By Mariah Gunnison
TPA has not had many changes in the textbooks it has been using for the past couple of years. The most recent change was to the Latin I and II textbooks, from “Latin Via Ovid” to “Latin for the New Millenium.” There are, however, more changes coming, thanks to Dr. Ryan, TPA’s current high school Latin and 12th grade humane letters teacher, who is currently in the process of writing a textbook for the school.
His inspiration for creating this new book comes from his own experience studying Greek in college. “I learned Greek from a textbook that was … self-published by a professor of mine,” he said. He describes the process as very effective because the textbook focused on the morphology, or the way the language is formed.
“It was a highly efficient way to learn Greek,” Dr. Ryan said.
When he started teaching Latin, Dr. Ryan noticed that there was not a similar textbook to help students better understand the formation of Latin grammar. To help students learn, he compiled rules he thought would be good for them to understand while starting out. Doing more research, he “started collecting material and what started to emerge was a textbook.”
While this has been mainly a solo writing project, Dr. Ryan also sought out help from outside sources. He reached out to Dr. James Patterson, a professor of Classics at Yale University. Dr. Ryan said about working with the professor that the “nice thing about talking to people like Dr. Patterson has been that we argued at length about why I gave up on complete accuracy at certain points in order to gain simplicity. Being forced to defend my decisions has been really helpful.”
Other help comes from Dr. Ryan’s 7th grade Latin class. He would sometimes try out lessons from the textbook for them and look to see if they are understanding the material.
He also receives feedback from Dr. Wells, TPA’s Greek and 8th grade Latin I teacher.
The current stage of completeness for the textbook is halfway done. Dr. Ryan said, “After drafting half of it, I stepped back to revise it because…I started to see some problems with the outline, so I had to change some features. I’ve written about 150 pages.”
Dr. Ryan actually started working on this textbook all the way back in 2019 but has started refocusing on it especially since he started teaching at TPA.
He also said, “My hope is that it’s a lasting, valuable asset for our Latin program. The most certain thing I can say is that it’ll be around for use.”
The title of the book is “Latin Morphology & Syntax I,” which the current Greek I class teacher describes as a “working title.”