working on Aeneid stuff

So, I've spent most of the summer so far working on my Aeneid syllabus and making materials I want to use for this year.

Basically I'm creating a lot of work for myself.  In some ways.  But I have two aims in mind: 1) have LESS work to do for AP during the year so that it will be almost all pleasure to teach, and 2) create ways to help all of my AP students be successful.  And, yes, I could just blow off this summer, and just kick it all into high gear next school year, but I want to be able to go to my Tae Kwon Do class this year (I didn't all of last year, and I really missed it).

The first thing I've done is revised my syllabus to fit with next year's calendar and to switch the assignments from being weekly to daily. That is, I've gone through and broken down the lines by day, scheduled quizzes, review, and enrichment activities.  If we can't do everything, so be it.  It's not set in stone.  What my students need will really guide me.  I even added topics covered for each week so that I can see at a glance when we get to X doing Y in the story. 

Of course, revising my schedule in this kind of detail has been time consuming, but if you don't have to cheat (that is, because you are new and really need to use someone else's syllabus to get you off the ground and running), it is so worthwhile.  I'd like to think that if I were doing a masters of teaching in Latin that this might a sort of project that I would do.  (I have no idea what projects MAT programs do, outside of the CANE resource materials.)  And I don't just mean revising my syllabus.  I'm thinking about the whole student.

High school students, unlike college students, in general don't own their textbooks thus they cannot write in them.  I know there are some people that would never write in any book.  I know there are some that would cram English above every line of Latin.  I do not do the latter nor would I ever advocate that.  HOWEVER, I would definitely advocate marking phrasing and whatnot, and for particularly difficult lines make notes in the margins.  This past year I really wanted my Latin 3 students to see phrasing and therefore typed out all the stories we read in Unit 4 (but only Unit 4 of CLC), double-spaced it, and gave it to the students to write on.  The idea was that we'd use ONLY the book in class (clean text) but that they could study from their notes. It worked ok. 

So, one of the things I'm doing is copying and pasting the lines of Vergil from www.thelatinlibrary.com into assignment sheets that would last for each week. (Of course, this will probably need tweeking each year; will this be worth it?)   What I want is for students NOT to TRANSLATE every damn word onto paper.  This is NOT a class on turning Latin into English.  I want to promote READING.  I want to help students develop READING skills and to do so help them learn to see phrases and clauses and THE BIG PICTURE while keeping mindful of all the details.  I'm also creating a reading log that they will need to maintain for a homework grade.  If I punch holes in these sheets and continuously encourage careful storage of them, then students will have created their own review materials to cram from before the exam.  My students this last year had, well, nothing but quizzes and tests to look at.  Not good enough.

I'm also including on the print-outs small sections in bold to be translated into good English PLUS prepared for oral recitation.  Oh, and scanned.  Weekly.  I'm going through a website that has all the old AP questions in order to target passages that have been asked and may well be targetted again.  So the passages that will be key passages for review come exam time should be the passages that they are the most familiar with.  Sounds good in theory, at least.

Finally, I'm working in at least essay prep (if not full essay writing) in some compare/contrast stuff--previous AP questions that asked for students to look at two passages.  I'm also going to do this with comparing a passage and a work of art or some famous person's translation.  I want to mark these passages too (in italics or something) on the sheets of text I'm working on. 

I know I can't do it all this summer, and in fact I really need to turn my attention to something else I want to do with my level 1-3 classes this year (more in another post), but to me it's all about finding a way to teach successfully.  One might say that I'm doing half the work for the students, that other teachers would just make the students write out or type out the lines themselves (I know of one teacher who does).  But these are students that also are in extracurricular activities and other AP classes.  This isn't like college where students are in classes for a few hours each day and have the rest of the day off to study and prepare.  I poured HOURS AND HOURS into preparing my lines for my Latin classes in college.  HOURS AND HOURS. 

I'm into reality.  I don't want my students saying to me that they like Latin until AP because AP was soooo much hard work.  I want them to think of it as challenging, but not impossible.  I want them to feel like they've accomplished something grand, you know?

Anyway.  That's what I'm doing this summer.