Editor Amelia Wallace caught this license plate in the parking lot at the Hawthorne Inn and Conference Center in Winston-Salem, NC, site of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South Southern Section biennial meeting. (For report on CAMWS-SS, see next month's eLitterae.)

 

The upper panel of this nineteenth-century looking glass depicts the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. The glass captures the image of an historical interpreter at Old Salem, NC. Excavations during the nineteenth century led to Pompeii-inspired decoration like this.

Latin for the New Millennium Level 2. (329 words)

 

 

Welcome to autumn—the fall colors of New England where I grew up made autumn my favorite season. And, for high school teachers, the football season with homecoming games, dances, and alumni reunions make autumn a special busy and festive time.

Please encourage your students to enter Bolchazy-Carducci's Dolus aut Dulce 2018 costume contest. The winner in each of the entry categories, individual and group costume, will receive a $50 book credit. Deadline for photo entries is November 7.

Keeping with the Halloween theme, we include in the "Resources & Teaching Tips" section some suggestions for class activities along with some complimentary downloadables for use in your classroom. Some of you might experience some déjà vu looking at these. Yes, we offered them in the October 2016 eLitterae.

A special delight for most teachers and, I believe especially for Latin teachers, is to see young people enter this venerable profession. B-C editor Amelia Wallace is following three such tyros on the B-C blog. Check the series out.

It's always edifying to see colleagues honored for their years of devotion to the profession. At this fall's annual Classical Association of the Atlantic States (CAAS) meeting, it was my pleasure to see David Murphy (coauthor of B-C's Horace: A LEGAMUS Transitional Reader and A Horace Workbook) honored with a Gratulatio. I was pleased that Mary Brown, CAAS executive director, with whom I have worked closely over the years, was honored with an Ovatio. CAAS's highest honor went to Henry Bender whom I first met over forty years ago when we were both leading Jesuit high school students on Italy tours. Henry received the Barbara McManus Award. Barbara was another dear friend whom I also met over forty years ago when we were both participants in a Vergilian Society program in Campania. Congratulations to such deserving colleague friends.

May your autumn bring you dulcia!

All the best, 

 

This month, I am excited to write about a tool called Book Creator. It is a simple interface that allows teachers and students to easily create eBooks. Book Creator is available as both an iPad app and a Chrome browser-based tool which means that it can be used on most teacher or student devices. It has a number of simple templates to work from and allows enough flexibility to make it fun to use, yet it is not overwhelming. As the eBook author, you can add text, images, maps, video, audio, web links, and YouTube content. Teachers can generate short eBooks focused on specific grammar topics or themes. These short eBooks are a unique way to deliver important content and examples to students. For those of us who sometimes create our own class materials, Book Creator is an efficient way to share these materials with students. I think the real potential is in considering how students can use this tool.

For many years, when my Latin 3 class was learning about Pompeii, their assignment was to create a tour itinerary and an accompanying guidebook. Having my students create these materials digitally using Book Creator would enhance this assignment in a variety of ways. Students can record themselves talking about some of the sites on their tour. They can embed video clips of reconstructions of buildings as well as links to further information. It is free to create a Book Creator account with the capacity for forty students to generate an eBook. Premium options and site licenses are also available. Book Creator has generated a good library of tutorial tools as well as resources to spark your creativity. To get started, visit www.bookcreator.com.

 

 

Lynne West
Consultant
Sunodia Educational Consulting

  

Editor's Note: When assigning projects with this software, teachers can use this as a teachable moment to instruct students that this program is a means for them to assemble their own work and that using materials from copyrighted sources is plagiarism. 

 

Editor's Notes: The above PDFs are provided for classroom use only as downloaded by the eLitterae subscriber and are not to be otherwise copied or distributed. If you don't have copies of these resources for your classroom library, take advantage of this issue's special 33% discount.

 

The Inn at Penn, with its gracious and accommodating staff, welcomed over two hundred classicists, a number well beyond expectations, to its facilities October 4–6, 2018. The program of some seventy presentations included panels addressing such timely topics as "Gender, Class, and Power in Plautine Comedy," "Afro-Greeks: A Panel in Honor of Emily Greenwood," and "Heroines Rising from the Depths of Misogyny: Women and Classical Themes in Modern Cinema." The CAAS program committee is to be lauded for its hard work—Saturday morning the committee met at 6:45 am to begin planning for the 2019 meeting!

 

A perennial highlight of each CAAS annual meeting is the Friday evening Clack reception and Clack lecture. The attendees took a brief walk or caught a trolley bus to the Penn Museum for libations, nibbles, and scintillating chat. They then assembled in the auditorium, where Yale University's Emily Greenwood delivered the 2018 Clack Lecture. Jerry Clack, classics professor emeritus at Duquesne University (and author of three works on Greek poetry published by Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers), established a fund for the lecture that annually presents a classicist of note. Greenwood's presentation on reception was well-received.

 

 

Editor Don Sprague represented Bolchazy-Carducci. The company's display of B-C titles filled four tables and anchored the exhibit room. Grad students, high school teachers, and college professors all expressed their gratitude for B-C's service to the classics community and for the opportunity to examine the books firsthand. The nineteen BC Readers continue to draw professors looking for appropriate titles for their courses.

 

 

CAAS annually honors its members for their dedication to the profession. CAAS Executive Director Mary Brown, who has taught Latin at both the high school and college level, received an Ovatio to recognize her service and especially her diligence at mastering the logistics of each annual meeting. The Shipley School's Anne Reidel Smith, the George School's Jane Dunlap, Linganore High School's Deborah Carter, and McDaniel College's Thomas Falkner all received Ovationes. Gratulationes honored Lee Pearcy and his editorial colleagues for their work with Classical World and David Murphy and Mervin Dilts for their new Oxford Classical Text of Antiphon and Andocides. CAAS presented the Barbara McManus Award for Leadership to Henry Bender. What an honor to celebrate these dedicated teachers!

 

With the program committee already hard at work, the 2019 annual meeting in Silver Springs, MD awaits!

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
Rest Lightly: An Anthology of Greek and Latin Tomb Inscriptions
By Paul Shore
xi + 75 pp. (1997) Paperback, ISBN 978-0-86516-355-3
$15.00 $10.00
 
Petronius: Selections from the Satyricon
By Gilbert Lawall
xvi + 260 pp. (1995) Paperback, ISBN 978-0-86516-288-4
$35.00 $23.00
 
To Be A Roman: Topics in Roman Culture
By Margaret A. Brucia and Gregory N. Daugherty
viii + 155 pp. (2007) Paperback, ISBN 978-0-86516-633-2
$29.00 $19.00

 

Professor Nousek is a Caesar devotee who has extensively researched, presented on, and written about him. Her most recent delineated below focuses on Caesar as author. This webinar will be a great learning experience for all teachers of Caesar and especially those who shepherd their students through the AP Latin curriculum.

 

Debra L. Nousek is associate professor at The University of Western Ontario in Canada where she served as Director of the Graduate Program in the Classics. She earned a BA at the University of Alberta, an MA at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and a PhD from Rutgers University.

Recognized internationally for his expertise and scholarship in medieval and Neo-Latin, Professor Tunberg will share his passion for post-antique Latin in this webinar. Tunberg will discuss representative examples of this beautiful bounty—twice as much Latin published in the post-antique period as during the Roman era—noting that many authors emulated the style of their Roman predecessors.

 

Terence Owen Tunberg is a professor in the Department of Classical Languages and teaches in the Honors Program at the University of Kentucky. Tunberg received a BA and MA in classics from the University of Southern California and a PhD from the University of Toronto.

Visit our website for complete author bios.