Award-Winning Private Latin Tutoring in Warwick, RI

"The student and I spent our session this morning going over her most recent tests. She felt that she had some gaps in her knowledge, and we agreed that looking over her tests and discussing the wrong answers was the best way to identify and plug these gaps. Like a lot of intermediate Latin students, she seemed to have a fairly strong grasp of forms, but was struggling a bit with some of the more complicated aspects of Latin syntax and with parsing forms into translations. A lot of the mistakes she made on her test seemed to arise from her attempts to make the grammar of the sentence fit what she thought the sentence meant. I gave her a few tips that I thought would help her. First, I talked about my technique for diagramming tricky sentences, and showed her some examples. Second, I advised her to first study the passages without consulting a translation. I believe that both of these techniques will help her bridge the gap between knowledge of forms and translating ability."

"The student said that since her class has finished the textbook, they are just working on some poetry. She needs to work on a paper comparing various translations of the first lines of the Aeneid; that is something I think she can do on her own. Thus, we started reviewing grammar for the final exam. I went back to the beginning to point out certain basic verb patterns before showing how they applied to all the various verb tenses she learned this semester (future tense, passive voice, etc.). We went through a lot of charts and drills together, but I think she will just need some very intense drills to actually remember and retain these skills. I'll email some handouts this upcoming week. "