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Here's the letter from AP with the link to the survey below. I haven't done mine yet; I'm contemplating possibilities. (more comments below the letter)
***
Dear AP Latin Teacher:
We are writing to request your ideas as we work to revise the AP Latin program in the coming years.
Last spring, we announced that AP Latin Literature, along with three other AP courses, will be discontinued following the May 2009 exam. The College Board remains committed to supporting college-level world language studies in secondary schools. Because more secondary schools offer the AP Latin: Vergil program, we decided to maintain the AP Latin: Vergil program for 2009-10. As a not-for-profit organization, we will continue to bear a considerable financial loss annually to provide schools with AP world language offerings and to keep student exam fees reasonable. Some educators have suggested that if the College Board can only fund one AP Latin Exam, the solution should be to keep two different curricula in place, alternating the exam content every other year. This solution does not, however, actually address the funding issue, since maintaining two separate AP Latin Exams would require two separate budgets and processes for test form assembly, item development, college comparability studies, reliability studies, equating plans, and other processes that are crucial to delivery of reliable, high-stakes examinations.
Others have suggested calling two years of curriculum "AP Latin," so that students would have incentive to choose Latin over other languages, even though the exam would only be offered at the end of the final year of study. But if we were to allow multiple courses that prepare students for eventual success on an AP Latin Exam to be called "AP Latin," teachers of other languages (German, French, etc.) would want to label multiple years of their course work similarly. Attempting to acquire the most AP designations as possible on a transcript is not something we should support. Accordingly, the "AP" designation will be reserved for the capstone course in the sequence that culminates in the AP Exam.
Having decided to keep the AP Latin: Vergil Exam as the sole AP Latin Exam, it became important to us to understand the extent to which the course should be modified over time to represent the best possible capstone AP Latin experience. We have just completed a survey of college professors at dozens of the nation's top classics departments, and this is the consensus that emerged:
The AP Latin Development Committee will meet in late March 2009 to decide the timeline for modifying AP Latin: Vergil to include other authors beyond Vergil. To make this decision, the AP Latin Development Committee would appreciate guidance from AP teachers. Assuming that the new AP Latin course and exam will reduce the amount of time on Vergil and require works by other prose and poetry authors, when should the new course first be offered? In other words, how much time will AP teachers want to prepare for offering the new course, and how much professional development are they likely to need? How much time would AP Latin teachers need to acquire course textbooks and materials?
The AP Latin Development Committee will review the results of this survey of AP Latin teachers in late March, and will identify any other information necessary to making decisions about changes to the AP Latin program. We will provide AP Latin teachers with an update in May 2009 about the Development Committee's exploratory work, and will remind teachers that no changes will be made to AP Latin: Vergil for the 2009-10 academic year.
Accordingly, please fill out a brief survey, which we estimate will take about 10 minutes to complete. Your responses will be kept anonymous.
Thank you for taking the time to complete this survey and thereby guide the future of the AP Latin program.
The Advanced Placement Program
***
Decisions are made by those who show up. Show up.
And then, before you whine about what we canNOT get that we want, think about the people who have lost their jobs to the recession. Consider the Latin Lit test nothing more than a layoff. At least Vergil hasn't gotten a pink slip.
No job is sacred. While we may be slaves to our jobs,we are LUCKY to be able to teach something we LOVE.
And if we don't want pink slips, we need to be creatively rethinking how our program is structured. Can we do something else for year 5 that's college credit in conjunction with a local university?
Oh here's a weird idea. You know, often we think of pairing up our upper level classes. What if there's a way to write up a class for say Plautus--for Roman comedies--where the advance Latin 5's are reading the original but kids who really don't want to continue Latin (barely scraped by the 1st two years) but who like the cultural civ stuff do research in English on the time period and the stuff in English. The two groups come together to plan performances. The Latin 5 students do the acting/scenes in Latin; the civ/culture students do sets, costumes, whatever.
What if you did Cicero like that? Latin 5's do the speeches; culture students make costumes, are in charge of tech stuff (recording?), historical accuracy of props and such.
Really, the only things that holds us back from such classes are 1) time to execute the class well, 2) time to think creatively to come up with such a class, and 3) convincing administration to allow a crossbreed beast like that. Then again, isn't that a way to make classes more democratic in a way? Broaden exposure of higher level topics to a wider audience, even if they are gaining information via different mediums?
well, I'm going to regret having spent time here again instead of grading. Time to get back into it. I thought i was almost done until I got to the number of tests that were turned in/taken late. eheu.
***
Dear AP Latin Teacher:
We are writing to request your ideas as we work to revise the AP Latin program in the coming years.
Last spring, we announced that AP Latin Literature, along with three other AP courses, will be discontinued following the May 2009 exam. The College Board remains committed to supporting college-level world language studies in secondary schools. Because more secondary schools offer the AP Latin: Vergil program, we decided to maintain the AP Latin: Vergil program for 2009-10. As a not-for-profit organization, we will continue to bear a considerable financial loss annually to provide schools with AP world language offerings and to keep student exam fees reasonable. Some educators have suggested that if the College Board can only fund one AP Latin Exam, the solution should be to keep two different curricula in place, alternating the exam content every other year. This solution does not, however, actually address the funding issue, since maintaining two separate AP Latin Exams would require two separate budgets and processes for test form assembly, item development, college comparability studies, reliability studies, equating plans, and other processes that are crucial to delivery of reliable, high-stakes examinations.
Others have suggested calling two years of curriculum "AP Latin," so that students would have incentive to choose Latin over other languages, even though the exam would only be offered at the end of the final year of study. But if we were to allow multiple courses that prepare students for eventual success on an AP Latin Exam to be called "AP Latin," teachers of other languages (German, French, etc.) would want to label multiple years of their course work similarly. Attempting to acquire the most AP designations as possible on a transcript is not something we should support. Accordingly, the "AP" designation will be reserved for the capstone course in the sequence that culminates in the AP Exam.
Having decided to keep the AP Latin: Vergil Exam as the sole AP Latin Exam, it became important to us to understand the extent to which the course should be modified over time to represent the best possible capstone AP Latin experience. We have just completed a survey of college professors at dozens of the nation's top classics departments, and this is the consensus that emerged:
 | College faculty confirmed that we should keep Vergil at the core of the capstone AP Latin course, but that we should reduce the amount of time on Vergil to approximately 40 percent of the current reading list, so that the capstone course could be a prose and poetry course with selections from Catullus, Cicero, and/or Caesar filling the remainder of the reading list. |
| College faculty expressed a strong desire for this course to be offered in the twelfth-grade year, so that students would persist in their course of Latin study through their final year of high school, entering college with the knowledge and skills still fresh from their AP course. (However, choices regarding the grade level in which AP Latin should be offered will remain within the jurisdiction of the secondary school.) |
| 100 percent of college faculty indicated that their institutions would provide credit and placement to AP Latin students who succeeded on a multiauthor, prose and poetry AP Latin Exam. |
The AP Latin Development Committee will meet in late March 2009 to decide the timeline for modifying AP Latin: Vergil to include other authors beyond Vergil. To make this decision, the AP Latin Development Committee would appreciate guidance from AP teachers. Assuming that the new AP Latin course and exam will reduce the amount of time on Vergil and require works by other prose and poetry authors, when should the new course first be offered? In other words, how much time will AP teachers want to prepare for offering the new course, and how much professional development are they likely to need? How much time would AP Latin teachers need to acquire course textbooks and materials?
The AP Latin Development Committee will review the results of this survey of AP Latin teachers in late March, and will identify any other information necessary to making decisions about changes to the AP Latin program. We will provide AP Latin teachers with an update in May 2009 about the Development Committee's exploratory work, and will remind teachers that no changes will be made to AP Latin: Vergil for the 2009-10 academic year.
Accordingly, please fill out a brief survey, which we estimate will take about 10 minutes to complete. Your responses will be kept anonymous.
Thank you for taking the time to complete this survey and thereby guide the future of the AP Latin program.
The Advanced Placement Program
***
Decisions are made by those who show up. Show up.
And then, before you whine about what we canNOT get that we want, think about the people who have lost their jobs to the recession. Consider the Latin Lit test nothing more than a layoff. At least Vergil hasn't gotten a pink slip.
No job is sacred. While we may be slaves to our jobs,we are LUCKY to be able to teach something we LOVE.
And if we don't want pink slips, we need to be creatively rethinking how our program is structured. Can we do something else for year 5 that's college credit in conjunction with a local university?
Oh here's a weird idea. You know, often we think of pairing up our upper level classes. What if there's a way to write up a class for say Plautus--for Roman comedies--where the advance Latin 5's are reading the original but kids who really don't want to continue Latin (barely scraped by the 1st two years) but who like the cultural civ stuff do research in English on the time period and the stuff in English. The two groups come together to plan performances. The Latin 5 students do the acting/scenes in Latin; the civ/culture students do sets, costumes, whatever.
What if you did Cicero like that? Latin 5's do the speeches; culture students make costumes, are in charge of tech stuff (recording?), historical accuracy of props and such.
Really, the only things that holds us back from such classes are 1) time to execute the class well, 2) time to think creatively to come up with such a class, and 3) convincing administration to allow a crossbreed beast like that. Then again, isn't that a way to make classes more democratic in a way? Broaden exposure of higher level topics to a wider audience, even if they are gaining information via different mediums?
well, I'm going to regret having spent time here again instead of grading. Time to get back into it. I thought i was almost done until I got to the number of tests that were turned in/taken late. eheu.
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