A Level exams, AP exams and what we are teaching

This was a note I just sent to the classics list in reply to a lengthy discussion of a Times Ed piece (London Times, most assuredly) on changes (for the worse?) in A Level exams in ancient languages.

People were moaning about the decline in standards, etc etc.  But it seems to me that it's just a test.  We don't have to teach to it, or limite our teaching with it.  ANYWAY, this is what I rambled on at length about....

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What I don't get is WHY the test was diminished in scope to begin with.

But then how do you profs feel about the AP exams? An AP program, taught well, can be a positive way to get more out of Latin before high school graduation, and to have students reading in greater depth before getting to university.

With that said, I know that some AP programs leave a lot to be desired. I know who among secondary teachers I see at conferences and who I don't. I know who (locally, at least) really care about pedagody and who are just running Latin programs. (Good ones, too.) And I'm not trying to be critical. Just honest.

I know that many of the brightest students in AP Latin (ok, I'm thinking of my niece, who took 2 AP Latin classes from a master teacher) are only taking AP to place out of college courses and sadly have no intention of continuing with Latin.

Was that the intention when it was created? Or certainly it was to provide a more challenging curriculum for the extraordinary student? I do know that there's been considerable frustration with the number of lines in the Vergil AP course, that the equivalent college course (which, I believe, at UTexas would be 312), usually does NOT cover the same number of lines. I know that my niece, who enjoyed Ovid/Catullus (as a sophomore) hated Vergil (as a junior...she graduated early) because there was never any time to discuss what was going on. Can you imagine being so pressed to cover lines that you can't get into the whole Aeneas/Dido relationship?

Yes, as was argued in one email (or was it the original article?), students can probably memorize passages for this new A level exam--as if we haven't all seen that in one form or fashion. All the more reason to change how we teach anyway with more question and answer in Latin, etc, that get to the heart of Latin, instead of checking comprehension solely by seeing if the student can produce a word for word translation in English.

Can someone tell me how the A level test compares to an AP exam? I have a student, for example, who I inherited from another teacher. He was apparently doing AP so I was, at first, trying to keep him on the AP curriculum so he could challenge the test. What I discovered upon examination is that he would get the gist of what was going on, but couldn't deal with the grammar. His mastery of morphology was too week in some ways.

So we backed off of our plan to challenge the AP exam and have just read some other things. (He didn't like Catullus.)

I have been impressed that he has continued to read with interest. (He's technically not getting any credit for any of the Latin he does with me.) But I digress.

I suppose my question is why should we get our knickers in a twist over an exam? When have you let an exam dictate every damn thing that you do? We shouldn't. Yeah, I suppose I'll be singing a different tune when I'm finally teaching AP, but I know teachers who teach sections of Vergil not covered on the exam. GOLLY, just because they WANT to. I'm about to teach some Martial and that's nowhere in my curriculum. Ok, I don't have a curriculum; I think I'm supposed to write it this summer.

So this new A level is only over a smaller portion of lines. Any teacher worth his/her salt will be teaching the student to READ Latin, and if that teacher is used to teaching MORE lines, then perhaps he/she will continue to do so. Or maybe he or she will be able to teach the smaller number of lines with a thoroughness not able before--more scholarly articles brought in, more culture or archaeology tied in.

Here's the thing: if the student has been taking teacher-designed tests that can more easily be taken by memorizing the English than by rereading and rereading the Latin, then that's the fault of the teacher. When you ask a student about a favorite Latin poem, they shouldn't start out, "I hate and I love"--they should reply "Odi et amo" and continue on IN LATIN.

In _Teach the Latin, I Pray You_ by Distler (now sold by Bolchazy! Yippee!), I know there's a section about getting students to read and reread passages already read in between working on new passages. I haven't figured out how to get something like this going. I know when I do I will increase the quality of my course, but I haven't figured out how to make the students accountable without making excessive grading for me. But I know that's what I want to do. I need some sort of reading log, one that I'll stick with, one that will work.

But consider, if you are reading one of the stories from the Metamorphoses and you ended class 1/4 into Baucis & Philemon, say, how can you just pick up with the next set of lines and actually *see* the repetition of words (esp new ones) and phrases without starting by REREADING the last assignment first? How many of you train your students to do that? How many of you EXPLICITLY state, "before beginning lines Y-Z, go back and just read through without stopping lines X-Y"? Or how many of you MODEL it? It really doesn't take that long to reread even 40-60 lines before beginning the new section, and often increases comprehension. With my auditing student, I always always always read to him, read the whole paragraph we're on, go back to the sentence we're on, read that a few times, and then begin to discuss it/translate it with him. Yeah, we translate (instead of ideally discussing it in Latin), but I make sure I model what I want him to be doing when he's on his own, esp if he takes more Latin in college. (Perhaps if he wasn't the "3rd class" in a 3-way split level class I could have worked on the discussion-in-Latin approach, but that just didn't happen.)

Right. That's enough rambling from me.