Slowing down to master it all

I've been busy trying to break through writer's block on another project, so I've been quiet. No more.

I was working with a student this week and noticed that in certain situations he was making errors. One of the things I like to do with students is to label sentences so the structure of the language is obvious. (I'm partial to something that looks like a modified Shurley grammar but whatever you use, stick with it.) The idea is to do this so much that it becomes second nature to the students.

However. Students left to their own devices like to hurry through work. I don't know why, but I was (and occasionally still can be) certainly guilty of this habit. As a result, students make sloppy errors that mislead. They can answer questions about the reading perfectly well. They can draw pictures about the story. Or answer questions (correctly) about the grammar. But there it is, the Accusative object of a preposition labeled as a direct object.

The problem for us is to tease out which is an error from going too fast and which is an error in understanding. This is not easy, unless we take time to go over errors with students, and time is certainly a precious commodity. What is better is to encourage students to slow down. Yes, that means their studies will take longer, but over time they will master the material and need less time.

So try to convey this message: Go slow, take time now and build good Latin skills OR whip through and need to unlearn bad habits to learn the correct skills.

My coop just cancelled its weekly meeting

And, in fact, mine did.

You know it's going to happen if it hasn't happened already. Something—snow, construction or something else—crops up and cancels the weekly meeting of your Latin group.

So what to do?

If your student is struggling, this is a good time to go back and review difficult concepts. If your student isn't struggling, this is a good time to go back and review difficult concepts. No matter how well or poorly you are doing in Latin, review is always good. Firming up paradigms (also known as noun and verb charts) is always good for students in grammar driven curricula. Spending time with the readings is great for students in reading driven curricula. In other words, you're going to gear your activity to the curriculum—which, if you've gotten lucky or chosen well, matches your student's learning style.

The key is to spend some time every day. Language is a use it or lose it sort of skill. So for learners of all stripes, daily practice is better than taking the week off. Even spending ten minutes each day is better than lumping in a one-day, hour-long catch up session before heading back to the coop. I can't emphasize enough that daily exposure is superior to anything else. Even if you go back to the beginning of the book and review there, you're ok. It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you're doing something instead of knocking off for the week.

This work by Peter Sipes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.