An Example Paperless Assignment: A Latin Poetry Blog

Regular readers know that I occasionally like to post sample paperless assignments for your review. Here's a recent one from my Latin III class. This was a quarter project based on all of the poems we read over the last three months. The students had three weeks to complete the project outside of class.

This assignment requires students to translate the original Latin from at least ten poems, summarize biographical information, and synthesize art and life in the form of a compelling and well-constructed series of conversations between the historical actors about the poetry of their lives. As usual, students also use the project to extend their personal hyperlinked bibliographies of ancient sources and modern scholarship.

For non-Latin folks: Catullus was a lyric poet and Lesbia was the object of his affection (as well as his passion-spurned envious yet pithy wrath)...


A Journal of Hate and Love

You are either a) Catullus or b) Lesbia.

You are keeping a blog about your relationship.

Your journal must be ten posts long. The posts will be written from the point-of-view of one of the two characters. Then, you will write three to four comments back and forth to each post -- one from one character, the next in reply, and so on...

The blog must be separate and distinct from your own blog. It should include pics and multimedia/apps/widgets to look like Cat's or Lesbia's own personal blog.

Requirements:

1. You must cite in the original Latin and in your own English translation 10 lines of Catullus' poetry in each post.

2. The conversation between Catullus and Lesbia must be referencing the poems themselves. So, for instance, if you do poem 5 from Catullus' point-of-view, he in his post would have to talk about how crazy he is for Lesbia and in her comments on his blog, she would be responding to this and perhaps use lines from his own poem to make fun of him.

This is a work of Historical Fiction. The 'Historical' part being as important as the 'Fiction'. Please keep an annotated hyperlinked bibliography on your own blog.

Due: March 25th. Double-weighted.

Be creative, do your best work. In terms of dates, please figure out what the Roman dates would be for each post of your conversation.