11/30: three latin classes, three good things

I'm teaching three levels of Latin this semester, and today I have a good thing related to each of them.

It's always a (fun) challenge to find Latin passages that the beginning students can read without too much grammar help from me--I know I can write Latin for them myself, but it's nice to give them something REAL to read. Today I found a Latin version of the country mouse & city mouse story from the 17th century that's manageable. (There's a Latin version of the same story from the 1st c. BCE, but it's too tricky for beginners.) In any case, I hope the class will enjoy the tale--preparing a hand-out for it today made me smile.

In my intermediate Latin class we've finished our main text for the semester and are spending the last few class sessions reading some short poems by Martial about the Colosseum. It's great to spend time with the poems as I prepare to teach them--they pack a lot into a small space--and today I felt like the students started to see how the poems are doing interesting things. It's only our third day with poetry (we had been reading prose before), and so they had been a little vexed at the new complications that come with translating poetry; today maybe they saw why the vexation is worthwhile.

Right before the Thanksgiving break my upper-level Latin students and I had a book-binding workshop, since part of what we're doing this semester is studying the history of the book as a physical form. This evening I read their reflections on the book-binding workshop, and they did some careful thinking about the books they made, about the process we used, and about what books as physical objects are.