A Handy Classroom Tip or Two

Most of classroom management is having the forsight to predict and prevent mayhem before it gets out of hand. We have to purge our rooms of flammable material, so to speak. I have assembled four tips below based on the principle of getting out ahead of things that could go wrong so as to promote a healthy classroom that is conducive to learning.

Set For Success

An experiment of mine has recently blossomed into a now indispensable part of my routine as I prepare for the students each day, and that is setting up the classroom myself. You may already be graced with the luxury of having your own personal classroom that is not shared with other teachers, but at [insert classical school] our classrooms may be shared between a couple of teachers, each of whom want the desks arranged in a particular way. Even as recently as a couple of months ago, I was in the habit of having the students arrange the desks themselves, and I was consistently frazzled by how poorly they did so. The excitement and the noise of twenty students scooting tables across tile floors while stacked plastic chairs tumbled to the ground only added fuel to the already-primed adolescent mind for mayhem. The process of it all usually ended with something akin to a riot where otherwise well-behaved kids are caught up in the excitement. Suddenly it occurred to me that if I arranged the desks myself, the students wouldn’t have to, and by doing so I could prevent an opportunity for disorder. Sure, it takes a little bit more time for me to do it on my own, but the reward of not having the students do it poorly is worth it. Now when the students get into the classroom they are not immediately stimulated with noise and an activity that promotes shenanigans. The broader message of this tip is that you should not set kids up to fail. I was practically asking for a disaster by leaving the arrangement of the room to the kids. How often do we ask something of students with the expectation or knowledge that the results will inevitabley frustrate us? This principle is especially pertinent to homework assignments. How many times have we given an assignment that we know the students will do poorly or not at all. We should set our expectations high, but should not be consistently asking for things that we know the students can’t do. I think that students can sometimes respond well to disappointing a teacher’s expectation, but it should probably be a rare occurence.

Get the Students in the Door

If you have young middle-school students bunched up in a hallway together, madness is surely afoot. Avoid the headache of trying to calm the agitated waters, so to speak. Take measures to avoid getting them riled up in the first place. Be ready at the door when the bell rings to allow kids to trickle into the room as soon as they are able, lest they congregate outside your door.

Once inside, stay diligent in getting them working on something to keep their attention away from doing something loud and obnoxious with their friends. I always have a noun and a few verbs to conjugate on the board for students when they walk in. Draw attention to the fact that certain students have started their work already and, if you are playing the point game, start adding points quickly for the students that have been working quietly. That way, the remaining students that trickle in towards the end of the five-minute passing period find a tranquil environment that invites quiet and study instead of tomfoolery.

No Lulls

The classroom requires constant attention. If you have something you need to do that would take your attention away from moderating the room, set the students on a deliberate task first. Sometimes, for example, I have vocab I need to write on the board, but I need to pull it up on my computer or find it in my notes first. The best practice would probably be having those notes ready so that you don’t have to hunt them down in class, but sometimes we just forget or simply run out of time before the bell rings. In order to keep them engaged in Latin class, I might ask them to quiz their partners on last-week’s vocab for two minutes while I find those notes. Even a lull of a few seconds wherein the students don’t have an accomplishable task invites a slow but inevitable descent into the chaos we want to avoid.

I should mention that it is natural for that to happen. Human beings want to talk with the people sitting near them, so should our negligence furnish an opportunity for something contrary to what we expect to happen, we ought to be careful in the way that we respond.

There is More to Latin Class than Latin

In the early days of my teaching career, the thought of keeping students busy for an hour every day on just Latin was perplexing and suffocating. What kinds of activities could consume a whole hour, much less a whole year in a Latin 1 classroom where the students don’t know anything beyond the third declension and a handful of vocabulary words?
It is tempting to set the kids at work on time-consuming tasks that feel robust and meaningful, but in the end do very little in the way of corroborating their knowledge. For example, the opening text in our standard-issue textbook is a passage from Plautus, a poet whose diction and style does its best to stay humble, but is still far too challenging for an entry-level student. The editor of the book supports the tiro with a lengthy gloss of words on the opposite page.

I would not go so far as to say that putting students to work on translating this passage is completely useless. There is value in learning to read a glossary, and visually encountering new words is important, but taking 45 minutes to translate something this far above their reading level is not an effective use of time. It feels productive because the students are looking at difficult Latin for a long time, but how much is actually being learned?

The same ‘illusion of challenge’ can trick us into thinking that long periods of time spent in declensions, conjugations, and parsing is good because they can take a long time and they involve ‘Latin’/’Greek’. They are important. Students should learn to do all of those things. But learining to decline is not synonymous with learning Latin.

So if we strip our class of all of the superfluous time fillers, what are we left with? How do you spend your one hour together every day? I cannot respond to this question in full here, but the answer may begin to reveal itself if we stop thinking of the classroom as a machine or mechanism whereby we program students with declensions, conjugations, and vocabulary. Instead, we should think of it as a dynamic real-life enviornment, because that is exactly what it is.

Children are human beings and we should treat them as such. Asking a student how their day has been or how their soccer game went last night shows the students that you are not just a mean teacher that is trying to berate them with an old dead language. Taking an interest in the children’s lives actually goes a long way in getting students invested, if not in Latin itself, at least in you the teacher. They will be more willing to listen to you if they are convinced that you actually care about them.

We have to get rid of the idea that time not spent doing Latin or Greek or whatever the subject may be is time wasted. Reiterating the oft-uttered classical-education mantra “these things are good and you should like them” is only going to alienate students if they associate the thing that you are calling “good” with cold mechanical school exercises. Spend some class time telling the students about something funny that happened to you that morning or ask a student or two to tell you the most interesting thing they did last weekend. Discussions like these go a long way in keeping morale high and consiliating goodwill, and nothing is more effective at preventing disruption than these.

– Rogerius

Table of Contents

Set For Success

Get the Students in the Door

No Lulls

There is More to Latin Class than Latin

Introducing a New Edition of Erasmus's

Paraphrasis in Evangelium Marci