My school requires us to put a Unit-by-Unit plan into an online system with learning goals and assessments and activity plans and essential questions and objectives and and and and and etc. Doing this for a CI course is a total headache. No one has put anything of this level online and I can understand why. Such things exist for other languages, but you have to buy them. One day maybe you’ll be able to buy Latin ones too. A girl can dream!
This year, however, I have been building my own curriculum
ē culō, if you will. I am going to share with you how I have been doing that. Here’s the tl;dr version:
- Define goals and limits…
- … and create a curriculum that suits them.
- Choose vocabulary based on frequency and utility.
- Choose target structures based on frequency and utility.
Define goals and limits...
Consider these questions.
- Are you using a textbook?
- Do you have the freedom to transform your curriculum?
- What are your goals for your students?
- How much can your students realistically acquire in a year?
Here are my personal answers.
- No. My kids seem to hate books, and I'm a control freak so I don’t like doing what textbooks tell me to. This is crazy and I recommend you let a book help you.
- Yes, I am the only Latin teacher, and I can basically teach however I want.
- The usual goal for a Latin teacher is for students to be able to read classical Latin literature by their fourth year. That’s my “reach” goal. For right now, it’s more like “get them to see English isn’t the only language” and “have at least one academic class they don’t hate.”
- With TPRS the average number of structures you can hope for a class to acquire in a year is between 150-200. That means that if you have 40 weeks of class, you can do roughly 5 structures a week (at best!).*
* Edited to add this note: This number comes from my Blaine Ray TPRS workshop. I strongly suspect that this number depends A LOT on (a) how much input the teacher is able to provide, (b) how comprehensible that input is, (c) how interesting that input is, and finally (d) individual student aptitude and attention. That means it should be considered an upper limit, probably. Realistically I think this year my kids have got about 50 vocabulary words really solidly known in many forms, and they can deal with present & imperfect tense active indicative pretty well. They have also seen perfect & future but I wouldn't say they've internalized how those work yet.
… and create a curriculum that suits them.
So, my curriculum should:
- have a maximum of 150-200 target structures
- follow whatever scope & sequence I think is most useful
- not scare kids away or make them hate me or themselves
My first year I taught out of
CLC and none of those requirements were met. Good heavens, not by a long shot. This year I have been going by the seat of my pants and things are more or less working out. That middle point though- the scope & sequence- is really very hard to do on your own. I looked around at different books and things. The thing I’ve found that works best for me is to just follow the
NLE syllabus for scope & sequence, plus some additions to Latin I that make life more interesting (complementary infinitives) and grammar more comprehensible.
