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Revised AP Latin 2025: Good News…Still Bad News…And Maybe Even Worse News

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**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 Text Vocab
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.

Love Stories

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Wait…next week is Valentine’s Day already?! Crazy. Also, it’s kind of a terrible holiday, though isn’t it? My best memories are of the perforated cards you’d exchange in elementary school just hoping one kid had cool enough parents to buy them the Valentines that had Thundercats or GI Joe characters being all lovey on them. Never liked the heart candy; those were just awful. Anyway, if you have the following books on hand, consider reading them to students this week, or scoop up one of the new eBooks so students can read on their own. Here are novellas that contain stories about the joys of relationships, as well as their challenges:

Sitne amor? (Amazon, eBook Polyglots, eBook on Storylabs)
For first year Latin students, there’s the LGBTQ-friendly book of 2400 words about desire, and discovery, in which Piso crashes and burns when he’s around Syra.

Pluto: fabula amoris (Amazon)
For first or second year Latin students looking for a quick read in a book of 1070 words, there’s this take on the Pluto & Proserpina myth.

Pandora (Amazon, eBook Polyglots, eBook on Storylabs)
For first year Latin students looking for a longer novella of 4200 total words, there’s the adaptation of the Pandora myth.

Ovidius Mus (Amazon)
The three stories based on Ovid in this book 1075 words are designed for readers at the end of their first year.

Unguentum (Amazon)
This book of 1575 words is an adaptation of Catullus 13, and includes tiered versions of the original.

Euryidice: fabula amoris (Amazon)
This book, much like its prequel Pluto, includes a different take on the Eurydice & Orpheus myth.

Medea et Peregrinus Pulcherrimus (Amazon)
A Latin III book of 7500 words in this adaptation of the Golden Fleece.

Carmen Megilli (Amazon)
A Latin III book of 9300 words in this that includes an LGBTQ-friendly love story.

Cupid et Psyche (Amazon)
A Latin III/IV book of 8800 words in this adaptation of of Apuleius.

Ira Veneris (Amazon)
A Latin III/IV book of 11000 words in this follow-up to Cupid & Psyche.

Lindsay Sears on Tiers!

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At CANE’s 2018 Annual Meeting this past weekend, Lindsay Sears gave the rundown on bottom-up and top-down approaches to creating tiered versions of texts. What caught my attention was seeing how just a few messages of unadapted Latin became paragraphs of comprehensible text for the novice. That is, the original 8 lines of poetry (of 46 words; 45 of them occurring 1x) nearly doubled in length with each tiered version. The result is students reading MORE Latin that they understand, especially if they read all tiered versions. Lindsay knows how to tier texts, and she does it well.

Beginning with 8 lines of Ovid that few students could understand without pages of notes and a dictionary, we were shown how to get subsequent versions down to one that ANY novice could read. Her steps were clear and concise; moreso than “make each version simpler.” Here they are as distilled as possible. For bottom-up stories (e.g. text to accompany MovieTalk), reverse the order: 

1st Tier down from original
– begin with a compelling text (already with high frequency words, if possible)
– rearrange order to be clearer & shorten sentences
– break into paragraphs to create white space & supply verbs/subjects

Next Tier
– replace vocab/obscure names with synonyms
– simplify complex constructions (i.e. make meaning clearer, which might mean using the subjunctive!)
– add anything missing

Next Tier
– break up all compound sentences, removing conjunctions
– keep simplifying & remove “flavor text” (i.e. unnecessary) modifiers/adverbs
– replace vocab with high frequency & entire explanatory phrases/sentences!

Next Tier!
– short sentences & basic idea

Communication: Definition & Clarification

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Recently on Twitter, Tea with BVP caller extraordinaire, Longinus, as well as some Inclusive Latin Classroom folks, got me thinking about the definition of communication. What follows are terms I’ve been using for a while (almost entirely unoriginal), clarified by Bill VanPatten on Episode 68 of Tea with BVP.

Communication isn’t only speaking:
Communication is the interpretation, negotiation, and expression of meaning. We interpret when we read, and express when we write; no speaking necessary.

Two people are usually involved, but not required:
If I write a note (expression), and place it in a drawer, but then the apt. catches fire (yes, we have renters insurance), there’s no possible way for anyone to read it (interpretation), or ask me about it (negotiation), even if that was my intent. I most certainly expressed my ideas, there just wasn’t anyone around to interpret them.

In Latin, reading—though not to be confused with translating—is the primary form of communication. ACTFL modes of communication are helpful, here. Reading is one-way, and Interpretive (i.e. interpretation), but someone had to write what we read…at some point (i.e. two people involved). That person who wrote what we read is also one-way, and Presentational (i.e. expression). Neither of these become Interpersonal (i.e. negotiation) unless there is interaction between two people, and this interaction doesn’t have to take place in person. This is why Bill VanPatten refers to communication as “expression, interpretation, and sometimes negotiation of meaning.” Both the writer and reader engage in acts of communication, it’s just that their role is different.

Timing (i.e. real, or asynchronous) & Perspective:
Ovid wrote something (expression) a couple thousand years ago that I can try to read today (interpretation). There has been no interaction between us, eliminating the possibility of negotiation. However, if I write an adaptation of Ovid (expression), and then send it to John Bracey, a couple things could happen. John could star the email, forget, and never end up reading it (no interpretation, just my expression). Or, John could read it (interpretation), and send back some notes or questions (negotiation). This interaction between us would be delayed, but still the same process communication-wise as if we were in person. Now, if I also star and forget about that latest correspondence from John, however, neither negotiation nor interpretation occur. This doesn’t change the fact that John expressed ideas and attempted to negotiate with me. That is to say, from John’s perspective, he still engaged in communication, but it was only one-way without my involvement.

Communication as a concept, not as verb “communicate:”
Although I’m engaging in the act of communication by trying to read Ovid (interpretation), one could hardly say that I’m “communicating with” Ovid anymore than Ovid is “communicating with” me, or us as a society. Ovid certainly expressed meaning, itself communication by definition, but in the absence of real time interaction and negotiation, or even delayed negotiation of meaning over letters, we are not “communicating with” each other.

Someone correctly brought up the fact that the idea of “communicating with the ancient world” isn’t possible. Classicists use this phrase, referring to relating to [certain] ancient people’s ideas (expression) by learning more (interpreting) about the past, and making connections to our own lives, but this ends there as far as communication goes. There is no possibility of interaction (negotiating) with ancient authors. When we read about the past, communication is one-way.

Partially- or fully-communicative:
Things get more complicated from here, but the definition of communication still holds up. An activity lacking a purpose yet focusing on meaning is partially-communicative. Most teachers spend their time doing partially-communicative activities in preparation of a few fully-communicative tasks along the way. Personally, I don’t bother with tasks/Tasks, and find them awfully close to performance-based assessments, the juice of which tends not to be worth the squeeze.

Latin Stories Videos Series: Pygmaliōn

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Pygmaliōn is the second video in the series after Mīnōtaurus. I wasn’t familiar with this myth until reading* Ovid with last year’s students. They voted to read it before Daedelus & Icarus, Pyramus & Thisbe, or Orpheus & Eurydice. My personal contribution here is calling Pygmalion “creepy” (i.e. infestus), which was inspired by student comments. I begin retelling the myth after the point when Ovid gives us Pygmalion’s reason for living alone, which downright bothered my students. Misogyny is completely unacceptable, and at an age when image is a sensitive topic, students weren’t comfortable with what the Pygmalion (i.e. Ovid) had to say about the nature of women, as well as how he sculpted a figure “more beautiful than a woman possibly could be.” Go ahead and add that part if you welcome the discussion, which could easily be connected to contemporary advertising industry and its use of Photoshop, as well as the negative social affects, but I kept the story more focused. Here’s Ovid’s Pygmalion myth retold using 31 unique words. The story is 221 words total in length.

1) Class
2) Story (link to Google Doc text found in YouTube video description, but also here)
3) Questions

*I say “reading,” but I definitely wasn’t reading Ovid with ease. I was certainly interacting with the text, reading the notes to establish meaning, consulting the L & S when necessary, and analyzing it closely for themes. After doing all of that in order to create simplified tiered versions for students, I will say that I had a better understanding, yet, as I “read” the poem now, I’m not sure I’m even reading still! Instead, I’m remembering what I translated during the interaction. I think this is what most Classicists do—recall what they’ve already translated, or discussion (in English) in the past.