Category: Latin

Latin Gets Things Done!

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

Interesting item from the Art Newspaper … some clipping along the way:

In 1937, the Warburg Institute, recently arrived in London from Hamburg, found itself homeless. Permission was given for it to move into the Imperial Institute, but there was no shelving, which made the library unusable. Month after month, the director Fritz Saxl sent letters to the senior civil servant at the Office of Works, Frederic Raby, asking him for shelves to be provided.

Now Raby was also a considerable scholar of Latin poetry of the Middle Ages; finally, Saxl asked Ernst Gombrich to write Raby a request in Latin poetry in case that might move him to action. Here is that poem, in the style of the “Wandering Scholars”.

The effect was instantaneous: Raby sent back a poem in the same rhyme-scheme saying that they could have their shelves. As Sir Ernst said in sending these opuscula to The Art Newspaper, “The whole stands as a nostalgic tribute to a vanished tradition of the Civil Service”.

The Gombrich Plea

Stella desperantium, miserorum lumen
Rerum primum mobile, nobis quasi numen
Audias propitie supplicantem sonum
De profundis clamitat studii patronum
Otium molestum est, et periculosum
Menses sine linea vexant studiosum.
Statum hunc chaoticum noli prolongare
Animam et domum nos fac aedificare
Libros nostros libera turri de seclusa
Quibus mus nunc fruitur gaudeat et Musa.
O, duc nos ad gratiae sempiternum fontem
Unde tibi lauri frons coronabit frontem.
Qui in Bibliotheca Warburgiana
studiis se dedere ardent
—Frederico Jacobo Edwardo Rabio

[…]

Raby’s reply (addressed to Fritz Saxl)

Doctor disertissime, rector venerande,
Omnibus amabilis semper et amande,
Congemiscens audio verba deprecantum
Imo corde vocibus tactus eiulantum.
Set nunc tibi nuncio gaudium suave,
Te et tuos liberans studiosos a ve.
EANT LIBRI LIBERE. Deus sit tutamen
Libris et legentibus in eternum. Amen.

… the original article includes translations … Both verses almost sound ‘Carmina Buranaish’ …

Gamifying Latin Redux

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ 1 Comment

A couple weeks ago we had an item from the Old Gold and Black on Ted Gellar-Goad’s efforts to gamify Latin prose comp (Gamifying Latin Prose Comp). Science Daily has an item in the same vein, but with a bit more detail for folks wondering about the method:

Choose your character, write spells, map the dungeon and move up levels. It sounds like Dungeons and Dragons, but it’s not. It’s Latin class.

Each student plays a hero from Graeco-Roman myth with a backstory, personality and actions determined largely by the student. Over the semester-long journey the players face obstacles, challenges and opportunities both independently and as a group.

And they learn to write Latin.

Game theory for teaching languages

“The best way to learn a language is by immersing yourself in it,” says Ted Gellar-Goad, a post doc teacher-scholar in Wake Forest’s classical languages department who teaches the class. “And it’s even more fun in a world not quite our own, in time, place or nature.”

The first day of Latin prose composition class, the most challenging required course for Latin majors and often the dullest, the 12 students chose a character to guide through the 20 levels of the course.

Sophomore Amy Templin chose Ariadne as her play character (PC) — the princess of Crete who clandestinely helps Theseus slay the mythological Minotaur. “My PC tends to help solve riddles and puzzles,” says Templin. “She matches my actual personality nicely.”

Templin says generally other women in the class were more hesitant to embrace role-playing than the men, something Gellar-Goad expected might happen. “But the class is not a video game, it’s a paper-based role-playing game, and its extrinsic value is to create increased engagement in the class. Something I think we’ve definitely accomplished,” he says.

“I look forward to the class, and I’m not constantly checking the clock,” says Templin. “Though I was initially intimidated by the set up, especially starting the class at level zero, I’ve noticed so much growth in my abilities. I’m looking at the dictionary less and less. That we craft our sentences according to our character and the motivations of game players is a big challenge, but so much more fun than translating the vanilla sentences someone else wrote from a 1940s textbook.”

Experience points: Level zero to level 20

Students earn experience points, not grades. They gain levels. They learn Latin in a “super-structure of fun,” says Gellar-Goad.

This includes:

• Scribing spells (complete translation projects),

• Mapping the dungeon (construct visual representations of Latin grammatical constructions);

• Crafting magic items (produce creative projects); and

• Completing side quests (establish standards of a Latin author’s style, for example).

The idea for the course setup came from a Teaching and Learning Center book group on José Antonio Bowen’s “Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning.” Gellar-Goad was most interested in Bowen’s exploration of using games as a useful pedagogical tool. “The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game,” was another useful resource for course design.

Learning through avatars

As game master, Gellar-Goad moderates the class, provides the setting and helps guide both the storytelling and the adventures. Students work as a class to figure our how their player characters will respond to given situations. Gellar-Goad sets up the simulation: We are in a city in ancient Greece and the Mycenean people are rebelling against their queen. The rebels have caught you, and you have two options: Confess you are gathering information on how to defeat the Sphinx or hide your true motives. The group discusses the options and possible outcomes, and then composes sentences in Latin to move the game forward.

“One of the biggest takeaways for me from the class is that Dr. Gellar-Goad’s unique approach is inspiring students in our class who have different ways of learning,” says senior Matt Sherry, an aspiring high school Latin teacher. He encourages creativity and that creativity gives students different ways to approach learning.”

Also Seen: Greek and Latin Plurals in the News

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

Not really sure if I (personally) would call these pretentious, but your mileage may vary (insert smiley here):

YLE’s Nuntii Latini in the News!

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

This one was mentioned on the Classics list last week … YLE’s Nuntii Latini was the subject of a feature in the New York Times. Here’s the first bit:

Leah Whittington, an English professor at Harvard, catches the news bulletins on her iPod while strolling to classes. Daniel Blanchard, a professional countertenor in Paris, used to listen on shortwave radio, but now he uses an iPod, too. The BBC? NPR? No, it’s a weekly summary of world events and news broadcast by Finnish state radio — not in Finnish, but in classical Latin.

Nobody knows exactly how many listeners the Latin program reaches. “Tens of thousands is my wild guess,” said Sami Koivisto, a reporter in the station’s news department. But it seems clear that the Internet is injecting new life into a language often described as dead.

No, there are no traffic reports from the Appian Way, nor does the station assign a political reporter to the Forum. But, on Friday evenings before the main news broadcast, the Finnish Broadcasting Company presents five or six short news stories in Latin. In recent weeks, the subjects have included the financial crisis in Cyprus, an unusually brilliant aurora borealis and the election of Pope Francis.

“There are no scoops,” Mr. Blanchard, 37, said recently, over coffee. “But it is a great way to hear the news.” A request to the French national broadcaster to do something similar, he said, failed to produce a response.

Not even Vatican Radio, which broadcasts some prayers each day in Latin, reports the news in the ancient tongue.

Tuomo Pekkanen, a retired professor of Latin who helped start “Nuntii Latini,” or “Latin News,” as the program is known, said the language is very much alive for him and for many educated Finns of his generation deeply influenced by Edwin Linkomies, his Latin professor at Helsinki University and prime minister during the difficult years of World War II. For them, Latin was a part of Finnish identity as well as of a sound education.

“In order to be educated,” said Mr. Pekkanen, 78, who is proficient in not only Latin but also ancient Greek and Sanskrit, “it was once said that a real humanist must write poetry in Latin and Greek.”

Mr. Pekkanen helped start the news program almost on a lark, then saw it steadily gain popularity. “Picking the subjects, that is the most difficult part of it,” said Mr. Pekkanen, who in his spare time has translated all 22,795 verses of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, into rhymed Latin verse. “One principle is that we don’t want to count the bodies of how many were killed in this or that country,” he said. “That is dull.”

It may be no coincidence that the broadcast began in 1989, the year Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and the Finns turned toward Western Europe. For educated Finns, Latin had long been the country’s link to Western culture, and they were required to study the language in school.

“It’s a brilliant idea,” said Jukka Ammondt, a university lecturer in English and German who dabbles in Latin and regularly tunes in to the broadcasts, even though he confesses that he cannot understand everything.

Mr. Ammondt, 68, has certainly done his part to promote Latin — and Finland. After a difficult divorce two decades ago, he turned increasingly to the songs of Elvis Presley, an idol of his youth, for consolation. For the fun of it, he began singing them in Latin. […]

… scroll down a bit for the latest edition; from this point on, all the ‘Nuntiis’ will appear as part of the regular Monday offerings at rogueclassicism (in the hopes that Latin teachers might incorporate them into their lessons)

Gamifying Latin Prose Comp

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

From the Old Gold & Black:

In a classroom where students battle away at mythological creatures and Latin grammar, Dr. Gellar-Goad has reinvigorated an out-dated course and brought new teaching methods with a twist of adventure.

In his first year as a Teacher-Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Classical Languages, Gellar-Goad has developed a unique and innovative method for teaching Latin Prose Composition, a class which is a major requirement for Latin majors. It is typically a course designed to be an intense review of Latin grammar and rigorous practice translating English sentences into Latin.

The original textbook used for the class contains material that is largely antiquated; the original publication of the book was in 1839. As Gellar-Goad pointed out, while not only is the subject matter very hard, the support in the text is not necessarily sufficient.

“This can lead to disengagement because the examples [in the textbook] don’t match the modern American experience of studying Latin,” said Gellar-Goad.

Last summer, he came upon a book called The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game by Lee Sheldon, which has inspired him to reimagine the way Latin Prose Composition is taught.

In the style of a classic tabletop roleplaying game (RPG), each student selects a character from Greek or Roman mythology at the beginning of the semester. Students then assume the roles of these player-characters and use them in class and for homework the rest of the year. The assignments include scribe spell-scrolls, side quests, dungeon maps, and more — all of which require the use of the appropriate Latin grammar.

“A typical class will consist of about half the class going over nitty-gritty grammar details — more of a traditional class format. The second half will then be an exercise on that day’s lesson or review tied to some in-game element.”

Grading in the class is also non-traditional. Instead of beginning with an A and only having the opportunity to lower their grade, students improve their grade by gaining experience points through assignments, homework, and projects.

“There is the extrinsic value of getting to the next level — which is tied to their grade — and the intrinsic value of learning Latin,” said Gellar-Goad.

Though it is only his first semester teaching the course, so far Gellar-Goad has seen encouraging student response. He finds that given room for creativity, students are able to find things which make them happy within the class material, a feature some might say is unusual of the typical course.

“The students do work extremely hard, but I feel like they don’t see it as drudgery; the improvement I have seen is amazing,” he said.

“I think we were all a little shocked the first day when we told that our class would be modeled off of Word of Warcraft and that we would all have to choose characters to role-play for the rest of the semester,” sophomore Sarah Stewart said.

“Professor Geller-Goad’s class is an experiment in 21st century pedagogy; a synthesis between technology and ancient works that makes students capable of grasping the most poignant and powerful messages of what would be highly exclusive materials,” sophomore Lee Quinn, a classics major, said.

“He teaches the students to develop a personal connection to the information,” Quinn said.

Gellar-Goad also said he is fairly certain this is the first time the course has ever been taught this way.

“It’s teaching Latin Prose Composition as a semester long mythological adventure for fun and profit,” he said.

… folks might remember Ted Gellar-Goad as one of the minds behind a lolcattish ‘Take Latin’ campaign last summer (e.g. Promoting Latin Internets Style:The Series I)