I've been asked to post some information about a Latin III/IV unit I'm doing right now, so here's what it looks like:
Last May, I asked my Latin II and III students to throw out some ideas of topics that interested them. They gave me a list of twenty-seven ranging from Roman-occupied Britain to fairy tales. Then they voted, we tallied the votes, and we ended up with:
magic
military
sports and games
mythology
fairy tales
I try very hard not to restrict them to topics I know about, because it gives me the opportunity to learn. :)
There are two back-ups, but the presence of only five gives me the luxury to really go in depth, or to take my time with them if I want to. I don't feel the need to slam through the unit in two weeks. Last year, when we did creation stories, it took far longer than I expected, so I wanted to give myself some latitude. I thought we might start with magic, since that's a sort of autumn-y topic.
I spent my summer reading a book called Studies in Magic from Latin Literature. He mentions two very interesting passages, the first Pseudo-Quintilian's and the second Apuleius'. Each gives a succinct description of what a magician is, and each of them indicates that to be a magician is not a particularly well-regarded position in Roman society. I took those two passages:
1. ...homo, cuius ars est ire contra naturam, qui simul ore squalido barbarum murmur intonuit, pallere superos, audire inferos, tremere terras, ut experimentis loquentium fama est. (the passage this comes from is actually also really fascinating, but it's quite long. we may yet read more of it; I haven't decided. this is from Quintilian's 10th declamation)
2. ...magum existimant qui communione loquendi cum deis immortalibus ad omnia quae velit incredibilia quadam vi cantaminum polleat... (this is from Apuleius' apology).
I know I need to add some Pliny - he is a wealth of information on magic - in here, but I am not there yet; I am still combing through Pliny to find some tight, applicable, interesting passages that I want to throw in there.
In any case, I wanted to have them read those two passages because they provided a really succinct view of a magician and what that is to the Romans. I pulled from them the words/phrases that I thought would be (a) tough on my kids and (b) fascinating:
1. communione loquendi
2. existimat (you wouldn't believe how much time i've spent the last two weeks saying quis est qui existimat... something. lots of taking polls on stuff. that's how that one got introduced.)
3. omnia quae velit incredibilia
4. quadam vi
5. cantaminum
6. pollet
7. facinus (contra naturam - I didn't ever write this on the board, nor did I introduce it, but when we talked about facinus, I asked them whether various things were contra naturam, so they've heard it)
8. ore squalido
9. barbarum murmur intonat
10. pallere superos
11. fama est
12. illecebra
13. habet in fastidium
14. sermone secreto
15. praecipit
16. artem callet
17. pedicis aeternis
18. magus/magicus/magia - these were important primarily because they were topically pertinent, so I wanted to be able to discuss magic vs. magicians vs. magical things with ease.
19. fallere/fefellit
I pulled several of these because later, I'm going to have them read a passage about Circe from Hyginus' Odyssey and one about the aunt's warning to Lucius from the Golden Ass, and they were very applicable words here. The longer I can keep them in their memory and the more I can give them association with them the better - and who doesn't love ore squalido and pedicis aeternis? (fun story - a kid accidentally wrote petasis aeternis today, and I really want to see a picture of someone being held/tied by eternal hats.)
Then I sat down and thought about the thoughts espoused by those particular passages and how I could best represent them to them visually. I thought about pop culture video clips I could show them, and I came up with these:
the scene from Fantasia in which Mickey Mouse enchants the brooms and then falls asleep and gets punished by his magus.
So here was what the day-to-day looked like at the beginning:
Day 1:
I asked them to each write their definition of a magician. This they save.
I introduced
communione loquendi
praecipit
artem callet
quadam vi
artem callet I added because I wanted to be able to talk about skill levels, and also because it provided an opportunity to give them idiom, and because it provided an interesting contrast from having an intrinsic skill. Mickey, for example, never artem callet - he simply puts on the hat.
I introduced those words by asking a student to teach us things. I told them what artem callet meant, and then I asked who, in fact, did that. I've taught these kids for a few years now, so if no one had volunteered immediately, I would have had a good idea of where to do. (A., for example, sings beautifully.) But K. raised his hand and said that he natat. This was a great opportunity to bring in genitive gerunds, which are so useful in Latin, so I said, "Oh, artemne natandi calles?" We circled a bit, trying to bring in those genitive gerunds. (this became a grammatical focus - not because it's present in the passages, but because there are only a couple structures in the passages that shout out to me, and because this is such a useful one. i also have been using ablative gerunds to indicate by doing something). I told the class that K was going to praecipit nos how to do something. We talked about praecipit, which has the connotation of instruct, and does have that connotation in the passage in which we're going to read it.
Then K. came up and I asked him what the first step was. He told us, and I told the class that K. praecipit nos ut...we do something, so we followed his instruction. I had told him he wasn't allowed to show us anything. We went all the way through how to swim, and then I deliberately did stuff stupidly, badly, such that if I'd actually tried to swim like that, I would have drowned. They told me, pretty clearly, that I was doing it badly. I informed them that what was missing was a quaedam vis. We had certain kids swim with no particular strength or force at all, and then they swam with a quadam vi, which was very funny. We were taught how to do one or two other things that day, and we did them all both with and without force.
Then we talked about how those people had instructed us. Another grammatical focus for us is ablative of means/instrument, because we have covered that, they understand it and they've seen it, but they don't have it yet, and I want it really firmly ingrained. We're doing this both with nouns and gerunds. K. instructed us communione loquendi. We then came up with other things you might do communione loquendi.
Day 2:
We went back over the previous day's words. We talked about the various ways of fascinat-ing people. I talked to them a little about fasces and fascists and fascinat (I did this in English) because it's cool etymologically, and I thought they might appreciate it. I drew a siren on the board, and we discussed how sirens fascinant people. Sirens do this cantando. I asked how wizards do it, and they told me dicendo abracadabra. This is true, and so I pointed to cantaminum. I gave them some examples of what a cantaminum is, and they already know bazagra and bescu-berebescu, so we practiced those.
Then I showed them the clip of Mickey Mouse. They told me they don't like stopping the video every ten seconds until they've seen the whole thing, so we watched the whole thing through. Then we started at the beginning and discussed the hat - how it is magicus, and who is the tall man (he is a magus) and is Mickey a magus? Most of them know this story, so the fact that it cuts off early isn't actually an issue - it's a good thing. It allows them to bring in prior associations from their lives.
We discussed what Mickey was doing - he wants to do magic. (I had written pollet on the board at this time, but they didn't know the word yet.) He fascinat the broom (we didn't know scopa, but we do now!) Mickey praecipit scopam ut - I asked them what he wanted the broom to do. I got laboret, vivat, ambulet, habeat manus, etc. Some gave me the subjunctive, others didn't, so I used it as an opportunity to go back over the present subjunctive with ut by circling and then asking them to tell me again what he wanted them to do. Mickey instructs the broom pretty forcefully, so we described him as doing this quadam vi. I asked them to show it to me without power, and then with power, and that was fairly illustrative.
Then I asked whether he instructed it communione loquendi. They indicated that there were no words in the movie. This is true, so I asked them to imagine. They said they felt he probably did. Various classes offered different cantamina, ranging from bazagra to abracadabra to squeakity-squeakus. So we went through and practiced the sentence Mickey, communione cum petaso et scopa loquendi, cantamino scopam praecipit ut vivat et laboret. This is a sentence that, through all the questioning, they had essentially built, so it was not nearly as ponderous as it at first seems. We practiced it for a while.
At the end, I told them that pollet means to exert power or be powerful. I asked them whether Mickey pollet petaso or pollet sua marte. They agreed that petaso was true. I asked them whether the gods pollet. They felt that they do. Then I asked what the job of the gods was. I got several answers, including:
1. homines custodire
2. naturam facere
3. vitam dare
4. necare
5. homines spectare
I asked whether Mickey had done any of those things, and they said that Mickey had. If I had not gotten some of those answers (which were awesome answers), I would have asked them specifically if the gods had certain jobs, and then we would have discussed whether Mickey did those things. I told them that pallent superi means that the gods go pale, which they do when they are shocked and appalled. I asked them whether Mickey had done magic pro bono or pro se, whether they thought the pallent superi when people changed nature or created life without them. They didn't think they gods would like people doing these things pro se. We were divided as to whether the gods would mind people doing these things pro bono.
In one class, I had time to show the next video, which was of David Blaine bamboozling Harrison Ford (heads up - if you're showing this to your students, stop it before Harrison drops the F bomb), but in most it had to wait 'til the next day. So...
Day 3
We did the weather. Why mention it? It lets me teach them the future without saying anything about it (what's the weather forecast for tonight? is it going to rain?), practice the past tense, and briefly discuss the mythology of each of the days. It means I can teach them deus fallendi, deus pugnandi, deus mortuos in inferos ferendi, etc. Reinforces all those lovely genitive gerunds I want them to hear.
Then I re-showed the Mickey Mouse clip. I asked a student who was feeling dangerous to come up and sit in front of my desk, so they could see the screen, but so could everyone else. I let the video run for a second until I got to a part I thought was discussable and asked the student to say everything they could. They described two such scenes, and then everyone applauded, I gave her a sucker (I like to reward kids for being dangerous), and she sat. We went through five or six volunteers that way. Then I asked some questions of the class, just to make sure we were all on the same page and to reinforce that really long, complicated sentence.
Then I told them we were going to watch another magician and discuss him.
The target was:
fallit (in great part because i wanted to reinforce the passive voice, both in the present and perfect, in a very obvious situation)
cantaminum
magus
anything ending in -ndo
praecipit
artem callet
ablatives of means/instrument
and reinforcement of the previous vocab.
The purpose of the video, actually, though, was not to teach vocabulary, but rather to provide a counterpoint to Mickey. I showed the video once through, and then we talked through it - we used mente tenet, chartulis fallit, David Harrisonem praecipit ut..., etc. I asked whether David cantamino pollet, and they said no, chartis et arte pollet. When we finished, I asked again what the job of the gods was. We remembered what we'd said the day before, and then, after going through all the things David Blaine did, I asked whether he done any of those. We made a Venn Diagram - stuff the gods do, stuff Mickey did, stuff David Blaine did. And then we decided who made himself a god, whom the superi pallent spectantes, and who is just a wily tricksy person. (when we read parts of Hyginus' Odyssey, we'll compare Odysseus - beloved of Athena - and David Blaine.) I asked who thought that ancient magic was a part of religion, and who thought ancient magic was the opposite of religion. Anyone who wanted to make a statement could, and then we did plus/deltas, and the bell rang.
Days 4 and 5
We played Concentration 64 for about 10 minutes. I warned them before each round what the topic would be. Sometimes it was animals, sometimes magic words, etc. We reviewed old stuff and new.
target vocab:
ore squalido
barbarum murmur intonat
sermone secreto
facinus
illecebra
habet in fastidium
pedicis aeternis
fama est
We did the weather. I asked them about the rain (it's been raining constantly here), so we talked about lightning, and then I asked whether it was thundering. We demonstrated thunder. I suggested that perhaps there was someone in the room was capable of thundering a barbarous murmur. Turns out that's true. Then I suggested that there was a rumor someone else could do it better. There was much thundering of barbarous murmurs, accompanied by me saying stuff like fama est laurenam barbarum murmur intonare posse melius antonio, etc. This, of course, gets their competition hackles up, so there was a lot of repetition and hilarity and turned into a thundering bar bar bar contest pretty quickly. Then it turned out I have an impromptu barbershop quartet in the back of my second period (which was awesome), and they can sing in a barbarum murmur, which is something everyone should get to hear at some point.
Then I told them a silly story. It was about someone in love with someone else, but person B kept saying nasty things by thundering barbarous murmurs ore squalido, so person A decided they needed to be punished. We did not get to all the vocab on day one.
Day two we reminded ourselves of the story and continued telling it. Person A speaks with person C (newly added) sermone secreto to figure out what to do to person B. We ruled out all manner of ways we could punish person B because, in great part, they were crimes. Some were crimes against humanity, others crimes against nature. By the end of the story, person A had person B in fastidium, lured them somewhere by an illecebra, and then bound him pedicis aeternis. (this involved using a magic wand to turn him into a squishy ball, which is now in my desk). Everyone was pleased except the kid who'd been turned into a squishy ball, because it turns out squishy balls don't have much emotion.
We used much of the other voacb in the story as well, just keep us abreast of the vocab.
Keep in mind, this is a HUGE amount of vocab to be introducing in this short amount of time, so I'm reinforcing it constantly. It's also on the board all the time, we do no-pressure refreshers all the time, etc.
To be continued...
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