I have been invited by the wonderful Debby Sneed to give a virtual talk this evening (2/11/2021). See the flyer below for more info.

I have been invited by the wonderful Debby Sneed to give a virtual talk this evening (2/11/2021). See the flyer below for more info.
This post is for all of my fellow educators out there.
Now is not the time to revamp your entire curriculum.
Now is not the time to compare yourself to “super teachers”.
Now is not the time to hone your craft.
Now is not the time to stay up until 3am creating immaculate Pear Decks.
Now is the not the time to beat yourself up for not providing enough comprehensible input.
Now is not the time feel guilty about using too much English in class.
Now is not the time to “pick up the pace”.
Now is not the time to inject more “rigor”.
Now is not the time pretend like this a normal school year.
Now is not the time to assess your quality as an educator.
Do whatever you need to do to make it through this year. Take all of these wonderful ideas, techniques, and materials, and think about how wonderful it will be to implement them next year. Now IS the time to focus on surviving, and save thriving for another day.
I love you all.
Magister Bracey
It’s officially that time of the year when all of schools will be in session! This is an unusual year but don’t worry, you got this! Whether you are in-person, hybrid or remote, this guide to the start of the year should help you navigate the rough waters ahead.
In-Person/Hybrid
Congratulations! You are lucky enough to get the opportunity to return to your classroom and spend full days with your students and colleagues again. Here are a few tips to help you prepare for success…
Remote
You are the real hero. What would we ever do without you? You are lazy and horrible. No bad things would ever happen if you would just do your job. Your fears, concerns, knowledge, experience and expertise are not valid. You just want to stay home and allow kids to suffer from the deadly pandemic that you caused. Get back in that building or else, you whiny little brat. We are all in this together. We are here to support you. This handy guide was made to set you up for the most successful year of your teaching career. You got this!
I will be presenting and teaching observable classes to real students at Express Fluency’s Conference in the Cloud for World Language Teachers this summer. Use the promo code: JOHN to get $20 off registration! https://expressfluency.com/product/summerworkshop/
New Conference Alert! I will be presenting at a brand new conference featuring an all-star team of Latin teachers. Register now!
I am announcing the addition of a “Stories” tab to this site.
Since it looks like we’re going to be working from home for quite some time, I wanted to help out in what little way I can. My goal is to add one original or adapted story for every day that we are out of school.
The stories will be short, fun, non-Classical and occasionally Classical.
Please feel free to copy, change, distribute and post these stories anywhere.
So click on the “Stories” tab and have fun!
The number one reason that teachers give me for not pursuing a Comprehensible Input-based approach is that they are afraid that their Latin isn’t good enough to speak to or write for their students. These are well-educated professional Latin teachers who are petrified of uttering a word in Latin. Is their Latin good enough? Absolutely! So what is holding them back? I believe there to be a number of toxic ideas floating around the Latin-teaching community that are the culprit. Let’s name and debunk them once and for all, so that teachers can be free to speak and write in Latin with minimal fear.
If your Latin isn’t flawless, you will harm your students!
This argument is based on a mythological phenomenon called fossilization, which is the idea that languages are habits and that exposure to “incorrect” language will cause that “incorrect” language to become a bad habit. Everything about this argument and itS underlying premises are wrong. Encountering non native-like language has no impact on acquisition and does not impede one’s ability to understand native-like language.
Latin isn’t your first language and that’s okay. Communicate to the best of your ability and your students will benefit and enjoy.
Latin is a competitive sport. If you can’t keep up, don’t play!
While no one has ever uttered these particular words, they are far too often implied in Latin teacher discourse. “Have you heard so-and-so’s Latin? It’s really good. It’s way better than that other person’s Latin.” “There are lot of people out there publishing Latin of questionable quality, here is a list of the only good ones out there.” The emphasis on who is “good” vs. who is “bad” serves no one but the people who consider themselves elite Latin athletes. Everyone else gets intimidated and sits out.
The purpose of language is communication. As teachers, our job is to communicate with our students in Latin, not to assert our dominance over other Latin teachers. Our job is to give kids a positive experience in another language, not to train future competitive Latinists. The good news is that none of these competitive Latinists will ever set foot in your classroom, so why bother trying to please them?
Unless you are willing to expose yourself to brutal judgement and error-correction, your Latin will never be good enough.
The research on the negative impact of error-correction on language acquisition is vast, but that doesn’t stop people from insisting on its value. In fact, I have often heard people go as far as to suggest that constant error-correction is the ONLY way to gain proficiency in another language.
It’s not uncommon to find people in the language-teaching world making comments like “I’ve taught myself 40 different languages exclusively by forcing myself to speak to native speakers and insisting that they stop me and correct every error I make. If you’re serious about being a professional language teacher, you should WANT to subject yourself to this experience.” These types of comments tend to come after they have insisted upon publicly “correcting” the Latin of another teacher.
If you don’t welcome unsolicited criticism and error-correction from people, there is nothing wrong with you. It is considered extremely rude to correct a peer, especially in public! Pick up a book on social pragmatics for children and you’ll see that this kind of behavior is beneath the expectations of a small child, let alone an adult.
You do not need to put yourself in uncomfortable situations or accept inappropriate behavior to be worthy of speaking Latin to students.
If you can’t defend your word choices to the harshest of critics, your Latin isn’t good enough!
This toxic framework can be found in pretty much any online thread that starts with someone asking how to say something in Latin. They tend to go like this:
“How do you say Bob is mean in Latin?”
Comment 1: I would keep it simple and say Bob est crudelis.
Comment 148: Everyone who has posted is a moron and a disgrace to Latin. The ONLY correct way to say this in REAL Latin is Lucius saevitiam exercere solet.
The impression left by these threads is that one needs to be able to build a court case to defend something like cupit vs. vult before daring to express desire in Latin.
We make choices when we write and speak Latin to students. Will all of them be perfect in the eyes of professional critics? No. Just remember that they are not your audience! Your job is to make yourself understood to your students.
Latinitas!
If you had to summarize all of the aforementioned issues in one word, that word would be Latinitas.
Your Latin is good enough.
Speak to your students.
Write for your students.
Don’t let anyone stop you.
– Magister Bracey
My experience with being taught with comprehensible input was in Denver and the teacher was Katya Paukova. She taught Russian to an enormous room full of mostly Spanish teachers. I had studied Russian in high school, so I had some prior understanding of the language, but most of the language being used was unknown to me. After about an hour and half spread over two days, this room full of teachers was able to read a two page long story entirely in Russian. I had spent nearly a year prior trying to wrap my head around CI through reading blogs, watching videos, chatting with master teachers, but this was the first time I really understood how it happened. Since then I have attended sessions in Romanian, Mandarin, German, Spanish, French and Japanese. Here is why you, Latin teachers, should do the same:
1) You have to experience CI working for yourself. When we attend CI sessions in a language we already know, we have don’t get to really experience the acquisition process. We end up having a great time, we learn some cool techniques, but we don’t get to experience the process of going from zero comprehension to full comprehension as a student.
2) You have to internalize the reality that Latin is a language like any other. I cannot stress this enough. I didn’t fully accept this fact until I experienced CI in Russian. Russian is heavily inflected language just like Latin. There are nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental and prepositional cases in Russian. The majority of people in the room had never even heard of the concept of case, but were able to read and understand the different cases comfortably in context. This experience totally dissolved any lingering suspicions that Latin was somehow different.
3) You have to get out of Latin teacher world and visit language teacher world. For the longest time, Latin has separated itself from other languages. Those days need to be done. It’s easy for CI principles to get lost in the variety of Latin-speaking subcultures that exist in our community. Comprehension-based teaching gets jumbled up with Spoken Latin, Active Latin, Latinitas, Latin Immersion etc., which makes learning to teach with CI difficult to navigate exclusively amongst other Latin teachers. Experience CI in action in a non language specific context allows for the fundamentals to be learned absent from the very emotionally-charged factions that form within each language’s community.
Hi, all! If you haven’t heard, Eidolon just published another one of my articles. This one is about my trials as a job-hunting black Latin teacher. Give it a read when you get a chance.
https://eidolon.pub/after-careful-consideration-7c50172d0aa3
– Magister Bracey
Hi all! Check out my conversation with Becky Morales on her podcast “The Language Latte”! We talk all about building community in the comprehensible input based classroom.
https://kidworldcitizen.org/importance-community-building-in-class/