Making Latin Come Alive

Learning a language that is no longer spoken can be challenging. And yet, at Overlake, Latin comes alive in many ways, thanks to our engaging and creative teachers. Briana Titus, who teaches Latin in the Upper School, says bringing in a creative element to her lessons can have a big impact for the students. This week her students in Latin IV are preparing for their unit test on Latin poetry. “I think the students were excited to do something more creative than retranslating what they’d previously read,” explains Titus.

The students are working on understanding some ancient poetry written by the ancient Romans. “Our first theme for the year is Love: students are reading poems, letters, and graffiti that express how the Romans felt about love,” says Titus. “One of our poets, Catullus, is often compared to Taylor Swift (who took Latin in high school herself!)”

To prepare for the test, Titus had the students work in pairs to utilize modern photos that best resemble what an ancient line of Roman poetry means. They are then creating presentations matching the photos to the line of poetry. This mixing of old and new works to solidify the language for the students. “We have read, discussed, and translated these poems and passages over the last couple of months. Instead of going back over the Latin word by word, students are combining the Latin text with images that express their meaning,” explains Titus. “In order to complete this project successfully, students need to have an accurate understanding of what they’ve read. Our primary goal is to read Latin as if it were our first language, picturing what is happening in a text, rather than translating it into English.”

And by immersing themselves in creative imagery, somehow this “dead” language comes alive. “The cool thing about Latin is that we can access the thoughts, feelings, experiences, and motivations of people from thousands of years ago in ways that can’t be conveyed by a translation. The more students learn about how some aspects of another culture differ from their own, the more they realize that some parts of the human experience are universal.”

Hence the poetry unit on Love. Titus believes this approach to preparing for the upcoming test has been a good one for the students. “I overheard one student say that they thought this would be a fun assignment to complete.” She goes on to say, despite the fun aspect, this assignment will also be useful. “The end result will be a shared set of projects that can help the whole class prepare for their unit test.”