Horace Workbook (Latin Literature Workbook Series) (Latin Literature Workbook Series)
After fading from the general consciousness and disappearing from the standard curriculum, Latin is starting to make a comeback. However, for Latin to catch up, it's not enough to brush off the old grammar-translation textbooks from the days of old. At the same time, T(otal) P(hysical) R(esponse) is probably not going to become the mainstay of Latin instruction either. What will? For introductory prose, there is some fairly good stuff on the market, notably the Oxford and Cambridge series. And if you're just looking for fun with Latin, the adventures of Paulus and Lucia in Teach Yourself Beginner's Latin are a delight. But... The place where Latin has always gotten difficult is the poetry. Horace, Ovid and Vergil thought with declensions and even they, we presume, sometimes must have wondered where the phrase they were working on was going to end and whether it would fit together. With its theoretically flexible word order, Latin allowed the Roman poet to do wondrous things to pair concepts and make it work with the meter. But for the non-Roman Latin student, this makes life very difficult. Until now. A Horace Workbook is exactly the sort of book I wish I had had when I was first starting to decipher Latin poetry. And again, when I was reading Horace in graduate school seminars. In the middle? I found the whole thing rather difficult and stuck to Catullus and Ovid's Metamorphoses, which are at least a little more transparent to the modern American reader. A Horace Workbook, however, has just about the right touch: it uses grammar and other exercises to help you understand the poem, not to test your mastery of minutia. In a typical A Horace Workbook presentation, you are given the poem, followed by leading questions that make it easier to see how it fits together, as well as prompting the occasional a-ha where you might have otherwise missed what was going on. The whole thing is very user-friendly, taking you by the hand and leading you through the things you ought to know.Horace is a difficult author for most Latin students to master. Therefore, any assistance that a teacher can get to help his/her students to understand better Horace's use of language is greatly appreciated. A Horace Workbook is a very nice resource which should be helpful to both students and teachers alike. The workbook, part of the Latin Literature Workbook Series produced by Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, is intended for AP and college use. However, since it includes only the odes and satire that currently make up the Horace syllabus for the AP Latin Literature exam, it is probably best suited for secondary AP classes. Although it could very easily be used with any Horace text, it is a very nice complement to Ancona's Horace: Selected Odes and Satire 1.9 (Wauconda IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1999; second edition, 2005). The workbook provides six different exercises for each ode and the satire: (1) short answer questions, (2) multiple-choice questions, (3) translations, (4) short analysis questions, (5) short essays, and (6) scansion. The short answer questions are designed to direct the students through a parsing of one or two key words per line. Case and use of a word are the most frequent items called for, but occasional questions about figures of speech and agreement occur. The multiple-choice questions are quite varied in content, hit on the key areas of the passages, and rarely overlap with the short answer questions on the same lines. These questions are an excellent asset for teachers who want to give their students extensive practice with this type of AP question. Even though there are no multiple-choice questions on Horace on the AP Latin Literature exam, students could easily benefit from additional practice with this type of question. --Thomas Stewart, Casady School - The Classical Outlook, 83.1Horace is a difficult author for most Latin students to master. Therefore, any assistance that a teacher can get to help his/her students to understand better Horace's use of language is greatly appreciated. A Horace Workbook is a very nice resource which should be helpful to both students and teachers alike. The workbook, part of the Latin Literature Workbook Series produced by Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, is intended for AP and college use. However, since it includes only the odes and satire that currently make up the Horace syllabus for the AP Latin Literature exam, it is probably best suited for secondary AP classes. Although it could very easily be used with any Horace text, it is a very nice complement to Ancona's Horace: Selected Odes and Satire 1.9 (Wauconda IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1999; second edition, 2005). The workbook provides six different exercises for each ode and the satire: (1) short answer questions, (2) multiple-choice questions, (3) translations, (4) short analysis questions, (5) short essays, and (6) scansion. The short answer questions are designed to direct the students through a parsing of one or two key words per line. Case and use of a word are the most frequent items called for, but occasional questions about figures of speech and agreement occur. The multiple-choice questions are quite varied in content, hit on the key areas of the passages, and rarely overlap with the short answer questions on the same lines. These questions are an excellent asset for teachers who want to give their students extensive practice with this type of AP question. Even though there are no multiple-choice questions on Horace on the AP Latin Literature exam, students could easily benefit from additional practice with this type of question. The workbook provides passages for students to translate and scan, but provides no more than the space and paper to do the work. The workbook contains no information about rules of scansion or the meters that Horac --Thomas Stewart, Casady School - The Classical Outlook, 83.1