Commentary on Student Work
Robert Patrick, PhD
The following commentary accompanies the five examples of student work produced by my students in
my Latin classrooms. I have selected work samples that are typical of the work that my students do
routinely and will reference them by their titles: Amicus Aptus, Cinquain, Isis and Osiris, Timed Write,
and Story Rough Draft. I use the Standards as the organizing principle of my commentary. I will,
however, give a contextual description for each of the samples.
Amicus Aptus
Students created this word art at the beginning of a Latin 2, mid-year unit in which the word aptus
(suitable) appeared. In discovering that students were having difficulty with it in part because they did
not really understand what “suitable” meant, I took a diversion by having them explore, for several days,
all the qualities that a suitable friend would have. The explored qualities and synonyms in L2, developed
larger vocabularies, and began to compare and contrast notions of friendship. At the end of this
segment of our work, I ask them to form all their collected Latin words into word art forming the shape
of something that represented all of their newly acquired vocabulary.
Cinquain
After the Winter Holiday break, I wanted to bring my Latin 1 students back into their Latin brains easily
but with some fun. I asked them to help me create a word wall of the 100 most important Latin words
from first semester, which they did. Then, I taught them how to write a cinquain poem and required
them to work with a partner to create a Latin cinquain using primarily words from the wall. Requiring
that the fifth line include a surprise or twist which had to be illustrated really kept this interesting and
fun while really reviewing the most important words of the previous semester-without ever using the
word “review.”
Isis and Osiris
At the end of a rather lengthy but intense unit in Latin 2, set in the context of ancient Alexandria where
a major character is a devotee of the goddess Isis, I asked students to research the stories of Isis and
Osiris. Then, in small groups, students considered what they had found out. They were assigned to tell
the story of Isis and Osiris in 6 frames of a cartoon with absolutely no words allowed. They grappled
with variations in story traditions, how to communicate in pictures and art, and some of the common
difficulties of translating across languages and cultures.
Timed Write
I routinely give my students at all levels timed writes after we have completed readings in a unit of work,
however I define that unit. The timed write consists of blank paper and a set time (usually 20 minutes)
in which they write as much as they can in Latin about what we have been reading. Usually, this is about
a story. In this example, Latin 2 students who read and discuss in Latin a Brevissima, a short proverb,
wrote for 20 minutes. Since there was no story to tell, they created some story aspects by giving
examples of what they thought the proverb meant. They found this much more challenging than writing
about a story, but many wrote more on this occasion than ever before.
Story Rough Draft
Latin 2 students, working in pairs, were charged with a year-end story project of writing a story that had
a) 2 or more characters who b) went to a location, encountered a problem and resolved it. c) The
resolution tookthem to a second location. d) At that point in their writing, they were to show their work
to another set of partners and get their advice on the story thus far. e) Finally, using the advice they
were to end the story with a surprise ending. The story had to be illustrated with their own original art,
and it had to be aimed at students in a Latin 1 class. This sample was a mid-project rough draft of what
they had so far so that I could give some direction and assess whether what I had conceived of was
working. I found that I had to make some adjustments.
Communication
Communication is necessarily the most important of the five Standards in my classroom. Succinctly put,
it is my job to deliver comprehensible input in Latin every day to all of my students at their level of
study. I understand clearly that students provided with comprehensible input will begin to understand
and will be able to indicate understanding long before they can produce much in the target language.
As students make progress, so does their production in speaking and writing, but early on, the burden is
on me, the teacher, to provide comprehensible Latin to them in my speaking and in the things that I
choose for them to read. As a result, drawing predominates in much of our work together.
In Amicus Aptus, second year students were engaged in the question of “what is a suitable friend to
you—quis est tibi amicus aptus?” I helped them explore all of the descriptors that they might use to
describe a suitable friend doing this in Latin. At this level, our communication was interpersonal. We
did this using adjectives, phrases and relative clauses, both with vocabulary that they already knew and
with words that they wanted to use. This necessarily required me to provide them with new vocabulary,
including many synonyms in Latin for “amicus”, and to use this new vocabulary with them in
understandable ways with much repetition in order to acquire the new words. As each student worked
on his/her descriptions of a suitable friend, the work became more interpretive not only of friendship,
but necessarily of themselves. After exploring this theme, they were assigned to create word art
depicting all of the words, phrases and clauses they would personally use to describe their suitable
friend, but shaped in a way that expressed how they felt about this kind of friendship. The several days
that we spent discussing the suitable friend raised questions from them about the difference it would
make if the friend were male or female and how best to express that, all questions of interpretive
communication. This word art became a presentational communication task as students used the end
products with partners and then before the whole class to describe what a “suitable friend” meant to
them.
I spent the first two days back from the Winter Holidays engaging Latin 1 students in Latin conversation
using the words on our Word Wall. Our interpersonal conversation was simple, focused on using these
words, and primarily about them. They were then invited to write a 5 line Cinquain using those 100
most important words, primarily. The pattern involved a noun, two adjectives describing the noun,
three verbs that the noun does, a descriptive four word sentence about the noun, and a five word
sentence that introduced an element of surprise about the noun. The students who wrote this cinquain
decided early on to exploit the implications of gender: a gladiator is implicitly a man, but their twist was
that this one was a “femina pulchra”, a beautiful woman, as their drawing depicts. The day of writing
and drawing raised questions for the students about adjectives and their agreement with nouns, noun
verb agreement, and how using the flexible word order of Latin allowed them to keep the surprise for
the end, a feature of some classical Latin epitaphs in poetry. While their surprise endings engaged them
largely in interpretive communication, these language features allowed me to introduce the
presentational element by showing them how Latin authors of various times created these effects.
The Timed Write and the Story Rough Draft samples both provide exciting examples of student
language production. Latin 2 students are introduced to a Brevissima each Monday—a
short proverb using common vocabulary followed by two explanatory Latin sentences. Each Brevissima
is shown on a poster that illustrates its meaning. We spend time daily, warming up, discussing via
comprehensible input, what the proverb says, what it means and searching for modern examples of this
proverb. In just a little time, communication transitions from interpersonal, to interpretive to
presentational. At the end of the week, the students are given 20 minutes to write as much as they can
about the meaning of the proverb. This is rather challenging writing because they find that the only
“story” involved is the one they bring to it. This particular student wrote 174 words about a 3 word
proverb. Her work not only made heavy use of the vocabulary that we had employed all week, but she
became witty in poking fun at herself—that reading is not enough, that she must stay awake in class and
engage the classroom activities if she wants to learn well. She seized on her propensity to daydream in
class and used it as a joke to respond to the proverb—all in Latin, written by herself within 20 minutes.
This is one of the most exciting aspects of making communication via comprehensible input in the target
language the centerpiece of what I do. Latin students not only gain ability to read what the ancients’
wrote, but they gain increasing ability for self-expression in this second language.
The story project Rough Draft turned in mid-project indicated to me what I am learning always to be
true: students’ ability at productions develops along different time lines. Some partners needed only a
little direction from me. In this sample, the students had a good start, but their story was moving too
fast and leaving out detail, which I indicated for them to work on. Other students were really struggling
to create this basic story, so I offered two alternatives: a) draw 4-8 stick figure cartoons that tell the
story all by themselves, no words. Then, write 2-3 Latin sentence captions under each picture. b) Using
Google Creative Commons, choose 4 photos along a theme that suggest a story and write 5-6 sentences
under each that define the story. These options put those students in a place to produce what they were
capable of and still be “in the business” of story telling. At the beginning of the project, I gave all
students a copy of the SWELL rubric (developed by and used in our district for writing assessments) so
that they would know from the beginning how I would assess their story.
In this particular rough draft, the students would have received 3.5 and above on all elements except
mechanics, and so I aimed my feedback in that direction. Their revisions began the next day to flesh out
the details of the story. The writing ability of these two students allowed them to do that with relative
ease. I created the two alternate options for students (about a third in each class) who would have
received lower than 3 in each category. The new options gave them a way of writing that demonstrated
their ability in their current state of development within the language.
While the Isis and Osiris sample actually involves no written language, I consider it an important
exercise in interpretive and presentational communication. Latin 2 students, while reading stories that
were situated in ancient Roman Egypt, did their own research on the cult of Isis and Osiris. In small
groups, they were to take their research (including competing versions of the story) and depict the story
of these Egyptian deities entirely in picture with no words at all. They had a total of 6 frames to convey
the story. On the following day, students discussed which set of drawings had done the best job,
including some intense debates about how certain details were communicated through a medium other
than language. My goal was for them to not only learn about the Egyptian deities, but to discover how
to translate ideas rather than just words.
Cultures and Comparisons
The Isis and Osiris work invited several issues of culture into our classroom. The story of Osiris is in
many respects a story similar to that of Jesus with which many of my students are familiar. Both stories
are cultural products. Students also discovered that there were different versions of the story, and that
required us to ask how different versions of the same story might serve different audiences: a strictly
Egyptian audience, a Roman or Greek audience influenced by the Egyptians, and an early Christian
Roman audience living in proximity to a temple of Isis. These varying versions represented and spoke to
varying cultural perspectives within religious groups in the area of the Mediterranean. That the missing
phallus of Osiris could be of religious import and not just “gross” became a significant item of discussion
about this relationship between product and perspective! The inter-cultural comparisons even raised
questions about the fact that the Jesus stories have different versions and that these also represent
varying perspectives within a larger Christian context.
The student who did the Amicus Aptus work is a young woman of Indian and Hindu background. She is
skilled in the work of Henna hand tattooing, a practice common in her family’s culture. This clearly
showed up in her word art. Each student who did this assignment expressed his/her own personal
understanding and perspectives in the idea of friendship, but it also required us to talk about the
implications of certain Latin words and the comparisons and contrasts in ancient Roman perspectives on
friendship and modern American perspectives. Within modern America, in fact, within our own
classroom, students found that their perspectives and practices of friendship were affected by their
family’s ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds. This Hindu young woman learned this art and
developed a sense of friendships with women and girls gathered around weddings. Other students
identified church youth groups, Scouting, and cheerleading as the groups that helped them form ideas
of friendship.
Prior to the Timed Write, my students found the proverbial idea, legisse parum est, “to have read is not
enough”, a strange idea. Here was a teacher suggesting that reading was not enough. We compared
that to other messages that they receive within and outside of the school culture. One of the short
explanatory notes indicates that what one reads is to be filled out by (literal meaning) one’s “virtues”.
We discussed how a modern notion of virtue is frequently limited to opinions and beliefs but that the
classical Roman idea of virtue required action. This was an important place to tie cultural perspective to
culturally supported practices. With a series of examples, largely in L2 conversation, we began to
explore what it would be like to hire a chef who had only read a cookbook; an auto mechanic who had
only read a mechanic’s guide; a surgeon who had only read an introduction to basic surgery. We
acknowledged that there is an academic culture that does not always include the culture of practice, but
that clearly, it is not enough to read. Overall, the students found this timed write more challenging than
writing about a story with characters and an interesting plot. But, all of their writings, like this one,
included multiple examples of what would go wrong in the world if all we did was read.
The Cinquain, as I note below, allowed some inter-lingual comparisons. Because the cinquain requires
few and focused word choices, students began to see comparisons of meaning between Latin words and
some English words which they knew they had heard before but which had not become meaningful to
them. In a real sense, learning some Latin words meaningfully such as “pulcher” led to a newly
meaningful word in English.
Connections
When I introduced students to writing the Cinquain, I was hoping that they had encountered this kind of
simple poetry writing before. I was not disappointed. At least half of my students had written cinquains
multiple times before in both language arts and social sciences courses. For those students, I was not
asking them to do something new and strange, but at least a little familiar. As they began working on
their surprise endings, these girls that created the cinquain about the Gladiator recalled a story that we
had read about a gladiator in which it was not revealed until the end that he was a ghost. They
obviously took inspiration from that other story, but as the week progressed, beyond the cinquain
writing, several of these Latin 1 students began to bring in short Latin quotations that they were finding
in other books written by J.K. Rowling and Rick Riordan. They noticed that selective use of Latin phrases
and quotations, and the fact that they understood most of them, made the stories that much more
interesting to them, and these are books that they are choosing to read. The Cinquain work helped
clarify that well chosen, specifically ordered words can have an impact, and some of these students are
beginning to see that Latin words and phrases have been used that way for centuries. The simple
Cinquain project which was designed to review important vocabulary has begun to help make
connections outside of the classroom.
Interestingly, I find that the Isis and Osiris work helps students to make connections in the fields of
religion and entertainment as well. As I mentioned above, student driven research yielded more than
one version of a religious story, both in Egyptian religion, and by their comparison, in Christianity (a
phenomenon that I happen to know repeats in most world religions). Students immediately wanted to
know “which one is the right one.” This question naturally led into a discussion of the plurality of
human experience and knowledge. Is it a bad thing for religion, the arts, language and philosophy to
point to more than one way of understanding something? Likewise, we were able to discuss how books
and movies based on those books vary, how remakes of the same books vary, and how one situation
comedy seems to appeal to different age groups in contrasting ways.
In a rather back-door approach, I found that the discussion of the Brevissima, as depicted in the TimedWrite drew into a discussion of philosophy students who otherwise would shun such a discussion.
Several of the athletes in my classes knew immediately why it was not enough to have read a book. The
“daydreamer” who wrote this timed write recognized some behaviors that plagued her in several other
classes as we discussed why reading is not all that it takes to have a successful life. Working with the
Brevissima and discussions leading up to the timed writes has convinced me that this is one significant
way to reach beyond the classroom, through Latin, to make connections with the larger world and, quite
honestly, with their own lives which are much larger than any of our classrooms.
Communities
The simplicity of the Cinquain work has been striking for what it produced. As mentioned above, my
goal was to review most common vocabulary after a holiday. However, the focused nature of the
cinquain and its requirements also allowed students to stay with Latin words. They began to ask about
these common words and their English derivatives: is ferox where we get ferocious? Is pulchritude
actually a word? I had told them these things before, but the slowed, focused work of the cinquain
allowed these to become their own connections within their own small learning communities and, quite
frankly, make Latin a little more relevant to their lives.
It has been my experience that students who take Latin all four years go on to continue language study
beyond high school, some in Latin, but most in one language or another. As my work with
comprehensible input has increased, so have the number of students who stay in Latin for the full four
years. When they leave, they have had positive enough experiences with language that they wish to
continue. A project like the one involved in the Story Rough Draft creates student interest in what they
are creating, and it forges a connection between learning communities within our program. These
Latin2 students take great pride in the fact that their stories will become fun for their younger peers
next year just like the Latin 2 and 3 students look forward to our Carlos Museum project (see video
below and teacher reflections 1 and 2) as something that they will receive and then produce. These are
small examples of micro-communities, but I am convinced that this is how young people become
conscious of community and their engagement in it.
While my evidence is only anecdotal, I am convinced that the redirection of my Latin teaching career by
the National Standards (first encountered in mid 1990’s) has enabled me to become a World Language
teacher and to create learning environments that make language acquisition possible and interesting. I
currently have two former students studying at West Point as language majors (one in Spanish and one
in Arabic). Each has visited with me to tell me that their work in Latin in the way that we did it
(comprehensible input and communicative approaches) convinced them to keep studying language.
Another former student is finishing his degree in linguistics and is currently studying his twelfth
language. A half dozen others are scattered at various universities currently having decided to take one
more Latin course. If history is an indicator, I expect several of those to keep taking Latin and declare a
major. I am glad, of course, when any student decides to continue with additional Latin study, but I am
most passionate that they all first have a positive experience acquiring some levels of proficiency in a
second language which is an excellent invitation to studying languages in the future.