Latin Bootcamp

I'm currently taking an intensive Latin workshop at UC Berkeley. There are only two programs like this (that I'm aware of) in the country that teach intensive workshops in languages: This one and the one at CUNY. There are plenty of schools that teach intensive language courses over their summer sessions, (I took Greek at UCLA one summer that was 8 weeks), but they differ from intensive workshops. What makes the CUNY and Berkeley programs different is that other summer sessions only teach a year's worth of language competency, but the CUNY/Berkeley sessions teach material up to at least a year and a half of language competency. So, while other schools simply teach morphology and grammar for the entirety of their session (with perhaps a smidgen of primary source reading ), CUNY and Berkeley teach that plus a four week workshop in which you enroll in two reading courses: one in prose and one in poetry. There are two classes to choose from in each category. The reading courses for the Latin workshop are as follows:

Prose:

Republican Prose
Main text: Cicero: Catilinarians

Survey of Medieval Latin
Main text: Harrrington, Medieval Latin
Secondary text: course reader, includes Augustine and Boethius selections.

Verse:

Ovid
Main text: Ovid (Metamorphoses XI)

Seneca
Main text: Seneca's Thyestes

For prose, as you might have guessed, I'm enrolling in Survey of Medieval Latin, and for verse, the Seneca class.


These reading classes are substantially more productive than just a year of grammar can provide and they give the student a greater exposure to the language as it was actually written (as opposed to the 'translationese' of textbooks.)

The main difference between CUNY and Berkeley's program is that at Berkeley, on Fridays, lecture is cut by an hour and instead there is a convivium (colloquia) of scholarly talks. These convivia consist of a talk given by a Berkeley or Stanford faculty member about some aspect of the ancient and early medieval world, which is then followed by a wine and cheese reception in Faculty Glade (which is quite beautiful). Both the Latin intensive and Greek intensive students are highly encouraged to attend. The first talk of the convivium concerned Seneca's (The Elder--the famous philosopher) view of eschatology.

At CUNY, however, they they cut the lecture short by an hour but not for convivia, but for a mandatory reading group in which some particular author is chosen for that evening's reading. This clearly is consistent with the project of getting the students to master their respective language, whereas the Berkeley convivia are more about disseminating classical thought, broadly construed. I suppose they each have their merits; but few of us are wanting to attend a 45 minute talk on some specialized subject after Latin's been kicking our asses all week long.

The workshop is taught by a director who does three hours of lecturing everyday, and who oversees course content and grade inspection. There are also two assistant instructors, each of whom teaches a section for three hours before the lecture. These sections consist of drilling in morphology, grammar, and translation from Latin to English and also English to Latin. The schedule is technically Monday-Friday 10am-5pm. But there are 30 minute group office hours with the assistants beginning at 930am, and an hour office hour with the director beginning at 515pm. So the course the course is practically longer than what the schedule states.

After class for the day, of course, you have a substantial amount of memorizing and homework to do. It's really about 10-13 hours a day of Latin. I'm exhausted by the time class is finished and then I have to ride BART for at least 45 minutes back. I get up between 5 and 615 every morning, head down to catch BART to campus, and then sit in the terrace at the Free Speech Cafe and study before class.

I'm doing this because I'm academically disposed towards history. So, doing history of philosophy requires knowing primary languages. I suppose I'll have to become very strong in Latin (for medieval and early modern philosophy), but since I still occasionally enjoy studying the classical and Hellenistic Greeks, I should get a bit better at Attic; likewise for French and German (since I'm also into Descartes and the Cartesian school [such as the occasionalists], Leibniz, Kant and Frege). Thank goodness that one of my favorite philosophers wrote in English--David Hume.