and thought the sound and meaning perfectly captured the essence of cecidit.  Others thought some of the other translations worked better, although I do not think anyone preferred "subsides."

We laughed that our discussion of one verb had taken nearly half the class period, but by the time the bell rang, we were close to being back on track with our syllabus.  Yet that was of little importance.  Classical G.P. Goold once wrote, "An elementary teacher, to reach in due season the end of his curriculum, must every hour turn a Nelson eye to serious problems and refrain from pursuing truth beyond the charted boundaries of the textbook."  I took issue with that statement in an article I wrote, and based on today's engagement by teenagers with one of the seminal texts of world literature, I would refute it yet again.  These students could appreciate the nuances and subtleties of translation and were eager to explore them.  In their plumbing of the depths of a verb meaning "to fall," they rose to heights of academic engagement that, well, give this teacher one more reason for getting up in the morning.