Dr. Edward Zarrow, currently President of the Classical Association of Massachusetts (CAM), has taught Latin at Westwood High School for the past 8 years. Dr. Zarrow has just been named to two teaching awards: MaFLA’s Foreign Language Teacher of the Year and NECTFL Teacher of the Year for 2015.  He will be representing Latin teachers at the National conference next year. Recently he hosted a CAM sponsored event:  ‘Active Latin,’ attended by 40 teachers from MA, CT and NH. The following are his comments which pertain to our Latin programs and the centrality of our best Latin pedagogy in those programs.
Corpus Commune                                                                                   Dr. Edward “Ted” Zarrow
We want our students to learn how to think critically, write fluidly, argue persuasively, (maybe even) act rationally, and we engage them with the ancient world so that they can think about their own in a new way. However, if we do not begin to embrace more the lessons of modern second language acquisition, we may be left behind. I don’t mean this in terms of the trendy teaching 21st century skills to which I often retort, “I’m teaching my students 1st century skills!”; rather, I am seeing personally how Latin is being differentiated from other languages as a result of a number of interactions that I’ve had with supervisors and advocates for language learning in general. This is a trend that, if reversed, will only strengthen our programs and allow us to advocate for ourselves as teachers and for our programs more effectively.

At Westwood, we recently completed a curriculum review of our department in which we discussed our mission, celebrated our strengths, and made (increasingly elaborate) steps for improvement. As the discussions about our mission began, I was feeling left behind: “The Foreign Language Department of the Westwood Public Schools is committed to providing all students with the linguistic and cultural tools for meaningful communication in a second language … our curriculum moves students toward proficiency – the ability to communicate and comprehend increasingly complex ideas with increasing accuracy.” Comprehend, yes – communicate, no. Not yet, anyway. As a result, I was left out of the discussion about the direction of our program as a whole.
However, I wondered whether if by incorporating more spoken and active Latin into the curriculum, I would see an increased ability in my students to comprehend and master more complex structures at an earlier stage. After two years of using spoken Latin mastery exercises as the culmination of a unit, we have moved what we used to do from the first quarter of Latin III to the last quarter of Latin II. More importantly, I can defend my position as I did once, when cornered by a conservative member of our school committee who challenged the value of language education, especially Latin, on the grounds that the goal was not communication. I was able to say to him, “As a matter of fact, I speak Latin with my students every day.”
More recently, I have had many opportunities to advocate for Latin learning in general. As a result of the MaFLA award, I was selected as a regional finalist, and I attended an interview in New York with representatives from NECTFL.  As I sat down for the interview, the first question they asked was this: “What do you do to promote the use of the target language in the classroom?” I was able to discuss how my own teaching has transformed over the past couple of years as a result of spoken Latin and how a majority of Latinists in graduate programs now are being instructed in communicative methods, and the general paradigm shift that we as Latin teachers are beginning to experience.  I felt buoyed by the question, and, again, my response began with “As a matter of fact, I speak Latin with my students every day.” Doing what we can to incorporate more active Latin in our curricula will not only strengthen the status of our programs in the eyes of the people who make decisions about them but it will allow us to forge a stronger connection with our modern language colleagues. Our students will experience the excitement and engagement of authentic and purposeful communication.   Indeed, as we take Latin language education seriously along with all modern languages, we take education seriously.
You can find Dr. Zarrow on Twitter:   @drzarrow

Dr. Edward Zarrow: A Brief Reflection on the Value of Learning Language and Culture
Two years ago, towards the halfway point of second-year Latin, we had begun a unit on Vergil, the Aeneid, and Roman education, and I asked my class of mostly sophomores the following questions: “So, why exactly are you in school in the first place? What is the purpose of your education?” Perplexed faces stared back at me, and the discussion slowly began to unfold. A particularly cynical student in the class folded his arms and leaned back in his chair, “I don’t know! Why are we here?” Giggles and nods quickly rippled across the room, and much of the discussion that followed centered on the absence of usefulness which the students perceived to dominate their day. I then turned the debate towards our class and the study of Latin itself. “If you’re looking for things that are useful, why are you taking Latin? It’s an elective. You don’t have to be here, so why are you?” After a brief pause, again my cynical student retorted, “Because this class teaches me how to think.”
When I was a first year teacher the study of the ancient world was my passion. Even so, I wondered a great deal about its usefulness and how I would ever justify it to my students should they ask—students who might never study Latin or ancient history again and certainly could never tout the knowledge of Latin as a job advantage in today’s global economy. Finally, years later, when one of my most defensive and jaded students identified Latin as a vehicle for learning how to think, I felt an immediate recognition of a principle which I had always known but as a rookie would have been hard pressed to identify, express, or justify. My goal as a Latin teacher and the true value of learning language and culture is just that: to teach students how to think.
This principle extends beyond the tenet of learning language for the purpose of meaningful communication or knowing how and when to say what to whom. Every day in the classroom, whether discussing the origins of English vocabulary through Anglo-French (Freshmen) or exploring views on the nature of the soul during the “Second Sophistic” (Seniors), I try to engage with the ancient world so that my students can think about their own lives and the world in which they live in a new way.
By studying Latin my students learn how to think logically and critically, act rationally, and argue persuasively, even if they do not realize it and cannot articulate it until long after they forget conjugations or demonstrative adjectives. They will have immersed themselves in a language and culture through which they were compelled to reexamine their own values and beliefs. As a result, they come to be scholars and life-long learners, to lead informed lives, to respect knowledge for its own sake, to go beyond a shallow understanding of the world, and to seek the truth – for only then can we come to recognize what is good and beautiful when we see it, and even fight for it when we have to.