Cavedo: compositio

salvete omnes!

This is magister Cavedo and this post is about my class this summer, which is called compositio.

Over the last few years, the amazing and fantastic faculty at GLA and I have noticed that students often arrive at Academy with drastically divergent experiences and abilities with the production of written Latin. Some students practice regularly, although they may not have formal instruction or guidance, while some have literally never written a sentence in Latin. Instruction in "composition," as the process of writing Latin is called, can be very intimidating and often quite "old fashioned" (i.e. excessively rigorous yet frustratingly ineffective). I intend for this class to be the opposite: naturally comprehensible and delightfully intuitive.

This class is designed to aid and advance students at any level of Latin learning in the production of grammatically correct and stylistically nuanced written Latin. The means to this end are twofold: (i) as a class, students will participate in the reading aloud of a 'young adult Roman graphic novel' that presents grammatical lessons through a series of questions and answers; (ii) in small groups and individually, students will practice asking and answering similarly scaffolded questions about images of Greek and Roman art aloud before then writing more polished questions that synthesize and distill each day's topics. This approach will review your understanding of how Latin constructs meaning and assist you with both written and spoken Latin while also introducing you to the field of ancient art history.

I look forward to meeting you and sharing this class (which has been several years in the making) with you. In the meantime, I wish you the best for the end of your school year and encourage you to enjoy the little bit of summer vacation you have before the real fun begins at Latin Academy.

ex animo,
magister Cavedo