Where Was I? Part II: Because Latin

When at the conclusion of Latin IV last year I asked my students to reflect on the experience, one remarked that our inability to procure a text book changed the class. I didn't know it at the time I was frantically copying pages, but my student would prove correct. Quite by chance we happy few of Latin IV found ourselves liberated from the constraints of curiously culled collections and before us had the entire Latin canon. Now that may sound exciting, but to a teacher it sounds a logistical nightmare. Indeed it was both a risk and a burden to adapt the curriculum, but it seemed timid to suffer through the compromises of an anthology for mere convenience. The result was an immensely successful and satisfying year about which I'll write later.

The result was also the desire to refine those selections, add the necessary vocabulary and notes, and then compile additional resources–maps, charts, timelines, images of works of art, fun marginalia– into a proper anthology, which I have done. I'm excited to use it through this coming year, but it was quite a labor.

Instead of the senior slog through Vergil–a terrible thing to do to teachers, students, and Vergil–I selected several topics which we explore philosophically through lecture, discussion, and articles, and which we follow up with Latin texts.

1. Warm-Up: Aesop's Fables in Latin
2. Cosmology: The beginning of Ovid's Metamorphoses
3. Mythology: The tales of Echo and Narcissus from the Metamorphoses and Orpheus and Eurydice from Georgic IV.
4. Courage: Nisus and Euryalus from Aeneid IX
5. Elegy & Leisure: Tibullus I 
6. Leisure: Selections from Horace, Martial, Catullus, and Ovid
7. Beauty: Selections from Horace's Odes
8. History and Philosophy of History: Livy I: Ch. 1-16
9. Stoicism and Moral Philosophy: Marcus Aurelius in Latin

Reading Ovid we compare science and mythology, and we let Aristotle guide us through the story of Nisus and Euryalus, focusing on the question of courage. I introduce the topic of leisure with Josef Pieper and that of Beauty with Roger Scruton.  It was quite a blast, I must say. (And it was no small thrill to fill full the selections of Ovid and Vergil which the anthology had sliced down to thin morsels.)

What took even longer than the anthology, though, was the next major revision, 3.0, of the Latin Grammar on which I've been working for some time. Some time ago I grew tired of bouncing back and forth between incomplete modern grammars and stuffy, confusing old ones. The result is now a few hundred pages of an intellegible, organized, comprehensive Latin grammar. It was as much a task of organization and formatting as it was of clear explication. 

At any rate: it's done, and I'm back blogging.