The Best Way to Teach Anything?? Use the Known as a Bridge to the Unknown

One of my more exotic projects is celebrating a birthday. Twenty years ago I published “Latin Lives On--333 common words letter-for-letter identical in Latin and English.” This list is widely used by Latin teachers, English teachers, History teachers, all sorts of teachers, and is readily available on the internet.

Does this list sound like a mere curiosity? A source perhaps for Trivial Pursuit questions? Well, I want to argue that it’s much more than that. “Latin Lives On” embodies an educational strategy that I believe every teacher should exploit as much as possible. I call this strategy “bridge theory.” It asserts that the best way to teach anything is to use what the students already know as a bridge to what you’d like them to learn next.

Basically, bridge theory explains the inner workings and universal popularity of similes, metaphors, parables, analogies, comparisons, allegories and any other device where you talk about A to explain B. The audience knows A, so you use A as a handy bridge to travel to B. Sure, you can do it the hard way and start off talking about B. But savvy communicators opt for efficiency and speed.

In the case of “Latin Lives On,” a teacher holds up this list before a class and announces, “Look, you already know a lot of Latin. Isn’t this amazing! Here’s 333 words that Julius Caesar himself spoke around the Forum. And you know every one of them. Dead language? I don’t think so. It’s alive in each of you!”

Or let’s say it’s an English class. The students know the 333 words as English words. That’s the known part. Now, in one quick strike, the teacher can say, “Oh, and by the way, these English words you know--they are also Latin.” The students now know vastly more about history and linguistics. In minutes. With so little effort.

The beauty of this list, by the way, is that the 333 words are all ordinary words, not legal or medical Latin, not Latin phrases which are properly written in italic. Here’s 25 typical words from “Latin Lives On:” campus, alibi, bonus, area, exit, habitat, gymnasium, labor, crisis, curator, museum, editor, minimum, nausea, stimulus, stadium, moderator, rumor, arena, odor, medium, doctor, album, opera, nucleus.

Now, wouldn’t you think that every Latin teacher, especially, would use this list? Ah, now we come to the dark heart of the story. I had three years of high school Latin; I got honors in English Literature. I probably assumed I was pretty well educated. A few years later I was living in Manhattan, in and out of the subway every day, reading one of Manhattan’s most ubiquitous words perhaps a thousand times: TRANSIT. And one day it hit me, “That’s Latin! It goes across....” I was amazed. I actually did not realize there were any pure Latin words in English. (I asked many other well educated people; and none of them could name even one.) But how could TRANSIT be such a surprise? I had to wrestle with the idea that some teachers (e.g., the one I had) will do everything in the most tedious and difficult way because that’s how it was done years before. These teachers like to talk about etymologies and cognates but shy from mentioning what is really cool: Latin lives!

In short, “Latin Lives On” was not for me a vocabulary builder. It was an assault on dull, uncreative teaching.

Here’s an odd thing I’ve learned in the last 20 years. Most teachers immediately see the value of “Latin Lives On.” These teachers exclaim, “Great! I’ve been looking for something like that.” Others actually seem to worry, Well, that wasn’t used when I was in school; we don’t want to make things too easy, do we?...Part of the problem here is that so-called schools of education love to dwell on theory but not that much on practical strategies. In truth, that’s pretty much all they should be dwelling on. Another aspect of the problem is that many pedagogues tend to be a little plodding. The challenge is to inject some show biz into the mix.

I hope that if you’re a teacher you’ll play around with “Latin Lives On” and find out for yourself whether it’s helpful. Or maybe it’ll come in handy when playing Trivial Pursuits.

First published in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, “Latin Lives On” is now Essay #3 on Improve-Education.org. (Or enter Latin Lives On in Google--the list comes up #1.)