Teaching Philosophy

Reggie hates the Melonheads from Pompeii. That’s how he refers to the Cambridge beginning Latin textbooks, which have a cartoon family with heads shaped like footballs – Maria habet parvos annos or something like that. And he hates Wheelock, where you can say you “did the subjunctive” over the weekend. And he really hates, according to one of his letters, the “AP [Latin] nightmare which has killed Latin as a mature and serious study of a whole world.”

He hates most of all the mystification of the language caused by grammatical terminology. “Pluperfect infinitive periphrastic conjugation WHAT?!?” he shouts. “Pooh pah buh buh buh buuuuuuugggghhhh…” he leans heavily to one side for emphasis. “You think Cicero used that when talking to his KIDS?? HUH?” Reggie gestures and says sweetly, “No, daddy, I think you need to use the pluperfect subjunctive here –” and growls “oh YES?? I tell you he did not!”

He believes instead in the teaching and acquisition of Latin from REAL. LATIN. SENTENCES. Do his beginners during the year have a textbook? No they do not – that’s why you’re there, the teacher, you’re supposed to know this stuff you understAAAAAND? They have sheets, just like us – the giant packets of xeroxed Latin passages from the past 2200 years. He dreams of the day where someone will make a textbook from real Latin sentences, with a simple cartoon drawing and a caption which reads: Tryphon, Syriae rex, victus, per totum iter fugiens pecuniam sparsit: eique sectandae Antiochi equites immoratos effugit. [Tryphon, King of Syria, beaten, sprinkled money through the whole way as he was fleeing: he escaped the horsemen of Antioch who were wasting time collecting it.] – Sextus Julius Frontinus (40-103 post), in his Strategematicon, Chapter XIII number II. Or Marcus Aurelius in a letter to his teacher Fronto – “Ego te numquam satis amabo. Dormiam.” [I will never love you enough. I’m going to sleep.] (Book 5, Letter 2). “This was the emperor of the WOOOOORLD!” Reggie sings, “and he’s writing to stupid Fronto about fevers and inguina – groin problems!”

Someone asks him from the back what he teaches beginners on the first day – sentence structure. He says he shows the students that the words of the sentence don’t go in order, and that we have to figure out their 1) meaning and 2) function by the endings. He spends the better part of class showing them how Maria habet amicum and Mariam habet amicus are two completely different sentences, and showing them how the words go in REAL. LATIN. SENTENCES. And then, he says, with about 8 or 9 minutes to go, he says OK now, I’ll show you how to do verb endings. [And I don’t do them in order, dearies, noooo…] We is -mus. They is -nt. You singular is -s. I is -o, -m, or -i. He, she, it is -t. You plural is -tis. And then I tell them to pick a verb from the page of the sheets – ok they pick perdidissemus. And I tell them – I tell them my friends – that it means “we would have looooost.” And I say, so what would “they would have lost” be? And you know what they say? “Perdidissent.” And I would have lost? Perdidissem. And you know what? They leave class and say, What's all the fuss? Latin's not so hard...

[And you might say well, but they don’t understand the subjunctive. Beh bah buuuuggghh! They know what it MEANS! They have a lifetime for the rest, dearies, a lifetime.]