Friday, September 04, 2009

Teaching Latin Efficiently

Thomas M. Hayes shares a fascinating article on his wiki, Ut Discamus Omnes, entitled "Skinning the Latin Cat." This is a fascinating discussion regarding the two concepts of "disambiguation" and "economy" in teaching Latin morphology, which is a very fancy way of saying "Which endings do we concentrate most of our energy teaching to our students so that they can read and understand Latin efficiently and quickly?" Hayes compares the huge collection of grammatical endings in Latin to a big hardware store full of tools, some that are more likely to be used than others. It's a fascinating article and he discusses some experimentation he has done in the classroom as well as the ramifications of an approach that considers the "bottom line" when teaching forms.