Perhaps no other field in academia is as prone to self-delusion as Latin, with teachers at every level tempted to swell enrollments by making it a feel-good course. My favorite example comes from a recent student who had come to Northwestern from a public school in Michigan: ‘‘I loved my Latin teacher. He was the best teacher I had in four years, but I didn’t learn a darn thing from him.’’ Pressures for mediocrity in college Latin teaching are not as murderous as in high school, though it is still true that serving up lashings of good feeling in return for driblets of actual learning is a proven technique for becoming the Beloved Professor. If, on the other hand, you are willing to endure some hard looks and whiny course evaluations consequent upon your hard work and tough grading, you will bring high quality students into your program. They will develop a lasting determination to prove themselves, as well as high literacy and other mental powers. Good quality instruction attracts more and better classics majors than flabby courses with low standards.
In the initial years of language instruction, it is axiomatic that reality checks should be frequent, at least weekly. Without spending too much class time in testing, it should be possible to devote 15-20 minutes a week to quizzes, the fewer surprises the better, along the following lines:
• a few syntax questions, always with a standard, unvarying protocol for answers;
• a translation or two of short sentences or clauses;
• questions that ask the student to place a few words from a recently studied lyric in their context, or ask who is being addressed, etc.; such questions reward familiarity with the poems assigned;
• a few lines of scansion.
• a question or two about a specific rhetorical or literary device; these may be more or less technical, or they may ask what makes some lines funny, ironic, or typically Catullan.
Such tests should reward students for knowing terms of art such as adversative asyndeton, hyperbaton, syncope, rhetorical color, and the like that apply to literary techniques often seen in the Carmina. Scoring should be as objective, consistent, and transparent as you can make it and should be described in terms of rewards instead of penalties, e. g., ‘‘You had 45 opportunities to earn a top score of 40 points on this quiz.’’ Of course, this is double talk but it creates a flexibility and assures the class we do not expect perfection. Do not be offended if a mercenary student asks how many points a certain question was worth, or if somebody makes a wild guess. In fact, you should encourage such enterprise as a creative alternative to leaving an answer blank. You will learn more from wrong answers in some cases than you will from right ones. Wrong answers will tell you what you can be teaching better.
To maintain morale and a positive attitude to redemption, consider basing your quiz average in the course on the best 80 percent or so of all grades received, including tests not taken. This provides leeway for illness, family emergencies, bad hair days, oversleeping, and hangovers. If a student in your class asks to be excused from a quiz for any reason, you can then answer ‘‘Of course! You are automatically excused from any two quizzes in this course whether or not you actually take them.’’ My experience with this policy over the last 39 years is that it all but eliminates absences from quizzes, just as frequent testing all but eliminates cutting of other class meetings.
World History
