The Classical Origins of Western Culture, popularly known as the "Core 1 Study Guide," was designed to be used by students in Core Studies 1 at Brooklyn College. The text is keyed to specific selections from ancient Greek and Roman literature in translation as chosen by the Classics Department, which staffs the sections of this course. The main purpose of the Study Guide is to help students read the assigned texts with greater understanding and enable them to be better prepared for classroom discussions. The introductory material in each unit is intended to enable more class time to be spent on the analysis of the texts by reducing the need for lectures on background information.

One problem that student faces when reading Greco-Roman literature for the first time is the lack of literary and historical context. This text in each of its chapters (each on a different literary work) provides information about genre and where appropriate, historical and intellectual background. Some chapters (e.g., on the Iliad and the Aeneid) include advice on how to read a particular work and explain basic terms and principles of interpretation.

Another function of this text is to help the student develop the skill of reading a literary work closely. Each chapter contains a section called "Exercise for Reading Comprehension and Interpretation", which contains very specific questions about the text with numerical references for easy location of particular passages.1 Most of the questions just direct students to consider carefully what is going on in a small section of the text, while others ask them to make an interpretational judgment.

It should also be noted that over the past thirteen years this text has also proved useful to instructors inexperienced in teaching classics in translation by providing an indication of some basic issues of interpretation in each work. The Study Guide, however, is not meant to be a collection of restrictive lesson plans; at most it is a point of embarkation for both teacher and student.

The initial impulse for putting an electronic version of the Core 1 Study Guide online was a desire to make this text, already available in a printed version, even more accessible to students and to call students' attention to other online resources once they visited our departmental web site. In recent years, however, the Study Guide has begun to play a role in the department's virtual Core experiment, in which one class meeting per week is replaced by online non-synchronous discussion by means of Caucus conferencing software.2 The advantage of this method is that the twenty students registered in one of these special sections are required to express their ideas on a given topic, whereas in a regular section of forty it is very difficult to have all students participate in the discussion. Another benefit is the ability to deliver images to enhance the discussion of texts without the cumbersome and time-consuming medium of slides. Because there are fewer class meetings, the students in these experimental sections have to depend even more on supplementary resources like the Study Guide.

In order to see one of these sections in action, you can visit Caucus conferences for both virtual Core sections and regular sections by following these directions. Go to Brooklyn College's Caucus Center at,

and click on "self-register a userid and password;" you can join any conference but you will be limited to "read only" privileges. Then click on "A list of all conferences" and visit the following conferences: core1g_s99, hansen3, honors_core1_f98 , core1bv, and core_1k2_f98. For one sample of how images can support the discussion of texts, see honors_core1_f98, item #14.