Bringing Back Catallus

Stationed in Room 439, surrounded by math classrooms, is a woman with a warm smile, casual disposition, and eyes gleaming with Latin knowledge and pride. I was in the room “where all things Latin happen” to learn more about the new poetry class at Stuyvesant. Instead, I learned about a teacher who, because of her dedication to her Latin students, went to great lengths to create a class against convention. She conducts her classes like an orchestra. She coaches her students like a team. This was Latin teacher Dr. Susan Brockman in her element.

Dr. Brockman has brought back the curriculum of an old, favorite course with her new Advanced Poetry class for seniors. The class is offered as an alternative to AP Latin.

Sixteen years ago, when Dr. Brockman was a new teacher at Stuyvesant, the College Board offered two major AP courses for Latin. One of them, named Virgil, was a course based solely on epic poetry by the poet, Virgil. The course was “very, very difficult,” Dr. Brockman emphasized.

The other course, named Latin Literature, had two different semesters, each focusing on one poet: Catullus during first semester, and three options of poets for students to choose from for the other half of the course. This made a total of four different AP Latin courses that Dr. Brockman would cycle through.

Catullus, who wrote about love, romance, and friendship, is a favorite among high school students. “He talks to you from 50 BC. It’s like you sat at a bar, maybe Starbucks in your case, and you met this person, and he was some really cool kid who had been burned in love who had really good friends and had ideas about politics and made fun of people that he thought were stupid. He’s so original and really alive, and I think if you’re going to study a language for four years, you might as well be exposed to one of the most charming and really memorable voices from the Ancient World,” Dr. Brockman expressed warmly.

Most students preferred the poetry course with Catullus over the one with Virgil, Dr. Brockman recalled. So when the College Board decided to cancel the Latin Literature course with Catullus, presumably because of budget cuts, she was very disappointed. Both courses were hard, but Latin Literature with Catullus was less difficult and “in a way the more fun of the two courses,” Dr. Brockman stated.

“So for a while we just had one course, and we taught it. Everyone was just depressed, but we did it,” Dr. Brockman said.

Then the College Board decided to further increase the difficulty of the AP Latin course by including Julius Caesar’s commentary on the Gallic War, in addition to the dense Latin of very hard author, Virgil. “If you are interested in military people, and if you want to read about tribal people who used to live in modern France who got conquered by Romans, the course is really interesting,” Dr. Brockman commented, “but it is pretty dry for most students.”

The revised AP course wasn't well received by students. “I had 35 excited Latin students, and 10 of them dropped the class because it was too hard. They were depressed, they felt beaten, they just hated it,” Dr. Brockman said.

On the difficulty of the course, Dr. Brockman stated, “I don’t really believe, quite frankly, that high school students should feel like they’re already in college. I don’t teach college. I’ve taught college for 25 years, but I’m teaching at a high school now, and high school students are different from college students.”

After teaching the AP Latin course for years with mixed class performance, Dr. Brockman decided to try something different. “I finally decided that Latin teachers all over the countries were getting really fed up with this. And AP has kind of taken over. I thought it was ridiculous to have no choice at all,” she said. She went back to the old AP syllabi. With all the old textbooks in place, she revived the old course with Catullus, naming it Advanced Poetry, and started teaching it last year as an alternative course for seniors who did not want to burden themselves with AP Latin. “I was able to sneak this in because [former Principal Jie] Zhang was leaving, and Principal Contreras was just coming,” Dr. Brockman confessed.

This current year, Dr. Brockman said there were only half a dozen students who wanted to take AP Latin. About 10 students were completely opposed to taking AP Latin, but they still wanted to continue with Latin. “If I hadn’t been able to offer the students a choice this year, we probably would not have an advanced class because Principal Contreras can’t run a class with only six kids. That doesn’t work,” Dr. Brockman said. “Students have a lot of choices in their senior year. They don’t necessarily want to burden themselves. It’s a very, very difficult class—and as you know, if you really want to do the work in a difficult class, it’s fun. But if you’re forced to, it is horrible.”

Dr. Brockman is now actually teaching both the AP Latin and Advanced Poetry courses at the same time in the same room. This is the first time she has done this, but according to her, it has been working “pretty well.” On how she has been able to teach two courses in the same period, Dr. Brockman said she uses her phone to record herself teaching for every lesson and uploads them to Google Classroom. From Dr. Brockman’s recordings, students have a mini-teacher talking, explaining, going through the poetry and the prose, and helping them understand and put in context the Latin when they do their homework every night. This is especially helpful for students who are absent for a day or want to prepare for an exam.

Students come in each day prepared and able to work independently in small groups with Dr. Brockman alternating in working with each group. As for exam days, every student gets a different exam depending on his or her course. “So they’re getting independent work, they’re getting an audio lesson, and then they get to work with me, and that’s how we’re doing it this year,” Dr. Brockman explained. “Everybody is really happy because everybody is doing what they want to do.” The AP students are sticking to a very rigorous schedule because they have to finish a lot of material in time for the May AP exam, which can be very restrictive. But “they’re doing it because they love it, and that’s why they made a choice,” Dr. Brockman said. “They’re like a little platoon in the army. They’re coming in, and they’re very disciplined.” The students who are taking the alternative poetry course are also very disciplined but are reading around half as many lines of Latin as the AP students. They are still reading very carefully, but in a different atmosphere from the AP course.

On this unorthodox way of teaching, Dr. Brockman stated, “It’s great. I think it’s terrific, and I’m going to try to always do this. To be honest to you, not that many teachers can do this, but I’ve been teaching forever—like 32 years—and I’ve been teaching Latin for 20 years, and a lot of my colleagues that teach Latin across the country do have different levels of Latin all in the same room.”

However, not everyone is thrilled about an alternative Latin class. “The administration doesn’t like the idea of fourth-year language classes that don’t have the stamp of approval from the AP program,” Dr. Brockman said, since the school gets judged on how many AP classes it offers. Her personal belief on AP is that even though it is good for some subjects, the AP is an overrated program. There are a lot of teachers at Stuyvesant and at other high schools who are highly qualified (in Dr. Brockman’s case, she has a doctorate) and who she believes can write courses for their students that are just as challenging but different from the AP.

“It’s like cookie cutter education. I’m not bad mouthing AP classes or the teachers who teach them or the students who take them, but it’s a little bit restrictive. Having taught at the college and university level for so many years, it’s not really a college class when you’re teaching high school students,” Dr. Brockman commented. ”It’s great. It’s a different animal. Five days a week, 40 minutes, with your students. There are college professors that would give their eye teeth to see their students five days a week, but you only have 40 minutes, and the kids have too much homework. In college, you don’t usually take more than four, five courses. You guys are taking nine or ten. So it’s very very different to teach in high school.” Dr. Brockman is not anti-AP, but she believes there should be alternatives.

Many of her students have told her that they don’t really care whether they get college credit in high school for Latin. Many colleges are now requiring placement exams for classes even if you take an AP course, and some require you to take their beginner course even if you’ve taken the AP. As Dr. Brockman recalled, one of her students from last year who was placed into a 300 level Latin class in college said her feeling was that “there was no difference at all between taking the non AP and the AP except that she had more fun taking the non AP.”

Perhaps this shows that the most important thing Latin students gain from their studies is a connection with the great poets of the Ancient World. The many poets, such as Catullus and Ovid, who were removed from the AP Latin course have been brought back in the Advanced Poetry Class. “Nobody who reads Catullus will ever forget Catullus,” Dr. Brockman said. “This is the Latin poetry that makes people smile 25 years later. So I think it is something worth doing, even if it isn’t for AP credit.”