I walked into my first Latin classroom as a teacher back in 2019, green, eager, and confident that I could teach a Latin 3 course no sweat. Having spent hours talking with veteran teachers and working out a stellar course map, there was not a doubt in my mind that the class would learn the rules for conjugating the present subjunctive by the end of the first couple days of school, and that we could move swiftly into the imperfect on the following Monday. The first week or two of lessons had been diligently planned to the minute and left no room for dilly dally.

Standing at a delapidaded podium on my first day, I meticulously enumerated every item of the syllabus while attempting to maintain an air of stern authority, glancing up from time to time to a sundry audience of disinterested and melancholy countenances. The awareness of a slightly uninteresting class had not perturbed me much. I was actually pleased with the way the first day had gone, despite the deafening lack of enthusiasm from the four classes that day. There were no serious hiccups, and I considered myself to have neatly displayed the itinerary of the coming months to the other humans in the room. 

This day, however, would be the spark that would ignite the dumptser fire that was my first year of teaching.   

That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it still wasn’t great. Within the first few days I was already encountering problems, which at the time were only vaguely ringing as such. Latin III ushered in a new textbook for the kids, the Latin for the new Millennium book 2, which begins with an introduction to the subjunctive mood. Naturally, I picked up on day two or three by having the students copy notes on the subjunctive mood and then proceeded to assign them homework from the textbook. A slurry of rushed papers made their way to my desk as the bell rang the next day. Upon review, the grades for what I thought was a simple conjugation exercise were significantly lower than expected. Nevertheless, I entered them into my gradebook and handed them back the next day. 

After a few weeks of lessons, vocabulary quizzes, and chapter homework assignments, the failing class average was brought directly to my attention when I was forced by our school policy to notify parents of failing grades. Students were upset. Parents were angry. I was frustrated. The thought of entering the classroom each day to meet with the slowly deteriorating class demeanor was dreadful. The students had dropped their initial masque of timid reservation and were beginning to become unmanageable. They didn’t want to translate another random Plautus excerpt or study their vocabulary, and the only way I knew to get them to complete any work was to play the part of a stern disciplinarian. I was growing more and more disheartened and bitter with each initialed detention, with each administrative referral, while the students grew more brazen and unbridled.

I chalked their failing grades up to a lack of focus and their evanescing sense of shame to the mores of the generation. They, after all, were not attending tutoring nor were they asking me any relevent questions in class. They were the ones who chose to continue talking after being told to stop. How could anything possibly be my fault? I was telling them exactly what they needed to do, exactly what they needed to know, and they were failing. 

Now that I have had years to reflect on the issue and have accrued a little bit of experience, I can identify the central plague of my first year as a distinctive lack of art coupled with a misguided concept of who a teacher ought to be. To use the old Latin adage, I was teaching crassa Minerva. 

What I came to realize is that the process of teaching a child is not a simple one-to-one transfer of information from my brain to the student’s. Real teaching is an art. It is subtle. It is complex. We cannot simply tell the students what we want them to know. We have to teach them, and that is a different thing entirely. 

You might be wondering to yourself what that art is and how to attain it. Well, like I said, it is complex, and I would not claim to have mastered it, but in part, this site was created to help answer that question for teachers of Latin and Greek.

           – Rogerius