In a message dated 98-03-18 03:17:15 EST, you write:
 
*****Sorry in advance for the length of this post.****
 
<<  Please don't make assumptions about my ideology or agenda without
consulting me first; >>
 
Excellent advice, Johanna, and now I ask you to take it.
 
As the original poster of the question about the Latin curriculum I'd like to
enter the discussion.  While I agree with much of what Johanna says (though by
no means all of it), I think much of what she did say is beside the point for
my purposes (and that includes her unhelpful indignation and self-serving
rhetoric), which I obviously did not make clear in my short post.
 
Here's the background to my situation and what I am trying to do (if you don't
want to read the whole song and dance, skip down to the "***"):
 
I teach at an independent school where the vast majority of children come from
middle and upper class homes and have been well-provided for during their
lives as far as safety, nutrition, educational opportunities, etc. go.  The
common language is Standard English and that is what the children and the
parents want to get better at (and that wish is also shared by the few less-
privileged children in the school, which is why they sacrifice to be there in
the first place [see Lisa Delpit's _Other People's Children_ for more on
this).
 
We currently have a Latin course that is senseless.  We begin it too late and
don't cover enough content so it makes no  sense to us to inflict it any
longer on our students who are already overextended.  We would like to stop
teaching this course. We have two considerations in doing so, however.  First,
for political reasons we can't simply eliminate "Latin".  Second, and more
importantly, we have found (by having both Latin and English taught to a
cohort by the same teacher) that there is much positive transfer that can be
facilitated from Latin to English grammar and vocabulary (the latter shouldn't
be news to anyone) and we don't want to lose that benefit  from Latin. It also
will not work for us to simply start teaching it earlier in the curriculum
because we would like to add other things to the curriculum which we feel are
more important for _elementary/middle_ school students (more arts, more
writing, more computer).
 
***
We do not want our children to learn Latin per se.  But, the ability to see a
word physically change as its function changes is helpful to children who need
to see things concretely.  They are often too skilled at, and close to,
English to be able to come at it from a "meta" level.  Latin is a distancing
and modeling tool. Our goal is to create a general introduction to language
course, based on a very watered-down Latin curriculum, which would prepare our
students with the grammatical knowledge they need to start French and Spanish
in 6th grade, build their abilities to talk structurally about English, and
give them the etymological tools to figure out new vocabulary words in
context.  It make absolute sense to us who teach young children every day to
do this, while it may not make sense to those who teach adults.  We want them
to talk about the basic elements of a sentence (NOT parts of speech, but
subject, object, clause, etc.).  We want them to be able to take words apart
into meaningful units and see commonalities between cognates.
 
Too often, people with degrees in a subject area, say linguistics, confuse
that knowledge with expertise in teaching.  We all know that one need not have
much going on upstairs to take a course, and we all have colleague who have
been at it for years whom we do not think are very good.  Neither transcript
nor tenure an educator make.  If anyone has any constructive advice on how to
construct a curriculum like the one I described above or any advice in this
area at all, please let me know.  I will be greatly appreciative of any
genuine attempt to _help_ me improve the language skills of the _young_
children in my charge.
 
Steve Cohen