Sapientis Elementary Latin I: May 31 – September 8, 2010
Instructor: Mr. West (dwest@udallas.edu)
Books:
Required: Wheelock’s Latin, by Frederic M. Wheelock and Richard A. LaFleur, 6th Blg Revised Edition (May 31, 2005), HarperCollins Publishers, available from Amazon.com for $15.39
Recommended but Optional: English Grammar for Students of Latin by Norma Goldman, 3rd edition (June 2004), Olivia and Hill Press, available from Amazon.com for $17.02
Prerequisites:
None. This course is for beginners.
Course Plan:
There will be a total of 30 class meetings. We will meet twice a week for 1 hr and 20 minute sessions: Mondays and Wednesdays, 7:00 pm - 8:20 pm Central Daylight Time (8-9:20 EST).
Class begins on Monday, May 31; our last class meeting will be on Wednesday, September 8. Thus we will start and finish under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Class will not meet on Monday, June 21. This session will be transferred to Saturday, June 26 (time of class that day to be determined in consultation with the students).
This course is modeled on a typical one semester college course in Elementary Latin. We will cover the first 20 chapters of Wheelock’s Latin. We will typically complete one chapter per week (2 class sessions), although sometimes we will do two in one week, especially when the material is not as challenging.
Your job will be to work hard on memorizing the new material presented each chapter and applying it by translating sentences and short stories. Your success in this course depends primarily on one thing: rote memorization. Your main focus should be on committing to memory the new vocabulary list and new grammatical “charts” presented in each chapter. Moreover, at the early stages of language learning, putting in at least one hour per day is of the essence, so you must find some time each day to spend on Latin.
Homework/Quizzes/Tests:
You may, if you wish, send me by email your daily assignments for me to correct them and then send them back to you. But this is only optional, since we will go over most if not all of the homework assignment in class, and thus you will know what you did correctly and what you need to change. Frequent take-home quizzes/tests will be given on vocabulary and grammatical forms (charts), and their application (reading). These will help you determine how well you actually know the material. But if you make them open-book quizzes, which there is nothing to stop you from doing, then you won’t be learning anything. Instead, you should study the material, and then close your book and see how well you do. Only rarely will we do quizzes or tests during actual class time, which in a course of this kind is better spent on actual instruction, questions and answers.