We are definitely in the midst of winter doldrums with arctic blasts and snowstorms across the country. And, that has surely been the case here in Augusta, ME! Growing up in Massachusetts, I looked forward to the February vacation that includes the holiday Presidents Day as an opportunity to enjoy the snow and as a respite from the trek to school in the cold. It was not, however, uphill. :) Even as a youth, I always suspected that the week of vacation was designed to benefit the New England ski industry. So, whether you’re receiving this eLitterae at the end of the holiday weekend or at the beginning of your vacation, I hope it finds you healthy and warm.

 

Mid-February means March will be here before we know it. And, with March comes B-C’s Seventh Annual edition of Martia Dementia. To learn more, see the announcement later in the issue.

 

It is my honor to present Matthew Katsenes as the author of this month’s Teaching Tip. Timing is everything! The Classical Association of New England has just named Matt as the 2021 recipient of the Matthew I. Wiencke Teaching Award for excellence in precollegiate teaching. How wonderful to receive such recognition from one’s teacher peers, include colleague Emma Vanderpool, one of his nominators! I first learned of Matt when he was the beloved Latin teacher at Pentucket Regional High School in West Newbury, MA, and my “niece” Rachel was one of his enthusiastic students. Subsequently, I met Matt when he was teaching at Lincoln Way High School in New Lenox, IL, and he was the coordinator for the Illinois Classical Conference’s book exhibit. The photo below was taken at the American Classical League banquet at the 2017 Institute at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. My husband, Ray Grant, poses with "Romans," Monmouth College students Tim Morris and Emma Vanderpool and, at the far right, Matt Katsenes. B-C is very proud of its new Encounter Latin Novella Series and is pleased to share Matt’s insights on teaching with novellas.

 

Congratulations to the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society for Classical Studies on successfully meeting the challenges of navigating a multifaceted annual meeting in Covidian times! President Bridget Dean, PhD, editor Amelia Wallace, and I enjoyed the opportunity to pursue, via Zoom, some professional development as we attended various presentations and sessions. I especially enjoyed the American Classical League and pedagogy panels as well as the Presidential Panel on William Sanders Scarborough. I am hopeful that the 2022 meeting will be able to take place real time next January in San Francisco. Deo volente!

I’m sure you’ve seen various articles noting that Dr. Anthony Fauci is proud of his study of the classics and his Jesuit education. We share two interesting articles in the Classics Tidbits of this issue. Fauci’s entry in the Regis High School yearbook notes that he participated in the Iliad Academy. In keeping with Jesuit high school tradition, Fauci and his classmates in the Academy would have read the poem in Greek and then participated in a public defense in which examiners, probably professors from Fordham University, would question the students about their work with the Iliad. My alma mater, Jesuit Boston College High School, has a sixty or so year tradition of the Homeric Academy, whose students traditionally read all of the Odyssey in Greek and then undertake a similar public defense. My year was one of transition: we participated in a Herodotean Academy but did not undertake a public defense. When I was teaching Latin and Greek at Loyola Academy in Wilmette, IL, I was able to establish the public defense tradition and that first year, 1990, the late Brian Donaher, my Herodotus teacher at BC High, served as one of the examiners. Do check out the Fauci articles.

With every good wish for you, your students, and your families,

I've found the recent proliferation of novellae aimed at novice and intermediate readers of Latin to be a tremendous boon for my Latin program. They offer comprehensible and compelling input for readers even at the earliest stages. With limited vocabulary and carefully curated sentence complexity, they are comprehensible for readers across a broader spectrum of skill.

 

I am not a full Comprehensible Input evangelist, and my classroom reflects that mindset. I generally use novellae as a whole-class reading experience and build grammatical lessons around the content of each book. This means that I am no longer wedded to a particular textbook's sequence of grammatical concepts. My students tend to encounter indirect statements, for instance, well before they are grappling with the myriad ways to use the ablative case. The great benefit I see with this is the motivation of my students. It is no longer about preparing to answer a question on a test, which always brought some buy-in, but about being able to read the next page of the story, which grabs a much larger segment of the class. Emma Vanderpool's new novella, Augury Is for the Birds: Marcus de Avibus Discit, is an excellent example of the genre, providing engaging material for novice readers of Latin with ample opportunity to expand students' understanding of grammatical structures usually hidden from students until their second year of study.

 

In the last couple of years, the greatest difficulty with a novella-based approach has been in finding material with longer, more complex sentences. I've always seen this as a strength of several reading method textbook series, and we have been struggling to catch up in the novella world. Recently, however, many novellae addressing this gap have been published, providing engaging material to students ready for more complex texts. Two texts in particular kept my intermediate students tuned in to Zoom class for weeks last spring: Bellovesus in Gallia by Laura Shaw and Pugio Bruti by Daniel Pettersson and Amelie Rosengren were real page turners, despite the level of complexity in the language (especially in Pugio Bruti).*

 

Overall, using novellae in my classroom has given more students the opportunity to feel successful in Latin class. Turning up the dial on intrinsic motivation with a good story and ratcheting down the vocabulary demands have allowed students, even the ones who struggle with the endings, to feel the joy of understanding on a daily basis without sacrificing the opportunity to expose learners to the complexity of Latin. It has meant, essentially, that students who used to be driven away early on now regularly make it into the intermediate level and take away a stronger understanding of the language and culture we teach.

 

I heartily encourage my colleagues to take advantage of novellas and their potential for significantly impacting your students’ appreciation for Latin.

 

Matthew Katsenes
Moultonborough Academy

 

Editor’s Notes:

 

 

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.

 

Plan to purchase the second novella in the Vanderpool series on augury, Under His Father’s Wing: Marcus de Auguribus Discit. This, the second of four novellas planned, is scheduled to be in print later in 2021!

 

 

 

Editor's Note: We are pleased to call your attention to materials, including lesson plans, added to the digital content for Augury Is for the Birds: Marcus de Avibus Discit.

Presenter: Amelia Wallace, Editor, Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers

This presentation is intended to equip secondary teachers with materials and ideas for developing and teaching a unit about the Jewish Diaspora in Rome; this unit fulfills aspects of the Connections Goal of the Standards for Classical Language Learning. While it will address the connection between violence and the Jewish Diaspora—for example, the significance of the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE—it will focus on Roman-Jewish cultural exchange, as well as quotidian interactions between Romans and Jews within the city of Rome and its environs.

 

Amelia Wallace received her MAT in Latin and Classical Humanities from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and her BA in Classical Civilizations from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining Bolchazy-Carducci in 2018, she taught Latin at the middle school, high school, and university levels, in addition to tutoring students of all ages. Wallace pursues a variety of topics in classics and keeps up to date on developments in classics pedagogy.

 

Tuesday, March 23, 2021, 6–7:00 pm ET
LGBT Meets SPQR: Resources and Lesson Plans for Including LGBTQIA+ Instruction into High School Latin Curricula
Presenter: Kristin Masters, Rowan University and Cumberland Regional High School, NJ

The purpose of this webinar is to provide lesson plans and authentic Latin and Greek sources on gender and sexuality in the ancient Greco-Roman world. High school appropriate materials will be provided to enhance representation and foster conversations on LGBTQIA+ topics in the classroom. Ancient terminology and voices on how the ancients defined themselves will also be discussed.

 

Kristin A. Masters has been an Adjunct Professor of Latin at Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ, since 2010. While this is her first year teaching at Cumberland Regional High School, Bridgeton, NJ, her alma mater, she taught high school Latin elsewhere in New Jersey for thirteen years. She sponsors Junior Classical League and has established a dual credit course with Rowan. Masters earned a BA from Dickinson College and her MA from Bryn Mawr College Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. She specializes in Roman history and is the author of several articles and two textbooks, The First Twenty Roman Emperors: Selections from Eutropius Adapted for Beginning Readers of Latin and Troy on Trial: An Intermediate Latin Reader. Masters has provided resources and lesson plans through some 150 blog entries on LGBT Meets SPQR.

 

Tuesday, April 6, 2021, 6–7:00 pm ET
Trying to Hear the Anti-racism Voices of Antiquity
Presenter: Jackie Murray, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

In antiquity, slavery and genocide were the ubiquitous consequences of defeat by a mightier military force. "History is written by the conquerors," they say, so we could ask with the literary theorist Spivak, "can the subaltern* speak?" and return a negative answer as she does. However, often left unconsidered is the scholar's social distance from those they are trying to hear speak. In this presentation, Dr. Murray suggests that we do not hear the subaltern because it is the habit of scholars—especially classicists, who are overwhelmingly from the dominant and well-heeled groups of society—who tend to identify with the historical and mythical figures, especially those glorified by the stories/histories, to be inured to the subalterns' cries against dehumanization and oppression. By using oppositional reading on a sample of ancient texts, she shows that not only can the ancient Greek subaltern speak, but they have a lot to say against racism.

 

 

Dr. Jackie Murray is Associate Professor of Classics in the Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures Department at the University of Kentucky. She is on the editorial board of Classical Philology, Religion Compass, and Brill Research Perspectives in Classical Poetry. Her primary area of research is Hellenistic Poetry, and her secondary area is Race and the Classics. For insights on these areas of scholarship, please see how Dr. Murray expresses it “in her own words.”

Murray earned her BA in Latin and Classical Studies (summa cum laude), University of Guelph, an MA in Classics from the University of Western Ontario, and her PhD from the University of Washington. A sampling of her awards, honors, and scholarships include Fellowship (2020) and Visiting Scholar (2018) at the Center for Hellenic Studies, NEH Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2011–2012), NEH Fellowships (2010, 2006), and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship (1999–2003). Select recent publications include “Race and Sexuality: Racecraft in the Odyssey” in Denise McCoskey, ed., Bloomsbury Cultural History of Race Series [in press 2021], “Poetically Erect: The female oriented humor in Callimachus’ Hymn to Demeter” Hellenistica Groningana 24: New Perspectives in Callimachean Scholarship (Leuven, 2020), and “W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Quest of the Silver Fleece: The Education of Black Medea” TAPA 149.2 Supplement (Sesquicentennial Anniversary Issue 2019).

 

Old Problems, New Approaches
Presenter: Sinclair Bell, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL

Can we write an archaeology of "race" in the Roman period? In this webinar, Dr. Bell considers the question through the lens of images of and artifacts related to Aethiopians (that is, Sub-Saharan Africans). After providing a brief overview of the corpus of objects and their imagery and the critical axioms of their study, he will propose some new ways of thinking about this material culture and discuss the ethical stakes of such a project within the field of archaeology more broadly.

 

Sinclair Bell is a classical archaeologist and art historian. Professor of Art History at Northern Illinois University, he is also the editor of the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. His current areas of research include the art and archaeology of the Etruscans; the art and archaeology of the Roman provinces; spectacles in the Roman imperial period; the visual and material evidence for slaves and foreigners in the Roman Empire, especially Aethiopians/Nubians. He has co-edited twelve books, including Free at Last! The Impact of Freed Slaves on the Roman Empire (London, 2012). After earning his BA in Classical Studies and History at Wake Forest University, he earned a master’s degree in Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford and the University of Edinburgh, from which he received his PhD in Classics in 2004. He also studied at the University of Cologne and has been a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the Howard Foundation. Congratulations to Professor Bell who has recently been named a recipient of a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities grant to fund his research on the visual and material evidence of race and ethnicity in the Roman Empire (c. 100 BCE–200 CE).

 

Tuesday, May 11, 2021, 6–7:00 pm ET
Julius Caesar’s “Augustan” Dictatorship
Presenter: Hans-Friedrich Mueller, Union College, Schenectady, NY

Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico portray a republican general of the traditional type. When students turn from this reading to Vergil's Aeneid, they land in a rather different world of myth, legend, and Augustan values. How can we help students bridge this seeming disconnect? We can fill in the historical background. Many of the policies and programs that we associate primarily with the principate of Augustus were, in fact, either established by, or foreshadowed in, the legislative program of Caesar’s brief dictatorship. Cassius Dio, for example, discusses Caesar’s descent from Venus and Mars, his celebration of equestrian games for noble youth, and his promotion of marriage and childbirth. By exploring “Augustan” elements in Caesar’s legislative program, we can help students connect Caesar not just to Augustus, but also to Augustus’s Vergilian avatar Aeneas. 

 

Hans-Friedrich Mueller has been praised for his previous webinars for B-C. Mueller, a.k.a. Molinarius/ΜΥΛΩΝΙΚΟΣ, is the Thomas B. Lamont Professor of Ancient & Modern Languages at Union College. He is a recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from Eta Sigma Phi and of the Society for Classical Studies Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Classics as well as two awards for excellence in teaching at Florida State University. While at FSU, Mueller developed a graduate distance program in classics for high school teachers. Mueller is the author of Roman Religion in Valerius Maximus (Routledge, 2002), the editor of an abridgment of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Modern Library, 2003), the translator of Mehl’s Roman Historiography (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and the author of two video courses for The Great Courses (Teaching Company), Latin 101: Learning a Classical Language and Greek 101: Learning an Ancient Language. Molinarius’s six years as a high school teacher served him well as author of Caesar: Selections from his Commentarii De Bello Gallico and as coauthor (with Rose Williams) of Caesar: A LEGAMUS Transitional Reader (Bolchazy-Carducci, 2012). Mueller is presently working on night as a legal, religious, and social context in Roman culture.

CANE—Classical Association of New England Annual Meeting
Saturday, March 13 and Saturday, March 20, 2021
B–C will participate in the Virtual Exhibit Hall.

 

 

B-C Author Presentations
Saturday, March 13
10:30–11:45 am
Panel: Novellas: Aligning Purpose and Audience, Organizer, Emma Vanderpool
“Novellas as a Bridge for Authentic Texts” Emma Vanderpool, author, Explore Latin: Aves and Augury Is for the Birds: Marcus de Avibus Discit

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 will be Virtual
June 24–26, 2021
B–C will participate in the Virtual Exhibit Hall.

NJCL—National Junior Classical League
68th Annual Convention will be virtual.
July 26–31, 2021
B–C will participate in the Virtual Exhibit Hall.

 

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 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.

 William Sanders Scarborough's First Lessons in Greek
A Facsimile of the 1881 First Edition