Marisa Alimento (Crossroads Middle School)
Latin is required for 7th- and 8th-grade students at X School, where I teach. However,
this year, the administration has questioned the value of this requirement. My main argument is that the school provides equal access to Latin for all students, not just the economically privileged or “gifted and talented”, and that all students are able to experience success. X School is a private, independent school that prides itself on increasing its ethnic and socio-economic diversity each year. Our Middle School Latin department differentiates the curriculum so that students choose their own challenges, supports struggling students, and strives for all students to see themselves represented in the curriculum. While we use the Cambridge Latin Course with its narrative driven by enslaved persons, we invite students to challenge representations and characterizations within the stories they read. We recognize different learning styles among our students and offer multiple modes to learn the language, including scaffolding for note-taking and reading, chanting, singing, using hand gestures to teach grammar. Likewise, we employ alternative assessments and reassessments to demonstrate mastery. Students complete multimedia projects about mythology, literature in translation, culture, and history and demonstrate skills outside of language learning, thereby finding another route to success, whether or not it is language-related. Studying the historical or mythological characters highlights their attributes as well as their faults, which cannot be ignored. This year, we also considered accessibility to technology and other materials--computers, wifi, printers, books, etc. Finally, we acknowledge that high scores alone do not define excellence; therefore, the Honors designation in Latin has been accessible to all students who engage fully in the class and show rigorous dedication to their own edification.