Classicists are in charge of our high schools!

What I've learned from advertising to be a Latin tutor -

All the high schools pretty much focus on teaching Vergil for the AP Latin test, so that's what kids want help with.

I think that's stupid. Vergil is really hard to read, and must be discouraging, and on top of that you have to learn how to "scan" lines of poetry for long and short vowels, which is a stupid thing of a pissing contest to make kids learn, because even the best classicist I know can't scan a line on sight or spontaneously read out loud a line so the meter sounds good, and even those classicist I know who read Vergil fluently, when they read him, don't think and process the meter as they read!

So, why the fuck make kids learn that? Because, that's what classicists were taught and idolize, that's why.

I think it makes so much more sense to start with easier texts and build up grammar/vocab knowledge and recognition on those texts, and then move into more difficult ones (and Vergil maybe in the distant future, if ever - he's not that interesting).

I also ordered and got in the mail a paperback copy of the classic Homer grammar, so I can understand the snippets of Homer quoted in texts that I read, and the whole intro is about how Homeric Greek is the obvious place to start learning Greek, since from it you can learn the rest of the language, including then the New Testament. How stupid is that?!??!?! It's probably the last place you should start, since (as I understand it), Homeric Greek is a mixture of different dialect forms, so it makes sense to learn one more-pure dialect (e.g. Attic) well, and then work through simple texts to get a handle on that and then skip back to Homeric Greek. Even in the ancient world Homer was the focus of specialized knowledge where they had to explain so many words and forms! On top of that, what the heck kind of comparison do classicists really do between dialect forms? It's probably just listing similar-looking forms next to each other, rather than real historical linguistic analysis of what changed where when - much like what it seems Egyptologists do when they study different stages of Egyptian.