AP Latin Literature Cancelled -- Please Add Your Name

[Andrew Reinhard]

Salve,

As many of you know, AP Latin Literature is being cancelled, although AP Vergil will remain in place for the immediate future. Please read the letter from the AP in the news section on the right and the letter from Ronnie Ancona in the Blog, and if you feel strongly about keeping the AP Latin Literature program alive and active in the United States, please add a comment to this post with your name and school affiliation attached. I will collect these in preparation for what is sure to be a counter-offensive by some of the leading lights in US Classics education. Thanks for adding your names to the list.

Andrew Reinhard
Director of eLearning
Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers

[Peter Rook]

Parents at my school have already started sending me emails wondering about the long term viability of our Latin program, I hope something can be done to keep these authors in our curriculum.

Peter Rook
Upper School Latin Teacher
Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart
Bethesda, MD

[Sherry Jankowski]

It would be a terrible shame to discontinue the AP Latin Literature Test. Please consider the impact of this decision. From teacher education to curriculum planning, the effect of this (seemingly) hasty decision is far-reaching. Also please remember that many teachers re-invigorated their methodologies and curricula only 1 year ago to accommodate the AP Audit process. Obviously, teachers are willing to comply with the expectations of the Collegeboard; it is now the Collegeboard's turn to show respect for the teachers and students who look to the validation that the AP designation carries.

Sherry Jankowski
The Meadows School
Las Vegas, NV

[Heather Yost]

Not having the Latin Literature AP Exam will greatly HURT my Latin program at my school. Students who are looking to take 4 years of a language will now move on to another language. I have worked so hard to promote Latin in my high school, and I feel as though this is a set-back. It will really hurt the world of Classics at the high school level, and it will help to undo everything I know the American Classical League and myself have been working so hard to accomplish--PROMOTE LATIN!!!

[Marla S. Dean]

I have returned to teaching Latin after taking 20 years to raise five children and follow an Air Force officer around the country. I'm having quite a lot of fun being back in the classroom. I've found teaching AP Virgil quite a challenge, since I managed to get a degree in Latin without ever reading the Aeneid. I got the feeling that my favorite professor truly didn't like Virgil, and since he was an expert in Cicero, I was steeped in Cicero for four years. I was delighted at the idea of a Cicero syllabus for AP, attended a summer institute, and I have been happily planning to offer such a course. What a shock it was to me, to find that I and my students must continue slogging through an author that I'm not as comfortable with, rather than designing a program that would allow me to share with my students an author that I truly enjoyed in my own youth!
I teach in a state which forces the teachers of the "core" subjects to teach strictly to a standardized test. I've watched all of the fun and creativity being sucked out of my colleagues' classes because of the awful test. This move by the college board seems like a step toward the same kind of standardization in teaching Latin. I would so much rather have the freedom to share with my students my love for Cicero, Catullus and Ovid, as well as exposing them to Virgil (who my students called "the Shakespeare of his time").
Marla S. Dean
Earl Warren High School
San Antonio, Tx.

[Tim Flannery]

I'm both dismayed and angered by College Board's decision to drop the AP Latin Literature course. Dismayed because it represents a giant step backward in all of our efforts over the decades to safeguard the role of Latin within today's education system. Angered because this decision comes less than one year shy of the mandate put forth by College Board that secondary school teachers of any AP course must construct to dictated specification and submit for approval lengthy course audits in order for schools to be able to use the "official" AP course designation on transcripts. This rather than, say, allowing past student performances for each school/course to speak for themselves. Having spent umpteen hours last spring to construct a nearly twenty page audit pertaining to the AP Latin Literature course (about which I harbored, when submitting it, many a misgiving regarding copyright/ownership issues), I now realise that my time was wasted for nothing and that my document has been rendered meaningless. This at the very moment that my required audit for next year's AP Vergil course is now coming due.

I am a teacher within my school, not an administrator. But, as I began to sense last year, I now feel passionately that this is the time for many a school to consider doing without the AP course structure and adopting instead honors-designated courses. The ever increasing role that AP courses have come to play within the machinery of "the college process" has, in my opinion, gotten way out of control. The veritable frenzy of high school juniors and seniors attempting to register for three and four APs in one year (and often consequently doing poorly in all of them) has become common occurence. I wonder which schools will be wise enough and brave enough to lead the way in dismantling the absolute power structure that College Board's AP courses have by now become.

Tim Flannery
Packer Collegiate Institute
Brooklyn, NY

[Magister Lupifilius]

I was shocked to learn of the AP plan to do away with the Latin Literature course. After many years of only teaching the Vergil course, I found that my students last year wanted to take the Catullus-Ovid option of the Latin Literature curriculum. It was an eye opener. My students had more fun, even though the Latin is trickier than Vergil. I am now teaching Vergil again and had planned to alternate between the two courses to keep the material fresh for me as well as interesting for the students. I am also annoyed that less than a year after the College Board demanded that we jump through their hoops for the AP Audit, which meant that many of us prepared "acceptable" curricula for both courses, the College Board has decided to end the Latin Literature course, thus rendering our labors pointless.

Sincerely,
Brian Hyland
Seton Catholic Central High School
Binghamton, NY

[Trisha Tan]

I agree with all of the illustrious people who have commented on this before me. Personally, the AP Latin Literature exam was the highlight of my high school career; and in an age where (it would seem) many students find themselves in high school programs where teachers teach only poetry, the primacy of Cicero on the exam guarantees, in my opinion, that students will at least be exposed to our favorite chick-pea of them all.

Trisha Tan
Naperville North HS Alum (2004)
MAT Student @ National-Louis University
Naperville, IL

[Melissa Gann]

As a newly hired Latin teacher, about to start my career spreading the love of the language that has changed my life, I was extremely distraught by the news of the cancellation of all but Virgil in the AP curriculum. How can a student really understand the depth and breadth of Latin literature by only reading one author in depth? How can a student come to appreciate the turns in the language, the development of ideas throughout the empire and in the smaller day to day niches of Romans without love elegy, without the great speeches, without carpe diem? We all know the answer: a student cannot have a proper Latin education without these things. What is advanced about only studying Virgil? The student should be expected to do that on a regular level. An advanced student should be allowed to compare the authors and test their own skills and knowledge.

Melissa Gann
Texas A&M University '08
College Station, TX
New Hire for Fall at Cypress Lakes High School
[e-mail]

[Jason Baur]

Latin and the further study of classics has been a rich and enjoyable part of my high school and college experience. Although my school offered AP Vergil, and not AP Latin Literature, I am deeply saddened that the College Board would choose to reduce the options available to students and teachers across America. I hope that this unfortunate decision can be reversed.

Jason Baur
Undergraduate Student
Georgetown University, Washington D.C.

[Luis]

I am a student in AP Vergil this year, but I was fortunate enough to have taken AP Latin Lit last year. While the value of studying Vergil is undeniable, it does become a bit redundant to study the same author, the same book, the same themes all year long. What I enjoyed about Lit last year was the opportunity to read several different authors talking about very different things. Aren't students better benefited by being exposed to both the way that Catullus mocks Roman society and the way Ovid characterizes Ariadne's grief than just how Vergil characterizes Aeneas in this part of the poem, and now this part, and now this part?
I do not think that any one will deny the Lit class is just a lot more fun and interesting!!! :)

Saddened High School Student
West Springfield High School
Springfield, VA

[Jeanine Edson]

I agree that the cancellation of the AP Latin Literature exam will be a setback for students, high school teachers, and college Classics programs. Having taught both the Vergil and Latin Literature syllabi, and having taught the International Baccalaureate syllabus (which has an even wider survey of literature and an exam, which is, in my experience, more similar to exams Latin students actually take in college than the AP exam is), I am saddened at the loss of the three rich and engaging syllabi that make up the Latin Literature course.

Jeanine Edson
Westwood High School
Austin, Texas

[Andrew Gollan]

When the only expression of Latin at the AP level is Vergil, we lose any exposure to that majority of Latin literature over the more than 2000 years of its history: prose. This is really disappointing, since poetry only exists in counterpoint to prose and are students are now corralled even more into the view that Latin is just like a puzzle that when solved is English, since the word order and usage in poetry is so far removed from a usable, comprehensible medium of communication, beautiful as it is.

Andrew Gollan
Santa Monica High School, CA