Any Road Out of Town

There's an old saying that if you don't know where you're going, any road out of town will do.  So it is when it comes to pedagogy.  For example, one Latin textbook series begins introducing war vocabulary in the first year to prepare students to read Caesar's De Bello Gallico in the second.  My favorite elementary Greek text introduces the vocabulary of Xenophon so students will be able to read his Anabasis.  

A friend shared with me a recent article, "Classical Schools Aren't Really Classical" by Jonathan Roberts that contrasts grammar-based methods of teaching Latin with comprehensible input.  It begins with a passage from Surprised By Joy by C.S. Lewis in which Lewis describes the thrill of being able to read extended passages of Homer's Iliad in Greek.  Roberts goes on to suggest that the human brain will come to understand a language without being taught explicitly to analyze its architecture as is common in the grammar-translation methods.

From there Roberts discusses the Classical education movement, inspired largely by an essay from Dorothy Sayers and put into practice by a growing number of Christian schools and homeschool communities.  He cites examples of why the grammar-translation method is hailed in such schools and then refutes the arguments for such pedagogy.

The title of his article is partly correct and partly incorrect.  It is true that ancient Roman children did not learn their own language, at least initially, through grammatical analysis.  St. Augustine famously talks about this in Book I of his Confessions.

cur ergo graecam etiam grammaticam oderam talia cantantem? nam et Homerus peritus texere tales fabellas et dulcissime vanus est, mihi tamen amarus erat puero. credo etiam graecis pueris Vergilius ita sit, cum eum sic discere coguntur ut ego illum. videlicet difficultas, difficultas omnino ediscendae linguae peregrinae, quasi felle aspergebat omnes suavitates graecas fabulosarum narrationum. nulla enim verba illa noveram, et saevis terroribus ac poenis ut nossem instabatur mihi vehementer. nam et latina aliquando infans utique nulla noveram, et tamen advertendo didici sine ullo metu atque cruciatu, inter etiam blandimenta nutricum et ioca adridentium et laetitias adludentium. didici vero illa sine poenali onere urgentium....

Why, therefore, did I hate Greek grammar singing also such things?  For Homer is skilled at weaving such tales and is sweetly entertaining, but to me as a boy he was bitter.  I believe Vergil is the same for Greek boys when they are forced to learn him in this way as I was Homer.  Indeed there is a difficulty, entirely the difficulty of learning a foreign language as if someone spread bitterness over all the Greek sweetness of those fabulous tales.  For when I was an infant, I knew no Latin, but nevertheless I learned it by paying attention and without any fear or punishment, among the coaxing of my nurses and the jokes of those who laughed with me and the happiness of those who played with me.  Truly, I learned it without the burdensome penalty of people forcing me....

Yet Augustine also makes it clear that a grammar-based approach was precisely what he had experienced when it came to learning Greek.  One could then argue both ways, that it is and that it is not Classical to teach with this pedagogy.

The question, of course, is not merely what did the ancients do, but what is best for our children.  Roberts cites arguments for the grammar-based approach that are easily refuted, as he indeed does, but there is more to consider here, and that is the question at the beginning of this post.  Where are you going?  Once you know that, you can pick the best road to travel.

If your goal is to read Homer and Vergil with the speed and facility with which you read a contemporary author, then comprehensible input will likely get you there more quickly.  If, however, your goal is something else, one Roberts does not consider, then the grammar-translation approach will serve you better.  This goal is developing an appreciation for beauty, in this case linguistic beauty, that will nourish the spirt and inspire further reading and study, whether in translation or in the original languages.  For more on this, see my article "Difficile est transferre hanc sententiam Latinam in Anglicam: The Depth and Charm of Latin Translation," The Classical Outlook, Volume 84, Number 1, Fall 2006.

Consider now the tale of two students.  One completes a four year high school program in Latin using the grammar-translation method, and the other does the same but with comprehensible input.  They both then pursue an undergraduate degree in Classics.  At the end of eight years of study, they will be indistinguishable.  They will both be able to read fluently and to appreciate the nuances of composition that make the works of Homer and Vergil true works of art.

Yet how many will pursue those additional four years of an undergraduate degree in Classics?  Most high school Latin students will not, and at the end of their high school careers, our two hypothetical students could not look more different.  The one, presumably, would have a deep appreciation for, in Poe's words, "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" as expressed in Classical literature.  The other would have the skill and pleasure of reading that literature with ease and rapidity.

"Knowing how way leads on to way," to quote Frost, I doubt that many of those who can read Classical languages fluently at eighteen will continue to do so.  Notice that I said I doubt many will do so.  Some may, but most, I imagine, will not.  On the other hand, I have had a great number of my former students continue their Classical interest and studies, whether through an undergraduate minor, additional Classics courses, or merely personal reading, and they have all experienced the grammar-based instruction of my classroom.  Notice again that I did not say all of my students have done this.  At the end of the day, however, I still champion and use the grammar-translation approach, not for the rigor of analysis it supposedly instills in students comparable to the study of geometry or physics, and certainly not for linguistic gains in word study and derivatives.  I use it it for the following reasons.

First, it quickly gets students into the language.  Second, it allows them to explore more deeply the beauties and intricacies of truly great authors.  Third, our English discussions allow us to go deeper and more quickly into the heart of the works themselves.  Fourth and finally, thirty years of teaching have shown that students who are exposed to this particular pedagogy have multiple roads to take toward whichever destination they choose, whether it be fluency, enjoyment, further study, or anything else to which they have been inspired.  Since giving my students multiple options is where I want to go, the grammar-translation road is the one I choose.

Technicolor Latin

When the anthropologist father of one of my former students shared an article with me titled "Why Students Of Color Don't Take Latin," I was immediately intrigued.  

The author of the article is John Bracey, "one of few people on the planet who can call themselves both black and a Latin teacher," and he makes two points with which I completely agree.  He states, "We must resist the temptation to use standardized test scores, such as the Latin AP exam, as a mark of program quality."  No one of reasonable intellect thinks that test scores are the measure of anything other than the number of questions students answered correctly, and I have written about this here and here and here.

Mr. Bracey also advocates for hiring more Latin teachers of color.  "[W]e need to train and hire more teachers of color. Department chairs and their Latin teachers can start by reaching out to local colleges and universities inquiring about Classics majors of color who might be interested in becoming Latin teachers. Make it known that your school is actively looking to increase diversity and views this as a real priority. Also, if you are fortunate enough to have a qualified applicant of color for a Latin position at your school, hire them! If you are not the one doing the hiring, make sure that your admins know that you have a strong interest in adding a teacher of color to your team. Ultimately, we won’t make significant progress in this area unless we start attracting and retaining students of color in secondary and post-secondary programs."

He is right in this, but it is increasingly difficult to attract anyone of any color into teaching, and with poverty afflicting American Indian/Alaska Native and Black/African American citizens the most harshly, it is reasonable for those who do escape its clutches to want more than a public teacher's salary.  Still, I join him in his call for more Latin teachers of color, for he is right when he answers his students' questions about the reason for taking Latin by saying, "I tell them that it is a beautiful language that unlocks a world of wonder. From the ancient Romans to the modern day, Latin has been an international language of art, music, science, math, law, government, medicine and everything in between. Whatever the student’s passion is, Latin will definitely help."  If seeing teachers that look like them and share their experiences helps even one student claim the intellectual and cultural wealth that is no longer strictly Greco-Roman but has passed into the human treasury, riches that are that student's birthright as a human being, then every effort should be made to make that happen.

Where I would disagree with Mr. Bracey is regarding what that effort should include.  He asks, "[W]hy don’t more students of color sign up for Latin in middle or high school?"  This is, of course, an important question to ask, although completely different from what is implied in the article's title, which suggests that students of color do not take Latin at all.  This is patently false as the more than thirty percent of the Latin students at my school of nearly 4,000, where Latin is the third largest in enrollment of seven languages, will attest.  It can only be assumed that Eidolon chose a provocative, if misleading, title for Mr. Bracey's article to garner attention.

Still, the question Mr. Bracey asks is important, but I disagree with his claim that pedagogy is a contributing factor.  He writes, "Unfortunately, far too many Latin programs have embraced exclusivity rather than seeking to counteract it. Often this takes the form of making pedagogical choices that advantage a select few students and disadvantage the rest.  [C]ertain practices have and will continue to create exclusive programs, regardless of intent."

The pedagogical approach he finds problematic is the grammar-translation method that "generally consists of learning grammar rules, learning grammar terminology, memorizing paradigms, and translating Latin into English primarily to demonstrate grammatical accuracy."  The first part of this definition is fair enough, but that its goal is "primarily to demonstrate grammatical accuracy" through translation is not.  While some instructors may make this the summum bonum of grammar-translation classroom, it need not be the case.  As I recently wrote, and published several years ago, there are many artistic and creative explorations that go far beyond mere grammatical accuracy and that should form the basis of a rich language classroom.

With this slanted understanding of what the grammar-translation classroom can be, Mr. Bracey continues.  "The challenge that the grammar-translation approach poses to inclusivity is that it takes language, something universally accessible to all, and creates a series of unnecessary and onerous roadblocks that render it accessible to only the few. For example, using a comprehension-based approach, with no direct grammar instruction, all of my 7th grade students were able to read novice-level chapter books in Latin by the end of the year. With a grammar-based approach, those same results would be considered totally invalid unless accompanied by the ability to decline mixed-declension adjective-noun pairings, or to identify the difference between ablative of means and an ablative of manner."

It is unclear why the grammar-translation approach is "accessible to only the few," and the article never explains this.  Is the approach one that only the brains of people with certain physical traits can comprehend?  This would seem to be the logic behind such a statement, but that is surely not what Mr. Bracey intended.  Still, pressing on from this curious statement, he suggests that the teacher who uses the grammar-translation approach would invalidate the achievement of students in one area if they were not successful in another.  This, too, is perplexing.  The G-T teacher may well expect students to identify a particular ablative use, but their failure to do so would not prompt that teacher to discount their other achievements.  Surely a teacher would not claim students knew nothing about the labors of Hercules if they simply mislabeled the lion as being from Lerna and the hydra from Nemea, yet beautifully retold the myth in a modern setting.

At this point Mr. Bracey's argument seems a bit slanted and confusing, but it takes an egregious turn when he proclaims, "Grammar-translation and its demands have served as something akin to voter I.D. laws in the United States.  Insisting that Latin students have a solid understanding of Latin grammar also seems harmless, but it can result in limiting access to students of color in the name of providing skills that are not necessary."

Again, it is unclear why students of color should be limited by a solid understanding of grammar.  Mr. Bracey himself possesses such an understanding.  Is he an exception?  Yet one of the strongest refutations of such a claim is the 1st century A.D. Roman rhetorician Quintilian, who wrote, "Nomina declinare et verba in primis pueri sciant:  neque enim aliter pervenire ad intellectum sequentium possunt."  "Let boys especially know how to decline nouns and verbs, for otherwise they cannot come to understand what follows."  (Institutio Oratoria I.4.22)

The grammar-translation method has stood the test of time because of its effectiveness.  Students typically begin their Latin studies rather late in life, in their early to middle teen years  While some teachers have undoubtedly made of it a thing of pedagogical abuse, this can be said of any bad teacher's mishandling of anything, and the fault rests squarely with those who have misused it.  The grammar-translation method is an excellent approach for helping them achieve precisely what Mr. Bracey wants them to achieve, engagement with authentic, Roman-authored Latin.  Their engagement with authentic literature after having learned Latin through the G-T method is rich and full, for when they come to Cicero or Horace, Ovid or Vergil, they possess the linguistic framework with which to plumb the depths and explore the marvelous intricacies of meaning and style brought forth by authors who have rightly earned their place in the world's pantheon of writers.

Is there more that Latin teachers and Classics departments can do to help students of color hear what may be their calling into the tradition of passing along the world's cultural treasures to the next generation?  There most certainly is.  We begin by inspiring all of our students as we immerse ourselves and them in the richness of the Classical languages.  We allow students to take over our classes and teach their peers.  We encourage those in whom we see the spark of the magister or magistra to pursue one of the most noble of all human callings, in spite of educational systems designed to dehumanize the enterprise of learning.  And we do all this because we believe, in the words of the Latin playwright from North Africa, "homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto."  "I am a human being:  I think nothing that belongs to humanity to be alien to me."  (Heauton Timorumenos, 77)

Fifty Minutes

It was a class like any other and because of that it was a class like no other.  My 3rd period is Latin II, and we were finishing our study of Julius Caesar.  The warm-up activity was to translate an English sentence into Latin.  Following that, we read and discussed a passage of Latin poetry related to Caesar.  Ho hum.  Not terribly exciting stuff.

Ah, but you were not there.  The warm-up sentence was the most complex piece the class had ever seen.  It was a compound sentence with two subordinate clauses, one of which contained a passive periphrastic.  Yet the students have been completing prose composition exercises since the beginning of the semester and they were ready.

Using different colors, we analyzed the parts of the sentence first.  We talked about the need to re-word the clause "troops must form a battle line" to read "a battle line must be formed by troops" so we could more easily construct the Latin passive periphrastic.  The students then turned to their notebooks and began the task of composing the Latin.

I walked around the room, and the questions were simply astonishing.  "Why is 'was announced' passive, but 'was announcing' is active?"  "Why does the form of sum need to be an infinitive?"  "How do you get the stem to make the gerundive?"  Again, these may seem rather ho-hum questions, but the earnestness with which they were asked and their specificity spoke volumes.  These average, normal, typical teenagers were not throwing up their hands in despair.  They did not simply check out and put their heads on their desks.  They knew what they needed to know and were able to formulate the right questions to obtain that information.  I am not exaggerating when I say that every single student was actively searching notes, figuring things out, and asking questions.  Many came within two or three minor errors of perfection, and one young lady was just one letter off in one word.

From there we turned to our discussion of a passage from Book IX of Lucan's Pharsalia, an epic poem written in the first century A.D. about a battle between Caesar and Pompey in 48 B.C.  Because our unit is primarily on Caesar's writings and Lucan's poetry is quite challenging, we do not read it in Latin but from a bi-lingual version with Latin and English on facing pages.  The passage we read this day gave Cato's speech to Pompey's men as they were about to face the arduous march back home across the inhospitable region of North Africa.  We talked about Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis and how his name has stood for two thousand years as the symbol of honesty and uprightness of character.  We talked about Joseph Addison's 1713 play Cato:  A Tragedy and why George Washington had it performed for his men on the eve of Valley Forge.  Students asked questions like, "Why do we think of Caesar as a hero if a man like Cato was against him?"  This, of course, led to a discussion of the complex nature of any person and how it is possible to admire and even imitate some qualities while being opposed to others.  When we read the lines

Must any soldier be assured of danger there's relief,

So taken with life's sweetness, let him seek another chief*

we talked of how success is not always assured, a good grade is not guaranteed, and a job after college is not a given, but that a true leader will always shoot straight and not sugar coat things.  The line "for whether I command or serve, I would not have it known" prompted the observation that the real leader is a servant-leader, serving alongside the rest.

It was fifty minutes of intense, complex grammatical work and intense, complex philosophical/historical discussion.  Conversation with one young man even continued after class, and I think it is safe to say that this ordinary class of young people, some honor students, but many not, proved the truth of Cato's words, "True honor comes more joyful when at higher cost it's won."

*Translations are mine, copyright 2010.