Nellie's First Day 2
Unfortunately Nellie’s story is not uncommon. Many teachers come to the workplace poorly prepared for the classroom, and Latin teachers are no different. The teaching profession has traditionally offered an inadequate internship with unrealistic expectations of new members, regardless of their content area.
Preparing teachers is a multi-step, multi-year process involving a partnership of college instructors, veteran teachers and administrators. It begins in the first college Latin class and continues past the probationary period of the beginning teacher. Shortchanging any step in the process presents a higher probability of failure for the new teacher. Latin teachers are especially vulnerable to new teacher attrition, since they are often the only ones in their schools who teach their subject, and are more isolated than core-subject teachers. In this paper we examine the multi-partner, multi-step, multi-year process of preparing future teachers of Latin.
