My Spotlight on Strategies
My S.O.S. focuses on one of the most important concepts in teaching Latin: learning the language through comparing it to the students' native one. If I were to simply hand the students information on Latin grammar concepts, focusing only on the Latin, I would receive many blank stares back. By comparing Latin grammar to English grammar, I can access knowledge the students have built up through years of English learning and connect it to Latin. While it is not the ultimate solution, it does help my students by taking a foundation and branching off of it, which can be vital when Latin textbooks use terms that would confuse the students otherwise.
What bringing new digital media into this concept does is make this even more accessible to the digital natives we teach every day. Every year textbooks seem less and less appealing, and why not? The pantone world of the internet is so much more thrilling than the black and white pages of the grammar section of Oxford Latin Course: Part One. What we as teachers need to do is ensure that our subjects and materials do not fall behind the times, for once they pass a certain point of no return they become almost useless to the students of today.
Bringing social media into the classroom allows for this advance to occur. Number one, by having students post on a central topic, they gain personal choice in what they want to post. Yes, they could find a sentence on a billboard or in some instructions from Ikea, but maybe they take a photo from their favorite comic book, or, now that vinyl records are making somewhat of a comeback, maybe they find a sentence they want to examine in the liner notes of Bruce Springsteen's Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ. It allows for students to not only learn more about the subject, but to learn more about each other as people, which makes them so much more invested in the material. I can remember in class writing small Latin stories with classmates and we were excited to see where each other took their stories. Now a Latin Instagram could become a place for students to not only discuss why they think the prepositional phrase on a video game box would be accusative or ablative, but also find out more about why that person made that post. It helps create an environment where schools go beyond educating just the academic student, but the whole person.
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