Daddy's Big Girl Tackles Latin

Don't you dare call her little.  She will set you straight, stomping her foot if necessary.

This wasn't my idea either, at least not for her, and not at the time. Yesterday was a lazy day at home for the Rietz clan.  We are fairly

Christmas Eve

industrious slobs, though; after a couple of bike rides my middle guy was mastering the GoPro camera given him by relatives, my oldest was managing a virtual soccer team, and my daughter was lying on the couch next to me, weaving with her new rainbow loom.  I was on my laptop debugging code.

Although I don't push it too hard, my kids are no strangers to what I do.  My older kids have both played in Linguachet, and several years ago my middle guy (who was 8) actually helped inspire the vocab and forms tabs by the questions he asked me as he worked.  My oldest, who is quite good at graphic design, created my current business cards.  When my daughter asked me today if she could play Linguachet, it didn't surprise me.

She is seven, though.  She's a very good speller, but - like all second graders - she's still learning.  She really just picked up cursive in the last couple of weeks.  She's curious and quick as a whip, but she changes her mind just as quickly.  I certainly didn't picture her composing full sentences in Latin.  I handed her an iPad with a smile, figuring this little experiment would last five minutes at most.

What happened next floored me.  It's exactly what was supposed to happen.  She started typing, looking up almost every word at first.  She's still a hunt-and-peck typist; it still takes her a couple of seconds to find letters like "P".  She didn't whine. She asked questions. She didn't quit.  She fixed all her mistakes.  She celebrated.  She did the first unit.

I figured surely it was time to lighten up...or at least vary the approach before she burned out!  We went outside and threw a "pila" to each other. As we threw, I called the play-by-play in simple, repetitive Latin.  She got cold. She came back in.  She asked to do more Linguachet.

She redid the first unit.  She started the second.

I pulled out Oerberg's Lingua Latina and a globe.  She translated that first page, her confidence surging.  After that she reached for my copy of Cattus Pettasatus. Obviously that wasn't so easy AT ALL, but not being able to do that didn't seem to discourage her at all either.  She went back to Linguachet.

At dinner, I told her that words are fossils.  She immediately started splitting up words she knew.

I took a walk around the front yard with my oldest.  I was worried she'd get frustrated and quit, but I also think kids need space to learn to manage their frustrations. I fully expected to return and find her watching a cartoon, and I would have been fine with that. 

I returned to find her typing Latin. 

Minecraft and Disney get turned down for what!?

At bedtime we often read a Bible story together.  On a whim, I pulled out the Latin Vulgate, reading in Latin from Luke 3, a story she had heard in church - in English - a couple of nights before.  She looked over my shoulder and picked out Latin words she had seen and used throughout the afternoon: "et", "est", "sunt".  Others, like "angeli" she easily picked out from context.

I attach no ongoing expectations here. Today is a new day.  However, as I was first typing that sentence, my daughter woke up walked into my room.  She didn't say good morning.  She asked to play more Linguachet. ;-)

Keeping the Love of Latin Alive...During Exam Prep.?

Exams can mark a nerve-wracking time for all of us.  Younger students (I teach middle school.) need

Blechhhy, Wikimedia

to be walked through their studying more than older ones do.  For years I simply gave a nonstop regimen of quizzes the two weeks before an exam.  They did help measurably, but no one could describe the process as engaging, and it certainly did little to foster the love of Latin!  Sure we sang a bit too, but we had a lot to cover, and one aspires to more than chocolate-covered broccoli, right?

Then I stumbled upon the idea of review via composition.  At first, I was thinking of efficiency, not passion.  I could hit all of the grammar (and much of the vocabulary) in ten to twenty carefully-written Latin sentences.  This did seem to be more authentically challenging, and it actually did work well for my top students.  

My struggling students, though, could get overwhelmed as they self-corrected that action-packed page.  It was too much feedback for them to take in all at once, and there was nothing they could immediately do with that onslaught of information... except hope to do better next time!

Doing this in Linguachet did improve things a good bit:  students got specific immediate feedback as they were working. They could learn from their mistakes. Furthermore, that immediate feedback

really motivated them...even when I was simply grading completion!  

For highly challenging, cumulative exercises, though, this motivation occasionally became a bit of a problem: struggling students struggled too hard, and occasionally I would find an exercise 1/2 done to total perfection with a massive amount of time expended.

From talking with my students through this process, I began to realize that - for many of them - making more than 10 attempts per question often amounted to brute-force hacking.  Formative feedback drew them deeply into battle, but - in certain situations - Pyhrric victories were more likely to result than meaningful learning.  Ironically, I had built Linguachet partly to enable differentiation, but seeing my own students' learning data from it was what fully convinced me.  Students' attention and effort are precious, limited resources, and I had to start learning to steward them.  This may even be more true during exams, when many students also need to catch up!

From there, I began to watch Linguachet's results tab data differently.  My goals began to change: from getting everyone through the same work to keeping each student in a state of flow so he or she could progress.  Armed with live data and plenty of ready choices, I began to improvise differentiation a bit.  I began encouraging certain students to use the skip button, not to avoid challenges but to select just a few of them.   I began to experiment with assigning the concept-dense review exercises to my strongest students while targeting concept-specific units for the struggling ones.  I also experimented with self-prescription, having students look at a recent test and choose 3 weak areas to target in Linguachet.  Knowing the homework was targeted to help them individually did put more of the focus on learning for some.

Everybody loves a Cinderella ending.  All my C students became A students.  That didn't happen.  Writing 12 sentences doesn't make every single vocabulary word magically stick either, but it definitely helps with grammar.  My steps were tentative.  I still gave the same exams.

What else happened, though, was far, far cooler in its own way.  More of my students began to get the idea that they could DO Latin.  Some started working ahead in Linguachet.  One first-semester Latin student, in the peak season of exam stress, decided to translate "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" into Latin, frame it, and present it to me for Christmas.  In January, my Latin students crashed their school's talent show by performing "Free Bird"...in Latin.  On at least one occasion, my assigning Linguachet homework was met with a classroom of...cheers?

I still don't believe in a holy grail of education.  My classroom has often been a lab but never a test tube.  I was simultaneously experimenting with oral Latin, embedded stories, comprehensible input, and TPRS, and I think all of these things buoyed students' enthusiasm.  My students were also watching ME risk, improvise, and learn, which probably added to the energy.  Perhaps anything that makes you risk, improvise, and learn from your mistakes is going to catalyze a growth mindset.  I hope that Linguachet will do that for a lot of students...even during exams...perhaps especially during exams!