Panel Discussion

SYLLECTA CLASSICA 15 (2004): 217–226 PANEL DISCUSSION MARCIA LINDGREN: Our panelists are Carin Green, a professor in the Classics department; Geoff Roughton, an undergraduate Classics major; Bob Holschuh Simmons and Heather Waddell Gruber, who are graduate students and teaching assistants; and Sara Anne Miller, a Classics major who is working on another bachelor’s degree. Professors Groton and Gruber-Miller will be joining this discussion as well. BOB HOLSCHUH SIMMONS: Just to add something to what Anne said about the potential for Latin to be a window or an entryway to better ways of thinking, an opening into all sorts of possibilities of life, I’d like to focus on some of the foreignness of it. When we look at a sentence with our students and say, “We have an ablative here; what could this possibly mean?” there’s a real opportunity to move beyond simple translation to greater insight. We often encourage beginning students to think of an ablative as signifying “by,” “from,” or a few other simple prepositions. But if we really want to understand it, we have to go beyond just a simple equation of one form in Latin with two or three simple equivalents in English. I’m sure many of us here who have taught Latin have had the experience of students saying, “You know, I never really knew English until I took Latin,” and I’d like to think that there’s something more profound in their statements than that they’ve learned a few more grammatical things about their native tongue. I’d like to think that what they’ve learned is that there is something in the study of Latin that leads them closer to the core not just of language, but rather of thought in general, and inquiry in general, and that because of its very foreignness, Latin asks them to look at not only it, but everything in their lives, in a much closer way than they would otherwise. One way that I learned French was just a lot of immersion in it: this is what you do when you’re at the beach, and these are the things you say on the beach. We don’t talk about going to the beach that much in Latin, but I think the very foreignness of it makes it in many ways a richer 218 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 15 (2004) intellectual experience. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t also have a goal of making Latin practical in some ways—that’s very important. But I do think that the very distance of it from English, both culturally and linguistically, allows people insight into the diversity of ways in which systems in general can work. I’d like to hope that this is something that spurs students to think about all sorts of assumptions that they make about life: “Where else do I think of things in a simple way, in the same way that I used to think of an ablative as simply equivalent to a few English prepositions? Where else do I have similar assumptions that I haven’t really probed into?” HEATHER WADDELL GRUBER: I would like to move from the theoretical level to a more practical concern. We all have to think about whether or not we’re going to take a traditional approach to teaching Latin: are we going to make our students pound away at forms and grammar, or do we want to teach Latin more like a modern, you know, modern spoken language, and where do we draw that line? This is something that we all will have to think about as future teachers, and it can also help us in our current teaching, even if we’re not going on the job market. So, I was hoping we could talk about specifics of what are basically two different methods of teaching Latin, and their respective benefits: should we teach traditionally, or not? JOHN GRUBER-MILLER: It’s a very fundamental question in terms of what you’re going to end up doing in the classroom. I wouldn’t say that it’s just an “either-or”; that’s too simplistic, because...