So,
I’ve been incredibly lucky in the range of teaching opportunities offered to me
this year, meaning that I’ve been able to branch out from seminar teaching and
try my hand at lecturing (bit.ly/2rtEaZt). This term, I’ve also been doing a bit of
language teaching for an intermediate Latin class, which has allowed me to hone
the skills I picked up through my initial introductory teaching training course
and developed during my brief foray into language instruction to cover for
staff illness last year.
I
find language teaching quite different from lecturing and leading seminars
because of its mixture of instruction and student engagement. Students take an active role in their own
learning process in these classes, rather than (theoretically) taking notes
during lectures, or turning up with (again, theoretically) pre-prepared ideas
for discussion in seminars. Plus, language teaching is great for my own
personal studies and development. Even though I spend most days reading Latin,
I’ve realised that I’m becoming a bit lazy in my own reading, not necessarily
appreciating how and why clauses work as I go through often thinking about
other things. I was once told by a lecturer
that language teaching is the best way to sharpen up your ancient language
abilities, and I’ve definitely found this to be true. When preparing for
classes, I try and anticipate areas which may cause students difficulty and
organise (hopefully) intelligent responses to their questions and alternative
ways of approaching the material, and so reach into the depths of my dusty brain
to work out how best to present the topic at hand.
The
module in question covered reading of Virgil’s Eclogues alongside elements of language teaching and revision, which
meant that I was able to play around with a good range of topics and materials,
as well as flex my teaching muscles and try new activities and exercises with
the students. Some particular highlights included…
1)
A Mysterious Intertextuality
Exercise
Inspired
by an activity I participated in at a Flavian Literature workshop at the
University of Manchester last year (bit.ly/2jEG71N), I put together an exercise to test
the critical, analytical, and logical skills of my students. They were presented with a number of
unidentified passages of Greek and Latin poetry, each with some relationship to/bearing
on the Eclogue we were reading at the time.
Students had the option to work as individuals or as a group to identify
all of the passages, and then establish why they had been chosen to be
discussed alongside our main Latin reading for the week. I hoped that the
activity would encourage the students to engage in some close reading of our
Latin text (great preparation for coursework and exams) and challenge their
knowledge of the wider ancient bucolic tradition.
2) Some
Exciting Unseen Translations
As
part of a language revision class, I presented the students with two pieces for
unseen translation. The first of these,
an extract from the Latin translation of Harry
Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, was used to test how quickly students
can get a basic grasp of the contents of a passage without actually translating
it, by identifying familiar words and scanning through its structure and
organisation.
The
second (the slightly more serious unseen), was taken from Pliny’s letters (Epist.
9. 33. 2-6) and contains an account of a
dolphin who swims with a young boy. This
is one of my favourite Pliny letters, and was part of a collection of texts I
read during the summer before my university applications. I chose the letter (not just as an indulgent
end-of-term-treat for myself), but because it combines straight-forward and manageable
phrases alongside more challenging passages, many of which picked up on some of
the revision topics the students had previously requested. I really enjoyed revisiting an old favourite
with the students and watching them put their hard language work into practice
in unpacking some of the slightly trickier parts of the passage. Plus, the
students seemed to enjoy Pliny’s tale of the dolphin!
3)
A
Teaching Double Act
For the class scheduled to read the
final poem of the Eclogues, Professor
Bruce Gibson (the module convenor and my PhD supervisor) suggested that we
teach the session together in a kind of co-teaching enterprise to round off the
set text reading. I found this session
to be very exciting. Firstly, it came
with the benefit of two instructors being able to play off one another’s
thoughts. Since our research interests
are not identical, and Bruce is a much more established academic than I am, we
would always each bring something slightly different to the table, even when
both looking at the same lines of texts.
Hopefully the students found this kind of dialogue helpful and
encouraged them to consider their set text from different angles and offer
alternative readings of the material. Secondly, it was really useful for me to
see how another more experienced tutor approaches Latin texts with a class, and
I found that this kind of mentoring experience has given me new perspectives on
my own teaching. Bruce would approach
the reading and discussion of the Latin in a slightly different way to how I
had been leading my classes, which provided plenty of food for thought for how
I might organise and execute future language and literature classes.
My
teaching on this module allowed me to revisit a work I hadn’t really looked at
since my MA year at Exeter when I did a comparative essay on the Eclogues and Theocritus’ Idylls as part of a course on
Hellenistic literature. I also got to
engage with a fantastic group of students, who always came eager to get their
teeth into a new part of the text, and who were prepared to contribute and
often drive the classroom discussion. Finally,
being encouraged to reflect on how I teach Latin has been a valuable
experience, which I hope will inform and improve my teaching in years to come…
E
Over & Out
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