I noted in an aside in my last article that I taught middle-school Latin at a private school for a year and a half. Teaching middle-school Latin is a vocation that requires a great deal of organization and a keenly attuned sense for catching social disruption before it erupts, neither of which I possess. Latin was mandatory for all the fifth- and sixth-graders at my employer (yes, the fifth-graders were classed as middle-schoolers; it was a reasonably academically selective institution), but the sixth-graders had to restart it from scratch due to a handful of new incomers, and most of them then moved onto French/Spanish/Mandarin in seventh grade. In other words, the school didn’t know exactly why it had me teaching the courses I was teaching, other than that it had to justify the $35K/year price tag somehow, and the kids knew this.
So about halfway through my second year of teaching (I’d started midway through my first year) I figured I wasn’t likely to come back, that anything truly important the kids would cover in sixth grade or later on, and that the best way to add value to the kids’ education was to stick to the spirit of the curriculum while showing them Cool Stuff that might make them more interesting at cocktail parties fifteen years down the line1. This article, written for no good reason other than that it needs a better record than a series of Tweets, will show you how to repeat my greatest pedagogical triumph: having forty fifth-graders learn what a lectio difficilior is and, for the most part, have fun doing it.
As far as I know, I am the first to have ever cooked up this particular activity. It is virtually immune to cheating, will teach your charges something they will never learn otherwise unless they do a Classics degree or go to seminary, and requires no particularly specialized equipment other than a photocopier.
You will need
A double-digit number of middle-schoolers; reasonably smart fifth-graders will do in a pinch, at least if it’s late enough in the year. It is ideal if they are not all in the same class section.
Lined paper and pens/pencils.
A blank sheet of poster paper with markers.
A Xerox machine.
One- to two-paragraph samples (in English translation) from your favorite classical texts.
At least three class periods (the first two periods won’t take the full class, so you can do something else in the second half).
You, the teacher, will begin the weekend before by copying out, in legible longhand (preferably in pen), the English text of each samples onto a separate piece of paper. I used the opening sections of Cicero’s First Catilinarian, Herodotus’s Histories, the Thalatta! Thalatta! episode from Xenophon’s Anabasis, and a passage from Cicero’s In Verrem (looking back, I wish I’d done some poetry or something like that, but this worked fine).
Now make Xeroxes of each text until you have one for each student. If you have about forty kids, find four passages and make ten copies of each. Don’t go beyond a couple of paragraphs; fifth-graders are much lazier and less attentive than medieval monks, so that’s all the text you’ll need to get all sorts of interesting examples of bad spelling scribal errors, unfinished work fragmentary papyri, unreadable sloppiness corrupt readings, and plain old cheating manuscripts reflecting multiple text-types as sources.
It is ideal if the kids think they’re doing something other than plain old handwriting practice. I started by showing them this clip of a man printing a couple pages of the Gutenberg Bible on a replica Gutenberg printing press—and then noting that mass-producing books this way wasn’t possible for well over a millennium after any of our Latin literature was originally written and nearly two millennia after much of our classical Greek literature. So how do we know what Plato or Cicero actually wrote? We don’t have the autograph, i.e. the original manuscript that the author himself actually sat down and wrote, for any literature from antiquity—what survives isn’t even copies; it’s copies of copies of copies, with the earliest surviving grand-copy often from no earlier than the 9th or 10th century AD, and very often later than that. Everything we have up to this point—until the Herculaneum Scrolls get deciphered en masse—survives due to a long, long line of (usually) medieval monks copying entire texts out.
This is the one activity where it is ideal not to keep too close an eye on how diligently the kids are actually working. At the end of this first activity you will have, for each kid, one ‘primary copy’ of their source text. Give them all an A for participation.
Now, for each text, choose three to four primary copies and throw the rest in the trash.
But Billy worked all class on that copy!
Billy was probably a monk at Lindisfarne. A 30% survival rate is anachronistically good; it’s estimated we have less than 1% of all the Greek and Latin literature from antiquity.
(If Billy wrote his primary copy in pencil, though, and you feel like messing with them even further, get an eraser and do a fairly sloppy job of erasing everything he wrote.)
Assuming you have two or more sections of students, take each primary copy and make photocopies of it again until you have enough for about ten students; this means each primary copy should get three or four photocopies. In your notes, mark which kid produced each of the surviving copies, but cover up their names on the Xerox. Now go to section B and give each kid a photocopy of a primary copy made by someone in section A, and vice versa, along with a sheet of blank paper to work with. If you have a mostly-erased primary copy, slip it in with the blank papers (probably give this to a smarter and more dutiful pupil who won’t ask too many questions). At the end of this process, section B has produced twenty secondary copies of six or seven primary copies from section A.
Mark each secondary copy with a Greek or Hebrew letter2 as a shorthand, mark which kid produced which secondary and which primary they produced it from, and then erase or white-out their names on the secondaries. Then take all of section B’s secondaries and bring them back to section A.
Section A’s job is now to reconstruct the stemma.
Here’s a picture from the board midway through that process. If you zoom in you can see that manuscripts Δ, Ζ and ת all share a number of shared readings, such as ‘luntic’ for lunatic and ‘fallen people’ for ‘fallen morals’3. It’s almost certain that they’re all from the same primary copy, and indeed that turned out to be the case:
My handwriting has never been maximally legible, which is probably why everyone had palative or thereabouts for Palatine. Manuscripts צ and ת of In Verrem were done by a kid who really didn’t like the activity and, when I asked her to try again, made an even scribblier copy from her first one. We were also able to determine, though I forget how, that the primary copy from which In Catilinam’s Δ, Ζ and ת were made must have had influence from the source of ר and Π—normally a cause for a quick talk about cheating, but not here!
I unfortunately never got a picture of a quirk of, I believe, In Catilinam’s Ω/ס/Λ: they all had plans you connected at the end of the first paragraph where the others had plans you concocted. We don’t have the autograph/ur-text (the original text as the author wrote it, which we’re trying to reconstruct). So which one do we pick?
We can of course just go by majority rules, and say that three groups of manuscripts here have concocted while the rest have connected. But that doesn’t always work. There’s basic coherence/plausibility, of course: concocted makes more sense in a speech railing against a plot to overthrow the Republic.
But there’s another, even niftier principle that might lead us to choose concocted, even if we just had (say) Ω and ת: connect is a fairly common word that most fifth-graders at a nice, academically-selective private school will know, even if they misspell it. But concoct is much rarer. It is easy to see how someone who sees concocted but doesn’t know what it means might try ‘fixing’ it to connected, but it’s much harder to explain why someone would change connected to concocted.
In other words, dear children, concocted is the lectio difficilior: the more difficult, fancier-schmancier potential reading is more likely, all else being equal, to be the correct one, precisely because it’s weirder.
Finish off with a quick and above all leniently-graded quiz on some key concepts you’ve asked them to learn.
Again, this was an academically rigorous private school and they were already learning words like chloroplast in biology, and if they can learn that they can learn what an ur-text is. Some other terms and concepts you could have them learn:
—A group of manuscripts that all come from the same source constitute a text-type.
—Shared retentions don’t mean much for grouping manuscripts into a text-type, but shared innovations do. This is a general principle that they’ll see again when they do cladograms in evolutionary biology.
—apparatus (criticus), a system of footnotes below the text showing all the variations found in the manuscripts (I had this as an extra-credit question on the back, with the helpful nudge that it otherwise means ‘gadget’).
—okay, we learned how to do textual criticism; what’s literary criticism? (It’s what you’re learning to do in English class—theme, plot, and so on and so forth).
—If Timmy wrote a primary copy in pencil that you then mostly erased and had Susie write her secondary copy on Timmy’s primary, congratulations: Susie’s copy is a palimpsest. (It didn’t occur to me to do this at the time, unfortunately).
—Eventually, probably at the end of the 15th or early 16th century, someone—most commonly at the Aldine Press in Venice—will publish the first version of the text on a printing press, and that is the editio princeps.
Mr. Jonathan, when are we ever going to use this?
It’s two weeks until Spring Break, they’re getting squirrelly, and as far as excuses to have them practice their handwriting go, this is a pretty good one.
But, well, what was the point of fifth-grade Latin? It wasn’t a Catholic school, and they all had to start Latin over again from puella in sixth grade. Nobody’s life has ever been ruined by an easy A in a fifth-grade humanities class, and they’ve learned something interesting about the world. Even if they’ll never need to know what a stemma is at their day job, there are worse ways to burn three class periods.
(And what was the point of this article? I don’t much miss teaching middle-schoolers on balance, but I was proud of this one and need to get back to writing regularly.)
Other examples of Cool Stuff from my Latin/ancient history classroom: the Ancient Greek alphabet, a week of Ancient Greek and an optional Odyssey-memorization contest (with a Middle and Little Liddell for the winner and runner-up); a heavily bowdlerized production of The Clouds (using the chem teacher’s smoke machine for the Thinkery burning down); the basics of Grimm’s Law with fish/piscis, three/trēs, have/capiō, etc.; putting Socrates on trial; and why Ptolemaic astronomy looked like it made sense (freeze the camera on Earth in Universe Sandbox 2 and the other planets will suddenly have epicycles). Despite my best efforts we never did get around to mummifying a rat with natron in the bio lab.
Cf., e.g., א for Codex Sinaiticus.
From, of course, O tempora! o mores!