Conclusion

We can hope that college classes reading Catullus will benefit from the preparation received in AP courses, but for several reasons we cannot expect perfect continuity. Many students will not have read Catullus before college. They will feel at a disadvantage because they have been thrown in with others who have already read this author. The fraction who feel they have already ‘‘done’’ Catullus in AP Latin will feel they should not be expected to repeat high school work. But experience shows it is sometimes the novice readers who do better because they know their education is not yet complete. The veterans who ‘‘did’’ Catullus studied a thoughtfully chosen subset of his work that was tailored to their youth rather than the complexity of Catullus’ actual oeuvre. Depending on the instruction they received, they will have expectations the college instructor can scarcely hope to satisfy (or may prefer not to satisfy), and they may have forgotten all but fleeting impressions of the Catullus they must meet anew in the college classroom. There is a steep gradient between the best high school instruction and the average, which further limits what the college instructor can expect of students matriculating from AP Catullus.

As argued at the beginning of this chapter, the greatest challenge at the college level may be to unteach attitudes learned early in Latin study which violate the fundamental, universally acknowledged tenets of all foreign language instruction. The cardinal error of mediocre Latin instruction is that the object is to translate, when the only reasonable object in the study of language and literature is to think in the target language. The teacher caught in the grip of this delusion thinks ‘‘I am teaching my class to translate Catullus’’ rather than ‘‘I am teaching my class to read Catullus.’’ If this distinction seems a quibble, substitute another author. Would you take a course from an instructor who proposed to teach you how to translate Goethe or Mallarme?

The proper study of Latin revives the dying art of reading slowly. The best goals of the college classroom - reading rather than translating, memorization of key lyrics, close analysis of the Latin text - are also goals of the best high school teachers. Though the range and depth of reading increase in college, well-prepared students at every level have more fun with Catullus, find more in his language, and have a stronger appetite for more.