Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
The Cambridge Latin Course is a well-established introductory program in four Units, originally developed by the Cambridge School Classics Project. Under the sponsorship of the North American Cambridge Classics Project, Unit 1 now has been fully revised and adapted for use in the United States and Canada. This proven approach includes a stimulating, continuous storyline, grammatical development and cultural information carefully woven throughout the text, a complete Language Information section--now bound into the students' volume-- and, for the first time, color photographs that illustrate the Roman world. Also available are a thorough Teacher's Manual, a workbook, and cassette tapes. This Third Edition is wholly compatible with the existing Second Edition.

Rating : - please realize now how counterproductive this is!
To add to the Teacher from New York, there are additional difficulties in the teaching of this book. True, there are no true grammar explanations, but that can be supplemented, as most texts do demand. One insurmountable issue (and the one that killed this course for me) is that the grammatical forms introduced follow no logical progression. To introduce perfect passive participles before the concept of passive verbs is difficult, but to compound that by including deponent perfect active participles?? Students at this point have no ability to understand what a deponent verb is, ergo they must just add this to the list of unfathomable "things" to memorize, without understanding HOW anything works. The books also do not teach the future tense until the end of the third book, thereby requiring teachers to bounce back and forth from verb principal part to principal part as Cambridge haphazardly introduces tenses, seemingly on a whim.
As any high school teacher who is part of a world language program has said time and time again, "we just cannot teach this like a modern language." I am absolutely open to the newer reading method, but Oxford does a much better job at reading and grammar fluency than this does. Teachers should not allow themselves to be seduced by the sheer poundage of supplementary materials that accompany this course; much of it is pedagogically useless and serves only the purpose of lulling one into becoming a "worksheet teacher."