Caesar   Petronius  Cicero     Plautus    Ovid      Vergil Catullus    Horace
Upper School Latin
Students may choose Latin at any time in their career at Moses Brown.  Because we finish all the grammar by the winter of the second year, those students who excell have the option of skipping Latin 3 and going into the Vergil Advanced Placement course.  Those who want to move more slowly can go into Latin 3.
The course is based on the grammar-translation method, where the grammar is intensively learned early on and then the rest of the student's career is spent reading and explicating texts in the original Latin.
Because Latin is a very structured language, all students find the organization of material helpful.  This is especially true for those students new to a foreign language or who have had difficulty with a spoken language.  Since the goal is to read, we do not converse in Latin!
In addition to the reading and grammar, we also discuss mythology and its continuing effect on literature, history from the Roman point of view, and many other subjects as they come up.  Elections are an especially exciting time for Latin students, as we analyze the rhetoric of the various candidates.
All students participate in the National Latin Exam, which is given every year in the spring.  On average, over half of the students receive awards in this contest.  Often students participate in the Classical Association of New England Writing Contest; over the past 15 years, Moses Brown has won the award 3 times - a record!
Extra credit is given once each quarter if a student reads a novel (but not Stephen King) outside of any required class.  This does not have to be about Rome; then the students tells me about it.  Reading is a sure-fire way to improve SATs, along with taking Latin itself.
If you have any questions about the Classics Program here at Moses Brown, please send me an EMail.