	I am devoted to teaching Latin forms and words orally through the use of conversational Latin. This approach is at great variance with most current Latin programs. Therefore, I would like to share with you some thoughts describing my approach is so different.
	Most Latin programs make students memorize Latin grammar structures and vocabulary words for the sake of translating Latin into English. I think that Latin is close to being a dead language precisely because it has been taught solely in this way throughout the last several centuries. This, quite frankly, is what has nearly killed the language. How many students love memorizing grammar and translating? The answer is, very few. A short anecdote may help to illustrate my point.
	One of my former teachers (I call him ‘Magister,’ which is really a Latin title whose meaning has to do with wisdom, like the Magi of the Gospels, but also with the Latin idea of the adverb magis, ‘more’—magister, therefore, is someone who knows more than his students) described how a person returned for a 50-year high school reunion. She walked into his classroom and asked if she could sit down at a particular desk. Magister replied in the affirmative. She sat down, informing him that she sat in the same spot 50 years ago. To my teacher’s amazement, she then added that this had been her Latin classroom. Magister informed her that he himself was a Latin teacher. Giving Magister a frightened look, she said, “Sir, I don’t remember any Latin. Please, do not ask me anything about Latin!”
	She knew where she sat 50 years ago but she did not actively remember anything she had done in that Latin class! More to the point, she was frightened by her memories of that class. Unfortunately, her reaction is typical to most students who have studied Latin using the ‘memorize and translate’ method. Most of the men and women I have talked with, who studied the language in school, may remember ‘Amo, amas, amat’ (the beginning of a grammar drill), but little to nothing else. At best, many now are appreciative that they ‘learned’ Latin in the past, but almost all disliked the subject itself.
	To give a positive example that counteracts such typical experiences, I think about one of my favorite teachers in a different subject. He taught Social Studies to the 7th grade. This is one assignment I remember in particular: for three days, he made all of his students copy—using colored pencils—a picture of workers making cars on a production line. Rather than presenting a list of facts, he made his students reproduce, in detail, a real-life specific example, in order to teach about production. He taught me to reflect on and absorb experientially what I was learning, rather than acquire dead material to be memorized, regurgitated for a test, and then discarded.
	Latin must be taught as a living, spoken language, or only a very few people will know it. (The same can be said of any academic subject. The students today will not read as well as they should if English is taught by means of spelling, vocabulary, and genres, rather than as a living language of poetry and story. Students will not know history as well as they should if facts, not the living acts that caused the facts, are being drilled into students’ brains. Students will not be as apt as they should be in science if they are taught to dissect, but not assent to and learn of beautiful qualities that all creation holds. Where there is life in a subject there is learning, but a dead subject cultivates nothing.) Today, a few scholars know a lot of Latin, but most people know nothing. The purpose of teaching Latin, the common language of the Catholic Church, is to make that language accessible not just to a select few who relish learning grammar and translating, but rather to all people. (Our English word ‘vulgar’ originally referred to regular human beings. The first authoritative version of the Bible, written in Latin, was named the Vulgate because it was accessible to all Catholics, not just to a handful of scholars who could read Hebrew and Greek.)
