a resource for teachers of classical languages, history, and literature
It is not at all uncommon to see the following anxiety expressed by a new instructor: My job is to have the answer to every single question that could possibly come up in class today; if I don’t, I’m not doing my job properly, I will immediately forfeit all authority in the classroom, and it… Continue reading Not Having Every Answer
We can't prevent students from discovering tools like Perseus and William Whitaker's Words, but we should definitely not help them find them. Once they discover a website that will fully parse morphology and provide the (not always correct) meaning of the word, our job is made much more difficult. Instead of pretending like online resources… Continue reading Online Tools
Learning vocabulary isn't simply a matter of learning what roots mean. However, many or most of your students will assume it is. You need to be sure they know that vocabulary is both lexical and morphological. Take amō, amāre, amāvī, amātus. This string of words does not mean "I love." Only amō means that, and… Continue reading Learning & Testing Vocabulary
More low stakes assignments (e.g. lots of quizzes, mini tests, etc.) are preferred to fewer high stakes assignments (e.g. one midterm and a final). No assignment should be worth more than 20% of one's final grade. Low stakes assignments are preferred for a variety of reasons: • Less stress on the student (a single quiz… Continue reading Mini Quizzes
A Document Camera (or DocuCam) is quite simply a camera that displays whatever it sees on the projector screen. As far as I'm concerned, it is the single most valuable tool in the language classroom. By projecting the text under examination using a DocuCam, you and your students can always be on the same page—or… Continue reading DocuCams
There is nothing ingenious in what I write here. My objective was to replicate my normal classroom, not to use tech for the sake of using tech, and it all worked out fine, at least for the language classroom. To summarize Communications for pedagogy, there are three things to attend to at any given moment:… Continue reading The Zoom Classroom
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As I see it, there are three big problems with the correspondences we make between the target language (Ancient Greek or Latin) and English. (1) English definitions are so out-of-date or obscure that students need to look up the English in order to understand the definition. Perhaps there was a time when immo vero could… Continue reading Fixing the Lexicon
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Teaching Pronunciation It is important that we teach our students the "correct" classical pronunciation of Greek and Latin. I say "correct" because the way we learn to pronounce Greek and Latin isn't in fact correct (e.g. we don't nasalize Latin con- or -am/-um/-em; native English speakers normally can't distinguish between aspirated and un-aspirated voiceless dental… Continue reading Pronunciation
Classics Teaching 