by Aldus Marius on Wed Aug 06, 2003 2:32 am
Ahem.
Everyone seems to have agreed that while a kid wanting to learn Latin makes a cute picture, the likelihood of its occurance lags somewhat behind the likelihood of spotting a purple Pegasus winging its way across the Moon. As one who has actually taught Latin to several homeless children and troubled youths, I have to take issue with that assumption.
The way it happened for me was simply this: I had just fetched up at a homeless shelter, and immediately came down with the serious respiratory illness that I'd never found time for before, being too busy surviving. So on my first full day at the shelter, I sat on a bench at a table with a shawl around me, assembling miniature Roman soldiers--I never went anywhere without my Legion, and some of the troops had suffered in transit.
As I filed and shaped and epoxied, any number of shelter kids came up to me and asked what I was doing. So I explained about the soldiers, about the Romans, about being a Roman, and many related topics, as many as we had time for. By the end of this little colloquium, no less than six kids, ages 8 to 12, asked me to teach them "everything about the Romans." Parental permissions had to be secured, of course, and refusals cut my class in half; but of the remaining three, one also expressed the desire to learn Latin, he having heard plenty of it from me at our first meeting.
I will point you to the Contributions section of this very Collegium, which contains the materials I developed for David. His parents and I agreed that I would help him with his schoolwork, leaving Latin for dessert. We exchanged Latin greetings every day; and one day he asked me to take him to the Library so he could check out his own Latin dictionary and other Roman-related materials. By this time we were all out of the shelter; David's folks had gotten a small house, and guess who got the spare bedroom?? (Nothing lights a fire under the growth of your Romanitas quite like living with a Roman!) [feg]( = Fiendish Evil Grin)
The 'boy' (now 22) still retains a deep love for the ancient world, speaks as much Latin as I do, and until recently was sending me little 'guess-what' translation tests in the mail.
My other favorite disciple was an ex-gang member named Daniel. My sister got him off the streets, out of the gang and into her church environment; my task was to help him get caught up with his schoolwork, as he had a strong desire to graduate with his class even after missing five semesters. This ended up working the same way as David's deal, except that Daniel's brother and sister got in on the act too! We worked Romans, we played Romans, we did Latin as a treat, we made up clever alphabet games ("Aurelius Began Canning Dried Eggplant..."), and we covered our homemade skateboard ramp with spray-painted Roman-style graffiti, Marvin the Martian and the SK8-Ball. Those were good days. Daniel's family were the first to see me in my Legionary armor, and David's the second... Unfortunately, Daniel's family broke up, and I never could find out for sure whether he wound up in Florida with his mom or Oregon with his dad. I still have a Pog shaped like the SK8-Ball that I'm saving for if I ever see him again.
The common threads with these kids learning Latin were that they were first attracted to the Roman in their midst (rather like the 'circles' I once wrote about when we were discussing recruiting on the Topica Lists), and from this stemmed the desire to learn Latin. In all cases learning Latin was the kid's idea. It was treated as a privilege, something to be done for pleasure after all required homework had been seen to. Kids also like having a secret language known only to themselves and their friends. And in many cases--this may well have been my most significant and lasting contribution--it was the first time the child had learned anything strictly for fun in his or her life.
Think about it. For so much of our lives we are under pressure to learn something useful, something practical, something that will enable us to 'get ahead' in life. Much creative and exploratory activity is dismissed as mere woolgathering. Even my sister, when she understood that I was going to be teaching Daniel's family Latin on top of everything else, stormed at me: "Who the hell are they going to talk to, a Priest??" This kind of thinking, so pervasive in the world, is the enemy of a well-rounded education, and through that, a balanced life.
If, through 'useless' Latin, a child can be taught to wonder; to want to study; to use the Library and other resources on his own; to follow his curiosity just as far as he wishes; to look into another world, and find a bit of himself there...why, who's to say that these things are useless, or that the thing that transmits them is dead?
In amicitia et fide,
Aldus Marius Peregrinus.