What If We Considered Restitution

My Latin colleagues and I have been studying and reflecting on the work of Dr. Christopher Emdin this whole academic year and working to implement his “reality pedagogy” into our CI Latin classrooms. The two work together so well that I also have made his book, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood and the Rest of Y’all Too, required reading for the grad course I am teaching at UGA this spring. I strongly encourage all teachers to get this book and start a disturbing, necessary, powerful journey into yourself, your practices, the young people who show up or who COULD show up in your classrooms.

As Latin teachers, we have to cultivate and recruit those who come to our classes. You all know that this has been a driving passion for me for the last two decades of my career as a Latin teacher–who we teach and who we don’t, the things we do, consciously and mostly unconsciously that keep students of Color out of the Latin classroom. We believe (we say) that Latin has so much to offer young people. If it does, why would we not want ALL kinds of learners, students from ALL backgrounds in our classes? Part of it is that we who teach Latin, mostly white folks, don’t know what we don’t know, and what we do know often scares us because we don’t know what to do about it.

Christopher Emdin‘s book. Go get it. Find someone to study it with you.

Yesterday, he was the featured lecturer at UGA’s Mary Early Lecture series. All five of us took the last hour of school off, journeyed to Athens, GA and beheld him in person. Words don’t suffice to articulate how powerful he was. One thing he said that gave me a way of thinking about my own life and work is this consideration of “restitution.”  What if restitution in this country towards People of Color meant for white teachers to give back from their lives to those young people who have been shut out of the “tribe” of education, life and success in this country?  In many ways, that’s what I feel like I’ve been aiming at during my 30 years of teaching–especially the last 20.  His book is a powerful piece of that for me.  That’s why we have created a huge Latin program (next year 7 Latin teachers from middle school to high school here teaching over 700 students) here with the multi-cultural mix that is Parkview High School, where all kinds of learners are successful in Latin, where we have a zero fail rate.  This is not me boasting.  This is me inviting–all of us–to re-vision how we teach, what we teach, to whom we teach.

If Latin is so valuable, isn’t it valuable to all learners in our schools?  Who are the learners not yet included in our schools?  Isn’t this the work of restitution that we who are white Latin teachers could take up as our call?

Emdin ended his pentecostal service (read the book, you’ll understand) with an African proverb. For me, it says it all.

“If the youth are not initiated into the tribe, they will burn the village down just to feel the warmth.”

In our program at Parkview, we say that CI is about comprehensible, compelling, caring work in Latin. Emdin’s book just so happens to organize into 7 C’s! All 7 of them help us fill out what that Caring part is about.

Bob Patrick

Scaenae–Alblative Absolutes in Targeted Communicative Activities

Goal: students help create a list “scaenae” (literary backdrops that Latin does with Ablative absolutes).  Then, they vote on their favorite. Teacher uses the top picks in “one phrase images” in the same way as one word images.  This is where a chunk of Latin words acts as one. They may also be used as story starters for small groups to devise.

 

Class Activity

Tell the class that we are going to create some “scaenae” together, that a scaena is a staging backdrop for a play to happen against.  Latin does this all the time in what are usually two word phrases known as ablative absolutes.  They can end up in several forms, but here are a couple of formats they represent most of these literary “backdrops” (write these on the board):

With ___________  ___________ing

 

With ___________ ____________ed

 

Ask students to generate these word backdrops.  You might give some examples in English first. Ask them what such a backdrop scenery suggests to the reader before going any further.  They will see that these scaenae can foreshadow what is to come. 

 

With the sky burning

With pigs flying

With everyone crying

With the forest burned up

With the nest built

With the monster slaughtered

 

They can go completely from their imaginations, or you may have a list of verbs for them to consider.

 

For this Latin 3 activity, I listed these recently new and brand new words:

iungere–to join

Mirari–to be amazed

Mutare–to change

Occupare–to seize, to fill up

Pati–to suffer

Premere–to press, hold down

Queri–to complain

Solvere–to loose

Subire–to go up under

 

Voting

With the teacher’s help, they make as many scaenae (ablative absolutes) as possible out of their imaginations or from listed verbs or both. The teacher then creates a google form with the Latin and English equivalents.  The invitation is to vote on the scaenae that they like the best.  If you teach more than one section of the same level, put them all into the google form and better crowd source the possibilities. 

 

One Phrase Images

The google form will show which were the top pics.  Over the next several days or weeks, you can choose one of the top pics as the starting point (the background) of a one word/phrase image story.  Do all the usual things:

1. Pick an artist who sits apart from the whole to draw what you create.
2. Ask who, what, where, how, why questions of the orginating scene.
3. Since this is Latin using ablative absolutes, make it clear that the noun in the scaena cannot be mentioned in the rest of the opening sentence.  It can, of course, thereafter. You might give them an example. If the opening scaena is “caelo ardente” that is the backdrop to the story. Caelum cannot be mentioned in the remainder of the first sentence.  After that, of course, we can talk about the sky all we want.
4. Continue until you have a story or until time runs out.  
5. Have the artist show the picture.
6. Perhaps take photos of the pics and pull one out for a timed write later.
7. In this sort of thing, they are free to add in some more scaenae if they want as the story progresses.

Small Group Generated Stories and Pictures

1. Put the most popular ablative absolute on the board, and invite the class to use it as a story starter and help you create the opening line.
2. Once you have the first full sentence of a story on the board, divide the class into small groups.  Each group is to write the first sentence on a piece of paper.  They must then create a micro story with the following elements.
3. 5 more sentences to tell the whole story.
4. Story must have a problem and a solution.
5. Story solution best if it comes as a surprise.
6. Picture in color on card stock depicting the the micro story.

Any stories generated from the above can be edited and prepared by the teacher very quickly for use as warm ups, brain breaks or other activities in the classroom.  One use that I have in mind is to use two per week to read and discuss together (20 minutes) and then have them write for 20 minutes about the story and adding to it.