Moms, Challenge students, directors… Henle Latin is hard. I’ve talked about it here before. It can really suck the love out of learning if you aren’t careful. The workload is heavy–particularly by the time you reach Challenge I and have to complete the entire book in one year, as opposed to Challenge A when you’ve only got to do 1/3 of the book.
As a director, I found myself stuck in a really hard place. Aside from a couple of students who actually enjoy languages and plan to have futures in careers where Latin will serve them well, the rest of my Challenge class was drowning. I would stand up to lead our Latin strand and get blanks stares and slow blinks as I tried to get answers out of them. It was such a frustrating hour of the day because hardly any one was keeping up with the exercises and therefore they could not participate in class. It also felt like the weight of being behind in Latin was weighing so heavily on them all that it was impacting their attitudes towards being at CC and towards the rest of their work. I went home week after week and cried. I felt like I was failing the kids and failing as a director.