English Commentary

[Latinum Institute]

I came across an interesting editorial today in an edition of Horace - in which the author, writing a translation of the Delphin commentary on Horace, felt the need to explain himself,and effectively, apologise for writing a commentary in English, and not in Latin.
This edition, however, has a very useful Latin paraphrase running alongside the original Latin text, which could be useful to teachers teaching Horace.

This, only in 1832.
By this stage, Latin was no longer being spoken, and I suppose, the level of competence was beginning its steep decline; still the level was high enough to warrant a Latin paraphrase as the primary commentary

http://books.google.com/books?id=8N4TAAAAYAAJ

[Laura Gibbs]

That Latin paraphrase is nifty, Evan! Wouldn't THAT be a great exercise for AP students to do, rather than writing essays in English... Cramming for the exam would then consist of memorizing lists of Latin synonyms and writing out practice synopses and sharing them with other students... all of which sounds like a fine way to spend one's time learning Latin! And surely for the AP grades the grading of such synopses would not be any harder than grading essays written in English. :-)

[Latinum Institute]

I expect they would have trouble finding sufficient people competent to mark the papers......

[Laura Gibbs]

Well, the whole business of grading AP exams is exactly that, a BUSINESS - they write up rubrics, and the AP graders are trained in this kind of boot camp, and they are paid for all the training they do in order to generate the statistically reliable grades (I've had people who do this; it is very "scientific" in its own way, where they do random tests with the same item given to multiple graders and the inter-rater reliability has to be kept high, etc. etc.). So, although I am often cynical about AP, I really do think this could work in the AP framework very nicely, just as nicely as the current English essays. Not that they will ever consider it - but I do think it actually would be a very practical reform to implement. Everybody would benefit! :-)