Custom Readers for Latin/Greek

[Andrew Reinhard]

At the recent AIA/APA and MLA annual meetings, I toured the book expos to see what was new in publishing. The trend in 2007 and 2008 seems to be print-on-demand customizable textbooks. Teachers can cherry-pick literature selections and produce a booklet unique to a class that only costs a few dollars and weighs a lot less than, say, the Norton Anthology of Literature. Would you, as teachers of Latin/Greek, find this useful for your classes, or would you prefer offering a textbook/reader that has many more selections than you could hope to cover in a semester?

[Chris Francese]

Sorry I missed you at the convention, Andrew. I'm back now and returning to my long neglected podcasts. Just posted a poem on Roman toothpaste by Apuleius. Stirring stuff (http://blog.dickinson.edu/?cat=815). I think custom textbooks are a great idea, the more individually tailored to the class the better. I will be experimenting with two wiki commentaries in my classes this spring, and am curious to see how students react to having a primary class book on line only.

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Andrew, although they are not printed textbooks, I have essentially got two custom "textbooks" for my online classes, put together with public domain materials gathered from Project Gutenberg and similar online sources:
Myth-Folklore
World Literature

I know if these collections of readings were available in printed form, students would gladly by them - right now, I know they generally print them out week by week (and that is still cheaper than having to buy monster anthologies from which we would read only a tiny fraction of the materials... you can get a hernia just from LOOKING at one of those Norton Anthologies... much less picking it up or carrying it in your backpack!!!).

You will see the real challenge if you look at the Myth-Folklore class: in that class, the students CHOOSE one of two readings each week, so there are literally over 16,000 possible combinations - how freaky is that??? The possibilities of recombination are amazing: as the students choose each week the readings they want to do, they build their own path through the course. There are 28 possible readings, but the number of unique combinations is mind-boggling.

I had a lot of fun with that in the class, because some weeks the students are really torn which one to choose ... so I wrote a little javascript called "Let The Fates Decide" - it's a hoot; the students will regularly say in their blog posts for the week "The Fates told me to read Robin Hood" or "The Fates told me to read Estonian fairy tales" - here's an example:
http://tinyurl.com/36w8ku