Class composition.

For my Latin class, the class composition is -

- mostly male.
- mostly college age / early 20s.
- mostly into Classics (e.g. one reads Homer on breaks, a large number of them tend to chew with their mouths open and be on the hairy side with poor grooming skills).

An exception is an older guy who's a Latin teacher and his daughters (I think) and their friends, and he wears some sort of scapular thing (I could see it on under his shirt), and the girls wear long skirts in simple, sedate patterns, and one of them is named "Iacintha" or whatever the heck that one kid from the Fatima apparitions was named.

In addition, there's a couple younger guys from like Notre Dame or something who know them (I'm assuming from conservative Catholic circles?).

The kids talk a lot to the priest, but mostly about Cicero or "what do you think of Catallus?", and when I ask about modern church politics, they usually take some minor minor thread of the conversation and derail it with requests for trivia-like information that classicists are so fond of and could probably wikipedia (e.g. with, "Has there ever been a non-Italian pope before Benedict?", or, "Has there ever been a pope from the mendicant orders?").

They also do the thing that classicists do and look weirdly upon other eras of Latin like church Latin. "Did they really do that?", one asked with mouth open, when he saw a new use of a conjunction that seemed odd to him.

I think one of the biggest flaws of Classics is that classicists (like most people who never think about moral topics) don't understand the difference between analysis (i.e. description leading into argumentation, but no moral judgments) and evaluation (i.e. moral judgments), and so they don't see that their field involves a very normative decisions about the height of Latin or Greek, and so although some people may slum with koine Greek and the non-literary papyri from Egypt or something like that, they would *never* start to study Christian literature in their departments, even when it's contemporaneous with other stuff they study.

Honestly, what the fuck is up with that? You would never get away with such snobbery in English departments or other modern language departments, where people have been actively trying to de-center the canon while they teach it. Classics is so behind the times that it's sick.

Also, when the priest talked about knowing the importance of vowel length if you want to speak Latin or read it out loud correctly, and for that you have to consult the dictionary and memorize - "You have to know everything!", he says - one asked where the dictionaries got it, and the priest said that alternate vowel lengths in dictionary entries usually indicate options for poetic usage, and after that, I politely chimed in and said that another important source for accents/vowel lengths for a language like Latin is to make reconstructions from daughter languages, and also check them against reconstructions of Indo-European roots, to the extent that that is known, and the priest was like, "Oh yes, definitely," and then mentioned you can also look at the treatment of the vowels of Greek words borrowed into Latin.

Honestly, the difference between a classicist and someone who knows his shit is the decision to stop idolizing trivia and learn the damn system that lets you make sense of all the shit you've memorized (the same is probably true of egyptology as a whole, too, from what I've seen of it).

The structure of Latin language learning.

So, the priest thinks that if you learn Latin, you should learn Latin from all eras, and that differences between eras are overblown.

"And I know that in modern times that it's only the church that's writing," he said, "But that's just the way that it is. I hate it too!"

I said that the trouble was where were you going to get teachers who were conversant in the quirks of Latin from all eras, since people just weren't set up to be trained that way.

And, that it's hard enough to get clued in to the historical background of texts from one era, let alone those spanning from across 2200 years.

He agreed, and said that it's a shame that you have Latin in Classics, and then Medieval Latin in the History dept. or maybe Religious Studies, and Renaissance or Reformation somewhere else entirely.

"Some of it's good, and some of it's bad, but people should read some of all of it!", he was like.

I started to try to ask him if he thought Classics Depts. as they are currently composed are a help or a hindrance to his dream of how Latin should be taught, but our conversation got interrupted and then it was time for the next session to start.

More from the Priest: He slams the Germans.

One of the priest who teaches my Latin class's big pet peeves is people who think Latin stopped with Classical texts.

So, the other day he was talking about how they teach Latin composition in Germany, and that you get marked down for every word you use that isn't in Cicero's corpus, and that if you use more than 5 of them, they fail you straight out.

"There they go, goose-stepping through the Latin language," he was like.

He also said he used to have horrible fights with this one German student who, when asked why he did something, would say that his teacher taught him that, and then when the priest would adduce like 5 examples from Classical authors suggesting things should be done the other way, the guy would ignore them.

"They think those rule-books dropped from heaven!", he was like, "But they didn't."

Also, whenever someone asks him what he does and he says he's a Latinist, the typical response is usually something like, "But isn't Latin a dead language?", and more often than not he's like, "You're dead, Latin is alive."

Great idea: Latin reading group.

As soon as I finish my Ph.D., I’m going to try to gather a Latin sightreading group that meets once or twice a month, likely using a book that has vocab/grammar notes opposite the page of Latin, so as many people can join as possible.

I’d advertise among students and professors at local universities, and high school Latin teachers as well, and maybe I'll throw up a few random signs or put a few notices in local media.

I think such a reading group would be a *blast*, esp. since I have so much fun as it is tutoring my Latin and Greek students, and since there’s so many Latin texts that I look at or briefly read (tweets by Pope Francis, writings of Francis of Assisi) that would be easy and fun to read more at length.

It’s too bad that I won’t have any time for this until I graduate, I think it would be invigorating and rewarding.

Conservative Catholic Book (8 of 8): Seminary complaints.

From Michael S. Rose’s “Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations from the Priesthood” (2002) (p. 227):

[Father John Trigilio remembers that h]is Latin breviary got him in trouble too [at St. Mark’s High School Seminary in Erie, Pennsylvania, in the late 1970s.]

“Sometimes I’d get a knock on the door of my room late at night, and one of the upperclassmen would slide a copy of ‘Playboy’ under my door.  This was the common way to circulate these magazines, but I would slide it right back out.  A few days later one of my high school teachers, a priest, asked me why I had a copy of the Latin breviary and the 1917 Code of Canon Law in Latin.  He asked me how I could read all this if I just started taking Latin this year, and followed that up by instructing me that 14-year-old boys shouldn’t be praying in Latin and reading the Code of Canon Law.  He told me that I ought to be ‘reading’ ‘Playboy’s like the other guys.

. . .

Latin Students (2 of 2): Lost the homeschooler.

I think I lost the overscheduled homeschooler who didn't really know Latin all that well.

Her mom had asked me to write a year-end evaluation, which teachers often "write in the form of a recommendation", which I really couldn't do since her memorization wasn't that thorough, she would do word-order translations, and had problems with recognizing when she didn't know things and would have to double-check in a dictionary or grammar (and when she did consult those, she often came away with the wrong vocab word).

Even though we worked together for a year, she still did word order translations, and I couldn't assign homework, since she didn't have the basic skill set that would have allowed me to do so.

I said that nicely in the evaluation (not a rec) along with some mitigating positives, and ran it by my dad who did high school recs, and then I sent it to the mom in an email saying to have a year-end conference to go over it, and followed that up by text.

The mom texted me that we'd meet in 3 weeks once the schedule cleared, but she never did.

Now, it's a month in to when her daughter's term started, and no contact from them.

The daughter's last tutor sounded awful - he would assign her paragraph upon paragraph of translation, then say she didn't know anything, the mom said - and the mom said she liked her daughter studying a Latin because it was a challenge for her (her other subjects weren't), and that my style fit her daughter better.

I figure, either the eval shocked her, or the daughter finagled her way out of Latin since she hated it, since she wasn't good at it.

She really did hate it when she realized she wasn't good at it.

Right after we started, she got enthusiastic for Latin for about a month, and would read gravestones when she was on vacation with her parents and at some historic cemetary (though I don't know how she did that, she probably improvised translations off cognates and made something up that made sense).

That enthusiasm dwindled, though, when I started having to ask her how much time she spent on her homework, go over how she looked up words in dictionaries, etc.

She's a nice kid, but I think she's going to have long-term problems with anything she really has to work at, and isn't immediately good at.

Ultimately, her not doing well was never her fault, and her parents protected her from that, which isn't doing her any favors.

Sightreading Pope Francis’s tweets.

The other week I had a Latin lesson w/my one very good Latin student, and I printed out some recent tweets of Pope Francis so we could kick off the lesson by sightreading a few of them.

One of the most recent ones was something like –

Ostium tui cordis pulsat dominus.  Suspendistine de bulla titulum “Nolo turbari”?

(The Lord is knocking on the door of your heart.  Have you hung a sign from the doorknob, “I don’t want to be disturbed”?)

- and since I always make fun of the classist and perhaps even corrupt president of our university during lessons, I was like, “And do you know what President [- - -] would say to that?”

“‘Yes’?”, my one good Latin was like.

“No!”, I was like, “He would say, ‘Of course I haven’t, I had someone do it for me’!”.

And then my one good Latin student impersonated the president and was like, “‘And I made them take the stairs.’”

. . .

For our next class, I’m having him revise the university’s (Latin) motto into 2-3 parody versions reflecting the current president’s values.

New Greek student!

I'm excited, I have a new Greek student!

She's a Latin teacher at one of the city's magnet schools, and had studied Greek a long time ago in college, but had mostly worked on Latin and had never felt like she got a handle on it.

So, now she's setting out to re-learn it, and maybe down the road she'd start up a  Greek program at her school; oddly, she said, there's no obvious certification for that, like there is with Latin, so she's just setting out to re-learn Greek and then she'll figure out things from there.

She's very motivated, and she says she likes how I can make meaningful comparisons between Latin and Greek b/c of my linguistics background.

Hopefully, this will work out...  And it will be a lot of work for me, since I'll have to more carefully re-memorize paradigms as I shepherd her through the textbook!  I don't have to do that with my Latin students I'm taking through textbooks, but with Greek I do, there's so many irregular forms.

One year of tutoring!

At our session last weekend, the one lawyer who studies Latin with me pointed out that we had begun Memorial Day weekend last year, so it had been a year since we started.

That made me feel really good.

In that time, I had him review all his Latin grammar (which he had studied like 20 years ago), re-memorize everything, began him on real Latin texts within 6 weeks (selected Apophthegmata Patrum), and then moved into Thomas Aquinas's Summa when he was ready.  Bit by bit, I have had him read other texts in Latin - for example, the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum sections on scholastic philosophy, and the commentary of Cardinal Cajetan on the sections of the Summa that we were reading.  Last week, we began reading a bit of Cicero's De Legibus, because it's on natural law (an interest of his).

It was very affirming, because the session last weekend was his best ever - even though he hadn't prepared anything because of his busy work schedule, he was able to sightread a good 15-16 sentences in the Summa with minimal help, over the course of like 50-55 minutes.

As he pointed out, too, there have been a couple times where because of his travel schedule for work he didn't have Latin for like 3 weeks at a time, so he said we've really only studying together for the equivalent of like 10 months, over the course of a year.

That really was a ton of progress for him, and it made me so happy.

Latin tweets.

The other month, I met to read some of Caesar’s Gallic Wars and sightread some of Pope Francis’s Latin tweets with my one very good Latin student, who’s taking time off from regular lessons in order to study for career certification exams.

Many of the Pope’s tweets were profoundly moving, especially the ones about never having war again, and how he extremely deplores the use of chemical weapons.

Who else can send such genuine bursts of truth with such simplicity and authority?

I really didn’t want to stop reading the tweets and our lesson went 20 minutes over, which I justified by saying the extra time was in return for him buying me my beer and whiskey, but even then I wanted to keep reading, and so I stayed at the bar and had another beer and whiskey and kept reading the Pope’s Latin tweets.

Phew - Just in time - Latin accomplishment.

So yesterday me and my one grantwriting Latin student finished up our special readings to coincide with the conclave.

Last week was our 2nd session on sections from the Apostolic Constitution "Universi Dominici Gregis" (the most recent doc outlaying conclave procedures), and we did a ton of sightreading at the end to power through it.

Yesterday we worked on Benedict's resignation announcement.  He had prepped about half, then we powered through and did a ton of sightreading to finish that off too.

I'm happy, my goal had been to finish both those readings before the new pope was elected!

In like 2 places (maybe 3), too, the Latin of Benedict's announcement was kind of shitty, from what I could tell:

1) He used "conscius" instead of "conscius sibi" to mean "aware of".

2) He went back into an accusative-infinitive instruction after a purpose clause, when it seems like it should have been a continuation of the purpose clause.

Also, I think he used "non solum - non minus" when "non solum - non etiam" would have been better (I'd have to check usage on that, though).

I wonder who drew up the Latin text - and what language Benedict's resignation was originally written in (Italian? German?).

Translation spiel: "give birth to".

I'm finding that I'm getting a translation spiel down for tutorees.

Usually, people say they want to translate "literally", and then I gently re-direct them from that term to the word "faithfully", which is what most people mean when they say "literally".

Then, I say that within the domain of translation, you can render "word-for-word", and you can render "by sense", and sometimes those are the same thing, but sometimes there's a disjunct between the 2, and that's where you have to make a choice.

The example I use for that is the English phrase "give birth to".

In Latin, you would say "genuit" for "gave birth to", as in - "genuit puerum" ('she gave birth to a son').

Now, if we were reverse translating from English to Latin, would we translate each separate word of the phrase into Latin, and come up with something like "dedit (=gave) nativitatem (=birth) puero (="to the son")"?

Of course we wouldn't, that would be hash!

For some reason, I find that example really makes things click for my students, and makes them start thinking about 'turns of phrase' in English and Latin and how they're not commensurable.

Latin bummer.

My one very good Latin student sent me a semi-dramatic email out of the blue thanking me for lessons, and saying he really couldn’t continue them because he got suddenly tapped to undergo (free) certification training that allowed him to ascend the office ladder, and that’d pretty much suck up all his free time, though he’d try to translate a little bit on his own if he ever had time.

I replied very nicely, and reminded him that I’d be in the city for at least 2 years, so he always had the option of starting up lessons again, and that if he ever got through any decent amount of the texts we had been working on (and I recommended which ones might be easier to do on his own, since a few of them were consistently challenging for him, in a good way), we could always meet for 15-30min. to check his translation on a play-it-by-ear basis.

He said definitely, and thanked me for my flexibility.

It’s kind of sad, he read a ton of Latin each week, and it really kept me on my toes.

I’m certain he’ll be back, though, if/when his time frees up.

At our last lesson, even, we had just started Vergil’s 1^st Eclogue – we had already read the 4^th – and he mentioned that he really enjoyed it, and when I then said that it would be feasible with dedication to read the entire work, he genuinely, immediately exclaimed, “I’d love that!”, and you could tell he meant it.

He really does have a genuine love for Latin, it’s very endearing and inspiring.  I’d *love* for him to be able to study with that one priest I studied with, I know he’d really enjoy it and learn a lot.

I also think that he gets oddly dramatic...  Like half a year ago he said he had a family situation that was sucking up his time and money (he lives at home with his parents – is one of them sick?), and couldn’t afford the roughly $150 a month he was paying me, so we talked it over, and I ended up halving my hourly price to fit his budget, until such a time that he could up it again, as he could afford it again.

I really think he was honest with me then, and had thought I’d be a stickler for my price or something, and that's why he cancelled.

Latin challenges.

My home-schooled high schooler has some long-term bad translation habits stemming from an online course and a (lazy, I think) previous tutor, and she often begins to translate without pausing and thinking through the grammatical structure of a sentence.

The closer a sentence's grammar is to English and French word order (she's studied French forever), the better she does, but I'm not yet able to assign her translation homework for her to do at home, since she doesn't have the process down quite yet.

Because she was thinking that all that translation stuff wouldn't help when she retakes the SAT II, which is multiple choice, I ended up sitting down with her and her mom, and her mom helped me talk through her worries with me and why my lesson plans seemed like they would help in the longterm...

One big thing that I said was that attention to detail with a language and how to figure out unfamiliar forms would probably be the biggest takeaway from the class, even beyond knowing Latin.

The mom liked that.

She also liked how I reminded her daughter that stress from other areas in life (she's studying for a lot of standardized college admissions tests right now) can adhere to other things, and that some of her frustration might be with the challenge of Latin, but Latin might also be a magnet for other stress.

On my end, I made up a worksheet called a "Learning Log" that me and the homeschooler can work on together, containing tips on word identification / complicated grammar / translation tips for workable English, so she can gather a list of what seems to be a thousand small points that are tripping her up and move more quickly past them and see the progress that she's making... I put down a few points from the past couple lessons in each category, and I'll be asking her to update it with me at the end of every lesson.

Roman Catholic Womenpriests.

You know what I really like?  Roman Catholic Womenpriests.

The name "womenpriests" is a little odd (it's almost like a corporate logo where two words are both capitalized and written without a space in between, and it's reminiscent of 2nd-wave feminist wordplay), but I love 3 things about them:

1) They got apostolic succession by having (unnamed) bishops consecrate them.

2) They take a historic view, and say that what Rome condemns one century it loves down the road.

3) They call the consecrations "contra legem" ('against the law' in Latin), which not only points out that some specific man-made canon prevents women from becoming priest, but even uses Latin to boot in order to do that, which must really irk conservative Catholics, who tend to love to throw Latin around.

Overall, between the apostolic succession, the appeal to history, and the Latin, they took all these conservative hallmarks and did something really really liberal.

Go them!

Good deed - I toot my own horn.

For the final class gift, people had thought about getting the priest a DVD set of the Ken Burns series "The Civil War", but because he had no DVD player, they'd have to get one too.

I sent out a gentle email, then, suggesting maybe get him some Latin books he doesn't have, and that he had said he was missing a library, to which one guy who's from Wisconsin suggested getting him a "friends of the university library" card so he could check stuff out, or maybe even a higher level of membership so he get inter-library loans, but the class was closing fast and there was a lot of questions that we'd have to ask the priest to make sure that he'd use the membership, so some guy got a $130 bottle of liquor from the Grand Chartreuse and asked everyone to chip in (I didn't).

But, at the last day of class, at one of the priest's friends lake houses where we went to read Horace and then enjoy the beach, I found myself alone with him, so I cornered him and asked him if he would use a membership like the one guy from Wisconsin had mentioned.

He asked me what it was and I gave him a few details, and he said he'd have to research it more, never mind (! - he doesn't have internet access, how would he do that), and at that point the hostess asked me if I needed a computer, and brought out her laptop.

So, right then and there I looked up how much it would cost, and then asked him what books he wished he had so we could see if the university library had them - and, as it turns out, they not only had Aulus Gellius's "Attic Nights", but that was part of a 19th c. reprint of a 118vol. series of Latin texts that he loves, and all 118vol. were available for checkout, in addition to other common series of Latin texts.

"You could spend a whole lifetime just with that," he was like, and said he wouldn't even need interlibrary-loan privileges.

(The priest doesn't really care about critical editions etc. like scholars do, he just loves to read the Latin.)

"And you're doing that all off of that thing?", he was like.

Then, I got the reference desk number, and called up about handicap access to the stacks and photocopiers - he had free transport there or wherever he wants in the county, and he said the trip wouldn't be too long for him - and since that stuff was indeed handicap accessible, I told him that, and then he again brushed off the membership, saying he'd have to look into more.

So, I found the online order form, told him that he couldn't do this easily himself, but I could sign him up and he could get the library card in the mail and then go up there at his leisure, and then asked him for his full name address phone etc., and put that down.

"Yes," he was like, "But I want to pay for it."

And then, he added, "And you can do that all on that thing?"

Anyhow, I told him that I was going to slide him some money from the class (he takes anonymous donations), so not to pay me back, I'd just lessen my donation by the membership amount.

Then, he added that it would be nice to have the membership benefits etc. in a hard copy, so the day after I got back, I printed that and library hours and the reference desk # out, and mailed it to him, as well as a reminder to start up an email account for library purposes (the online form required one and he doesn't have one, so I just put my email address in).