By Joseph Meyer, Glastonbury High School, CT

Esteemed Teaching Assistant! Picture it with me, if you will. It is the night before the first day of classes. You have picked out your most professorial outfit, maybe even something with elbow patches, or – for the more adventurous – billowy pirate sleeves. More importantly, you have meticulously planned your first lesson with care and precision. The stage has been set for academic excellence, and surely the highly capable and motivated freshmen who fill your class roster are ready to hit the proverbial ground running. Surely, surely, their four years of US high school Latin have given them all the necessary skills required to scale every conceivable pedagogical hurdle you throw at them? They’re ready… right? Right??

Well – maybe, maybe not. In an ideal world, four years of Latin language study at a competitive US high school like Glastonbury High School (CT), where I have worked for the past twenty years, should be more than enough for a motivated student to enter an intermediate-level college Latin course and have success straightaway. But that’s not always the case. 

My colleague at GHS often recounts the tale of one the most talented readers of Latin he’s ever had in his nearly 30-year career. Her aptitude for languages was, by all accounts, dazzling. She got top grades on every marking period of every high school Latin class she ever took. She capped off her career by getting a “5” (the highest possible score) on the AP Latin Exam, widely regarded as one of the most challenging AP exams that the College Board offers. And when she enrolled at a well-regarded university and was placed into an intermediate-level Latin course for her first semester… she failed the class.  

She didn’t fail because she wasn’t capable, but rather because the curricular priorities at our school and at her university were wildly different. She reported that the skills most valued in her college Latin course were, as examples, parsing verbs, speedily reciting paradigms, explaining sequence of tenses, or casually dropping phrases like “dative of agent with the passive periphrastic” in conversation. This was a far cry from what Latin looked like for her back in Connecticut. 

At our school, as I sense is the case at an increasing majority of secondary schools around the country, “learning Latin” means something very different. In addition to using the study of Latin and Roman culture to foster our students’ inter-cultural competence, the Latin language skill we prioritize above all is interpretive reading as outlined by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL)’s World Readiness Standards for Language Learning and concomitant interpretive reading performance descriptors. In fact, we measure and chart our students’ growth in reading proficiency over time by having them take the ALIRA, a Latin reading proficiency exam, every year. In our program, we ultimately measure success by the percentage of students who score an Intermediate 3 or higher on this exam, thus qualifying for the prestigious Seal of Biliteracy. There are no language control questions (e.g. what case is “puellae” in line 4?) on the Alira, or on our own in-house exams for that matter, and though knowledge of syntax and morphology is certainly important, we regard it as existing in service of our students’ development of reading comprehension skills.

In other, less-hyper-link-dependent words, if one of my most successful students (of the sort that go on to attend prestigious universities) ended up in your intermediate Latin course, they would most likely be able to sight-read and understand the main ideas of a passage of the likes of Caesar or Livy, as examples. Given vocabulary support and some pre-teaching of a passage’s cultural context, they would also be able to describe specific details and translate the passage with a fair amount of accuracy. They would be comfortable being asked to interpret the text, draw conclusions about the cultural perspectives and truth values contained within, analyze the author’s craft, identify key themes, etc. What they would not be able to do, for example, is explain the mood and tense of verbs found in the protasis of contrary-to-fact-past conditionals off the top of their heads. Or at all. 

So if those types of questions are at the heart of your first-class lesson plan, not to mention your long-term curricular goals, just be prepared to give your students support. They have enough of a background that they will get there eventually, but it might take some time. On the other hand, if your class is instead focused on reading for information, translating literally, and discussing the text and its historical/cultural context, you should be in good shape for your classes. And added bonus – your students will likely feel comfortable enough in your class to be dazzled by your billowy pirate sleeves! Bonam Fortunam!