WTF, College Board! WTF, Latn teachers!

[seishonagon]

Okay, so College Board are being asses, but this time I honestly can't blame it entirely on them. They conducted a survey of AP Latin teachers, asking what they wanted to see on the new AP Latin curriculum

Comments

[littledarkvoice]

On that note, reading letters might also give Latin students a learning curve closer to the ones that other foreign language students experience. In French and Spanish, students don't start with philosophy and legal texts, they start with day to day life matters. While letters aren't quite the same as a conversation about what one picked up at the store, they often discuss day-to-day matters such as the health of one's family members and and city gossip, which I think hook students in and help them to see the Romans as real people.

Furthermore, combine an epistolatory focus with the "not just a single author" idea you mentioned below, and you've got yourself the beginnings of a nice survey course. You could read selections of Cicero and learn about the Republic, then transfer over to Seneca and Pliny for different points of the Empire. Towards the end of the class, you could even work in mini-lessons on the fragments of letters we have from "common people" as a fun side-trip through sub-elite Latin, or briefly look at the letters of Heloise (bonus: she's your female author) for to see what people were up to in the medieval period.

Aaaaaand now I'm adding Readings In Roman Epistles to the list of courses I want to teach someday alongside Myth And The Romans.

[ouij]

My main trouble with "other foreign language" courses is that they tend to coddle monolingual students excessively. By all means, go ahead and start with the the everyday, but please, for the love of God, move on to more advanced, grown-up, intelligent discourse quickly.

I guess I'm bitter. As a Spanish speaker, I'm annoyed as all hell that for too many people, the Spanish language is the language of basic phrases and laughably simple communication. Their language instruction never transitioned to serious literature.

I'd want the epistolary class to be Latin II. This of course presupposes that a student who passes Latin I has enough of a knowledge of grammar to read fluently.