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What are YOU doing? If YOU have a "Best Practice" that you would like to share please send it to vu7@marshall.edu
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 Dr. Christina Franzen is an enthusiastic professor in the Classics Department. She became WAC certified in 2009 and is now an active member of the WAC community. To engage her Greek and Latin students in their ancient texts, she uses a modified versions of double-sided journals. |
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Best Practices Archives Dr. Karen Mitchell-Concept Maps Dr. Donna Sullivan -Journaling
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Using WAC practices in upper level Ancient Greek and Latin
In my 400 level Greek and Latin classes, we do not speak the
languages; rather we read ancient authors such as Cicero, Sallust,
Tacitus, Euripides, Lysias and Aeschylus and discuss the literature With the help of Shirley Lumpkin and a few others at the WAC workshop, I came up with a version of the “double-sided journal.” Instead of having two columns on the worksheet, I made it four columns labeled as such from left to right: 1. Latin or Greek Text I required the students to make at least three observations in columns 2 and 4 and to give reasons why they chose to translate the sentence as they did. After completing their first 4 column worksheet, the students complained that the worksheet took too long to complete or that it was too difficult. I told them that they were out of luck and they had to continue to do the worksheet until they decided to prepare every homework assignment as if they were doing the worksheet. Despite the complaints, the result was remarkable! The first day back to class, I couldn’t believe how engaged the kids were in the literature. They all translated about 100 times better than the class period before, and class discussion was phenomenal. I truly almost cried tears of joy. The worksheet indeed forced the students to engage at a very deep level with the text and to more fully understand the language, context and occasion of the literature. As a teacher, this is perhaps the most valuable tool I have ever come up with.
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within its social, historical and poetic contexts. I found that my
students were preparing their readings very poorly by just looking
up words and cursorily going over the passages. As a result, class
was a complete disaster: we would only get through a few lines and
class discussion was horrible, because the students were not reading
and engaging in the literature.