William Gardner Hale, The Art of Reading Latin: How To Teach It

At the outset, make the student feel that the Latin language was once an every-day tongue of men, women, and children; a tongue in which people not only wrote books, but dined, and played tennis; a language spoken, and understood as spoken. Direct him, therefore, to aim to associate meaning with the sound of the word, not merely with groups of letters on a page. Tell him, as he commits his vocabulary to memory, to lift his eye from the printed word, and repeat again and again, in imagination, the spoken word, so that when he hears it from his teacher, he will feel its force immediately.

Throughout the introductory lesson-book, conduct the translation of the review and of the advance at hearing, and, in the same way, have the student, his book being closed, put the printed English sentences into Latin as you deliver them to him. If you do this from the first, he will be able, by the time the lesson-book is finished, to express a sentence of considerable length in Latin, grasping it as a whole, instead of turning one word into Latin, and then another, and so on, in piecemeal fashion.

If you can get time for preparation, aim at repetition, making for your own use, in connection with each lesson in the book, a group of sentences which, employing the vocabulary already acquired, shall proceed from change to change with but a slight difference each time. A simple example of what I mean may be recalled from pp. 25-26.¹ In this matter, — the insisting upon the value of repetition, — the Sauveur method is quite right.

As the student learns one new use after another, say of the accusative, help him to get a clear and practically serviceable idea of the possibilities of range of one and another kind of word, as Caesarem, mille passuum, annum, multum.

In a similar way, help him to classify ideas that are expressed by verbal constructions, especially in subordinate clauses. Let him, for example, know with perfect familiarity what two kinds of adversative ideas exist in the nature of things, and by what mode these are respectively expressed in Latin (of the period which he is dealing with), and with what introductory particles. Let him know familiarly what two ideas one may have in mind in using an antequam-construction, a dum-construction, and so on, and how these ideas are expressed.

By the time he has finished the introductory book, he will in this way have made the intelligent acquaintance of very nearly all the constructions of the language, and should have them all in working order, like familiar tools.

When you come to Caesar, do not let your class make the first plunge alone, but for a number of days carry them through the advance yourself, avoiding translation on your own part as far as possible, reading the Latin to them in your very best and most helpful manner, and pointing out order and construction. Throughout the Caesar and Cicero (I should say precisely the same thing of the Anabasis) have the review of each day prepared to be translated at hearing. Encourage your students to learn to deliver the Latin well by appointing a promising reader, from time to time, to prepare himself in advance to read the review to the class in your stead. Let him stand at your side with his eye upon his fellow-students; and as he finishes a sentence, or such part of a sentence as shall be best to give in a lump, do you yourself name the student who shall translate.

Be sure that you constantly treat constructions as means of expressing certain ideas, not as mere exemplifications of rules. And, to enforce this view, as well as for many other reasons, watch constantly the development of ideas in dealing with sentences which your students have not seen before, and, in your questioning for written answers, or for viva voce answers, call attention to point after point in the gradual unfolding of the meaning, demanding all the time what I have elsewhere called "anticipatory parsing." And have a good deal of memorizing and reciting of these selected passages.

Aim to go a little beyond the lesson every day, having your class read on, not at sight, but at hearing, this additional ground being understood to form a part of the review at the next meeting.

The disadvantage of reading on at sight is twofold. The student is too apt to look ahead while some one else is up, preparing himself to make a good showing if he is called upon. And even if he does not do this, he is too ready to run his eye to and fro in the sentence, not really accepting the Latin order, but doing a more or less clever piece of patchwork. It often happens to me, in dealing with students who have been well practised in sight-reading before coming to the University, to read aloud a sentence containing only familiar words, every one of which they catch as it is delivered, yet fail to get any meaning from the sentence as a whole; and I commonly find that, if I will at once put the sentence in the very same words, but in the English order, they will comprehend it instantly and without difficulty. That experience proves that one may do a deal of sight-reading, yet never come to know the Latin order in any practical way.²

Finally, no day should pass without composition. The writing of Latin is one of the most dreary of intellectual occupations, or one of the most delightful. Pretty uniformly it is the former for a boy who has not written a Latin sentence from the time he finished his elementary book and began his Caesar till, only a few months before going to college, he took up his special book in composition for the bare purpose of preparing for the examination in that subject. The object of writing Latin in the preparatory schools is not to get one's self ready to pass an examination, but to get one's self ready to read Latin; and if that aim be intelligently pursued, the examination in writing Latin will take care of itself. The pursuit, however, should be incessant. Every day a number of sentences based upon the author in use at the time should be written by various members of the class, sent to the board for the purpose. Time can easily be obtained by having the writing going on while the class is reciting upon the review; after which, corrections should be called for from the class in general.

Throughout the work of the preparatory school, the teacher should insist upon it that what the pupil is primarily aiming at is to learn to read in a great literature, with as slight a barrier as possible between him and his author; and he should make himself regard cases, modes, and tenses, and make his students regard them, as keys to the literature, as direct conveyors of thought from mind to mind. How the last may most effectively and rapidly be done, I have tried to show. This is all that strictly falls within the scope of the present pamphlet. But I cannot forbear to add that the teacher who is conducting a class through Caesar, or Cicero, or Virgil, should never lose sight of the fact that his work is not wholly preparatory, — that he is already dealing with a great literature. The more he can make his students see that it is a great literature, through the virtue of his own enjoyment of it, and, in particular, through the power with which he can read it to them in the Latin, and the power with which he can train them to read it themselves, the easier will be his task, and the richer its palpable rewards; and the greater will be his contribution to the sum total of the classical education.

This brings us to the university, with its manifold aims, — the study of the literature and of the history of its development, the comparative study of the forms and the syntax, the study of ancient history from the sources, the study of ancient life, of ancient art, etc. All these various pursuits, however, rest ultimately mainly upon the power to read Latin with ease and speed.