A little Hades-inspired fun.

So, Gravitas lends weight to drift boats? Wooden drift boards handcrafted in Montana exhibit at the Missoula airport caught the editor’s eye.

Will a Roman warship become a Lego reality?

Athena inspires
Chicago café.

Latin lovers’ love makes New York Times.

Allow me, once again, to laud you for your perseverance, your resiliency, your steadfastness, and your dedication to your students and your teaching. These are trying times and teachers have proven themselves anchors of stability for their students. May the coming vacation provide you much deserved rest, relaxation, restoration, and special time (as COVID allows) with your family.

 

It is my great pleasure to call your attention to this issue’s Teaching Tip penned by the talented Emma Vanderpool, who discusses the launch of Bolchazy-Carducci’s new novella series from the perspective of teacher and author. B-C is so very excited about this new series and pleased to have enlisted Emma as one of the series’ authors.

 

May I call your attention to two Teaching Tip and Resources items that feature the late Olympian gold medalist Rafer Johnson. Special thanks to Judith Peller Hallett, who provided the link to the documentary about the Olympics reenactment. It was intended to accompany the 1972 Olympics but was not shown due to the horrendous capture and shooting of Israeli athletes. Professor Hallett served as a classicist resource person for the production.

 

All of us at Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers wish you and your families and your students and their families a holiday season of joy as we celebrate light and life. May the arrival of the vaccine engender hope for the New Year!

I feel incredibly fortunate to help kick off this new novella series by Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers. For so long, we Latin teachers have focused on the extant texts that we do have, and they have served us well. The advent of Latin novellas, which use limited vocabulary, has offered our students new opportunities to enjoy extended, connected narratives. Moreover, these narratives have been used to transform our classroom spaces. They have added complexity to familiar narratives and have included voices and perspectives that have traditionally been marginalized or omitted.

 

By highlighting the multicultural nature of the ancient world and by lifting up the underrepresented voices, we allow our students more opportunities to see themselves in the past. As Rudine Sims Bishop wrote, literature can act as a door, a window, or a mirror. We can invite students to not just look into the past but to imagine themselves there. The ancient Mediterranean can act as a powerful laboratory, in which students can test hypotheses about the world or try on identities, due to the distance provided, and they can do so without the potential risks involved in trying these out by directly reflecting on current societies. Yet, being able to have narratives that act as a mirror and being able to see themselves in that world make it even easier to relate to a world that has grown ever farther from our students.

 

When I first began writing, because I did not have students of my own yet, I thought of the middle school students at Moultonborough Academy. Their teacher, Matthew Katsenes, had been kind enough to let me drop in and guest-teach a few times, and so I had a very clear audience in mind and a very clear goal. My goal: I wanted to create compelling material, based around Roman history, which was a topic that, up to that point, had been largely left out of the Latin novella market. That had been an entry point into the ancient Mediterranean for me as a student, and I strongly believe that it can be so for others as well. With a topic and an audience in hand, my first novella, Sacri Pulli: A Tale of War and Chickens, was born, followed by a series of books involving animals narrating historical events.

 

While first motivated by the lack of historical topics, I also began to think more deeply about the figures and perspectives which had been marginalized or omitted from our telling of history in the Latin classroom. This novella series that Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers is publishing focuses on the oft-overlooked topic of augury. The first two books in the series look at a familiar father-son narrative but also complicate the notion that everyone in the Roman world believed dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (“it is sweet and right to die for one’s country”). The third and fourth novellas, meanwhile, give women a voice by looking at their role in the familiar story of Romulus and Remus, and at the power of Tanaquil as a king-maker. When we change and challenge the perspectives of familiar stories and expand our historical lessons and discussions to the broader world around the Mediterranean, our classroom discussions can become more rich and complex.

 

The ancient world was just as diverse and intersectional as ours today. By not just highlighting but focusing on the complex narratives of the past, we can make our study of the past not only more representative of what was but also more representative of what is. Moreover, we can start to change the narrative of who is a Latin student. We can change who feels included and welcomed in our classrooms. We can change the direction of the field. Like many things, this difficult, but worthy work is our responsibility and it begins with teachers and with the narratives we choose to bring into our classrooms. Bolchazy-Carducci with their new novella series is providing us with even more comprehensible, compelling texts to expand the bounds of our classroom libraries and to engage in this worthwhile work.

 

DES: How did you become interested in the classics?

DES: Which of your many classics-connected accomplishments and honors especially please you? Why?

DES: What special nugget of advice would you give to a high school student studying the classics?

DES: What special nugget of advice would you give to a new teacher of the classics?

Emma Vanderpool has been teaching Latin since 2017—two years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year at Trickum Middle School in Gwinnett County, Georgia, and now back in her beloved New England at Springfield Honors Academy, Springfield, MA. Vanderpool earned her Bachelor of Arts in Latin, Classics, and History from Monmouth College in Illinois and her Master of Arts in Teaching for Classical Humanities from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Among her awards, Vanderpool is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award from UMASS Amherst (2019) and was honored as the Lincoln Laureate for Monmouth College (2017). She serves on the Executive Board for Ascanius: The Youth Classics Institute and the Classical Association of New England and is an organizer for Lupercal. She has self-published nine novellae and is pleased to be an author for Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers.

 

Designed to engage and delight novice and intermediate learners, these Latin readers use limited, high-frequency vocabulary and copious images to support comprehension. The debut titles in the Explore Latin and Encounter Latin series focus on the world of Roman augury—entirely in Latin!

The nonfiction text Explore Latin: Avēs offers an immersive introduction to the significance of birds in Roman culture and religion. This “pre-reader” pairs perfectly with the Encounter Latin novella, Augury Is for the Birds, which delves deeper into the ins and outs of augury and its role in ancient Rome.

 

 

 

This panel responds to a shameful episode in the history of American classics: in 1909, the distinguished Black classicist and President of Wilberforce University, William Sanders Scarborough (1852–1926), chose not to attend the annual meeting of the American Philological Association (now the SCS) in Baltimore because the hotel where the conference banquet was to be held refused to serve him. The speakers will contextualize Scarborough’s exclusion from the annual meeting within the history of Baltimore as well as the profession of Classical Studies and will address the aspirations and achievements of Scarborough himself and of the many Black writers and scholars of his period who engaged with classical antiquity, a rich legacy from which we have much to learn as we strive to make our profession truly inclusive and anti-racist.

 

The 2021 AIA/SCS Joint Annual Meeting will be an entirely virtual event.
B–C will participate in the Virtual Exhibit Hall.

Thursday, January 7
Sixth Paper Session (2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.)
“Learning the Rules: Games and Education in the Ancient World Panel” Del Chrol, Co–organizer, Latin for the New Millennium, Levels 1 and 2, audio recordings; “Check Your Mate: Ovid, the Game of Love, and Learning to be a Man” presenter

 

Friday, January 8
Presidential Panel of the Society for Classical Studies: “William Sanders Scarborough and Black Classicism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” (5:30 p.m.–7:30 p.m.)
“A Portrait of William Sanders Scarborough in 1909” Michele Valerie Ronnick, Introduction, William Sanders Scarborough's First Lessons in Greek: A Facsimile of the 1881 First Edition

Saturday, January 9
Ninth Paper Session (9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.)
“Spanish Vistas in Martial, Epigrams 10 and 12” Alison Keith, author, A Latin Epic Reader: Selections from Ten Epics

Tenth Paper Session (2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.)
“Recreating the Voice of the Gladiator for the Secondary Classroom” Emma Vanderpool, author, Explore Latin: Aves and Augury Is for the Birds: Marcus de Avibus Discit

Sunday, January 10
Twelfth Paper Session (2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.)
“The Ancient Novel and Material Culture Panel” Edmund P. Cueva, Co-organizer and Response, coauthor, Longus' Daphins & Chloe: An Annotated Edition

“Race, Classics, and the Latin Classroom Panel” Ronnie Ancona, Co-organizer and Introduction, author, Horace: Selected Odes and Satire 1.9, Writing Passion: A Catullus Reader, et alii

 

Representative: Donald Sprague will be available from 1:00–2:00 PM each day of the meeting.

CANE—Classical Association of New England Annual Meeting
Saturday, March 13 and Saturday, March 20, 2021
This meeting will be a virtual meeting via Zoom on two consecutive Saturdays.
B–C will participate in the Virtual Exhibit Hall.

CAMWS—Classical Association of the Middle West and South
117th Annual Conference will be Virtual
April 7–10, 2021
B–C will participate in the Virtual Exhibit Hall.

International Congress on Medieval Studies
56th International Congress on Medieval Studies will be Virtual
May 10–15, 2021
B–C will participate in the Virtual Exhibit Hall.

ACL—American Classical League
74th Annual Institute
Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri
June 24–26, 2021
Representatives: Bridget Dean and Donald Sprague

NJCL—National Junior Classical League
68th Annual Convention
San Diego State University, San Diego, California
July 26–31, 2021
Representatives: Donald Sprague and Amelia Wallace

Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers is thrilled to announce brand-new Lumina content that is now available: online exercises to accompany the Caesar and Vergil selections on the AP Latin syllabus! With its comprehensive, completely original content, Lumina: Caesar and Vergil Selections is a perfect complement to Bolchazy-Carducci's print and eBook resources for AP Latin. Better yet, Lumina: Caesar and Vergil Selections works on any internet-enabled device!

 

Features

To support teachers going remote this fall, content will be made available in stages. Multiple choice and free response questions for Vergil's Aeneid, Books 1 and 2, and Caesar's De Bello Gallico, Books 1, 4, and 6, are now available. The rest of the syllabus will be available October 26 or sooner. Practice exam content will follow.

 

To learn more, visit the Lumina: Caesar and Vergil Selections product page and watch the overview video.

 Lumina: Online Guided Practice to Accompany LNM

Lumina online content offers new resources to support LNM, Levels 1 and 2. The interactive guided Language Fact sections provide immediate feedback to students as they preview or review each chapter of Latin for the New Millennium Level 1 or Level 2. Mouse-over vocabulary lists allow a new format for vocabulary mastery. Infinitely replayable crossword puzzles engage students in derivative work. Automatically graded quizzes free up student-teacher interaction time for translation, oral/aural work, discussion, and other learning activities. For a brief overview of the program, check out this video.

 Artes Latinae: A Self-Teaching,

Lumina offers a revamped Artes Latinae. This fully interactive online program teaches all of Latin grammar in two courses. Purchase the program at a special discounted price of 25% off! For a brief overview of the program, check out this video.

Based on the program developed by Dr. Waldo E. Sweet of the University of Michigan for Encyclopedia Britannica, Lumina: Artes Latinae is an easy-to-follow course that includes all the tools a student needs to achieve a firm command of Latin. The course was carefully crafted and refined to suit the needs and abilities of a broad spectrum of students. Lumina: Artes Latinae meets existing foreign language requirements for high school graduation.

Contact us for an individual consultation on any program: bridget@bolchazy.com.

 

Discount is not available to distributors or on products distributed by Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers or on Lumina products.
 
  (Please note that there will be no adjustments on previous purchases.
Offer is nontransferable and subject to change without notice.)