The Hidden Classical World in Los Angeles

Though the Last Days of Pompeii exhibition has recently moved on from the Getty Villa (it's now at the Cleveland Museum of Art), there are other interesting pieces of art with connections to ancient Rome and Greece to be found in Los Angeles right now.  That items of this sort can be found almost randomly in Los Angeles goes to show just how pervasive Greco-Roman culture was in the ancient world and now, and it also attests to the fact that we live in a city remarkably rich in art.

Roman costume from Spartacus

The Stanley Kubrick exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has materials from all of the director's work. Items from his 1960 film Spartacus are on display, including costumes and storyboards from the movie. The degree of detail that Kubrick put into his movies was extraordinary, and the small corner of the exhibition dedicated to this film provides a fascinating glimpse into how movies on ancient Rome were made in his time. The Kubrick exhibition runs through June 30, 2013.

The Art of Continuity at the Pacific Asia Museum 

The Pacific Art Museum in Pasadena currently has on display The Art of Continuity: Revering our Elders, which collects Asian traditions of revering and honoring ancestors.  It's worth visiting to compare the Asian traditions to the Roman mos maiorum, in that the values that both traditions had are similar in some interesting ways.  Revering our Elders is on display until Jan. 5, 2014.

Buddha Shakyamuni

Also in Pasadena, the Norton Simon Museum houses a remarkable collection of Asian art, including spectacular pieces of Buddhist art. One piece in particular, a statue of Buddha Shakyamuni from Gandhara dating to c. 200CE (pictured above), is remarkable for its multicultural features. The Buddha shows the classical hand mudra and ushnisha above his head. But because ancient Gandhara (modern Pakistan) was at a confluence of Greek and Asian culture, thanks to the conquest of Alexander the Great, much art from the region shows Greek influence. Here, the statue possesses a flowing gown and curled hair that are not characteristic of Buddha depictions in older Buddhist art, but rather are standard features belonging to Hellinistic sculpture. This Buddha is part of the Norton Simon's permanent collection. Interest in ancient Gandhara has been on the rise, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York currently has a beautiful exhibition Buddhism art along the Silk Road through Feb. 10, 2013 that also includes several similar examples of Buddhist art with Hellenistic features.

Feel free to add any other potentially interesting items of Classical interest in the greater Los Angeles area below in the comments.

Digital Classical Texts

In reading the Getty Museum's recent blog post about an ancient Greek curse tablet dating to about 100 BCE and found in Morgantina that's now on display at the Villa, I noticed in the post a link to a website devoted to curse texts from Roman Britain.  It's an excellent site worthy of use in Latin classrooms for multiple reasons, with several interesting curse texts that are fairly easy to read (if not strange), and it can now be placed beside the rest of the digital "Vindolanda" tablets, which are also available online.

Given the current push toward digital texts in classrooms, it seems like a good time to share other online resources for reading Latin with the goal of discovering others.  The gold standard, of course, is still the Perseus Project, but the Latin Library is also very useful.  A short list is given below:

• Perseus Project
• Latin Library
• Vindolanda Tablets Online
• Curse Tablets of Roman Britain

Are there any other digital resources for Latin (or Greek!), including dictionaries, that Classics students have found interesting and useful?  Please comment, if so!

Convention Et Cetera

Now that the end of the calendar is approaching, it's time to start thinking about some of our spring activities, including the CA JCL convention, which will take place at the Sage Hill School on Friday, 3/15 (the Ides of March!) and Saturday, 3/16.  The school has put together a fantastic convention site and Facebook group page that are both worth exploring.

For those of you interested in playing competitive certamen at the convention, your team will need to qualify at CARCER, which will be held Saturday, 2/16 from 10am-2:30pm at the Willows Community School in Culver City.  All competitive certamen teams should plan on attending.

We've got two more extracurricular exams on the horizon:  the National Latin Exam during the week of March 11th and the Medusa Myth Exam during the week of March 18th.  Registration for both exams is due toward the end of Jan., so we'll start taking names for them after we return from the holiday break.  Enjoy it, and we'll see you all soon!

Vindolanda Mini-Class

I've been asked to teach a "mini"-class for prospective 7th graders at one of our schools Family Visit Days, when we'll host applicants.  The classes are broken down into 20-minute slots for no more than 20 students, and we'll run each class 6 times.  Thanks to the format, it's very difficult to teach a language-based mini-class, let alone one in Latin, but I have an idea that I'm eager to try.

I explored Hadrian's Wall a few years ago and have since been very interested in the military letters found along the wall, chiefly in the Roman fort at Vindolanda.  With that in mind, I've decided to do a very short writing project with the kids, having them write "Vindolanda" letters of their own.  I'll use Google Earth to "travel" to Hadrian's Wall and show them just how far they were from Rome (maybe also briefly using Stanford's ORBIS project?), then give them the Roman cursive script used along the wall and some Latin phrases in a Google Doc as a starting point.  They'll write their letters on a small piece of balsa wood using a black marker (cf. the famous letter 291 below), and I'll paste a QR code (found above) on the back of each "tablet" that will direct them to the same Google Doc, on which I'll allow comments, in case they have any questions or comments after they leave the classroom.  It'll be fun to see how many kids visit the Google Doc after the classes are over.

This project should be a great way to learn actively a little bit about the formalities of Roman letter writing, including names and dates, while working within an actual historical framework.  And it'll be a nice personal project that students will be able to take home with them.  I'm eagerly looking forward to putting some ideas I've had over the past few months to the test.

Greek Iconography Workshop Ideas

Right now I'm taking Google's Power Searching online course and am enjoying it.  In our 4th lesson, I learned that images can be dragged/dropped directly into the search bar for imaged searches (but not on tablet devices; cf. below!).  I got to thinking that this could be incredibly useful in looking at Greek iconography with students.  We offer the Medusa Mythology Exam as an optional exam to our students at the school, and I think we could have a lot of fun in a workshop combining the iconography of the mythic figures covered in the exam with the search tools we've learned in the course.  As an exercise, we could give students images from Greek vases or other pieces of art and ask them to identify the figures, based on what they see.  Then, they could check their guesses by searching for the image online and even figure out more about the image, e.g. its museum location, approximate date, etc.  Basically, it's an online scavenger hunt.

But, as noted in the course, image searching does not work with tablet devices!  Our school is in the beginning stages of implementing a 1:1 program starting next year, but we haven't yet chosen a device.  I'm sufficiently excited in the ability to search images in this way that I think this is another strong argument against adopting an iPad or other tablet device.  For now, I'm going to demo this myself in one of our JCL club meetings, but it's an idea I intend to explore in greater detail in the near future.

Medusa Mythology Exam

This year's theme for the 2013 Medusa Mythology Exam is The Trojan War:  Life and Death on Trojan Soil, and we'll plan on doing the exam sometime in March.  In the meantime, let's devote a JCL meeting in November or December to looking at the iconography of the figures in the exam syllabus as depicted on Greek vases and other works of art.  More information TBA!

Cheating, Investment, and Technogogy

We are in the middle of a reassessment of our honor code and have been thinking about ways to make it more visible in our daily lives on campus.  With that in mind, I just read through this NYT article on cheating at Stuyvesant HS, and a few things struck me.  One of the students who admitted to cheating, blamed his academic dishonesty on his lack of respect for his French teacher; he asks, “When it came to French class, where the teacher had literally taught me nothing all year, and during the final the students around me were openly discussing the answers, should I not listen?”

I hate to admit this, but he has a point, at least in part.  This goes back to the issue of personal investment in an academic courses that I brought up a few days ago.  I think I undervalued the importance in student investment for preventing academic dishonesty:  to my mind, students are less likely to cheat in a course, if they have respect for the course, namely, for the instructor, the material, and especially their role as a student.  I can't help but think that if this student really enjoyed his French class and was personally interested in the material, he would have acted differently.  But I wonder if this is a naive view on my part, given the "make or break" attitudes toward college these days...?

Additionally, I found it stunning that the interim principal of Stuyvesant has banned the use of laptops and iPads on campus during the day, which goes directly against the "1:1" movement that many schools, including ours, are pushing.  I think I've undervalued the concern for cheating in pushing for more "technogogy" in schools — and it's a concern I indeed want to address with faculty — but I don't see how electronic prohibition will help to prevent cheating and facilitate us moving forward with technology.  Many of the methods outlined in the article had nothing to do with electronic devices, and students who are intent on cheating will always find a way.  So, the issue of academic dishonesty is something to keep an eye on, as we push forward with our 1:1 movement and curricula redesigns.