Zero to Hero...

Yesterday, I handed National Latin Exam scores and awards back to my students.  They, having no idea of what they had received on it, were AMAZED to receive their certificates!  I was SO PROUD.  Even those who didn't receive certificates were AT the National average. And, as we all realized, they had started with 2 years of catch-up to do.  And THIS is what happened.  One of my students compared us to Hercules.  (Hence the Disney Song Title...)

"Alright," my assistant principal asked me, with a big smile on her face, "how did you do it?"

The answer was easy.  I built a community, encouraged students to help each other, laid down the expectations early on, and used Latin composition and scaffolded storytelling, oral and written, to encourage the students to use the new grammar, and mix it in with the history and mythology.

In reality, is this easy?  Hell no.  It's a ton of work, especially when you are presented with a bunch of students who have had a rough experience with a prior teacher and who are taught in other classes that they can simply coast.  They have so much work to catch up on, and they have no confidence.  So the first thing I had to do was ask the right questions to get them thinking.  We started working with stories, and posing questions to each other about them, first in English, then in Latin.  And confidence slowly emerged.

How do you ask the right questions?  It was as much of a learning experience for me as it was for them.  Lots of experimentation, lots thought, lots of wondering how far we could push ourselves on one story.  And at the same time, we had so much grammar to learn...which we managed to embed, mostly, in the stories. And it goes, often, against our own education to think about and ask the right questions.

I was worried about the National Latin Exam, I admit, but the students were super ready, and super confident.  And this is what happened.

So how do we ask the right questions?  What do we think about to make sure that this happens?  Even more importantly, perhaps, how do we make it our own nature to ask these questions, both of our students and of ourselves?