Yesterday, I received the results of the National Latin Exam, which many of my students took ominously on the Ides of March. Last year, nearly 140,000 students took the exam, and while the teacher at my school failed to administer the 2017 exam to students, I was keen to provide them with an opportunity to showcase their Latin abilities on a well-known standardized test by which to measure their success in Latin hitherto. Truth be told, I was worried—terribly worried—that the vast majority of my students who chose to take the exam would perform much poorer than their peers across the country. My fears, however, were evidently unfounded, since thirteen out of the twenty-three students who took the exam (of my thirty-nine students total; the exam was optional, due to cost concerns) earned some kind of distinction for their test scores, which varied from certificates of merit to the Gold Summa Cum Laude award for exceptional achievement.
Obviously, each student’s success is first and foremost her or his own, and I probably had little to do with it. Sure, we practiced for the test in class for about a week prior to the exam date, yet I have not consulted the National Latin Exam curriculum periodically over the course of this year and, frankly, knew little about it before January, when I realized I needed to order exams for my students (in fact, I never took the National Latin Exam, since I first took Latin at university). On the other hand, however, I beamed with pride as I opened the exam results just before my intermediate Latin class started, elated at my students’ performance. While I was unselfishly happy for their successes, I nevertheless felt affirmed and validated. Even if most of my students’ Latin education has come from other instructors before my time, at the very least I have not irrevocably hampered their ability to comprehend Latin and to answer multiple-choice questions about Latin texts. At the very best, I have honed their skills first cultivated under another teacher, and I may have even helped them acquire new ones. Finally, in the case of my Latin I students, I have, it seems, satisfactorily introduced them to the fundamental components of Latin, Roman culture, and Greco-Roman myth.
Not that I deserve too much credit. As I meet and speak with Latin educators from schools in my area, I am reminded constantly of my own limitations and weaknesses as a Latin teacher. On a personal note, I am nowhere near the fluency level that I think a truly successful Latin teacher needs to achieve, and I still find myself stretched too thin between six classes and a varsity athletic team to find the time needed to reflect on my instructional methods and improve them. As I look toward the end of the academic term, I seek to do well what I have done fairly well over the course of this year, rather than to introduce radically new approaches in my classes. Nevertheless, I continue to work with my Latin III students on the Latin novella Cloelia, keenly aware of the vast body of academic research that supports the efficacy of story-based instruction and comprehensible input. While I am poorly trained in both these areas, I continue to learn on the spot, as it were, in the last weeks of this chaotic and transformative professional experience.
The Classical Examiner 