I’ve shared that I’m taking the first of four courses towards Harvard’s Instructional Leadership Certificate. I really do find the course almost entirely helpful, which is a big endorsement from someone who’s been mostly disappointed by gen ed PD, and I would still recommend it.
Then there’s the points…
As I’ve revisited the problem with points, I also just experienced it firsthand as a student. In the course, there were optional message board activities each week with various point values for posting, replying, and/or “liking,” etc. There was a suggested minimum to “earn” over the six weeks, and a weekly maximum. But some points carried over to the next week. Not all. There was a maximum carry over limit beyond the maximum. As you see, this was not a straightforward system.
Now, I hadn’t been paying attention to the points, or perhaps better expressed, I actively tried to AVOID looking at those points. In short, when there was something to add to a topic and there were a couple replies between me and another participant, the weekly point maximum was met. Since I spent a lot of time posting and replying, I maxed out points each week.
Well, the Week 4 module didn’t really speak to me, so I did my OPTIONAL post, and didn’t really go back to look at what the other participants had to say. No biggie, right? Especially since I was nearing that six-week maximum at the end of the fourth week. What I find absolutely frustrating, though, is that I received an automated email “reminder to participate” at some point late in the week. That was just…insulting. I felt like replying “FU, bro. I’ve almost reached the limit, and these are friggin’ OPTIONAL?!” Oh, and I got another notification the following week, and a final notification after I completed the coursework. This only increased my frustration considering I had already overshot the maximum. Thanks, Harvard.
So, while the point (heh) of the message board was to encourage discussion and further learning, I was being told that I wasn’t doing it the way someone wanted me to do it. Makes me wonder how many teachers are trying to control their students in similar ways.
After 10 years of teaching, I left the classroom in 2023. I’ve earned an Ed.S. and passed comprehensive exams in the fall of 2025, making me a Candidate for a Ph.D. in Teacher Education. I research grading and classroom assessment, and work with pre-service educators. Here are my most up-to-date practices—frozen in time like Pompeii or Herculaneum right up to my last day in the classroom—that were fundamental to my teaching, making all the daily activities possible…
Someone in my grad program recently mentioned how grading should be completely based on what students can do. This idea was challenged by another who said that it certainly makes sense if you’re “the last step” before a career (e.g., administering licensing tests, or proving you can do an actual job via some performance), but what about when students are still in the learning phase? This was a good point. How long does a typical learning phase last before you’d expect, or even need to grade performance & competency? What if you—the person ultimately responsible for that grade—are not “the last step?”
What if you’re a college instructor for a 100-level survey course? What if you’re a 10th grade math teacher? What if you’re a middle-school science teacher? What if you’re an elementary school reading specialist? Surely, a high-functioning society doesn’t rely on any of these people giving summative grades based on performance & competency as if it were “the last step.” Placing these kind of obstacles during the learning process long before the rubber hits the road isn’t something we should be doing.
**Update 7.20.23 – This post was SOMEHOW deleted and nowhere in my trash folder?! I’m guessing it occurred when WordPress updated to the JetPack app. I know, you don’t care, but I Just wanted to say that I found the post in its ENTIRETY using the Wayback Machine. Here it is if you wanna see!**
When the draft of the new revised AP Latin course was released, I simultaneously couldn’t care less yet was also amazingly intrigued. So, I did another analysis like the one a few years ago. In short, the good news is that 1) the total amount of Latin has been reduced by about 25%, 2) quite a bit of “OTHER” Latin has been suggested as comprising a third of the overall syllabus alongside Virgil & Pliny, and 3) the revised course has been officially recognized as a second year college equivalent. Now, the bad news…
The Same The revised course is fundamentally the same. While the draft name-drops the trending “language acquisition” phrase, the core texts are still very, very far above the reading level of nearly every student who will take AP Latin. This, in no way, is a tenet of language acquisition, whatsoever. Even methods and theories encouraging a “productive struggle” would draw the line well before anything like Vergil & Pliny after a few years of a new language. Beyond that, most high school students have no business taking a second year college course, anyway. BuT Ap Is AdVaNcEd,RiGhT?! Sure. The problem, though, is all the schools that choose AP as their program capstone without any other option, weeding out kids who “can’t cut it,” and/or backwards designing the whole program down to freshmen year (or lower for “feeder” middle school programs). When AP is used this way—which is very common—most students are denied a senior year language experience, or are unnecessarily forced to struggle through the content.
Core TextVocab The revised Vergil & Pliny selections vocab comes to:
5,500 total words in length
3,500 forms (i.e. aberant + abest = 2)
1,800 meanings/lemmas (i.e. aberant + abest = 1 meaning of “awayness”)*
This particular Vergil & Pliny content not as bad as the current Vergil & Caesar content (i.e., down from 11,700 total words in length, 5,700 forms, and 2,600 total meanings/lemmas). Progress, right? But still nowhere close to what typical students have acquired by senior year. Using the same generous figure of seniors knowing 750 words by the time they begin AP coursework, there’s still more unknown than known vocab. Like, way more (i.e., 1050 unknown words of Vergil & Pliny remain!!). The AP draft also states that “the focus of the course is continued Latin language acquisition with the inclusion of some textual analysis and contextualization skills.” Uh…some…analysis and contextualization skills?! If the focus were actually on acquisition, students would be reading a LOT. To be clear, students still won’t be reading this kind of Latin. To truly “read” these texts, students would need to understand 98% of the Vergil & Pliny selections to have a chance at comprehending what’s going on (see Text Coverage). That ain’t gonna happen. But there’s more, and it might be worse…
The stats so far represent just 65% of the AP syllabus content!
Teacher Choice The AP draft outlines setting aside about 1350 total words of poetry and 1650 total words of prose, all of the teacher’s choosing. This constitutes a third of the revised course content aside from Vergil & Pliny. Now, for this analysis, I got lucky with randomly choosing the recommended Ovid passages from Metamorphoses (i.e., 1450 words), and the Ciceronian letters (i.e., EXACTLY 1650 words). When we add these texts to the core Virgil & Pliny, unfortunately, we get a chart that basically mirrors the current AP one:
While the 2025 AP draft shows the total amount of Latin being reduced by about 25%, it turns out that the vocab difference is only about 4% less (i.e., 2600 total words currently vs. 2300). Progress…right? Here are a few different charts to help visualize all that:
Wildcard Yet I chose Ovid & Cicero. The big wildcard is Teacher’s Choice portion of the AP syllabus. Surely, the impact of choosing text Y or author Z will vary, yet by how much? I was curious about that impact, but I do have a day job, other hobbies, and Ph.D. coursework to do. Rather than look at multiple combinations of poetry and prose, perhaps looking for the most extreme outcomes, I kept Ovid and replaced the Cicero letters with different prose selections amounting to ~1650 words of Latin to see what came up.
Starting with Sallust (Bellum Catilinae,, 5-15), the results were pretty close with just 10 more words added given all the vocab in common with Vergil, Pliny, and Ovid. Next, I pieced together an assortment of Gellius’ Vestal passage in Noctes Atticae (1.12), Eutropius’ founding of Rome in Breviarium Historiae Romanae (1.1-8), and the first five characters of Hyginus’ Fabulae. After all, the stated point of including this “OTHER” Latin is for encouraging teachers “to explore Latin texts from different time periods written by a variety of authors.” The difference between using this assortment of selections instead of Cicero wasn’t staggeringly worse. Then again, it did add about 50 more unique words, increasing those vocab demands, now coming within 200 words of the current AP syllabus!. The point? The Teacher’s Choice portion—a third of the AP syllabus—has the potential to meet (surpass?) the vocab demands of the current AP!
In sum, the revised AP course seems to be an all-too-common case in education: making progress in some areas yet ultimately falling short of addressing a fundamental problem. The 2025 AP is basically the same old thing (i.e., vocab demands are very close to the current AP with just ~4% fewer words) wrapped up in new packaging. I’m sure it will appeal to more teachers, but it doesn’t seem to deliver much else in terms of pedagogical improvements besides reduced workload and a tip of a hat to everyone reading “OTHER” Latin. So, maybe 2035 draft will be promising? I’ll be long gone from the classroom by then. Best of luck to everyone out there!
*Once again, for this analysis mostly done via Voyant Tools & Google Sheets, I rounded to the nearest 100, in the AP’s favor. Errors are unlikely to change things remarkably, and in all likelihood the situation is a little worse than what you see.
Gotta love a trilogy, right? This is my final Winter 2023 post on the whole cognate kerfuffle.
One reason Chinese takes native English speakers a LOT longer to acquire than something like Spanish is because Chinese has approximately zero cognates. Terry Waltz has reported that Spanish has about 3,000 words most English speakers can understand without being taught any of them. Languages with more cognates are acquired faster because cognates play a role in the first developmental stage of second language learning. Check out what ACTFL has to say about the novice language learner and cognates:
Cognates. Whether you love ’em or hate ’em, how much Latin are we talking about? When they’re used, do cognates end up comprising most of a book’s Latin? Are we talking half? A quarter? Less? And then what does that mean about the rest of a book? How much of a book’s Latin is being dismissed amongst the cognate concerns? One of the concerns is that cognates weren’t used by Classical authors, the claim being that using infrequent words is a problem, and the conclusion being that cognates are unhelpful for today’s Latin learner. I don’t have this concern or have found evidence to support the claim. Nevertheless, I have been wondering just how much—or little—the concerns constitute, percentage-wise, of a book. I also have been wondering if there were many words Classical authors themselves used that other Classical authors didn’t really use. N.B., I don’t mean hapax, just words that were rarely used by others. Thus, if Classical authors preferred to use rare words, too, that would help illustrate how the current cognate fuss is more about preference than anything else. Let’s see…
Certain learners exist who possess what seems like complete immunity to whatever pedagogy they’re subjected to. College students are a good example. Professors rarely have pedagogical training, which is perhaps the most ironic thing about those in charge of training pre-service primary and secondary teachers, but most college students are able to persist through a lack of solid pedagogy. How? Using their interests, some independent learning skills, and a bit of determination. Polyglots are another good example. They’ll learn many languages under all sorts of conditions that don’t transfer to others, claiming they found “the secret,” yet relatively few who adopt their “methods” report success (except for other…polyglots!). Upon thinking this over, many high school students—and not just those studying a second language—are often pedagogically immune, too. These students manage to pass courses even when teachers have wacky pedagogy with unhelpful practices. Consider the teacher using some pre-fab curriculum with loads of busywork. Students will put up with all that busywork. They might not learn much, but they’ll earn credit, then graduate. In that sense, then, these students made it through. They were immune (though not to learning…which we’ll get to). They just made it past the next level. They…”succeeded.”
This year’s Annual Criticism of Latin, or ACL for short, is about a month early. It’s been the same old gripes with the same old assumptions going back to 2018 or so. Almost every concern rests on the assumptions that a student will continue Latin in college and will be negatively impacted somehow by the decisions modern Latin authors have made. That’s two biggies: continue Latin, and be negatively impacted.
The most useful professional development (PD) I’ve had over these past 10 years in education has been from presentations, workshops, and blogs that have given me a “start here.” It’s usually in the form of someone figuring out a really effective way to do something, then putting it into some kind of ready-to-go format, whether that’s a packaged method, or list of steps. The “start here” works because it’s the culmination of trial, error, and revision. The “start here” works because it represents the essential. When I’ve used someone else’s “start here,” it’s been really effective. Naturally, there’s adaptation and I’ve been able to put my own spin on things, but only after I’ve implemented whatever was presented to me. So what’s the problem?
Some teachers begin to change the “start here” right away.
For example, if I share a cocktail recipe with you called “The Lance Drink,” and upon seeing .25oz Sfumato in the ingredients you decide to just leave it out, you haven’t actually made The Lance Drink. You’ve certainly made a cocktail. It’s close, but something else. You’ve mixed together ingredients of which the outcome is unknown…and there’s a good chance it might not turn out very good. Let’s say you love vodka. It’s in every cocktail you make, no matter what. When I give you my recipe, you sub vodka for The Lance Drink’s rye base. Why? That’s what you’ve always used. It’s what you’ve always done. So you mix…you sip…but you immediately spit it out because vodka is a horrible combination with the other ingredients. You might even say “gee, this Lance Drink isn’t so great.”
Teaching is a bit like that.
Instead of going with something tried and true, teachers tend to hold onto stuff that just doesn’t mix, not giving the “start here” a real chance. Sometimes, they might go as far as to claim that the “start here” doesn’t work (or whatever), mischaracterizing whatever was presented to them. In the worst of cases, other teachers that never got the original “start here” just listen to the ones who changed something right away, and shun the changed version before they can try the original, effective one.
The next steps—for anyone who works with these teachers—become searching for how to reconcile old principles in the changed version with new ones that the original “start here” was based on. Sometimes there’s no solution. The principles are too conflicting. Sad. Yet it all could’ve been avoided by just taking the “start here” and rolling with it. I’ve actually heard back from teachers who’ve experienced both, mostly when it comes to grading practices. Instead of rolling with the “start here,” they tried some weird combo, thought things didn’t work, then gave up only to revert to old ways. Then, sometime later, they gave things another try—exactly how it was presented—and come to find out they’re all of a sudden embracing the change. Again, it all could’ve been avoided.
So, in sticking with the metaphor, what’s your vodka? Let go of that, and why not give rye a try next time?
The 100-point scale is unbalanced. This is a fact. It allots 60 points to failure and just 10 points between each other letter grade.
But there’s another problem with the scale. When teachers use it, they rarely make a true evaluation of student work, instead getting distracted by mathy math. Consider a common teacher practice of taking off points…
Magister P. 