Latin for Dollars

Remember Bowling for Dollars? That old T.V. show. If you don’t remember don’t tell me, it will surely depress me.

Well, I found that the children’s enthusiasm for their Latin studies was waning “Why do we have to do this, this is boring, isn’t this a dead language for a reason?”. My detailed and patient explanations of how this was improving their minds and aquainting them with the language of the church as well as all of the Romance languages, for some reason, did not muster up a revival of previous enthusiasm.

So I resorted to cash.

Ok, so I won’t be featured in any parenting books any time soon. Cash works.

We learn our vocabulary and translations in a game show sort of format. The rules are made up by me and no amount of nagging will change them. Cheaters are charged $5 and each answer is assigned a monetary value (usually .25).

Is it working?

Well when we finished today I informed the kids that I did not have enough dollar bills to pay them and they would have to wait until after we ran some errands and I recieved some change.

Katie’s solution, “that’s ok, I’ll take a check.”

I don’t think she’ll ever be a language scholar. I’m just hoping she doesn’t turn out to be a loan shark.