Salvete Omnes! My name is Daniel W. and I am a Pennsylvania certified Latin and Social Studies teacher. I have been working as a substitute teacher for five years and am continually seeking new opportunities. Currently, I am a high school Latin teacher, but I can easily squeeze in some tutoring on the side, especially during breaks in the school year.
When in class teaching history, I always pursue the means necessary to make a lesson interesting whether by challenging presumptions in discussion or engaging students through projects, and it is my perpetual driving force to avoid inspiring the boredom I felt as a student.
I have primarily taken to tutoring in order to utilize my knowledge of Latin and its associated history. As a Latin tutor, I wish to take advantage of a certain struggle I faced when I was young. Learning different languages did not come to me naturally as did studying any other topic. Calculus would have been the only subject that I’d have ranked as worse than learning Latin as a high school student. Now as an adult, I developed the maturity to overcome this deficit and work more with how I learn, but I also gained some perspective on the difficulty associated with the Latin tongue for a native English speaker.
When teaching, I prefer trying to communicate using Latin in activities or having students read relatable and creative, yet accessible, texts, which they likely can figure out by context. I find that a better approach instead of simply giving students declension and conjugation lists expecting memorization and stale textbook passages for translation, although both have their function. Maintaining an interest in and deriving enjoyment from new language skills are key to overcoming what can be a very tedious task that some of my language teachers did not comprehend. Learning another language is an active affair, such has using a hammer to pound nails rather than having a teacher show you how a hammer works.
My high school Latin teacher had a quote from Ovid posted a