View Content #23918

From http://caneweb.org/

Stephen Ferrand writes, “I confess that, for much of my high school teaching career, I’ve had reservations about giving project assignments to my Latin students. Latin language and Roman culture have always been the focus of my courses, and students make the best progress through sustained, frequent engagement with the language. Above all this requires time and attention, precious things in the average public school day and often under assault by various centrifugal forces. Taking time away from learning the language and about the culture in order to conceive, organize and work on an individual or group project has seemed to me a spectacular misuse of time.

“…Anyway, the final week of our semester is taken up by our Human Ecology Capstone (HEC) project, to which an entire week is devoted. This can push semester finals back before Thanksgiving (although some of my colleagues of course give them). This is one of many reasons I offer doing a semester final project instead of writing an exam.

“…Results over seven years have ranged from good to truly fantastic. Out of about 45 projects, I’ve only had one that I would characterize as unsuccessful and one case where the student changed topics mid-stream. The latter student ended up writing a rap based on Francisco J Cabrera’s Latin poetry about the Aztec culture hero Quetzalcoatl and teaching himself how to scan hexameters in the process, so the end result was quite a success.”

Read the full article at http://caneweb.org/new/?p=3666