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|  | Get to the Good Stuff
The underlying tenet of my philosophy as a teacher of Latin and as a department head for more than 30 years has been to get the students to the good stuff as quickly as possible. I remember well my own ninth-grade class of 250 boys; we were required to take Latin, and all of us were looking forward to the experience. By senior year there were still 250 students taking Latin, but very few of us liked it, and I believe I was the only one who continued studying it in college. A steady diet of the traditional syllabus (grammar, Caesar, Cicero, and finally Vergil), with the emphasis on the deductive approach and a grammatical analysis, eliminated the interest and curiosity that my classmates had possessed as freshmen. The teachers I had throughout high school were all excellent and did a very good job of making their classes entertaining and educational, but in my opinion they were battling against unfair odds, namely, the approach and the material.
At Trinity our students are required to study Latin in sixth grade, meeting three times a week; they complete the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC) by the end of eighth grade, with meetings four times a week in grades 7 and 8. The emphasis varies according to the teacher, but we stress, as much as possible, learning the Latin through the intuitive method used in the CLC.
Balancing Grammar and Reading
By and large we skip the exercises, using them only when some grammar point has not been grasped by a large number of students in a particular class; quizzes are mainly on vocabulary, and tests are infrequent and rely heavily on sight passages. In ninth grade the students who continue Latin (and approximately 75 percent or more do so every year) are joined by 20 or more students who have studied Latin at various schools and have used different methods, ranging from Ecce Romani to Latin for Americans. Most have not gotten as far as our students, and so we spend the first third of the year with Fabulae Romanae, a graded reader that refreshes the minds of our students and teaches the new students the grammar they have not learned through a reading approach, while getting those accustomed to a deductive approach more comfortable with reading Latin for comprehension.
At the end of November, the students begin reading selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses, both in handouts and from Latin Poetry (Carr and Wedeck, eds.), with running vocabulary lists provided; the students are introduced to meter, figures of speech, and poetic vocabulary. We have created homework sheets like the example that follows this paragraph but with the addition of answer blanks; this assignment is done by students when they have just started the Aeneid (at Trinity they are still ninth-graders). Some of the teachers use these sheets in class, going over them while students take notes and using them to open discussions; the students in my class fill them out for homework, and I correct and return them the next day. The abbreviations are simple, with "FS" standing for "figure of speech," "C+R" for "case and reason," and "TMV" for "tense, mood, and voice." I tell students that, for ninth-graders, a good average is 50 to 60 percent and the majority of students score in this range. On similar sheets, juniors average more than 80 percent; Latin students need to be told that these are the hardest words and that there are occasionally questions that they could not know because they have not encountered, for example, a zeugma.
Assignment
AP® Latin: Vergil—Aeneid 1.65-80
Indicate all figures of speech:
- FS in 65 (2 points)
- 2 FS in 69 (2 pts. each)
- FS in 71 (2 pts.)
- "annos" (74) C+R (2 pts.)
- FS in 75 (2 pts.)
- "faciat" (75) TMV (3 pts.)
- "quid" (76) intros (1 pt.)
- FS in 78-79 (2 pts.) [Bonus: Second FS in 78-79 (2 pts.)]
- Scan (2 pts.):
exigat et pulchra faciat te prole parentem
- Translate (13 pts.):
gens inimica mihi Tyrrhenum navigat aequor
Ilium in Italiam portans victosque Penatis;
incute vim ventis submersasque obrue puppis,
aut age diversos et disjice corpora ponto.
- Briefly describe the relationship between Juno and Aeolus; use the text as the basis for your views. Write a short, well-constructed paragraph. (letter grade/max. 35 pts.)
Starting the Aeneid
In mid-March, we begin to read the first 519 lines of book 1 of the Aeneid, giving the students a running start on the AP material they will complete in tenth grade. When we start in tenth grade, we review by finishing book 1, and I remind students in a painless way of what they knew at the end of their freshman year. Juniors read the AP Latin Literature syllabus, and in senior year there are two electives available. Our numbers are usually about 65 freshmen, 55 sophomores, 53 juniors, and 50 seniors. The language requirement is either three years in grades 9 through 12 or a level 4 course (any language course at the AP level), and many students take two languages in grades 9 and 10.
In ninth grade, we have a steady seven to twelve students who come to the school with no Latin and want to begin. These students, who are bright and motivated, take a course named Latin Essentials, which uses the CLC and moves through the material as quickly as possible.
The students read the cultural material on their own and ask questions when puzzled; the grammar is presented inductively with minimal explanation by the teacher and only after it has been encountered several times in the readings. Class time is spent reading and translating the stories and explaining the grammar that confounds the students after they have read the CLC's brief explanations. With minimal testing and an emphasis on reading, the students usually complete the grammar covered in the CLC by the end of April or early May; it should be noted that we begin school the Monday after Labor Day and have a six-day cycle of classes with this course meeting five of the six days.
In May, the students begin to read the Aeneid, getting only as far as line 220 because they have to learn meter and figures of speech, as well as get used to poetic vocabulary. Fortunately, the text we use has a running vocabulary, and we supplement the homework with prelection sheets, which provide the students with more help than is found in the book.
In all the AP classes, as well as in the ninth-grade classes that read Vergil, we encourage the students to obtain a translation of the Aeneid that they find easy to understand. They are told to read the material before they start to translate and to mark off each section assigned so that they can use the translation intelligently when reviewing for a test. They are also told to keep a notebook, writing vocabulary they look up on only one side of the open notebook so that they can take notes and write down translations of difficult sentences or phrases during class. The students are reminded that they should use their time intelligently; if they have 20 lines of Latin to prepare for a class, they should allot two minutes per line and work through each sentence of, say, four lines in about eight minutes. They should use the vocabulary in the book, the notes in the book, the prelection sheet, and the translation to figure out the Latin without writing it down. The following assignment is a good example of a prelection sheet for the same part of the Aeneid as the assignment above; in this case, the number preceding each question corresponds to a line in the text:
Assignment
AP® Latin: Vergil—Aeneid 1.65-80 Prelection
- Note the arrangement of the words. What declension is "hominum"?
- "[D]edit" has the sense of give the power to, which explains the infinitives. Remember that infinitives are nouns, and here are the direct objects of "dedit." What is the direct object of "tollere"? I hope your answer is not "vento," which clearly depends on "tollere" in another way. What way?
- "[M]ihi" depends on "inimica," which makes the pronoun what C+R?
- "[P]ortans" modifies what word in the preceding line? How many direct objects does it take here? How does "Ilium" relate to the opening theme? Look at lines 5-7 again.
69-70. "[I]ncute," "obrue," "age," and "disjice" are all what form? Read all the notes in the book.
- "[P]uppis" is what case? Note that it is modified by "submersas."
- "[D]iversos" is what gender? What noun is understood with this substantive?
- "[B]is septem" is indeclinable. What is the only noun that it can go with? Note the arrangement of the words.
- The note at the bottom of the page is very good. Read carefully, and we will discuss any questions in class. "[Q]uarum" is what C+R if it depends on "unam," the understood object of "jungam" (73)? "[F]orma" has a macron on the last letter. What word does it depend on? Does this help with the C+R? "Deiopea" has macrons over each e. How many syllables in this name?
- "[S]tabili" is like what other Latin word? What declension? What part of speech?
- "[U]t" can introduce three different subjunctive clauses. What are they? Which one here? Why? "[A]nnos" is accusative. What is the verb? Does it need an object, or is "annos" accusative duration of time (acc. D.O.T.)?
- Note what words go with what words and translate them that way.
- Based on the note, what case is "haec"? "[C]ontra" is an adverb here, meaning in reply. "Tuus" is an adjective. What noun does it go with? "[Q]uid optes" is a clause. What kind? Look up opto and find what conjugation, which should tell you the tense, mood, and voice of the verb. "[Q]uid" is also a good clue, as is "explorare."
- As an ending for a verb, -esso means that one does the action of the stem (here from capio, capere, cepi, captus) with enthusiasm. We will see this several times, and it is worth filing away in your brain.
- Each "tu" is the subject of "concilias" (79). You should look up the meaning of this verb, think of English derivatives, note the different direct objects, and perhaps translate the verb differently with each object. This is what a zeugma requires. "[S]ceptra Jovemque" is not a hendiadys. Why not? Think of what "concilias" means.
- "[D]as" is from "do" and has the same sense as "dedit" (66); note the infinitive.
- "[T]empestatum" is explained in the notes, but what is the nominative and genitive singular?
Homework and Tests
If the students spend 45 minutes on their homework, that is all that we as a department feel that we can expect from them, and most students do finish in less time. With the homework sheets we try to challenge the students, and with the prelection sheets we try to help them make their way through the Latin. Tests occur after every 150 lines or so, with a week's notice, and follow the AP format but with less time allotted for each question; we feel the students should not have to spend time figuring out the passage but should recognize it at once.
The Joys of Aeneas
Several years ago I gave an AP workshop in which I offered many of the views I've presented above. A public school teacher who attended went back to his school and put the ideas into practice. Since his students are not all at the same level of ability as the students at Trinity, he spreads the CLC out over three semesters and a bit more. In the second semester of their second year of Latin, his students begin the Aeneid and complete the AP syllabus in what is the junior year for most, and then they do the AP Latin Literature syllabus the following year. He told me that his enrollment is up and that the students are more enthusiastic and committed to their study of Latin because they find the material interesting as well as challenging, and they get to an advanced level very quickly.
As I tell my colleagues in my department and participants in workshops, we Latin teachers were the "weird" kids from high school and/or college, the ones who liked Latin and got it with relative ease. Our job as teachers is not to replicate ourselves or to make sure that there are enough Latin teachers for the years to come. Our goal is to interest students in what interests us: the literature of Rome that still speaks to readers today and provides insight into the human condition. We may be grammar mavens, even grammar freaks, but that is no reason to inflict our "joys" on all our students. If the students at Trinity all live long lives and die without really understanding the sequence of tenses, I will not have a single regret. But if they do not remember Aeneas or Catullus as great experiences, then I will have major regrets. Those who love Latin and want to teach it will emerge in any program, but the program should always be as large as possible and should include as many students as it can.
Donald E. Connor is the head of the Classics Department at Trinity School in New York City, where he has taught since 1983. He received his B.A. in classics from Fordham University and earned his masters degree in classics from Yale University. He has taught both AP Latin courses every year since 1971. He has served as both a College Board consultant and an AP Latin Exam Reader; from 2000 to 2004, he was a member of the AP Latin Development Committee.
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