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

[bean_bunny]

... not Jason and the Argonauts?

I still have nightmares about trying to translate the Aenead, but I won't deny that it wasn't good for me.

[aurelia_star]

Vergil, fine.

CAESAR?! What the fuck?! EWWWWWWW! *bangs head against desk*

*sigh*

*facepalm*

~Emily

[ouij]

The standard of Latin instruction has been steadily falling. I remember thinking I was hot shit until I arrived at university. I was glad that I didn't sign on to read Classics, as my Classicist friends were having to sit Latin and Greek VERSE COMPOSITION exams.

[q10]

could the Caesar thing be an effect of unstructured voting? maybe there's a more sensible author that most of those polled would prefer to Caesar, but there were slightly more people whose first choice was Caesar than there were with any one other first choice. it's possible Caesar partisans are a minority but vote-fragmentation killed the other candidates. if they'd had some kind of tournament/primary/runoff system, or gone with IRV or approval voting, maybe the result would've been different.

but i haven't seen the poll so i don't know what they did.

[littledarkvoice]

Knowing Caesar, he probably stole the election.

After crucifying the pirates that kidnapped him and dividing Gaul into three parts.

[littledarkvoice]

Were Seneca's letters an option? Because I don't think their prose style is too crazed (granted, I've been reading Tacitus a lot over the past two weeks, so my opinion may be skewed). Also, that shit is awesome.

[ouij]

+1. I also dug Pliny the Younger's letters. Get "good" at the letters, and the more formal prose styles become easier, too--at least that's how I feel. Letters let you get a better sense of the rhythm of the language, which you can transfer to the far more formal prose of, say, Ciceronian orations.

[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

[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.