Specimens of papers
In giving in this way details of the system on which my own work is
conducted, I do not feel that I owe an apology. One who proposes
a method must have a very solid basis for his proposal. This basis
must be an experience of the efficacy of that which he is urging;
and this experience should be given with the greatest clearness and definiteness.
It is to be wished, indeed, that teachers of a given subject throughout
the country, in colleges and schools, might regard themselves as forming
one body with a common purpose, and that a constant interchange of experience
and opinion might go on among them, alike in matters of investigation and
matters of pedagogy.
It should be remembered that the papers printed below were used, early
in the Freshman year, with students who had prepared for college upon the
familiar and thoroughly un-Roman system. If students were prepared
upon the right method, not one in ten of the questions here indicated would
need to be asked, and the exercise of translating at hearing would be a
rapid and attractive affair.
These papers were given to the Freshman class in succession, at intervals
of a week, in the autumn of 1885; at which time the work of the other
recitations of the week was in Livy. The constant aim — and the class
were so informed — was to find for these papers, as given week after week,
passages which would demand of them a practical power of handling constructions
which had been discussed in the other exercises of the week, so that their
progress should be one of constant acquisition without loss; and
it was promised them that in this way they should in a short time possess
a ready and
available familiarity with all the commonly recurring
constructions of the language. I further told them that, since I
should not give them at these exercises in translation the meaning of any
word which they had ever seen before, they had a very strong reason for
laying up for themselves a vocabulary through securing in their memory
every Latin word occurring in their daily work, and a very strong reason
for paying extremely careful attention, both at and after the other recitations
of the week, to any explanations of meaning of this or that word, alone,
or in connection with others related to it in meaning (e.g. to
alius,
in connection with
alter and
ceteri), which might similarly
be given to them at the ordinary recitations. Nor was I content with
this; for, in order that there might be no escape, I prepared a partial
syllabus of definable points emphasized in the work of the term;
and one of these was purchased, from the office that printed it, by each
student in the class.
At the beginning of the term, the work of the advance lesson was largely
done in the class-room, instructor and instructed working together.
It will be rightly inferred from this that the class moved slowly at the
outset. I am a devout believer in the reading of large quantities
of the classics; indeed, that is, in this present business, my particular
and precise aim; but I am also a believer in what is called "the
long run," and "in the long run" only a soundly trained man gets very far.
In the preliminary training, it is necessary at first to take a good deal
of time in probing to the quick, sometimes with considerable distress to
the would-be athletes, a class of new students who have been carefully
trained to distort and mangle the Latin sentence; who have necessarily
failed to acquire the alert and self-watchful habits of thought and of
suspended judgment to which the received method, with its resulting impatience
to "make sense," is practically strongly opposed; whose knowledge
of syntax is of a back-handed kind, good for very little except to "parse"
with, more or less mechanically and ineffectually, after the whole sentence
has been dug out, but worth nothing as yet for the current interpretation
of the syntax of word after word
in situ in the progress of the
sentence; and, finally, some of whom have been trained to pronounce
Latin on the English method, others on the Continental, and others on one
or another of that great variety of methods passing current under the general
appellation of "Roman," and many of whom, accordingly, find it very difficult
to understand a word of one syllable as pronounced by my assistant or myself,
— to say nothing of a word of two syllables.
