Memorize. Repeat.
I have not had students memorize chapter vocabulary in a long time, not because I don’t think vocabulary is important, but because I think there is a more interesting, engaging, and robust method for beefing up the student vocab repository which I would like to share with you today.
Intro
Phrases, proverbs, and poems are probably the most recurrent and vital components of my middle and high-school Latin classes. Having students learn these does everything that learning individual vocabulary words does and more. They teach students 1) the way that Romans expressed themselves; 2) the proper context for new words and grammar; 3) unique grammar constructions; 4) little bits of proverbial advice; 5) to have an ear for meter before a formal introduction to poetry. Additionally, memorizing sentences instead of single words is more efficient, and I have found that students are capable of memorizing fairly long sentences and verses with enough in-class assistance. I’ll quickly work my way through this list I have laid out and briefly explain each one, though some are likely self-explanatory, while occasionally directing you to our resources pages, where you can download some of these for your own classroom.
Roman Expressions
The culture of the Romans is inextricable from their language. If you are not familiarizing yourself with the idioms and cultural practices, then the literature that we today refer to as classical will border on being inaccessable. Learning the vocabulary and the grammar is often not sufficient to get you through Cicero, Vergil, Caesar, Horace, Terence, and Quintilian. Their language drips with enigmatic cultural references, metaphors, and expressions that are completely foreign to our modern palate. We can track along with Cicero’s unbridled horse metaphor at the beginning of the Cataline orations – though this too may soon become unfamiliar as less and less people experience a horse in their lifetime – but what about when he exclaims “ubinam gentium sumus?” A student who has studied the individual words will recognize each of these but will require a footnote to explain the genitive plural use of ‘gentium’. So what is one quick way to combat this challenge? Have your students memorize thick Greek and Roman expressions. “Auris tinnit”; “supercilium salit”; “faciam ut in utramvis aurem dormias”; “res ad triarios rediit”. These are just a few examples, but there are literally hundreds of these kinds of expressions that are worth memorizing not only for the cultural knowledge they convey, but also so that when students light upon these dense expressions in the real texts, they will be less stupified. A very prospiciens magister might teach expressions that they know their students will see in the coming years, given their curriculum. Teaching a strange expression also offers an opportunity for a sort of “culture day” moment, like Ambulator mentioned in his last post. “Res ad triarios rediit” might be a great segue into the Roman military; “Aquilae senectus” into roman drinking customs and the anatomy of eagles.
Vocabulary Context
The next point is related to the previous one but distinct. Not only do phrases help teach us cultural idoms, but they also help give context to new vocabulary words, whose definitions might otherwise be misleading. I was looking at our standard-issue school textbook the other day and saw that in chapter six or seven it gives the definition of “se gerit” (cudos to the textbook for teaching a small phrase, by the way) as s/he behaves themself. This is not wrong, of course, but when we say “behave” in English, we usually mean to behave well. This ended up leading to some confusion one day, when a student from another class who was diligently attempting to complete her English-Latin translations asked me if her rendition of “the boy behaves himself” into “puer se gerit” was correct. I informed her that her translation was correct, but that she needed to include an adverb to tell us the manner in which he behaved, a detail that the book likely explains at some point, but not in the gloss of the word.
Unique Grammar
Moreover and in the same vein, proper phrases can teach new grammar constructions. Coming back again to Cicero’s Catiline speech, I recently gave my students the phrase “abuteris patientia mea” to memorize, which has a unique deponent verb in the second-person singular that takes an ablative object instead of an accusative. By using the phrase, the students are receiving the grammatical nuances of a unique verb and context for the kinds of things that one might “abuti”. If someone were just told that the word means “to abuse” there might be a temptation, for example, to imagine the word being used like this: “Caesar populo Romano abutitur.” The sentence is grammatically sound, but a Roman would likely not have used this word in the context of physically abusing something. These kinds of sentences can be pulled from the heap of classical (and high-renaissance) literature for memorization, a task that we have already done for you, so check out our resources.
Proverbial Advice
Phrases are nice for building vocabulary, teaching the correct context for words, and giving us a taste of Roman culture, but if we sprinkle proverbial dictums into this mix, we receive all of those things and also provide our students with helpful advice that hopefully will stick with them for the rest of their lives. That goal might sound lofty and idealistic, but I don’t think that it is. The things that we commit to memory at that age have the potential to stick with us for a long time. I remember having to memorize Aristotle’s so-called “ten categories” when I was in high school, and to this day I can recall them without any thought or effort, as if they have somehow become a part of me. If we can instill these students with an internal storehouse of wisdom whence they can pull in the future, we will have accomplished perhaps a more important task than teaching them the rudiments of an antiquated grammar. For as Horace says:
os tenerum pueri balbumque poeta figurat
torquet ab obscenis iam nunc sermonibus aurem
mox etiam pectus praeceptis format amicis
asperitatis et invidiae corrector et irae;
recte facta refert, orientia tempora notis
instruit exemplis, inopem solatur et aegrum.
– Horatius
These bons mots are sprinkled everywhere in ancient literature and frequently come in the form of a poetic metaphor. Ancient authors had the wisdom of the poets at the ready, frequently quoting from the greats: Homer, Hesiod, and Vergil, because within their expertly crafted dactlys and spondees lies a truth. Why should we not also instil our students with as much of that ancient wisdom as possible? The possibilities are as expansive as the corpus of poetic works that exist, but for Latin students, Vergil, Ovid, Horace, Phaedrus and Terence offer a fairly wide array of verse worth memorizing:
Tros Anchisiade, facilis descensus Averno
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua ditis
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras
hoc opus hic labor est. . .
– Vergilius
urticae proxima saepe rosa est.
– Ovidius
carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
– Horatius
audentis fortuna iuvat.
– Vergilius
Meter
Finally, on a less lofty level, memorizing verse gives the students the advantage of becoming familiar with poetry and meter even before they are formally introduced to poetry as a subject matter for their studies. There are plenty of quick and easy epigrams that I have even had first-year 6th-grade students memorizing, and they love it. Classical sources abound whence we may pull. Don’t get bogged down in the seriousness of the epic meter, nor feel like you have to memorize a poem in its entirety. Mix it up with a variety of meters. For example:
non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare
hoc tantum possum dicere: non amo te.
– Martialis
aequam memento rebus in arduis
servare mentem non secus in bonis
– Horatius
versiculos in me narratur scribere Cinna.
non scribit cuius carmina nemo legit.
– Martialis
ad rivum eundem lupus et agnus venerant.
siti compulsi superior stabat lupus
longeque inferior agnus, tunc fauce improba
latro incitatus iurgii causam intulit
“cur” inquit “turbulentam fecisti mihi”
aquam bibenti?” laniger contra timens . . .
– Phaedrus
aut consolando, aut consilio, aut re iuvero
– Terentius
amittit merito proprium qui aliena appetit
– Phaedrus
These are just a few examples, but the possibilities are practically endless.
This post has been a little more prolix than I expected, but I am not quite done yet. I will close by adding a couple more practical reason why phrases, proverbs, and poems are a good ideas for your classroom. The first is that they require time to learn, time that can be assigned as both classwork and homework. I devote at least four or five minutes each day to studying the week’s phrases, with an additional five or six minutes spent saying the poems together or competing to see who can remember the most phrases. Additionally, they are easy to grade. Students either know them or they don’t. Finally, they offer you, the teacher, an opportunity to memorize something yourself that you might not have learned otherwise.
We are continuing to post resources like the ones mentioned here to our downloadable resources page. Check back in on it every once in a while.
– Rogerius
Photo Credit – Titian, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
3 Responses