THE ACTIVE CLASSROOM

Need to add some zip to your Latin class? Matt Panciera offers some tips in a paper originally presented at the Meetting of the Southern Section of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. Our second article finds Nancy Sultan joining forces with the Theatre Department in a recreation of a choral moment from Greek tragedy. Feel free to contact either for more information -- and think about sharing your own experiences in a future issue of these pages.

Matt Panciera, Gustavus Adolphus College
Playing Games in Beginning Latin

Learning Latin is hard work. And much of that work, even in the early stages, involves explanation and exercises of the grammar and student translation of Latin passages. There is no getting around this – it is true even with a book like the Oxford Latin Course which, despite its interest in some of the methodologies of modern foreign language teaching, still requires a firm grasp of endings, a secure knowledge of vocabulary, and a good bit of daily translation from Latin into English.

As a graduate student at the University of North Carolina I was trained to teach Latin by Cecil Wooten. Cecil has always had a keen interest in modern languages and he frequently adopted methods from them. He did an excellent job in showing us how to vary our approach in explaining the material and testing the students’ comprehension. For example, he has always been an advocate for using the spoken language in the introductory levels of Latin. Unfortunately, last fall, at Gustavus Adolphus College where I now teach, none of the old tricks were working.
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Nancy Sultan, Illinois Wesleyan University
IWU Classics Collaborates with Theatre to Produce a Greek Chorus

Last year, my colleague in the School of Theatre Arts, Sara Freeman, and I discovered that we were both planning to teach Greek drama in the Fall of 2004. We thought it would be fun to collaborate on a hands-on project that would benefit both our classes ("Theatre History I" and "Greek Comedy and Tragedy"). We decided to workshop a Greek chorus together, and we enlisted the help of Curtis Trout, head of scenic design, who happened to be teaching a course on "Props." The project took several weeks to plan and five weeks of the semester to complete. Little did we realize that we would create something so meaningful and rewarding, not only for our students, but for ourselves.

The idea was to create an immersion experience during which the students would learn the technical, artistic and intellectual aspects of producing and performing a Greek chorus. We chose the "Binding Song" of the Furies from Aeschylus' Eumenides, and divided the students into three work groups. Each group was assigned the task of researching and creating either costumes, music, or properties, and were given lines to memorize.
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