New Life for a Dead Language

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.

But in the past half a dozen years, the old tongue has been given new life, in part because of a back-to-basics reform in school curriculums, and in part by the fresh teaching methods that have transformed Latin study from a lock-step marathon into a lively challenge that students enjoy. Today's approach, according to Joseph Desmond, head of the 19-member faculty of ancient languages at prestigious Boston Latin School, is to let the students absorb Latin "the way all language is naturally learned, by reading and speaking it first." Says Betsy Frank, a teacher in suburban Atlanta's Walton High: "Now we're putting in history, mythology and a host of other things to keep it interesting. The students are fascinated with the daily life of the gladiators." Susan Belmonte, 14, in her first year of Latin at Walton, confirms the enthusiasm: "The Romans were neat," she bubbles. "You get to learn about a whole different culture."

In response, high school enrollments in Latin are up by 20,000 nationwide, and climbing. Texas alone has shown a 42% increase, to 12,438 in the past two school years. Philadelphia's phalanx of elementary students has grown from an experimental group of 429. Virginia boasts 15,311 Latin students, including some of the most devoted in the U.S. Last month 2,000 of them traveled on their own time to Norfolk for a weekend convention of the Virginia Junior Classical League, featuring a Roman banquet, Latin recitations and competitions. "It's weird, isn't it," said Conventioneer Jim Willems, 17, "kids showing up on a Friday night to take tests."

Weird and, to Latin teachers, wonderfully satisfying. For along with such enthusiasms have come ancillary effects. Last year students taking the Latin Achievement Test outscored the national mean in the verbal SATs 591 to 425, and in math 591 to 468. Though some educators claim the reason may be that students pursuing the classics are bright to begin with, the teachers believe otherwise. "Latin helps students become more disciplined," says Rita Ryan of Omaha's Central High School. "It's a good means of training the memory."

More significantly, at the elementary school level the imaginative, fast-paced lessons provide a boost toward mastering basic English, particularly for disadvantaged youngsters with poor reading and writing skills. As they discover the Latin roots of such common English words as flame, and pick up an understanding of grammar and structure from the ordered shape of Latin words and sentences, they build everyday linguistic capabilities. In verbal tests, Philadelphia's fifth-grade Latin pupils perform up to a full year ahead of peers who have not taken the subject. So do youngsters in similar programs in Indianapolis and Brooklyn. The same is true for sixth-graders in Los Angeles, where Spanish-speaking students find Latin to be the most relevant part of their school lives--90% of the vocabulary of their native tongue comes directly from it. "Now something is happening in the classroom they can relate to," says one California scholar. "It sounds Like their own language."

In fact, the only limit to continuing growth for Latin is not in students' appetites but in the shortage of qualified instructors. Philadelphia's foreign-language-education director, Rudolph Mascian-tonio, who pioneered the city's Latin renaissance, says confidently, "If I had the teachers, we would have Latin in every fourth, fifth-and sixth-grade classroom in the city tomorrow." --ByEzraBowen.

Reported by Patricia Delaney/Washington and Jeanne-Marie North/Philadelphia

With reporting by Patricia Delaney, Jeanne-Marie North