I just interviewed a college student who wants tutoring in second year Latin. I went into detail about how she was taught so I could match the requirements she would have to meet. Translation and parsing.
So, given that very common finding, my only request of anyone writing something like the post below is: please define “read”. Do we mean read or do we mean translate into English and then read with digressions into parsing.
If this poster’s students are really reading unadapted Latin classical authors – not adapted texts, not normal Latin prose, but the convoluted, highly artful language of classical authors, that would be worth investigating. To sit and read another language is a wonderful experience, the better the writing the better the experience. But the traditional Latin classroom does not do that nor does it teach that. This is the reason I ask. I do not ask on the listserv b/c we have had way too many blow-ups on that list to venture into those waters. But it is surely a reasonable question given the frequent statement, “We read Virgil”….. and no such thing happened.
>I was quite excited to get to try the CLC at my new school, and then found that it was a bad fit *for* *my* *goals*.
> What made me abandon CLC was my primary goal for my classes. I want my students to get to reading unadapted Classical Latin authors as quickly as possible. Secondarily, I want those students who are merely checking off a language requirement with no intention of going forward in Latin to come away with a better grasp of the nuts & bolts of language so that they will be better users of their own primary language.
>
> For these goals, CLC was a bad fit for me. A search through the archives will show quite a few discussions about what sorts of transitional readers are available to take students from the end of their textbooks to unadapted Classical authors. I never had this problem until I started using CLC. Despite the copious extended readings and continuous story line, when my students finally got out of CLC 3 (partway through Latin 4), they had great difficulty making the switch to authors like Catullus, Ovid, Martial, Petronius, Cicero, or Vergil.
> Since abandoning CLC, my students have gone back to finishing their textbooks at the end of Latin two or early in Latin 3 and then making a relatively painless transition to unadapted Classical authors.