‘Quomodo sentis hodie Latine?’
Building nuanced SEL Vocabularies to Help All Latin Students Flourish
I teach Latin and Ethics at a rural boarding school in Northern Indiana. Last spring, we went fully online, just as schools all across the world did. In our sudden departure from campus, I was deeply moved by the confusion, panic, and fear expressed by my students. At the start of our first class, I asked students to simply send me a private Zoom chat with their feelings that morning. I recorded the following emotions from my students (among many others): they said they were “disengaged,” “unstimulated,” “in shock,” “preoccupied,” “depressed,” “anxious,” “panicked.”(I say more about this experience itself in a piece I wrote for Teaching Classical Languages.)
I was also struck by the cold distance that now separated us from our classrooms and each other. My classroom practice is rooted in students’ attention, interest, and emotional register in my classes, and now I struggled to find ways to build student community and meet students’ learning, social, and emotional needs while in my online classroom space. Cognizant of the extra loss of bandwidth faced by BIPOC and LGBTQ+ students (whether in-person or online; before and during the pandemic) and the extraordinary challenges on all students brought on by COVID-19, I knew I needed to develop new strategies to honor and make space for student emotional expression and to foster a supportive, inclusive space for them to practice emotional regulation and flourish as learners — all while engaging them in Latin.
So, this piece is borne out of this dual need: On the one hand, to enrich my students’ ability to express themselves in Latin with a dynamic, nuanced emotional vocabulary (as our Latin program encourages and empowers our students to use Latin as a vehicle for comprehensible Latin expression, and ‘tristis’, ‘laetus’, ‘iratus’ just wouldn’t do); on the other, to give my students the digital and scaffolding tools to engage in emotional expression and regulation whether we were in class together in-person, in a hybrid format, or totally online.
Here I give teachers some helpful ready-made tools for meeting their students’ social and emotional needs in a proficiency-oriented Latin course. (But there is no reason these tools couldn’t be similarly useful in a Grammar-Translation course, too.) These tools serve both the purpose of giving our students a necessary outlet for their emotions and a chance to connect Latin to something deeply personal and ‘real world’: namely, our inner and outer emotional states. Not only is this essential for successful language learning (our proficiency grows as we connect language to the world around us and to own feelings and thoughts), but developing our students’ emotional intelligence is critical to their personal and professional future flourishing as learners and human beings. (Daniel Goleman’s work in inclusive, emotionally-intelligent leadership education is a refreshing and accessible introduction to the many benefits of emotional intelligence skills across the life cycle.)
Importantly, these tools are not a substitute for emotional support services for our students. The strategies I outline here can help to make a classroom more inclusive and welcoming to traumatized, emotionally-depleted, depressed, or anxious students, but they are not an invitation to the teacher’s providing therapy to their students. A helpful distinction can be made between facilitating student emotional regulation and expression in group conversation (which is appropriate) and a teacher’s asking probing questions, offering advice, and suggesting specific coping strategies (which is inappropriate and the work of a licensed mental health professional). With much practice and careful attention to appropriate student-teacher boundaries, these activities can help to make Latin classrooms more open and supportive for students by increasing classroom community, connectivity, and student input and expression while providing bridges to professional mental health support when necessary.
I’ve been incorporating SEL (Social Emotional Learning) practices intentionally in my Latin classes since I began teaching. This year, I began to make this practice more precise and use the RULER approach explicitly in my Latin teaching. RULER is a skills-based classroom and school SEL approach aimed at improving our own and our students’ emotional expression and regulation in our classrooms. It is an acronym for the five skills of emotional intelligence:
Recognizing emotions in oneself and others
Understanding the causes and consequences of emotions
Labeling emotions with a nuanced vocabulary
Expressing emotions in accordance with cultural norms and social context
Regulating emotions with helpful strategies
Using RULER as a guide, every day to start my Latin classes I help students to recognize their emotions, understand them, label them with a nuanced vocabulary, express them (including how they want to feel), and regulate them as appropriate. I do this through a simple check-in, a modification of the Emotional Intelligence Charter, one of the anchor tools of the RULER approach.
The Emotional Intelligence Charter is a collaborative, student and teacher-generated contract about shared classroom emotions. In its full form, it asks teachers and students to recognize the emotions they typically have in a school day and then asks how they want to feel.
The students and teacher then craft a shared contract on what they’ll each do — concrete action items — to bring about the classroom environment they desire. In the words of Marc Brackett, one of the psychologists who developed RULER, the point of the Emotional Intelligence Charter is to “have students describe how they want to feel, including how they’ll help one another feel those emotions, to give them control over their classroom environment.” (Brackett 206)
This is now one of the anchors of my teaching, and has been absolutely central to my Covid-era teaching rhythms. Every day, I ask my students two simple questions in Latin: Ut vales? (How are you?) and Quomodo vis sentire? (How do you want to feel?).
These two questions spur copious spontaneous, engaged interactions from my students. I simply give them an outlet for these feelings — often what is at the forefront of their minds — and they speak their minds and make their voices heard. It’s an empowering, restorative moment for my students.
But, as part of my Latin teaching practice involves empowering students to use simple, comprehensible Latin to describe themselves and the world around them, I’ve developed a need for a more nuanced vocabulary tool to share with them as they become more comfortable with the Emotional Intelligence Charter exercise.
So, I’ve translated the RULER Mood Meter (another of the foundational tools of the approach, now an app available through Yale) into simple Latin for the use of my students. This translation has proven both playful and effective. The Mood Meter is a powerful visual — one which my students return to as we conduct a RULER check-in to start each class. I’ve included it below.
The Mood Meter draws on robust psychological research that suggests our emotions fall roughly into four categories (represented above with the colors red, blue, green, and yellow). The Mood Meter helpfully demarcates between negative emotions on the left (lacking in voluptas — pleasure) and positive emotions on the right on the x-axis; on the y-axis, the intensity of emotions runs from ‘low’ emotions (sadness and calmness) and ‘high’ emotions (‘anger’ and ‘happiness’).
By translating the RULER Mood Meter into Latin (with much help from Smith and Hall’s Copious and Critical English-Latin Dictionary), I made both Latin emotional vocabulary instantly more accessible to my students and also introduced them to a powerful tool for recognizing and labeling their emotions.
Now, starting each class with a modified Emotional Intelligence Charter and this Latinized Mood Meter, I can facilitate a quick but meaningful survey of the emotional register of my classrooms. Paired with another centering or meditative activity, like Justin Slocum Bailey’s Acroamata Tranquilla, I am struck with the peace and calmness I find in my students after completing these daily rituals.
To further engagement and expand the linguistic possibilities of this SEL exercise, I use an online, free interactive slideshow tool (Mentimeter). With it, I can solicit student interaction and display auto-generated word bubbles of student emotions (see above and below), show my students daily statistics on the various Latin emotion words (‘depressus, contentus, iratus, laetus, lividus, infuriatus’ etc.), and use these words to craft the next Latin listening, writing, or speaking exercise (maximizing comprehensible input for my Latin learners through repetition).
Further, as students’ responses are recorded they show up in real-time in the word cloud. This doesn’t just help students to recognize and understand their own emotions. It gives them powerful practice in noticing the emotions of others — when a student writes ‘inconsolabilis’, ‘depressa’, ‘apprehensiva’, all of us know we need to be in a particularly supportive and understanding space.
For teachers wanting to use this exercise as a segue into discussion of the emotions of the Ancient Romans, this activity provides an easy and rich case study in comparison and contrast. Just how much overlap is there between our emotional vocabulary and that of the ancient Romans?
By way of conclusion, in a recent survey of my students’ experiences using these SEL tools in Latin, I drew powerful (anecdotal) data as to their effectiveness and impact for students. My students wrote that these rituals left them feeling “heard”, “seen,” “helpful,” “respected,” “energized,” “re-focused”; and, further, that this helped our Latin classroom feel “fun,” “warm,” “encouraging,” “nurturing,” “not scary,” “open,” “exciting,” “energizing,” “respectful,” “inclusive,” and “a place where I can always ask questions.”
Implementing SEL in the Latin classroom is part of our journey in making classics more welcoming, inclusive, and equitable. It helps students reclaim lost cognitive and emotional resources due to differentism of any kind and builds community in a distanced world desperately needing it. I hope to have sketched a framework for implementing a few powerful SEL tools in Latin courses that helps to achieve both of these aims.
Evan Dutmer, Ph.D., (he/him/his) is Instructor in Latin, Ancient Mediterranean Cultures, and Ethics at the Culver Academies, a boarding school in Northern Indiana. He received his Ph.D. in Ancient Philosophy from Northwestern University in 2019.
