So I’d originally planned on a 20-minute grammar lesson, followed by a handout to be finished in pairs, but I’d made the mistake of telling this class about Latin Day in April and how we were encouraging them to come to school in costume. All they wanted to do was talk about costume opportunities (and since I would like to keep my job, I had to explain why staging Caesar’s assassination in the middle of the lunchroom would be a Bad Idea), so I shifted gears and decided to channel that creative/social energy into a different assignment.
After lugging them through a condensed version of the grammar lesson on irregular verbs in the imperfect tense, I split them into groups and pulled an assignment out of the air.
Write two sentences in Latin
Use ONLY vocabulary from the textbook
Include at least ONE irregular verb
Include at least ONE verb in the imperfect tense
Include 5 (out of 6, including the vocative) cases
To write them on the board for their ‘rival’ groups to translate
They are a competitive bunch, so I knew this would be enough to encourage them to go All Out. But then one student raised her hand.
“Can our sentences be about bees?” she asked.
Bees. I swear this class has a thing with Bees. I hesitated. “There are no bees in your textbook.”
“Yes, but you taught us that word.”
I had, back when this same student had asked me how to say “the bees are suffering” for a kahoot she was writing. Granted, this same student is planning on coming in on Latin Day dressed as Caligula’s horse, so none of this surprises me.
I opened it up to the other ‘groups’. “What do you think?” I asked. “Should we let them write about bees?”
“No,” said one student with a heavy sort of solemnity, looking me dead in the eye. “We should all be required to write about bees.”
As the rest of the class eagerly cheered and nodded in agreement, three things occurred to me.
The word for bee, “apis”, is a 3rd-declension i-stem noun, which they could use more practice on.
They’re going to want to describe the bees, which means they will likely also be practicing noun-adjective agreement with a 3rd-declension i-stem noun, which they could also use more practice on.
This could be flipping hilarious.
And so I added “BEES?” to the list.
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