Feature What I learnt from writing a Latin textbook

WHAT I LEARNT FROM WRITING A LATIN TEXTBOOK

Co-authoring a pupil's guide to GCSE Latin is not without its challenges, as Director of Studies and Teacher of Classics Henry Cullen explains.

Immersed in the steady plod of writing a course book, it can be impossible to see the wood for the trees and to identify what you – as author – are learning in the process. This was certainly the case as I coauthored Latin to GCSE (Bloomsbury, 2016) in a stop-start fashion over the course of about five years. Reflecting now (from a safe distance), here are a few major insights I think I gained from the experience.

Setting out with a full(ish) road map is key

‘We must map out the vocab as the very first step,’ warned my coauthor, John Taylor, very sagely, ‘and tinker with it at our peril’. He was certainly correct: certain categories of Latin vocabulary naturally belong in discrete chunks – question words, for example, like quantus? (how big?), qualis? (what sort of?), quot? (how many?), and quando? (when?). But when do you want to slot them into the schema? What other types of words or patterns of endings do they need, or naturally pair with? Getting this right was essential and, since exercises and stories were designed to hammer repeatedly those items of vocab that had been met recently, it also meant that any later changes of mind necessitated lots of unpicking (no longer could prior knowledge be assumed). If you are building from the foundations up, then changing a building block in any given layer means that the ones above it don’t fit together nearly so well as you might have initially conceived – changes are much easier made at the outset than retrospectively.

Deep engagement with sequencing of knowledge is incredible fun!

Working out precisely which items of knowledge depended (in our eyes) on which prior items proved the most enjoyable – but perhaps the trickiest – part of the whole process. A straightforward example: say you want (as we did) your paradigm first conjugation verb to be a nice regular one like porto (I carry). In chapter one, therefore, you need people to do some carrying and nouns which can be carried – hence the appearance of, for example, nuntius (messenger) and epistula (letter). In chapter two you want the sentences to get more varied: what else can you do with a letter? Hence, we had scribo (I write), lego (I read), and mitto (I send). But these latter three are all third conjugation verbs – so in order to introduce them, you are committing yourself to introducing that linked grammatical point too: that is, if you subscribe (as we did) to the principle that the spellings and forms of vocab and grammar you introduce should be comprehensible from things already explicitly introduced, rather than appearing without warning, and thus seeming arbitrary or even mystifying to pupils.

You can also engineer tangents that serve other purposes: we had people warning (moneo – our paradigm second conjugation verb) others by letter (the ablative case); and we had people giving (do) letters to others (the dative case). We could also have readers hearing the words (verba – a neuter noun) of a letter (genitive case). On other occasions the sequencing links were more subtle: the future tense, for example, is often shied away from in Latin textbooks because it is seen as trickier (it has two sets of endings across the four main verb conjugations, rather than one). But it might be essential for some stories you want to tell along the way; we had Aeneas, for example, being presented in the Underworld with a vision of the Roman future, which proved the perfect vehicle both to tell a gripping tale and to introduce a grammar point very naturally: the Trojans will have a new homeland, for example, and the Romans will conquer many lands. Thinking through the possibilities in these ways – and the occasional bit of intellectual acrobatics – was a delightful early step. Though it may seem to reduce a subject to its dry fundamentals, it is key when thinking about how pupil schema-building will work.

Horizontal or vertical slicing both have their merits

By this I mean: do you explain the entirety of a concept, as manifested in many different items of knowledge (‘horizontal’)? Or the entirety of an item of knowledge, though it may involve many different concepts (‘vertical’)? Applied to the example of a Latin noun: do you meet just the nominative and accusative cases, across all three main noun declensions? Or do you prioritise meeting the whole of one declension (five cases), before moving to other noun declensions? Both approaches have their advantages: the horizontal allows a broad early range of examples focused on a single concept, while the vertical allows you to do more with an item of knowledge. They also both have their drawbacks: though the vertical approach may be more conceptually demanding, the horizontal might be more problematic in terms of making it harder, later on, to add ‘layers’ in such a way as to facilitate memorisation. And the choice is not always, to be honest, a binary one – often a middle ground is desirable. I think it’s helpful to steer clear of ideology on this front, and adapt a pragmatic approach, picking the method that seems best suited to a certain topic.

There is no such thing as a finished explanation

Finally – and briefly! As soon as the first edition of any printed resource lands on your doorstep (or in your inbox), you’ll pick it up and think of countless different (better) ways you might have explained a point, or illustrated it with examples. You are invariably your own worst critic (to go along with the others out there you’ll be bound to have disappointed!). But there’s always a chance to improve, next time, next lesson …

The examples above are clearly Latin-specific (my apologies for the terminology!) but I hope that they can be applied more widely: how does the roadmap look in your subject? Do you agree, as a department, about what it should contain? Do you need to re-sequence a particular unit? Does the concept of horizontal or vertical slicing apply to your subject, and if so, when is it best to use each approach? Finally, are you tempted to write your own textbook to improve on all the others already out there …?