Ditto languages. The best language teacher I ever had, Junius Johnson, who taught me Latin always, always, always started from a point of associating positive feelings with language learning rather than negative. Learning should always be restorative not retributive. https://twitter.com/kareem_carr/status/1300813741534121985

Instead of saying “No, that’s wrong”; Junius would say things like “Getting warmer!” or “Oooh so close!” or “You can do it. I know you know this!” This meant that even when you were wrong, you didn’t feel like a failure.

Junius understood how much of learning is psychological, and when, as this thread points out, you started getting frustrated with Latin even though you know a different language, he’d remind you to think about how you felt when you first started learning that language.

The point was to get the student to reflect on how hard it was when they started and how far they’ve come. He’d show us that it was unrealistic to walk in to Latin expecting to become instantly as good at it as we were in a different language.

Another thing he’d do is break up problems into smaller bits. So, if you were translating and getting stuck, he’d say “what part of speech is this word? Verb? Noun? Adjective?” which was usually an easy question and then build you up to the part you got stuck.