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An approach to teaching

Socrates sat down next to him and said, "How wonderful it would be, dear Agathon, if the foolish were filled with wisdom simply by touching the wise. If only wisdom were like water, which always flows from a full cup into an empty one when we connect them with a piece of yarn."
Plato, Symposium 175d-e

My approach to teaching is the result of reflection on my own experience as a learner and teacher, and is inspired by my major scholarly interest, the philosophy of Socrates. Socrates is famous for asking questions and refusing to provide answers. In practice, of course, he used a wider range of approaches (particularly as depicted by my favorite Socratic author, Xenophon). There are times when we can and ought to pass on factual material to our students, much as water flows from one cup to another through a straw or string. But students can get the facts themselves, if they are willing to look, and have learned where to look. And whatever Socrates meant by wisdom, he did not mean factual information alone.

Wisdom--at least the Greek sophia--begins with skills, from the ability to read a language to the intellectual tools required to engage seriously with texts, images, and ideas. It culminates in something more profound, a moral and intellectual commitment to the examined life. But well before we reach such dizzying heights we note that the water pouring analogy no longer works: we cannot simply pass on these skills, this wisdom, with our students passively drinking it all in. Our students themselves will be ultimately responsible for this highest sort of learning, which they must actively seek themselves if they are to get it. But we can help them do this in at least two ways.

First, we can strive to inspire our students to make the effort it will take them to learn. We can show them why the subject matter is relevant to our lives and to theirs. We can inspire them by example, showing them that we ourselves remain students who still have live questions that we seek to answer. One of the best ways to do this is to show them how enjoyable learning can be and how, as is true of all the important things, it becomes more enjoyable the harder one works at it.

Second, we can make questions rather than answers our chief tool. We can challenge students with our questions, and encourage them to challenge us and themselves with their own questions. If our students emerge with the ability and inclination to ask good questions, they have mastered the most important lesson of the liberal arts.

Language teaching

The fundamental goal of teaching Latin is, of course, to enable students to read and appreciate Latin texts. This statement is rather obvious, but it bears repeating, for too often students and even teachers forget that they are teaching a skill rather than delivering a set of facts like verb forms and vocabulary, which are merely necessary means to the end of reading. And too often students mistake translating into English for reading Latin in the original. Many are convinced that the goal of the class is to come up with the illusory single correct English translation that one can produce on a test, rather than the ability to understand and appreciate Latin. Here as elsewhere our students can be too passive. Rather as Socrates trained his companions to philosophize for themselves, rather than handing over a philosophy to them, language teachers ought to impart a skill, not a set of lessons.

A new approach

To address these concerns, I made a fairly radical change in my approach to language teaching in the spring of 2004. I began to ask students to read their Latin texts from left to right, in the Latin word order. This sounds obvious enough, but in graduate school and subsequently I, like most Latin teachers I have known, had encouraged students to hunt for the Latin verb (which is usually found, to the distress of English speakers, at the end of the sentence) and to rework the Latin sentence accordingly. This change helps students to read Latin as the Romans did, rather than to treat it as a puzzle designed to baffle English speakers.

Reading in the Latin word order also allowed me to change how much I ask individual students to translate: rather than relying on one student to translate an entire sentence, I can now ask each student to discuss an individual word or phrase. This ensures that all students are called on multiple times each class, and avoids unduly slowing the class down when a student stumbles over a sentence, or speeding along too quickly when a superior student is able to rattle off a translation at once.

I think this approach works. But my students were not particularly happy with it last semester (spring 2004), and this was reflected in my teaching evaluations. After a semester taught by a (now departed) colleague who employed a more traditional method, a number of students found themselves at sea when they encountered a different method and the greater challenges of second semester Latin. I will need to refine this method, and perhaps to begin at a slower pace. But I plan to stick to my guns, and am hopeful that, with a new colleague who is amenable to this approach, our students will thrive.

Beyond just learning the Latin

Of course even if we succeed in having our students learn more Latin, if we cater only to the tiny proportion of students who will go on to read Latin in graduate school, we are failing the majority. I thus make time to show how language study allows students to ask new questions about their own language, and language in general. Many students choose Latin in large part to help with their English grammar, so I do make time to discuss the (rather different) grammars of the two languages. In addition to this broadly linguistic emphasis, I also make use of Latin as a vehicle for understanding Roman culture, and encourage students to do the same thing with our language and our culture. In elementary classes this usually takes the form of examining the range of a central piece of Latin vocabulary, and considering how it differs from English words with similar meanings (e.g., Why is there no Latin word for "rights"?) In intermediate and upper level classes I encourage students to interpret their texts, not only to translate them, as the analytical skills they thus gain will serve them well even if they are clever enough to avoid graduate school in Classics.

Courses in translation

My courses in translation have come in two very different sizes, a relatively large lecture class of about 85, and small discussion classes of about 10. The two demand different approaches, but in both I try my best to get my students actively involved in their learning. Here I focus on the larger lecture class, the more challenging format.

I teach Greek civilization for the core curriculum. As we in Classics have no graduate students, we must teach our lecture classes without the aid of discussion sections. In large part to offset the absence of discussion sections, I make use of the WebCT software to have students post brief discussions of topics on Greek civilization, and to respond to each others' entries. I tend to leave the topics flexible, which encourages more creative student work and gives me the benefit of seeing what my students find interesting about the Greeks. I make use of the internet for other purposes, including posting study guides and lecture notes, and taking student surveys.

The forum on WebCT provides students with one means of engaging more actively with topics raised in class. In the lecture hall itself, I try to engage my students by emphasizing the contemporary relevance of Greek civilization. Rather than simply lecturing, I make an effort to get students to ask and answer questions. For example, much recent scholarship on the Greeks has focused on issues of identity, and I encourage my students to think about what the Greeks thought important (including whether one was free or slave, Greek or barbarian, man or woman) and what they didn't think important (including whether one was straight or gay, or white or black). Thinking about what was important for the Greeks can help us understand what is important for us—and what should be important for us. Just as learning another language gives one access to a new set of questions about one’s own language, learning about another culture allows one to question one’s own.