2001 Annual Grant Issue
Brian Burke: Barra Technology Grant Report
Editing of Latin 1 Text

In the mid nineties, when I was talking with Suzie Perot about the Classical Department, I was more than surprised to hear her report that Latin 1 "did not have a text." At first, I had no idea what she meant: Hadn't I been working on Latin 1 materials for the last thirty years!?! I realized, upon reflection that she was quoting a parent's complaint that her child's unbound Latin sheets were probably so scattered that there was not recognizable evidence of a full text. This realization made me aware of a need not only, most obviously, to bind the material but to improve the appearance, not to mention the content, of the text in as many ways as possible. The text did not have to look homemade, even though it was. My Barra grant has allowed me to continue that process with my colleague Lee Burnett.

Lee and I divided the labor so that I continued to work on the substance of the text as I had been doing since 1966 and he continued his job of computerizing the text, which he had started on a Kast Grant several years before. My job of editing was to improve the substance and appearance of Lessons 1-25, the material usually covered in Latin 1.

My first concern was for the grammatical explanation in each lesson. In most cases, I was doing a fourth draft of my material. This time around, I felt a need to pare off a little from my careful but repetitive grammatical explanations, especially in the first lessons. There was also a little room for expansion. Lee had suggested that I add a separate lesson on the verb to the introduction of the nouns in the first lesson. I added two exercises to accustom the students to verb forms. I also added a few exercises from English to Latin, when I thought that the concept required more careful practice. In a couple of cases, I made an exercise for a Latin grammatical concept in terms of English grammar. My purpose has been to make sure that the lessons do not miss a step in the introduction of grammatical concepts.

I also spent a lot of time trying to make the text appear neater. I used bold face for titles or important Latin forms and different fonts, as they seemed appropriate. I kept the vocabulary lists within a page and for the first time I made separate list of the words to be learned and those only necessary for the reading.

The major project was to replace the Asterix and Obelix cartoons from the unit on adjectives with another set of readings. Lee and I had decided that we wanted our own material in the text and that Asterix and Obelix was also too puerile. Since he suggested readings of mythological or Homeric content, I considered some Vergilian material for a Roman version of Homeric myth. I settled finally on a folktale of the Cyclops story from Johannes De Alta Silva's Dolopathos of the twelfth century, which I edited and divided into four episodes in Lessons 16-17. This story had the advantage of being a native Latin narrative from a folk tradition as valid as that of the Homeric narrative.

As I now review the text, I am pleased to see the progress, which we have made in taking the materials far beyond the first stages of development. I still consider the text, like many of the materials, which I have created in my career, to be homemade. In an independent school, the homemade text, arising from the native intellect of the teachers, is the best product of the invention, which the school may foster.