Fresh teaching techniques turn Latin into favorite classroom fare
Leonardus strides into the class of 24 small pupils and delivers an imperial greeting. "Salvete, discipuli!" he booms. "Salve, magister," replies the chorus. The sound is an echo from Pompeii: Health to the teacher, health to the pupils.
But the place is a far cry from that long-dead Roman town. This is inner-city Philadelphia, and the discipuli are fourth-graders at Samuel Powel Elementary School. Leonardus, a.k.a. Bruce Leonard, is one of a cadre of new-wave Latin teachers who are reviving the classics in schools across the U.S.
"We're going to play the 'come-up' game," says Leonard, holding aloft a picture. "Quid est [What's this]?" he asks. Hands fly up. "Caseus est [It's cheese]," pipes a nine-year-old named Cheryl. "Optime [Super]!" praises Leonard, and calls the proud pupil up front to play teacher with a new picture. After a relay of come-ups, Leonardus leads a Latin sing-along of Rome Is Burning to the tune of Are You Sleeping, Brother John? climaxed by a fire dance with everyone shouting "Flammae, flammae, flammae!"
The children love it. So do some 14,000 other Philadelphia youngsters who are taking Latin in 20-minute daily sessions of games, songs and chatter, supplemented by lively workbooks starring Batman, Conan the Barbarian and Donald Duck. "It's fun," says Powel Pupil Richard Williams, 9, adding that at home he hails his father with "Salve!"At New York City's private Trinity School, eighth-graders take turns reading aloud about a freed slave who owns a glassmaking shop. Teacher Cornelia Iredell spices the session by mixing in bits of grammatical instruction with the information that Roman merchants had to pay protection money to hoods in order to keep stores from being trashed.
At a Chicago public school, Teacher Robert Creighton wraps himself in a sheet before entering class. "When I walk into the room in a toga," he explains, "I've got everyone's attention." He holds it with a Latin version of What's My Line?, spelling bees and a puppet show starring a mouse named Equus Eddie. In Fairfax, Va., Maureen O'Donnell awards daily bonus points to high school students who can pick out pop items like Top 40 song titles scribbled in Latin on the blackboard.
O'Donnell returned to teaching the subject seven years ago, after raising six children. Her re-entry came at the nadir for Latin in the U.S. In 1976 just over 150,000 American public high school students took the language, down a disastrous 79% from the 1962 peak of 702,000. "Latin went into a slump with the Sputnik era, with its concentration on science and technology," she recalls. And she says, "Then came the permissive age," the 1960s and early 1970s, when demands for so-called relevancy in course content pushed many schools to reduce or abandon classical studies and language instruction.