Note: In 2008, I took a job as a Latin and American Literature teacher at a large Christian school. The goal was to pursue my calling and do what I loved (teach) while paying the bills and finishing my doctoral dissertation. Practically my first official task was to select the textbooks and develop the scope and sequence for the high-school Latin program. The school already had middle-school Latin and one of the reasons I was hired (instead of a pure literature teacher) was to establish a high-school Latin program. I prepared this textbook review as part of that process. Looking back, I’m impressed by this. I’d forgotten how thorough and clear it was. It should be clear to anyone who reads it how heavily my approach to Latin pedagogy leaned on grammar and vocab study. That kind of study is not easy work, and it’s hard to sell to students these days (and perhaps rightly so, but that’s a different conversation). But I still believe if you’re going to study a dead language, the best way to do it is the old-fashioned way. Those Renaissance schoolmasters knew what they were about when it came to teaching Latin to young people. (DL, Sept. 8, 2021)
Goal:
The purpose of the examination process is to select a multi-year Latin curriculum for grades nine through twelve. Upon adoption, the first-year course will be held in 2008-09, with successive courses added each year until the complete cycle has been implemented.
Guiding Assumptions:
The preeminent purpose of the high-school Latin course is to produce students who have a very firm formal as well as immediate grasp of Latin grammar and vocabulary to the end that they may both fluently read a variety of unabridged Latin texts as well as compose in Latin themselves and also so that they may be better able to understand their own language and future target languages due to their explicit grasp of grammatical structures. Presenting information about ancient Roman history, culture, and society is entirely secondary. Students who grasp Latin grammar and vocabulary will have no trouble learning all they could wish about ancient Roman life and letters. Latin is not a modern language, and learning Roman culture does not serve the same function for a Latin student that learning French social norms does for the student of French.
The publishers of the Cambridge Latin Course make an important point when they note that there is a “distinction between knowledge about the language and skill in using the language” (CLC website). While grammatical understanding and vocabulary definitions should be cognitively understood by conscious analysis, at some point they must also be subconsciously incorporated into a student’s immediate language “sense.” Ultimate success has not been achieved in the target language until students move beyond mere cognition and arrive at a direct and immediate understanding that has not been filtered through analytical structures couched in their native language.
Neither facet of the language-learning process should be ignored. A student who cannot explain in his own words the grammatical structures he is encountering on the page, even if he can completely grasp the meaning of the text, has gained but half the benefits of language study and will be very poorly equipped to teach the language. On the other hand, a student who can, after extended analysis, explain with great accuracy the grammar before him but has no reading fluency because he is constantly bound to either a dictionary or a grammar manual has gained less than half.
Essential Components:
An acceptable text must have the following four nonnegotiable characteristics:
- A clear and detailed presentation of Latin grammatical principles in an appropriately step-by-step and cumulative fashion.
- A healthy incorporation of well-chosen vocabulary for students to memorize.
- A generous selection of well-designed exercises that emphasize grammatical analysis.
- A generous selection of well-designed reading passages that emphasize intuitive and immediate comprehension.
Secondary Components:
Assuming the above essential components are included, a good text will have:
- A hard cover
- A paucity of poorly incorporated, non-essential tidbits. (see note below)
- Relatively low cost
- Smoothly incorporated, integrally presented information on Roman history and culture
- A selection of associated ancillary materials for classroom use, such as audio CDs, workbooks, etc.
- Pleasing production extras such as color pictures and glossy paper.
Note: Formally presented extra information (e.g. on Roman culture) can actually be a pedagogical liability if it is not tightly and naturally integrated with the Latin language material. Student energy, time, and endurance are finite, and asking students to digest tacked-on essays (even if brief and colorfully illustrated) about Roman life or other topics may be a poor use of limited resources in an already demanding class. If the information is well-integrated (when, for example, the Latin readings themselves deal with Roman history and culture), the situation is different. Studying Roman culture and history is a wonderful bonus when it’s done by means of the Latin language study.
Texts Examined:
A total of eight Latin programs by seven different publishers were examined: Wheelock’s Latin, Jenney’s Latin Course, Henle’s Latin, Latin for Americans, the Oxford Latin Course, the Cambridge Latin Course, Ecce Romani, and Latin for Christian Schools.
These seven fall into two broad pedagogical categories. Three (Wheelock, Henle, and Jenney’s) are traditional, grammar-intensive, deductive approaches. Three (Oxford, Cambridge, and Ecce Romani) sharply deemphasize explicit grammar instruction in favor of many lengthy and progressively more complex reading passages by means of which students intuitively explore and inductively acquire the Latin language. The seventh text, Latin for Americans, navigates a middle way between these two polar groups, and the eighth, Latin for Christian Schools uses a unique, dialogue-based pedagogical approach and is in a class by itself.
The Examiner:
The examiner has been both a student and a teacher of Wheelock’s Latin. Prior to completing this survey, he had no familiarity with any of the other seven texts in the survey.
Recommendation:
On the basis of the review, the following recommendations are made:
- [The school] should adopt Wheelock’s Latin, 6th ed. Rev. in hardcover as a detailed grammar manual and instructional resource to be used throughout the course of the program, especially during the first two years.
- [The school] should adopt the Cambridge Latin Course for reading texts, beginning with the Unit 1 text for the first-year class.
No text examined during the review completely satisfied all the requirements listed as non-negotiable essentials. Of the three traditional texts, Wheelock offers by far the best combination of clearly presented and well-organized grammar lessons and extensive and useful vocabulary; and its selection of exercises for each chapter is both excellent and voluminous. In addition, unlike either of the other two traditional texts, Wheelock offers a large selection of supplementary reading passages (carefully annotated) for advanced students and a large selection of supplementary exercises for each chapter that have answers included. What Wheelock lacks is sufficient reading material for beginning students. Until they have finished the forty grammar lessons, students will be limited largely to doing precise written translations of single sentences.
The Cambridge course, on the other hand, like the Oxford course and Ecce Romani, is characterized by a large quantity of reading passages for beginning students which are designed to inductively communicate grammatical principles. What separates the Cambridge course from the Oxford course and Ecce Romani is the way in which all the readings have been drawn from the archeological finds regarding Pompeii and Vesuvius. Taken as a whole, they provide not only regular, manageable Latin reading for beginners, but an unequalled introduction to Roman culture and archeology that is effortlessly and inextricably woven into the Latin material itself.
Henle’s Latin
Henle’s Latin is the work of a Robert Henle, a Jesuit, and comes well recommended. Classical Conversations a classically-based homeschool organization (with an immense catalog of materials) suggests Henle as the follow up to Latina Christiana, the series [the school] currently uses in seventh and eighth grade.
Henle, Robert J, S. J. First Year Latin. Chicago: Loyola Press, 1958. Softcover. 514 pp.
—. Latin Grammar. Chicago, Loyola Press, 1958. Softcover. 261 pp.
The Henle system is a four-year high-school Latin program available only in flimsy-feeling black-and-white paperbacks. It consists of two essential components: a Latin Grammar that is used all four years and four year-by-year textbooks. The grammar contains two sections; the first is seventy-six pages devoted to summaries in chart form of all the various declensions and conjugations a student will eventually need to know; the remaining 150+ pages are devoted to rules of usage and syntax, each one explained and exemplified. The first-year textbook is an intensive, step-by-step introduction to almost the whole of Latin grammar and comes complete with detailed explanations, sentence diagrams, English and Latin examples, vocabulary lists, and Latin-English/English-Latin exercises.
The Henle program is an ambitious, old-school, grammar-intensive approach to teaching Latin. I thought Wheelock was direct and demanding; Henle is far more so. An excerpt from the table of contents will illustrate:
Lesson 1: The First Declension 6
Lesson 2: The Second Declension 17
Lesson 3: The Third Declension 35
Lesson 4: The Fourth Declension 56
Lesson 5: The Fifth Declension 62
Henle begins the year with at least a month on noun declensions with but a few scanty mentions of verbs. I’m not sure I see the advantage of this approach other than to be able to say you’ve traversed the Substantive Alps in a single leap and with firm countenance like a true Roman.
Grammatically, the five declensions are identical in function, and studying one gains you everything except the actual endings and vocabulary associated with the other four. It seems to me far better to study the first and second declensions (which are closely related), thereby learning the nature and function of Latin noun declensions (which are somewhat foreign concepts for English speakers) and a partial (but completely usable) noun vocabulary and then hold off on the other three declensions until you’ve worked with verbs for a while. The soul of any sentence is the verb, and it seems pointless to continually expand your noun vocabulary (which is the only benefit of learning all five declensions at once) until you’ve learned what to do with that vocabulary in sentence context. If students learn basic verb forms and spend time using a limited noun vocabulary with those verbs, the later noun declensions will hardly need to be taught at all. Students will already have experience using nouns in a variety of situations, and adding another declension will be nothing more than learning new endings and new vocabulary. All the grammatical concepts will be totally familiar.
Because of his decision to study all the nouns in a lump, Henle makes almost 20% of the vocabulary in the first five lessons specific conjugated verb forms like audivit or dederunt or videt so that he has at least something to work with in exercise sentences. Students must simply learn these forms by rote without understanding much about how they work. Asking students to work this way seems to me to dilute their effort. I’d think it better to teach them verb endings up front and then give them a proper vocab entry—an entry that they genuinely should engrave into their brains for the rest of their lives. The alternative is for them to have to go back and mentally revise or expand upon 20% of their first month’s vocab work once they actually do learn verb forms.
This flaw (from my point of view) in organization is not a deal-breaker; but it is significant. Also disappointing is the emphasis on vocabulary drawn from Caesar. Henle sees this as a strength, as his second-year text is a Caesar text, but I (with Wheelock) question such prioritization of Caesar. There’s much more to Latin then the businesslike prose of Caesar with its (equitatus – cavalry, impedimenta – baggage train, vulnera – wounds, and caedes – slaughter). Even more troubling is the heavy dose of Mariolatry present in the exercises. Sentences like Deus amicis Mariae praemia dedit (“God gave rewards to the friends of Mary.”) and Christiani gloriam Mariae et Filio Mariae dederunt (“Christians have given glory to Mary and to the Son of Mary.”) and Maria, Mater Dei, est Porta Caeli (“Mary, the Mother of God, is the Gate of Heaven.”) are not infrequent.
The Henle system has a lot to commend itself. It’s aggressive. If the whole book were completed in a year, students would have an outstanding foundation in the language and be ready in year two to jump into real prose. It’s also flexible. As Henle says, “Not every class . . . can be expected to complete the forty-two lessons in FIRST YEAR LATIN. Since this textbook is part of a four-year series, adequate provision has been made for classes that cover fewer lessons” (FYL vi). Only the first twenty-six lessons are absolutely essential, and in each lesson only some of the generously apportioned and nicely varied exercises are considered essential, and these are very clearly marked. Moreover, despite the above quibble about memorizing conjugated verb forms, Henle does make a point of limiting the vocabulary in the exercises to words that students have been asked to memorize in the vocabulary lists; this is an extremely helpful, student-empowering practice. Longer reading passages are also regularly included with the shorter exercises.
Henle’s approach isn’t bad, and he provides a lot of growing room for the best students. If I were Catholic, I imagine that I’d be exceptionally pleased with this series. As I’m not, I’m only marginally pleased. Despite its strengths, there are better options.
Grade: B-
Jenney’s First Year Latin
Jenney, Charles Jr., et al. Jenney’s First Year Latin. Needham, MA: Prentice Hall, 1990. Hardcover. 579 pp.
Jenney’s program, like Henle’s, is another series with a reputation for being grammar-focused and old-school, although there are suggestions that the 1990 revision was a significant reworking which cut the pace (and amount of material covered in four years) in half.
Unlike Henle, Jenney’s is a sturdy hardcover designed for multi-year use in a school setting. It is heavier than both Henle volumes combined, but it is far less hefty than one of our current English lit texts. The binding is tight, the paper is better than Henle’s, and it is full color. Unfortunately, the layout is awful. Copious amounts of space are wasted on each page and the eye (my eye at least) simply refuses to flow elegantly from item to item. I have to hunt on every page to find things, even in the table of contents. It really does read like a book that has half the material it should for its size.
Despite this dilution, however, the amount of grammar formally introduced is still quite substantial. The only omission of note is the subjunctive, which isn’t needed in the first year. If my students are completely comfortable in the indicative after one year, I’ll be quite happy.
Each chapter begins with a two-page essay/spread on some Roman cultural theme. As a whole, these cultural tidbits are not at all well-incorporated with the grammatical material. One example of the disjointed break between cultural material and grammar will suffice. Page 203, the second in a two-page spread on Roman chariot racing, closes with “What do you suppose is so fascinating about horse racing that is has persisted until now?” Page 204 opens with “Third Conjugation –io Verbs: A few important verbs of the third conjugation . . .” This unincorporated cultural material is exactly the kind of distraction I’d like to avoid. I can’t justify testing students on it, and if I don’t test them, I can’t expect them to take it seriously. Obviously I don’t.
Despite these flaws, Jenney’s is a good text. The explanations of grammatical material are clear and the exercises are nicely varied, from conceptual grammar questions to sentence-length translations. Each chapter closes with a lightly-annotated reading of progressively greater length; these readings are more substantial and useful than the ones in Wheelock. I’m not sure, however, that they lend themselves to reading so much as to translation. This is a weakness shared by the readings in all three of the traditional books, and it is byproduct of the overall approach.
Jenney’s is not a bad text; it’s simply unremarkable (in its current iteration at least) given what else is available—texts with more grammar coverage, similar or even more generous kinds and allotments of exercises, and better layout. Add to this the fact that Pearson seems to be in the process of dropping Jenney’s entirely in favor of Ecce Romani, and it becomes unchooseable.
Grade: C+
Wheelock’s Latin
Wheelock, Frederic M. Wheelock’s Latin. 6th ed., revised. Revised by Richard A. LaFleur. New York: HarperResource, 2005. Softcover (Hardcover available). 511 pp.
Wheelock’s Latin is yet another textbook first written decades ago that has developed a strong reputation and a history of use in many Latin classes. Unlike Jenney’s and Henle, however, Wheelock is not a multi-year high-school Latin program, but a single-volume, comprehensive presentation of Latin grammar designed for college classrooms.
Despite this difference in target audience, Wheelock’s Latin is not inherently more demanding than either of those other two Latin courses. Latin grammar is Latin grammar regardless of when it is studied. In fact, Wheelock himself did not offer his text as any kind of advanced, uniquely college-level approach to Latin, but rather as something of an unfortunately necessary remedial stopgap designed for students in less than optimal circumstances:
It is notorious that every year increasing numbers of students enter college without Latin; and consequently they have to begin the language in college, usually as an elective, if they are to have any Latin at all. Though some college beginners do manage to continue their study of Latin for two or three years, a surprising number have to satisfied with only one year of the subject. (WL xiii)
Thus he prepared for such students a single-volume textbook designed to be completed in one year of college study. And while Wheelock recognized that such a single-year presentation necessarily (and even unfortunately) differed from “textbooks which in pace and in thought are graded to high-school beginners,” he was careful to “avoid the opposite extreme of a beginners’ book so advanced and so severe that it is likely to break the spirit of even mature students in its attempt to cover practically everything in Latin” (xiii).
Of course, though Wheelock “ha[d] striven to produce a beginners’ book . . . reasonable in its demands,” (xiii) the academic decline he hinted at has continued, and today it is normal to spend two years even on the college level to cover Wheelock’s forty chapters. This is sad and unnecessary, for Wheelock’s book, despite its compressed format, truly is a very fine, balanced, and reasonable exposition of Latin grammar and clearly outclasses the other two traditional approaches in this survey (while in fact, being less rigorous than Henle).
Wheelock’s strengths are many, and not least of these is its wonderfully clear and easy-reading layout. Whereas Henle looks like a cluttered photo reproduction of the original mid-century layout and Jenney’s more recent layout is overly spacious and distracting, Wheelock’s takes a simple and straightforward approach that makes for not only an easy-reading textbook but for a handy quick-reference grammar. While there are a few black-and-white photographs, the vast majority of the text is given over to easy-to-navigate charts, grammar expositions punctuated by easy-reading outlines, and clearly arranged vocabulary lists and exercises. For both the teacher and the student, this is a helpful beginning.
Second (and more significantly), Wheelock has a better and more generous selection of vocabulary than the other two traditional texts. The lists are fuller than those in Jenney’s, and because he wishes to bypass Caesar in the second year and also because he introduces verbs first of all, his lists avoid the military technical terms and conjugated verb forms that appear so frequently in Henle.
Most importantly, however, are the exercises. Each chapter includes two separate sets of translation sentences. The first are original sentences specifically written to display whatever grammatical features are under discussion in the current chapter; included in them are some English-to-Latin exercises. The second set are sentences from classical authors usually (though not always) adapted in some fashion to fit the student’s level. The combination of these two kinds of exercises is first rate. On the one hand, students get ample practice for the current lesson, while on the other, they begin to get a feel from the very beginning for the thought and expression of the classical authors they will some day be reading. Moreover, the text has been planned with such skill that every word in every exercise will either have already been memorized as vocabulary or will be glossed with the exercise. Diligent students are thus rewarded for their diligence by having no need to refer to the lexicon at the back of the book.
The book’s one weakness is a lack of extended reading passages suitable for beginners. Formal translation is excellent practice for grammatical mastery, but it’s not at all the same thing as reading at speed without being bogged down by analysis. Obviously such reading is impossible for beginners unless the texts are carefully designed and extremely simple. Nevertheless, such texts are essential if students are to get a feel for something more vibrant than laborious parsing and translation. Each chapter does include a paragraph-length selection, but these are usually of such brevity or difficulty as to be unsuitable for the kind of at-speed reading I have described.
The book does, however, include several extremely useful appendices. The first is two sets of long and heavily annotated advanced readings in both prose and verse for students who have finished the forty grammar chapters; half of these are full-blown and unsimplified classical Latin. The second is a complete set of optional self-tutorial exercises for each chapter. Many of these are conceptual questions related to the grammar, but there are also additional translation exercises. Most significantly, the answers for all of them are included in a separate section; this feature significantly expands the text’s flexibility as a tool for both teachers and students. Finally, after brief sections on etymological aids and supplementary syntax, there is a complete summary of all the forms covered in the book. Henle reserves such a summary for the separate grammar text, and the summary in Jenney’s takes up far too many pages and is far less wieldy.
Wheelock is definitely at the top of the traditional heap, and in fact, of all the texts examined, it is by far the best combination of versatility and value, and it almost matches the [school’s] essential requirements list. It is perfectly capable of serving as the main text for the first two years of a high-school Latin course (and thanks to the readings in the appendices, even beyond). If supplemented by a book of easy, extensive, graduated readings for beginners, it becomes ideal.
Grade: A-
Latin for Americans
Ullman, B. L. and Charles Henderson, Jr. Glencoe Latin 1: Latin for Americans. New York: McGraw Hill, 2007. Hardcover. 560 pp.
Latin for Americans is a big-time Latin program from a major publisher of American high-school teaching materials (McGraw Hill) and it’s both built and priced like one. The list price attached to this glossy hardcover is almost triple Wheelock’s, and when one considers that Wheelock will serve a high-school program for the first two years whereas LFA requires another even pricier book for the second year, it becomes clear that LFA costs about six times as much as Wheelock for essentially the same grammar material. To prove worthy of such a steep sticker price when there are truly excellent and inexpensive alternatives available is a tall order, but LFA tries.
Like the more traditional texts, LFA is clearly organized along grammatical lines, with each unit and lesson built around a specific grammatical concept. The total grammar coverage in the book is comparable to that of Jenney’s, although it introduces new concepts a little more gradually and in smaller bites. In this particular, its approach is exactly opposite of that of Henle. Each lesson has grammar charts and vocab for memorization as well as sentence-length (and shorter) translation exercises. But LFA differs from traditional texts in that it begins each lesson with a lengthy reading passage carefully adjusted to the students’ level; thus students read their way into Latin in a manner much more akin to non-traditional, grammar-hiding texts like Ecce Romani and the Oxbridge Latin courses.
The first lesson in the book begins:
Roma est in Italia. Italia est in Europa. Britannia est in Europa. Britannia est insula. Italia non est insula. Italia paene [glossed as “almost”] est insula. Italia paeninsula est. Sicilia et Sardinia sunt insulae. Insulae in aqua sunt. Australia insula est, sed Asia non est insula . . . (15).
Thus LFA alone among the texts reviewed combines the best features of the traditional and more modern approaches. For this it is to be highly commended, and if the series were more competitively priced, there would be much to recommend it. By including graduated readings, LFA has an advantage against Wheelock, even though Wheelock’s grammar material and exercises are stronger; likewise by offering a more comprehensive explanation of Latin grammar, LFA has an advantage against reading-based books like the Cambridge course even though Cambridge has more and better readings. But priced as it is, LFA cannot merely compete with these books on their own individual terms; it must compete with both at the same time. And since a school can purchase two years worth of both Wheelock (1 vol.) and the Cambridge course (2 vols.) and still pay only marginally more than it costs to have only one year of LFA, LFA comes out the loser despite its great strengths.
Grade: B+
Ecce Romani
Lawall, Gilbert, ed. Ecce Romani I: A Latin Reading Program. 3rd ed. Needham, MA: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005. Hardcover. 320 pp.
Ecce Romani is Pearson Prentice Hall’s modern replacement for the venerable Jenney’s program, and it radically departs from Jenney’s traditional approach. First of all, the grammar covered in the first year is substantially less than that in Jenney’s or any of the other traditional texts; it most notably omits all passives and the relative pronoun. Secondly, although each of the twenty-seven chapters is organized around some small grammatical feature, the grammatical explanations are brief, and there is slight emphasis on the memorization of forms and none on the memorization of vocabulary. No vocabulary list is provided in the chapters; instead, students have the list of words glossed from the reading, but these are wholly unsuitable for memorization. Not only are some words glossed more than once from chapter to chapter, grammatical constructions of all types are frequently glossed without explanation; students should never memorize such glosses.
Each chapter begins with the rather heavily glossed Latin reading passage that serves as the core of the instructional material in the chapter. The lion’s share of student learning is to take place through interacting with these reading passages, both by reading them and by answering various comprehension and language-related questions afterwards.
As you read the Latin stories you will discover many . . . similarities and differences between Latin and English. The authors of these books would like to emphasize the word discover, because as you read the Latin stories you will be discovering for yourself how Latin works as a language and how to understand and translate it. Following the stories you will find formal explanations of how the language works. But be sure to pay close attention as you read the Latin stories themselves and try to discover for yourself as much as you can about how the language works. (xv)
Obviously such a method depends very heavily on the quality of the reading passages and on their suitability for the role they are to play. Unfortunately in the case of Ecce Romani, the readings aren’t up to the task, as the following excerpt from the first reading demonstrates. Words glossed in the text have been marked with an asterisk.
Ecce!* In pictura est puella,* nomine* Cornelia. Cornelia est puella Romana quae* in Italia habitat.* Etiam* in pictura est villa* rustica* ubi* Cornelia aestate* habitat. Cornelia est laeta* quod* iam* in villa habitat.
When compared with the first reading in Latin for Americans, it’s clear that this reading introduces far too many grammatical concepts to be really useful. Students will not be able to understand most of what’s going on by looking strictly at the Latin (as they would be able to with the LFA reading), and they’ll simply let the glosses translate it for them; students will be bound to the glosses as they read, which is exactly the kind of habit we don’t want to encourage.
In sum, new ideas aren’t necessarily bad ideas; Ecce Romani simply doesn’t execute well.
Grade: D
Oxford Latin Course
Balme, Maurice and James Morwood. Oxford Latin Course: Part 1. 2nd ed, revised 2006. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Hardcover. 157 pp.
By far the slightest volume in the survey, the Oxford Latin Course brings with it the modern approach of Ecce Romani backed up by the powerhouse Oxford brand and very favorable online reviews. Given these credentials, it was with some surprise that I found the text a disappointing main classroom text.
While the book’s general approach is very similar to Ecce Romani’s, it does have some helpful improvements. The first is the addition of specific vocabulary lists for student memorization. The second is at the beginning of every chapter a series of cartoon illustrations that are captioned by sentences that exemplify the grammatical focus of that chapter. If the goal is to get students learning directly from the Latin, it seems wise to focus their attention directly on the Latin structures they’re supposed to be inductively acquiring. Moreover, the Oxford course takes the idea of reading into Latin and pushes it quite aggressively. Although there are only sixteen chapters, by the last chapter, students are reading longer passages than the ones at the end of Ecce Romani’s twenty-seven chapters.
Despite these additions, however, the book is not suitable. Firstly, the de-emphasis of explicit grammar instruction that seems to be the hallmark of these modern, reading-based texts is taken to an extreme in this book. None of the chapters contains any grammatical explanations of any kind; instead, the back of the book contains a small grammar section of explanations and exercises for each chapter. The explanations are extremely brief, seldom more than a page, and read more like grammar footnotes than main content. To get to them, users of the book must constantly flip back and forth between the grammatical appendix and the main chapters. Secondly, each chapter contains a several pages of English text detailing information related to the cultural or mythological topic dealt with in the reading. Given that the book is supposed to be a Latin language text, it’s difficult to see how devoting three or four times as much space to cultural material (and premium space, at that) as to grammar instruction is pedagogically appropriate. Finally, the book is simply too short. Sixteen chapters with sixteen Latin readings and sixteen cultural readings is simply not enough material for a year’s course unless the students are laboriously subjecting each reading to a grammatical analysis—an impossible proposition given the brevity of the grammar explanations in the book.
One online reader has lauded the quality of this text’s Latin readings, “translations [sic] of the highest instructional quality I have ever seen in a textbook. [They] sparkle with prose style and authenticity, while being of such a length that the student ceases to translate what he reads into English—rather, he reads the Latin language in a way no other series elicits” (Everything2.com). His praise has merit; nevertheless, the text as a whole is unsuitable for the needs of [the school].
Grade: D+
Cambridge Latin Course
Pope, Stephanie, et al, eds. Cambridge Latin Course: Unit 1. North American 4th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Hardcover. 260 pp.
Not surprisingly, the Cambridge Latin course is very similar to the Oxford Latin course in design and methodology; the Cambridge course, however, recommends itself more strongly.
Like the rest of the modern texts reviewed, the Cambridge course would be unable to stand alone as the main text for the [school] Latin program. It simply does not offer enough in the way of explicit grammatical instruction. As a supplement for a more traditional grammar text, however, it is very strong.
As with the Oxford text, each chapter begins with a series of captioned cartoons that highlight the grammar that is the focus in that particular chapter. Also like the Oxford text, this book features lengthy Latin readings, English essays on Roman culture, and vocabulary lists. Unlike the Oxford text, however, the Cambridge Latin Course incorporates its grammatical material directly into the chapters. It also includes significantly more Latin readings in each chapter, usually three or four page-length readings. The text as a whole is thus much more balanced than Oxford’s, with both grammatical information and Latin reading material given more space and prominence than the accordingly subdued English essays on Roman culture.
In addition to all of these improvements, this book does an absolutely first-rate job of combining all of the readings (both English and Latin) into one continuous, tightly integrated presentation of Roman culture. Unlike Ecce Romani and the Oxford text, both of which rely heavily on fictional or mythological narratives for the readings (though in the case of Oxford there are fictionalized vignettes of the life of Horace), the Cambridge course brings to life the ruined city of Pompeii and one of its citizens, Lucius Caecilius Iucundus. While the vignettes themselves are fictional, they are firmly based on the archeological discoveries at Pompeii concerning the historical Caecilius and the city in which he lived, and these discoveries are amply reproduced in photographs throughout the text, photographs that are much preferable to the painted illustrations that are so frequent in Ecce Romani and the Oxford course. The end result is a text which offers an unequalled introduction to the day-to-day lives of Roman citizens in that it introduces students in significant detail to the premier site of Roman archeology.
Learning Latin is not just about learning a language; it should also be a process of learning how to study history through primary sources. A person who reads Latin does not have to simply rely on the history textbooks; he can read the original sources for himself. How fitting it is that he should be encouraged to study the archeological record at the same time.
Grade: C (as a stand-alone text, but the best choice for a supplementary reader)
Latin for Christian Schools
Smith, Edith E. Latin for Christian Schools. Greenville: Bob Jones UP, 1999-2000.
Miss Smith is a wonderful lady whom I know personally, and I very much wanted to like this book; but truth be told, it’s very odd. Its format makes it absolutely unusable for a traditional Latin classroom, and it seems to have been made either for the home school or for a Latin teacher who knows no Latin. Such things are of course not unheard of in Christian schools.
The entire book, from start to finish, is in dialogue form and is designed to be read aloud in the classroom. Basically what we have here is a scripted Latin class, complete with explanations, questions, and answers. A few random examples will illustrate.
From page 45:
Clara: Every accusative ends in m. We just have to learn what vowel goes in front of it. The nominative and genitive aren’t so easy.
Magister: That’s right. But you can soon learn them by working with them in sentences and by spelling them, declension by declension.
Let’s begin by spelling them. As I name a case, I want you to give inflections for each declension.
First, give the nominative inflections, declension by declension . . .
Page 133:
Magister: Now for the one-termination adjectives. As the name tells us, all three genders have the same form in the nominative singular. If . . .
Paul: The genitive looks quite a bit different from the nominative.
Magister: That shouldn’t surprise you. You’ve worked with third-declension nouns that have changed spellings, like tempus, temporis and . . .
And so goes the entire book. While it cannot be argued that Plato and Cicero (among many estimable others) have used this dialogue method to write about such advanced subjects as moral philosophy and oratory, few would argue that simply reading their works aloud would make for an excellent class in ethics or speech. And yet that seems to be the idea with this book.
The end result is a text that, while perhaps helpful for the above-mentioned non-Latinists, is essentially useless for the normal classroom. No Latin teacher deserving of the name could ever benefit from having the whole year dictated verbatim, and no one can relish picking through pages of dictation when searching for the explanation of a specific grammatical topic.
Grade: F