"Now," I go on to say to my students, "you are to commit this sentence
to memory, and be ready to give it fluently in the Latin when we meet next.
And in the same way you will commit to memory every passage we so use in
the year; and at each term examination you will find yourselves called
upon to write one of these passages, still from memory. Further,
and still more important than this, never again pick out your subject,
your predicate, etc.; but, in preparing your daily lessons, do just
what we have been doing this morning, except that
you
are not to translate any sentence, or any part of any sentence, until you
have gone through the whole lesson in the Latin, and got all the meaning
in your power out of it. I give you a short lesson, and I
shall call upon one man and another to take up a sentence and go rapidly
through it as Latin, word after word, as we have just now done, telling
us precisely how it should be thought out. In preparing your lesson,
in order to be sure that your eye does not stray and run ahead, cut out
a piece of flexible pasteboard, or, until you can get pasteboard, a piece
of stiff writing-paper, as long as twice the width of your printed text,
and two or three inches wide. Cut a strip from the top, running along
half the length, and deep enough to correspond to precisely one line of
your text, including the space that belongs with it.
1
Use this piece of paper in such a way as to expose just one word at a time,
together with which, of course, will also be seen all the words preceding;
that is to say, as you think about one word after another, pushing your
paper on, you will constantly see all of the sentence thus far traversed,
without being able to look ahead."
At the next meeting, the class, thus prepared, recites as described,
a number of students attempting to show precisely what mental processes
one should go through in taking up the sentences of the lesson. At
the next but one, and thereafter throughout the Freshman year, all books
being closed, the instructor reads the review lesson aloud, with all the
effectiveness possible to him, one sentence at a time, calling for a translation
of it from one and another student.2
As a preparation for this exercise, each student is urged to read the review
aloud a number of times in his own room, doing his author as much justice
as possible.
At every exercise during the year, except the special weekly exercise,
a number of sentences, prepared by the instructor, and based upon the text
under reading at the time, are given out to students, to be written upon
the board, in the English and in Latin, while the rest of the class are
engaged upon translating the review as the instructor reads it; and
when the work upon the review is over, these Latin sentences upon the board
are criticised by the class. I touch upon a very serious defect in
most of our preparatory schools when I say that from beginning to end there
should never be a recitation in a foreign language without written or oral
translation into that language.
