-
Office/Student Hours
Office Hours are dedicated times you are available to students to talk about relevant academic questions about your course or the discipline/profession. You are not a qualified psychiatrist and should not pretend to be one. Students—especially incoming Freshman—do not know what Office Hours are. We have started to call them “Student Hours” to welcome students to them, but even…
-
Syllabus Design
Page in progress… The attached document, recommended by Yale’s Center for Language Study, provides a useful rubric for creating an effective syllabus. Diversity Statements: https://poorvucenter.yale.edu/DiversityStatements Academic Integrity Statements: https://poorvucenter.yale.edu/strategic-resources-digital-publications/academic-integrity-statements Include Graphic Syllabus
-
Difficult Topics
There’s really no way to avoid difficult topics from rape to incest to infanticide to genocide to suicide in the Classics classroom. These are central to the material we read and study. In my opinion, it is unethical to pretend they aren’t there. So the question is: how do we address them responsibly? By “responsibly”…
-
Fixing the Lexicon
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 (1) English definitions are so out-of-date or obscure that students need to look up the English in order to understand the definition.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…
-
Advertising
For a field like Classics, where enrollments sometimes determine whether we have jobs or not, and those numbers are perpetually on the fence, advertising is critical. We spend most of our effort—percentage-wise, too much, I think—preaching to the choir-adjacent, namely to students in History, English, etc. We should absolutely keep doing this, but our efforts…
-
Comprehensible Input
My Anecdotal Observations about Comprehensible InputBy James F. Patterson I’ve read and heard a fair amount about Comprehensible Input (hereafter CI), at least for a college teacher, but I can’t say with confidence I know what CI really is, and I doubt much (if anything) I do in the classroom counts as CI. And I’m…
-
Communicative Approach
The communicative method emphasizes four key elements of language-learning– reading, listening, speaking, and writing– and teaches these by encouraging students to focus on the successful transfer of meaning as opposed to the accurate reproduction of forms. The communicative method may be used to teach students either to learn to read or to communicate in Latin…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Classics Teaching 