Robert Patrick (Parkview High School)
Teaching high school Latin during the pandemic offers us a liminal space in which to consider three worlds: the worlds of what we did, why and how we did it in the Latin classroom before, during and after the pandemic. I will offer those reflections based on the experience and collaboration of our seven person Latin team in our 3200-student public high school. While acknowledging varied experiences, viewing the pandemic in this way offers teachers a way of reflecting on educational adversity. Reflection on a rare set of events filled with fear, confusion, deep frustration at school system leadership as well as the grief encountered can yield for us a powerful opportunity to rebirth our teaching and learning.
Prior to the pandemic, the world that we taught in included a large program (800 students, 6 teachers as well as one middle school teacher who worked with 300 students over the course of a year) that was entirely dedicated to teaching with the principles of Comprehensible Input (Patrick, 2019). This approach depended heavily upon teacher-student interaction, teacher speaking and providing compelling stories to students in Latin that is entirely comprehensible to everyone. It requires a set of skills for quickly identifying where understanding has failed and supplying low stress responses and activities to remedy that. We use no textbook (Ash, 2019).
The year of teaching during the pandemic was initially deeply frustrated by a school system leadership that really could not have known the best way to approach teaching and learning during a pandemic. We eventually taught “concurrently,” meaning both in person and online students at the same time. Leadership, in practice, only has a glimpse of what teachers do on a day-to-day basis, and if that was true before pandemic, it was especially true during pandemic. I will outline, briefly, the various strategies that our system required to help us prepare and move through the pandemic and those that we in the classroom (virtual and in person) developed out of necessity.
As we emerge from the pandemic, we have discovered that several fixtures within our program that were already cutting edge both for Latin teaching and for our school system served our students and teachers well. I will detail some aspects of Comprehensible Input, working with the needs of special education students (Donovan, 2019), and the practice of standards-based grading (Wilcox, 2011) that we experienced as if made for pandemic realities. I will then detail some practices and insights that emerged only because of the pandemic that we must consider new requirements in our classrooms post-pandemic. These include at least the following: a detailed and frequent routine for making contact with missing students; recording and posting on school platforms core weekly lessons for those missing (McGinnis, 2020), sick, hospitalized or otherwise detained from attending class; and a complete re-evaluation of what assessments look like, what materials students should have access to while demonstrating their progress, and how teachers think of and measure that success.