A colleague kindly handed me a printout of the following e-mail from the College Board, and I was surprised to see that it hadn’t made its way to my inbox. I noticed no chatter on the lists (though I receive the digests), and Google is so far silent:
Dear AP Latin Educator,
We are writing to provide an update to the message you received from us in June 2009, concerning the process for revising the AP Latin program. In that message we indicated that the AP Latin Development Committee had met in March 2009, to make the following preliminary decisions about the new AP Latin course:
Revise the current AP Latin: Vergil course to include two authors, and both poetry and prose readings.
Retain Vergil, but reduce significantly the number of lines of the Aeneid currently required in AP Latin: Vergil.
Include Caesar as the prose author.
Since the time of that message the AP Latin Development Committee has spent several months working on the new syllabus of required readings, considering very carefully the many thoughtful suggestions received from AP Latin teachers and college and university faculty. While the new syllabus isn’t ready yet for publication, we can now share the following details, which would, at the earliest, take effect in the 2012-2013 academic year. For Vergil, the number of lines of the Aeneid read in Latin will be reduced approximately by half; required reading in Latin comes from books 1 through 6 only. For Caesar, the required reading in Latin will come from both the Bellum Gallicum and the Bellum Civile.
There’s more, including information on various conferences where the details will be discussed, but frankly I’m ready for bed, and I’d rather not keep typing. You can rest assured that the current AP Vergil syllabus will remain in place through May 2012.