DT in the Latin Classroom

Now that I've working more with design thinking and have learned how powerful of a mindset it can be for creativity and innovation, I've been trying to infuse it into my Latin classrooms. It's not always easy to move through the entire design thinking process in a Latin course, but I believe it can be done—and done well—in at least a few ways. In particular, since language programs are the perfect content areas for "discovery", I'm using a design thinking approach to do this kind of work with my students (on which I've written in more detail here) by building empathy for a society of people who lived in a very different world than ours.

I've been exploring using a "gamified" structure in my 7th-grade Latin IA course in the past two years, in which we have a number of thematic "modules" containing both grammatical and cultural content. In each module, we cover the grammar and vocabulary necessary for the course, then do a project around the cultural theme. Our first module focused on ancient geography to give our students a context for their study of the language, and students were asked to build interactive maps to help build an understanding of how geography affected how people lived within the Roman world.

First, we did some research about cities and travel in the ancient world, relying heavily on Stanford's excellent ORBIS tool (Google Maps for the ancient world). Students worked in pairs to select a city, discover some historical significance about it, learn how far it was from Rome in days, distance, and cost, and figure out how one would have traveled from Rome to that city.

After each group submitted their research into a Google Form, we used it to build one collaborative map for the class in Google's My Maps (formerly Maps Engine) containing all their data. Because Google can't locate every ancient city, students had to note the modern country in which the ancient city can be found, before adjusting their location pin. Students then used ORBIS to draw the travel route between Rome and their chosen city. Our Period 9 map looks like:

In complement to our design mindset, we're in the process of building a "Yes, and..." culture in our classroom that governs how we interact with each other. That's to say, whenever we're sharing ideas, we're very careful to "Yes, and..." each of our classmates' thoughts, rather than being the "Yeah, but..." type (thanks to +Eric Saibel  for directing me to Dave Morris' brilliant "The Way of Improvisation" TED Talk that shows how valuable saying "yes" can be!).

With that in mind, I then asked our students a few questions through Canvas (our LMS) about travel in the ancient world, using our "Discovery" goals as the driver for the questions. In other words, I encouraged them to consider how travel affected people first and foremost by imagining that they were the ones taking these trips.

• How do you think travel affected communication in the ancient world? What was it like to travel?
• How different is our world today, thanks to the speed with which we can communicate?
• In general, what are the benefits of travel? Does it shape our thinking about people and ideas, and if so, how?

Students used what they learned through making their maps not only to post a response but also to respond to their classmates' ideas with our "Yes, and..." approach. I was amazed at the quality of the posts that they shared, and I was quite surprised that 37 students generated over 100 total posts in a single day. Just a few of the responses to their peers' posts:

• "I agree with this a lot, I like the way you mentioned how business can expand!"
• "I fully agree, the communication has improved a lot and long distance communications aren't very difficult. In the ancient world, communicating would take a lot of effort, money, and time."
• "I think you make very good points in why traveling was a necessity in ancient times and the benefits to travel."
• "I totally agree with how you mentioned that you can know about world events almost instantly, while hundreds of years ago, you wouldn't know for months, or maybe more than a year."

To close the project, we followed up the online discussion with an in-class activity comparing ancient to modern travel. I divided the class into an "Ancient" group and a "Modern" group, and students then had to think about positive and negative things about travel according to their assigned perspective, based on some of the ideas they saw in the Canvas discussion. They wrote ideas on Post-It notes, with one idea per note, and then stick them onto a white board that was organized in "+" and "-" squares for each idea (cf. the picture below). Finally, students had a chance to examine each other's ideas (as well as previous classes' ideas when possible), before crafting an argument explaining the positives and negatives for each group, again focusing on how geography affected people living in the ancient world.

Thoughts on Travel in the Ancient and Modern Worlds

Frankly, I expected most, if not all, of the discussion to favor modern travel for convenience and speed; but I was surprised when a number of students said that ancient travel would have been more fun and exciting, since we would have had the opportunity to explore more different types of geography and people. It would have taken at least 5 years for an average person to save enough money to travel from Rome to Londinium (ancient London) over the course of a month (at best!), to be sure; but imagine what we could have seen on the trip! Without any prompting on my part, some were saying that we should focus on the journey rather than the destination whenever possible, which helped us to discuss why travel is so valuable in the first place.

So, we didn't prototype anything, but I still think we found a successful way to bring some design thinking into the study of a dead language by discovering how geography determined to a large extent how people interacted with each other. The approach isn't perfect, and it still needs some tweaking and tuning, but I'm happy with the direction. In subsequent projects, I'll continue to explore how we can continue to build a designer's mindset through studying Latin.

Google Earth/Maps Latin Project

Thanks to inspiration from the Power Searching with Google course, I developed a digital Classical scavenger hunt for our last JCL club meeting of the year that takes advantage of Google's search-by-image feature. The experiment went well, and I'm looking forward to integrating the the use of images and Google Forms into my Latin classes next year.

I'm now thinking through ideas to use Google Maps and Earth, with some of the tricks I'm learning through the current Mapping with Google course. We will begin our 1:1 laptop program in 7th grade, and I'll have the pleasure of teaching our Latin IA course for the first time, including developing new collaborative activities and projects around the laptops.

I think that a mapping project of the sorts demonstrated in the course are perfect for our first project, based on the principle that "maps tell a story". Namely, We can let students choose ancient sites and build investigative tours for them using Maps Engine Lite, Google Earth, and the fantastic ORBIS project (an ancient travel tool) at Stanford. With the markup tools that Maps/Earth provide, we could even have students create their own overlay of Roman sites that are either in ruins or obscured by modern structures. They could easily point out features that are otherwise very difficult to see today.

The best feature of all, perhaps, is the ability to record a tour in a .kmz file to share publicly and even build upon further. This summer, planning on building a tour of Hadrian's wall, including details of some Roman forts, as an example to use in class, and I'll share it through Twitter. I also welcome ideas or comments from anyone else who has done any similar mapping project. In particular, I'm interested in sharing our map work with other classes out there to build a library of tours of ancient sites. Let me know, if you'd like to participate!

Latin III Exam Experiment

In my Latin III course, where we abandon the traditional textbooks in favor of a reading approach to cover advanced grammar, I ask students to keep an "Running Latin Commentary" (RLC) for all the work that we do together. This RLC is used to record notes on grammar, vocab., style, etc., as we move through our various texts. The "close reading" skills take a while to build, and it's proven challenging to organize too, leaving the paper RLCs not as useful as I think they should be.

With that, I decided to have students keep their RLC notes in a blog, rather than on paper. I'll admit that it took a huge leap of faith to ask 9th graders to keep a blog for the entire year, without having any idea of what to expect. But as I now reflect back on our year, the blog RLC was a huge success, and I'm both very pleased and quite amazed at the quality of work that they've done with their blogs. I sincerely hope that they continue using them, as they move through the cursus honorum of Latin courses.

Over the course of the year, I commented on their posts to help them look at the details that I wanted them to see. But I also gave them total creative control to add any other interesting ideas that occurred to them through their reading. I also encouraged them to read and comment each other's blogs to share ideas. On certain occasions, I gave them other prompts for posts, e.g. reading the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite for comparison with Venus in Cupid and Psyche and in the Aeneid, or comparing the heroic qualities of Aeneas to Tony Stark in Iron Man 3. In other words, the kinds of questions that Classicists like to ask.

As we approached today's final exam, we devoted the last few weeks of the year to reading Cicero's Pro Archia without fussing with grammatical detail to the same degree that we did at the beginning of the year; we just read for fun. In doing so, I saw more examples of deeper understanding of both the Latin language and literature that I'd hitherto seen, and I was very impressed at their ability to understand how prose and poetry differ. One of the biggest and most surprising outcomes of the blog experiment was an overall "looser" approach toward reading Latin.

Next year, I want to encourage more reading and commenting from the outset, and I also want to give more "freeblogging" opportunities to allow them to start making connections sooner and work through ideas that we could follow over the course of the year. And now that we'll have internet connectivity in all our classrooms, I'll even allow them to use their own RLCs on sight quizzes.

In the past, I used to give my Latin III students a final exam with a variety of parts: verb synopsis, vocab., seen reading, some sight reading, and some composition. Frankly, it was a bit of a bear and ultimately, I fear, not the best thing we could have done to cap our year of hard work. I believe that final exams should only help students not hurt them. This year, therefore, given our greater emphasis on sight-reading, I opted for solely sight passages on the final exam: one prose and one poetry passage, for which students could use a dictionary. When wi-fi access will be available everywhere in the school next year, I'll let them use their RLCs too.

It's typically the case that 9th graders take final exams, only to leave and never see them again. Given the new approach to the course we took this year, I thought that the best way to give us closure and a sense of accomplishment would be to grade the exams together. So, right after the exam, I collected those who were available, and I let students grade their own work, while we discussed the passages in detail. I'll catch up on Monday with the others who couldn't stay.

A few weeks earlier, I gave them a sight quiz that they found more difficult that I expected. Rather than grade and return it, I graded a photocopy (without telling them!) and in class handed back the original, which we graded together in the same grading style I use (assigning 1 point per word, with half for meaning and half for function). Once finished, we compared their own evaluation to mine. To our collective surprise, they all graded more harshly that I do, and I think they learned more from attentively looking at their own work than by reading my comments, especially on something they found difficult.

We took a similar approach toward grading their final exams, and in short, they were all quite happy with the outcome. Because there was no set corpus or any other set "study guide" or vocabulary to learn for the exam,, they just read Latin for the sake of Latin, and they even found both the review and the exam to be fun! In the end, they worked hard this year, and I hope that they'll leave campus this afternoon not only knowing their grade, but, much more importantly, knowing what they've accomplished.

I'm very pleased with these experiments, and I'm eager to continue to develop them next year. It'd be fantastic if we could find other Latin III classes interested in similar blog projects so we could share our work. Any interest?

On the History of Latin and Yoga

While in graduate school, the topic of "active" Latin (i.e. using spoken Latin in various ways) rarely came up, if at all, so it was something of a surprise to find so many proponents of it at the high school level.  In the various fora devoted to Latin discussions, it thus seems to be the case that every few months, a questions is asked about the linguistic status of the language by those who advocate its active use.  Namely, is Latin really a dead language?  It's typically asked, as I see it, with the expectation that the answer will be "no", given the wide breadth that the language and culture have in the modern world.

Image from The Guardian

Based on my training in Latin historical linguistics, however, I'm compelled to say that Latin is dead.  As far as we can tell, the Latin of Cicero and Caesar may have been no longer intelligible by as early as 500 CE, based on the testimony of texts like the Reichenau Glosses.  Sure, Latin evolved into the Romance languages and can be considered to be alive in their guise; but they are very different languages with different cultures.  Latin effectively died when its community of native speakers disappeared, since without them, there was no longer a full picture with which to reconstruct it.  Even though it continued to be used as a written language and even resuscitated orally for specific purposes (i.e. in the the form of Ecclesiastical Latin), Latin as an active linguistic entity has died.  From any objective perspective all claims to the contrary fail to stand up to scrutiny.

Without fail, declaring that Latin is objectively dead in these discussions incites vigorous attacks by those who dispute that it's dead, based on its active use.  Some have even alleged that dedicated oral Latin practice can lead to fluency at the proficiency level of native speaker, which is simply impossible.  I'm glad that there's so much enthusiasm for Latin around the world and that people defend their beliefs about it so vehemently, but I just don't think we can justify calling it a living language.  More importantly, I don't think that the death of Latin has to imply the death of active Latin today, which is the assumption that some have made.  All told, that Latin is dead doesn't need to be a negative thing at all.

To the contrary, oral Latin is gaining in popularity, and there are several active communities and enrichment opportunities with glowing reputations for speaking Latin actively.  In fact, one of my own students has participated at the Getty Villa's Academia Aestiva Latina program for two consecutive summers and hasn't a single negative word to say about the experience.  Approaching Latin pedagogy with more active principles in mind may actually lead to better experiences learning it, too.  We just need to divorce subjective feelings about what we do with Latin from the objective facts of its linguistic history.

Over spring break, I had a chance to catch up on reading.  In particular, I began +Carol Horton Yoga Ph.D, in which she analyzes the origins and transformation of yoga into what it is for many yogis today.  When she began her practice, she asked herself if the stories about yoga's supposedly 5000-year ancestry were true.  Many yoga teachers maintain its age to be true, and one teacher interviewed for the Enlighten Up! documentary even supposed that kundalini yoga can be traced back 40,000 years!  (For comparison, we generally believe that Proto-Indo-European was spoken as a linguistic entity sometime between 5000 and 4000 BCE.)  Horton shows us how the history of yoga has been homogenized, with very little ancient tradition to be found within the walls of modern studios, and more and more yogis are now coming understanding yoga as we know it is a very modern phenomenon.

But in her brilliant chapter on the duality of yoga, Horton doesn't dismiss its history as false and therefore useless.  Instead, she rather convincingly argues the need for a connection between the present and the past.  Although lacking a clear historical connection to India's ancient traditions, the difference from yoga's perceived history is valuable, in that "[b]reaking out of the box of our own cultural conditioning expands our sense of what's possible" (34).  Horton continues on the same page to say that "the more we use yoga to experience something deeper than our everyday consciousness, the more we're grounded in a sense that something significant connects human experience across the chasm of time and place".  Upon reading this a few nights ago, I was instantly reminded of the discussions about the linguistic lineage of Latin that I've been consistently returning to over past five years.  It would appear, then, that Latin and yoga share very similar histories, and I've found it very productive to compare my own experiences with the two.

When looking at Classical culture, we've also done a great job in homogenizing the past.  In the vast majority if historical depictions, Roman buildings look the same, the military looks the same, the elite are always the same gluttons, and most of all the Latin language is static and rigid.  Latin texts range from perhaps the 7th c. BCE to well into the middle of the 1st millennium CE, but we often take a myopic view of them within this span.  Classicists don't actually believe that this picture of ancient Rome is accurate, but in the same way that the ancient tradition of yoga is used as a foil for modern practice, according to Horton, active Latin can only thrive on maintaining a connection between the language we study today and the language that the Romans used 2000 years ago.

Because it's a dead language, there are several different pedagogical methods to approach teaching Latin, unlike what is done in modern language classrooms.  Some programs aim to read literature, while others teach students to speak Latin, and more programs are breaking away from the traditional mold, as far as I can tell.  I don't believe that Latin should only be taught actively, though, or that teachers necessarily need to adopt active methodologies, despite several claims assertions along these lines. Our program is relatively traditional in our overall approach, but we're also quite proud of it, since our students love it.  The unifying feature that makes Latin programs strong is the communal bond created in classes, when students believe they are part of something special and unique, much like what makes yoga communities strong.  This is certainly a driving force behind the oral Latin communities, I think, but in my experience a strong community can be built in a number of ways.

Image from VRoma

Next year, I've volunteered to teach Latin IA to the 7th grade, who will be the first at our school to begin a 1:1 laptop program.  I've never taught 7th grade before, but I'm excited to have the opportunity to build a communal foundation with new Latin students, who will hopefully continue through our program to Latin Lit. Honors and even take Greek.  Pounding grammar at this age is not the right thing to do, so I'm working toward other classroom activities, and I'm looking forward to continuing our department's use of technology in the classroom.  This is a large driving force behind the start of #latinlangchat, a Twitter chat devoted to Latin pedagogy, where I'm looking forward to meet other Latin teachers with great ideas about how to continue to build strong programs.  To my mind, the most important thing to do at this level is to foster engagement in whatever way it can be done, and I don't believe that there's only one correct way to accomplish this.

In sum, Horton supposes that she "can't help but feel that we're cheating ourselves out of something potentially valuable when we blithely assume that yoga's past was essentially the same as its present" (29), and this is essentially how I feel about Latin pedagogy and the more active uses of it.  Roman Latin is dead, and on account of this, there are certain things that we'll simply never know about it.  With only textual evidence available to us, mostly literary texts at that, no one will ever be "fluent" in Latin again.  It's important to me to acknowledge this and teach it to students, given that there's value in understanding what we're able do with Latin linguistically.  Our experiences with it, even if we encourage oral Latin, will always differ from what we read in original texts.  That knowledge and understanding, rather then serving as a detriment, can actually help us to build purpose and craft goals for our program.  And though we'll never create a community of active speakers in the same way that our Chinese, French, and Spanish programs can, we can nonetheless still build a strong, engaged communities and teach our students to enjoy learning Latin, while giving them the tools to continue their exploration of it subsequently, whether we're interested in reading ancient texts, conversing with each other in Latin, or doing some combination of both.

#latinlangchat Twitter Chat

I've had a great time participating in Twitter chats like "CAedchat", with hashtag #caedchat, which happens Sunday evenings at 8pm PST and provides a forum for CA teachers to discuss current topics in education and pedagogy.  As far as I know, there exists no current live chat devoted to Latin and the ancient world, and so capitalizing on the popularity of Twitter chats like this one (cf. this list for more), I'd like to start one.  It seems to me that we Latin teachers don't talk shop with enough frequency, and this could be a great way for us to build community (even Pompeii had social networks, after all!).

Latin graffiti from Pompeii

Given that the hashtag #latinlangchat is already in use by some Latin teachers, it makes sense to continue using it for this purpose.  I've created the #latinlangchat calendar that I'll use to plan our discussions, and I welcome help in any capacity, including co-moderators.  Though we're tagging our discussion with #latinlangchat, it is open to those who teach Greek, ancient history, and any other related fields.  Everyone should feel free to participate as much or as little as desired.

Let's have our first hour-long chat on Tuesday, 4/9 at 6pm PST and talk about the promotion of Latin programs.  How do we convince students to take Latin and maintain our program strength?  Is retention an problem, and if so, why?  Depending on how it goes, we can reconvene every other week at 6pm.

We'll follow the usual chat format and introduce ourselves, before jumping into questions labeled "Q1", "Q2", etc.  For convenience, answers should begin "A1", "A2", etc.  For chats of this sort on Twitter, it is usually suggested that tweetchat.com (vel sim.), which has worked very well for me, be used to monitor the discussion.  Chat digests will be kept using Storify.

Disclaimer:  I am in my fifth year teaching Latin at a middle school in Los Angeles and will be implementing a 1:1 laptop program for our 7th graders next fall.  I'm consequently very interested in discussing the incorporation of technology into our program.  I will again teach our 9th-grade Latin I course, designed for students new to the school or students taking a second language.  Traditionally, we have used the Oxford Latin Course for both the Latin IA-IB-II progression and this accelerated course, but I don't like its pacing for Latin I and will try Wheelock instead next year.  Finally, I teach Latin III to advanced 9th graders, using a reading-based approach that departs from the Oxford texts.  We begin with Balme and Morewood's Cupid and Psyche text, before moving on to one of the Focus Aeneid commentaries, in addition to other supplementary readings.  I am thus interested in discussing textbook choices and other resources for intermediate Latin students.  Based on my own experiences, I'll offer some of tentative ideas for discussion here, but I'd love to know what concerns others have:

• Building a Latin program
• JCL club culture 
• Latin and technology
• Textbooks and digital resources
• The AP Latin curriculum
• Latin-specific professional development opportunities

I can be found at @mosspike on Twitter, and our JCL club lives on at @hwjcl.  I'm looking forward to our first #latinlangchat next week!

Chromebooks and Word Processing

I finally picked up a Samsung Series 3 Chromebook, which I've had my eye on since I had the chance to work with one at the Boulder GAFE Summit last August (cf. my notes taken on a Chromebook).  I'm a big fan of Google Apps and have transitioned the majority of my work into my Drive account, so it's certainly a sensible purchase.  Additionally, my Mac is on its last leg, and the school-provided laptop is much too big for travel, and because I find using an iPad tedious for conferencing, the Chromebook seems like a great choice for a portable yet functional device while on the road.  After playing on it for a few hours, I'm very happy with the purchase.  Some quick observations:

• The Spotify extension didn't initially work, but after going through Facebook, it now opens the player.  The web player still in demo and doesn't offer full functionality.
• The trackpad is a little clunky, but I like the keyboard.
• The screen resolution is fine.
• The sound is surprisingly loud, even if somewhat muddled at high volumes, and the camera is respectable.

As our school moves toward a 1:1 laptop program beginning next fall, I've been working to keep the Chromebook in the picture as a viable laptop choice, and I've pushed toward as many web-based applications as possible to obviate the need for students to purchase expensive software that they would rarely use (I could easily see these software lists getting out of hand).  While web-based versions of most of the tools that students rely on are now available, however, there's still a dependence on Microsoft Office for all of our word-processing tasks.

I'm positive that I'll get quite a lot of use from the Chromebook, but one of my biggest issues in using it with students is the limited utility of fonts within Drive. Classics and linguistics consistently rely on specialized fonts for written work, and while Google Docs support nearly everything that we need, it is extremely tedious to generate non-standard characters easily within a document.  Consequently, I have two questions that I need to answer by August, before Drive can become a viable primary word-processing tool and the Chromebook can be a legitimate "BYOL" device for what I want to do in my Latin classes.

My Latin classes have found Drive useful (especially Docs and Spreadsheets), but we haven't yet used it to its full potential.  The default Chrome language can be set to Spanish, French, etc., with all diacritical characters readily available, and so modern language teachers should have little issues with writing the target languages.  But there's no "Latin" keyboard that offers the capability to write a long vowel with a "macron" over it, e.g. writing a verb like dūxērunt "they lead" (pf.).  When our students are doing written work on the computer, I want them to have the capability of marking vowel length without fuss, rather than having to insert a special character manually or type the Unicode character for each one, e.g. U+0113 for ē.

My question:  is there a way to create shortcut keys to type long vowels?  In Word, once can easily create a custom shortcut key, but because shortcuts are tied to browser function in web-based text editors, I'm not sure that this is possible.  Alternatively, can custom keyboard layouts be created?  If not, I'm worried that the usefulness of Docs will suffer, at least for Latin students, and that it will be even more difficult to move away from Word.

Similarly but going a step farther, it's impractical for me to do work with Proto-Indo-European (which traditionally does not use IPA), if I have to rely on inserting special characters like *gʷʰ or *ṷ (I can find no syllabic r). This issue isn't as urgent as the need for marking long vowels in Latin, but I would love to be able to do collaborative work with others.

I'll continue to explore Chrome-related questions over the next few months and will share my thoughts here.  As usual, I would greatly appreciate input from others.

Vindolanda Mini-Class

I've been asked to teach a "mini"-class for prospective 7th graders at one of our schools Family Visit Days, when we'll host applicants.  The classes are broken down into 20-minute slots for no more than 20 students, and we'll run each class 6 times.  Thanks to the format, it's very difficult to teach a language-based mini-class, let alone one in Latin, but I have an idea that I'm eager to try.

I explored Hadrian's Wall a few years ago and have since been very interested in the military letters found along the wall, chiefly in the Roman fort at Vindolanda.  With that in mind, I've decided to do a very short writing project with the kids, having them write "Vindolanda" letters of their own.  I'll use Google Earth to "travel" to Hadrian's Wall and show them just how far they were from Rome (maybe also briefly using Stanford's ORBIS project?), then give them the Roman cursive script used along the wall and some Latin phrases in a Google Doc as a starting point.  They'll write their letters on a small piece of balsa wood using a black marker (cf. the famous letter 291 below), and I'll paste a QR code (found above) on the back of each "tablet" that will direct them to the same Google Doc, on which I'll allow comments, in case they have any questions or comments after they leave the classroom.  It'll be fun to see how many kids visit the Google Doc after the classes are over.

This project should be a great way to learn actively a little bit about the formalities of Roman letter writing, including names and dates, while working within an actual historical framework.  And it'll be a nice personal project that students will be able to take home with them.  I'm eagerly looking forward to putting some ideas I've had over the past few months to the test.

A Little Latin Reader

Thanks to its recent BMCR review, I recently got word of English and Irby's new Latin reader, A Little Latin Reader (Oxford) and received my copy a few days ago.  I don't intend to fully review the book here, but I'll offer a few brief thoughts on it.  The reader is designed to give students an early introduction to real Latin (in opposition to "textbook" Latin) and is organized topically by points of grammar, e.g. the dative case, the perfect tense, indirect statements, cum-clauses, etc.  Each grammatical topic heading contains a few short passages with a brief self-contained vocabulary, giving the reader over 200 passages in total.  The authors have designed the book to be a versatile tool in accompanying grammar instruction, and in this respect, I think it's an excellent resource.

As Pollio notes in his BMCR review, the choice of passages and fullness in commentary could always be debated, and while I would have preferred to see more Imperial prose, I'm very happy with the selection.  In particular, I'm especially happy that the authors have included a number of epigraphical texts that are worth reading.  In fact, non-literary texts are receiving more attention than ever at the intermediate level, as is also the case with LaFleur's excellent Scribblers, Sculptors, and Scribes, and I hope that the trend continues.

It's certainly true that the minimalist commentary accompanying each text is little more than a plain vocabulary and as such won't help students with points of grammar, language, and style.  But while this fact will prevent the reader from becoming a primary textbook, it will also allow teachers to tailor the discussion to their own interests and force students to analyze the texts themselves.  A quick browse through the selections reveals an abundance of "nonstandard" forms that are ripe for all sorts of discussions, e.g. anc (34.4 and 38.1), cīves (43.1), deicō (15.1), līberum (27.3), negāstī (33.3), praetereis (45.2), sexs (34.3), etc., in addition to the usual points of literary interest.  In all of my classes I'm going to use the book exactly as the authors suggested, namely, as a springboard both for further discussion on selected topics and for sight-reading.  At $15.95 it's a bargain.