It’s the truth. . . probably. If you are fresh out of college with a few years of Latin under your belt, thinking you’re ready to teach a Latin class, you are mistaken, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be teaching the class. Allow me to explain. The demand for Latin and Greek teachers is high, and schools are chomping at the bit to hire the grad with “Latin” on their transcript who can teach a declension demonstration to a group of under-duress thirteen-year-olds. This is great news for those passionate about the language and who want to make a living teaching it. However, even the most studious of college students will find that once they set foot in the classroom, they likely overestimated their abilities. I was one of these teachers, and I don’t think my situation was unique.

I knew the declensions and the conjugations. Most of Henle’s and Lingua Latina’s vocabulary was familiar to me. I felt pretty confident about the sequence of tenses and irregular verbs. I had read through all of Familia Romana a number of times and even the first half of Roma Aeterna a few times. I had more knowledge than the eighth graders with whose care I had been charged, and I didn’t suspect that could be insufficient. 

I was first clued into my ignorance, however, by my students. Within the first week or two, I started getting questions like: “is there always a macron over the ‘i’?” and “how do you know a third declension’s gender?” legitimate questions that I vaguely remembered learning at some point, but whose answers I could not recall off the top of my head, especially with the pressure of a student audience awaiting my response. I was embarrassed that the answers to seemingly basic questions eluded me, and I could sense the indignation of the students who had the impression that I would be expecting them to know these things that I seemingly barely knew myself.

The second and more impactful thing that clued me into my ignorance was the first professional development day I attended, where all the Latin teachers in the district convened to discuss how to teach their classes more effectively. We were all pretty young with a few more-experienced teachers sprinkled in here and there.  After a long, slow, dry attempt to read some Cicero as a group, and a somewhat somber reflection on the way each of our classes had been going that year, someone in the room said something along the lines of “we need to train the students to be able to pick up a Latin text and read it”, to which another teacher in the room replied, “I don’t even know if I can do that.”

I think at the time I considered myself capable of picking up a random Latin text and kind of being able to read it. It was not really true. I could pick up Lingua Latina and read, but not Cicero, not Vergil. I wanted to get better. Unfortunately, the constant barrage of to-be-graded assignments, parent communication, meetings, tutoring, lesson planning, grade input etc. left me absolutely no time for reading, a hobby that I thoroughly enjoyed. My evenings and early mornings were completely consumed with correcting homework assignments that students would not really look at and writing lesson plans that I would probably not even really use.

Eventually, somewhere somehow something clicked. I learned that my time was better spent reading Latin and improving my skills as an instructor than correcting hundreds of student Latin sentences and spending hours writing lesson plans. The shift, which was accompanied with the realization that I did not need to grade as much as I was grading, was not just better for me, but for my students as well in number of ways. Perhaps the most important thing was that I was happier in the classroom and, by extension, so were the students. I was slowly improving my ability to read, to write, and even to speak in Latin, and all of those skills directly impacted the kids in a way that was more meaningful than receiving a marked-up translation back.

We had another professional development day not too long ago that was awfully similar to the first one I went to. I was particularly excited for this meeting, because I knew that the leader (our very own Ambulator) wanted to spend a lot of our time just reading together and perhaps composing some Latin ourselves. The afternoon, however, ended up having to yield to the will of the group and was almost entirely consumed by a prolix discussion about pedagogy and textbooks. There is, of course, nothing wrong with talking about pedagogy and textbooks. I love learning about new teaching techniques or new games to play, we even have our own textbook recommendations here on this site, but this day made it clear to me that we often ask the wrong questions when we our searching for ways to become better teachers. I think the first thing we should ask ourselves is, do we really know the subject we have been asked to teach? If the answer is actually yes, then the question about which textbook we need to use with our students becomes less urgent. If you know your stuff, you are the textbook. 

If the answer to that question is no, don’t be discouraged. Most entry-level teachers are likely in eadem navi, and that is a perfectly normal place to be. Nobody has ever truly learned everything there is to know. Teaching affords a wonderful opportunity to sharpen your skills, an opportunity you won’t get many other places. Don’t be afraid to say that you don’t know something, but don’t be content with your ignorance either. Be a good example of lifelong learning for your students. Set a goal, and read something new. You’ll thank yourself.

        – Rogerius