Latin and the SAT (pars secunda)

Magis utile nil est / artibus his quae nil utilitatis habent.  (Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto, Liber I, V (Cottae Maximo) ll. 53-4)

Last year I put together a few observations and thoughts about Latin and the SAT.  After I noticed the 2011 Total Group Report was out some months ago, I got to looking at it and noticed that things seemed to be about the same as the year before.  This time I thought I'd see what was going on with the Subject Test data, and that led me to looking at the correlation between years of study and various subject areas.  Eventually that got me into wondering where the three (four if you count a distance learning course offering) languages at my school fit with the national data.  You can download copies and check the data at the CollegeBoard Data & Reports page.  For earlier years look under Archived SAT Data & Reports.

Caveats: The SAT report says that the data in it is for high school graduates in the year 2011.  It claims a total number of test-takers of 1,647,123.  What percentage of all high school graduates this represents I don't know.  The 2011 ACT report claims "About 49% of all 2011 high school graduates in the United States took the ACT during high school, or about 1.62 million graduates."  Were there then about 3.3 million high school graduate?  There must be some percentage of graduates who took neither test, those heading for the military, into technical/vocational training programs, or directly into the workforce.  Presumably there are some stats on this, but I don't know where they are.  The ACT report does not mention foreign languages.

Subject tests have been going on for what seems like forever.  I think I took them in English and French back in 1966 or 1967.  At least I picked up 6 credits at Penn State for them.  In 2011 there were some 312,000 subject test takers.  This is up from about 279,000 in 2006.  Of these about 3,000 have taken the subject test in Latin.  That one percent of the subject test taking population does better on the three aspects of the general SAT than any other group, and of course rather considerably better than the norm for all students (which has been totaling about 1500 the last five years - see below).  Note that I have just added up the three scores for Critical Reading, Mathematics and Writing.

year	total of the mean scores of Latin students (about 1% of the total number of test takers)	mean of the total mean scores for other students	next highest set of mean scores to Latin	subject of the test with the next highest mean scores	lowest set of mean scores	subject of the test with the lowest mean scores
2006	2011	1833.8	1922	German	1698	Spanish listening
2007	2020	1831	1907	German	1676	Spanish listening
2008	2026	1827	1912	German	1665	Spanish listening
2009	2019	1833	1929	German	1675	Spanish listening
2010	2028	1838.25	1927	Physics	1685	Spanish listening
2011	2026	1838.05	1917	Chemistry	1674	Spanish listening

As I did last year, I wonder why the fact that these Latin students have done about ten percent better than the average subject test taker, and about 35 percent better than the average SAT taker doesn't lead to larger numbers of Latin students.  One minor curiosity is that these Latin subject test takers score better (by an average of 15 points) than those who take the Math 2 subject test on the math part of the general SAT, where they score about the same as Chemistry students and only some 35 points, on average, below Physics students who do the best on that part of the SAT.  I suppose these Latin subject test takers were mostly among the students who took two or three subject tests.  A large majority of subject test takers took two or more tests.  Whatever that may mean, there seems to be something about Latin itself, or about the sort of student who takes Latin seriously enough to do a Subject Test in it, or both, that sets this small group of subject test takers distinctly apart from all the rest.

Each annual report breaks down subject areas into six major groups: English, mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences & history, foreign languages, and arts & music (which also includes computer related courses).  I thought I'd see how foreign language students in general compared to others over the last six years in the total of their scores for Critical Reading, Mathematics and Writing per number of years of study in any particular one of these subject areas.  That led to the production of these six charts, including one for students taking AP or Honors courses.  In these charts the subject areas are sorted in descending order by the mean of the scores for the six years.

One year of study:

Subject	Total mean scores
	2011	2010	2009	2008	2007	2006	mean
Arts and Music	1495	1503	1502	1494	1505	1504	1500.5
Social Science & History	1386	1371	1379	1356	1378	1412	1380.33
Natural Sciences	1395	1380	1373	1349	1354	1379	1371.67
English	1365	1343	1310	1307	1353	1454	1355.33
Mathematics	1358	1334	1286	1266	1326	1421	1331.83
Foreign Languages	1322	1321	1314	1318	1321	1328	1320.67

Two years of study:

Subject	Total mean scores
	2011	2010	2009	2008	2007	2006	mean
Arts and Music	1503	1509	1507	1495	1519	1522	1509.17
Social Science & History	1429	1429	1435	1423	1432	1439	1431.17
English	1426	1411	1438	1402	1423	1454	1425.67
Foreign Languages	1407	1412	1414	1413	1420	1424	1415
Natural Sciences	1409	1404	1402	1390	1400	1410	1402.5
Mathematics	1382	1365	1368	1346	1372	1397	1371.67

Three years of study:

Subject	Total mean scores
	2011	2010	2009	2008	2007	2006	mean
Foreign Languages	1540	1545	1544	1536	1548	1548	1543.5
Arts and Music	1509	1519	1516	1509	1533	1531	1519.5
Social Science & History	1465	1474	1473	1463	1475	1477	1471.17
Natural Sciences	1433	1440	1442	1438	1451	1454	1443
English	1396	1400	1403	1401	1408	1397	1400.83
Mathematics	1385	1386	1390	1391	1400	1396	1391.33

Four years of study:

Subject	Total mean scores
	2011	2010	2009	2008	2007	2006	mean
Foreign Languages	1657	1673	1669	1654	1681	1681	1669.17
Arts and Music	1588	1603	1596	1586	1612	1616	1600.17
Natural Sciences	1555	1577	1564	1561	1580	1586	1570.5
Social Science & History	1541	1553	1548	1538	1554	1557	1548.5
Mathematics	1521	1543	1540	1533	1550	1554	1540.17
English	1528	1539	1535	1523	1541	1545	1535.17

Five or more years of study:

Subject	Total mean scores
	2011	2010	2009	2008	2007	2006	mean
Foreign Languages	1681	1681	1704	1681	1706	1699	1692
Natural Sciences	1644	1652	1683	1653	1671	1665	1661.33
Mathematics	1638	1643	1669	1640	1657	1652	1649.83
Social Science & History	1607	1605	1640	1609	1621	1609	1615.17
Arts and Music	1592	1585	1597	1584	1600	1595	1592.17
English	1585	1570	1607	1580	1587	1566	1582.5

Students who reported taking an AP or Honors course in these subject areas:

Subject	Total mean scores
	2011	2010	2009	2008	2007	2006	mean
Foreign Languages	1721	1731	1733	1714	1738	1736	1728.83
Mathematics	1704	1713	1715	1704	1729	1731	1716
Natural Sciences	1705	1714	1715	1702	1723	1724	1713.83
Arts and Music	1695	1704	1711	1689	1710	1707	1702.67
Social Science & History	1676	1687	1690	1677	1698	1701	1688.17
English	1663	1674	1678	1665	1686	1687	1675.5

Foreign language students start off at the bottom of the barrel in year one.  By the third year, they have taken the lead and stay in it solidly the rest of the way.  The numbers clearly indicate that the long-term, serious pursuit of a foreign language is associated with significantly higher critical reading, math and writing scores on the SAT to a greater extent than the long-term, serious pursuit of any of the other five subject areas.  The fact that this information has been out there for years, needing only to be looked at and put together, makes a person wonder about either the bona fides or the intelligence of those who are behind such things as NCLB, CCSS, STEM, and other schemes for what passes for school reform and improvement in this day and age, all of which mention foreign language instruction either not at all or only as a kind of amusing hobby draining energy and time from important subjects like English.  It is indeed curious that if one were to be limited to five choices of subject areas to teach or to study, this particular set of data logically would dictate the elimination of English.

Probably the distinction between required and elective courses and the prevailing policies of most schools have much to do with these results.  Most schools probably require things like mathematics and English for all four high school years, natural sciences and the social sciences for maybe three or four, while foreign languages and the arts are either pure electives or something in between (e.g., perhaps two years are required for kids intending to go to college; or maybe everybody has to take a semester or two of music or art or technology or human development or something of that sort).  English and math have been the focus of the high-stakes testing program in Pennsylvania known as the PSSA so they tend to get an awful lot of attention from the education department, school administrators and teachers.  Foreign languages don't get a lot of attention.  And that is a good thing, given the tendency of the officious know-it-alls in PDE, PSEA and colleges of education to pump out enormous quantities of obfuscatory balderdash on whatever half-baked fad their beady little brains happen to have become focused on.  In other words foreign language teachers have the advantage of not being impeded by the burden of figuring out how to deal with a confusing array of such things as "assessment anchors" (with their reporting categories, references, descriptors, cross-walking, eligible content, sample items, etc., etc.) unlike English teachers who have to deal with that whole mess and somehow either use it or pretend to use it in order to teach in such a way as to reduce the odds of the sort of student failure on the PSSA tests that could result in unpleasant consequences for the teacher.  Perhaps if good English teachers had more time to actually teach English, students who have to take English for four years might do a bit better on the SAT.  Another big factor behind these results is probably the self-selection thing.  Naturally subjects which all students are constrained to take will have a higher concentration of the unwilling and unmotivated type of student who doesn't read, think or learn very well. Non-mandatory subjects will tend to have more students characterized by willingness and personal motivation who have some confidence in their ability to do well because they have acquired some reading, thinking and learning skills, or in the case of the arts and music because they have more than ordinary artistic and musical talent.  A third part of the probable explanation for these kind of results is simply that there is something about the study of foreign languages that tends to improve a person's mind to a greater extent and in more ways than the study of any other subject.

The next logical question for me then was to work out which language is associated with the probability of scoring above average on the three SAT tests.  Here I've limited my inquiry to the languages offered at my school, one of which (German) is only offered by distance learning, and may in fact have fallen by the wayside by now.  [Just as a side note: Chinese and Hebrew students tend to do about as well and sometimes a bit better than Latin students: the Chinese students tend to be really good on the math part of the test, while the Hebrew students, like Latin students, tend to do about the same on all three segments of the test].  A few years ago, one of my better Latin students took this course and did well; he majored in German in college and is currently doing post-graduate work somewhere in Germany.  Here are two charts showing first the sets of critical reading, mathematics and writing scores for the past six years for Latin, German, French and Spanish, with the basic national average added so as to make it obvious where each stacks up relative to it, and second the enrollment trends for each of these four languages as measured by the number of students who reported taking at least some quantity of coursework in each language.

Subject	Total mean scores
	2011	2010	2009	2008	2007	2006	mean
Latin	1655	1667	1670	1657	1678	1668	1665.83
German	1583	1595	1599	1594	1600	1596	1594.5
French	1557	1569	1571	1562	1582	1575	1569.33
National average	1500	1509	1509	1511	1511	1518	1509.67
Spanish	1496	1503	1505	1494	1510	1507	1502.5

Subject	total number of students in thousands
	2011	2010	2009	2008	2007	2006	mean
Latin	76	77	77	72	86	87	79.17
German	53	53	54	52	61	64	56.17
French	220	214	214	205	236	247	222.67
total test takers	1647	1547	1530	1518	1494	1465	1533.5
Spanish	905	890	882	820	870	852	869.83

There is perhaps some irony in the circumstance that the number of Latin students (who routinely score about ten percent better than the national average) has decreased by about 11,000, and the number of Spanish students (who routinely score a little under the national average) has increased by about 53,000.  Pretty obviously something besides a familiarity with this data and an appreciation for the value of high SAT scores has been driving curriculum, staffing and enrollment decisions. 

In my school (with a total student population in four grades of about 600), the enrollment in Latin IV is -0-, in Latin III -3-, in Latin II -6-, in Latin I -11-, in French IV -0-, in French III -0-, in French II -10- and in French I -25-, in Spanish IV -6-, in Spanish III -16-, in Spanish II, -60-, in Spanish I -90-.   We have no AP or Honors courses in foreign languages.  Half, or slightly more (at least last year), of our senior class goes to college.  With the rather low enrollment in the third and fourth years it appears that some of our students are not making the most of their opportunities.

Teddy Bears

I don't know why this piece of art – or poster – or advertisement – or whatever it is (I stumbled across it somewhere on the internet) appeals to me.

Maybe it's the monster with the jaws that bite and claws that catch – major echoes of Lewis Carroll – the young warrior with his vorpal sword in hand who has been standing by a tum tum tree as if in uffish thought until this jabberwock with eye of flame has come wiffling through the tulgey wood, burbling as he came.  The tum tum tree must be off to the left here.

Maybe it's the allusion to Milne with the Pooh-like teddy and little wooden sword.  Where are Eeyore and Tigger?  Have they taken refuge off to the left on the other side of the tum tum tree?  Are they coming to the aid of their friend?

Maybe it's the whole 19th century feel to the thing, the juxtaposition of innocence, goodness and purity against the embodiment of evil.  Maybe it's the gallant posture of the itty-bitty defender with his itty-bitty weapon.

I don't know.  I just like that brave little bear.

Who really benefits from putting high-tech gadgets in classrooms?

Who really benefits from putting high-tech gadgets in classrooms?

History of Philosophy (revised)

A couple weeks ago, as I was leaving my classroom between class periods and locking the door, I overheard in the classroom next-door another teacher expounding to his students (I think this was a "learning support" class) on a theme generally relating to personal responsibility, discussing the kinds of things we have control over and the kinds of things we don't have control over, his point being that ultimately we only have control over our own selves.  In support of the points he was making in this exposition he referred to the well-known dictum, "I think, therefore I am," (he did not include its almost as well-known Latin version, "cogito, ergo sum") which he attributed to the famous 15th century philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche.

I mentioned this occurrence to a couple other staff people, but quickly noticed from the expressions on their faces that my colleague was likely not alone in his unfamiliarity with some of the basic factual particulars of a couple major figures in the history of philosophy. I stopped mentioning it to anybody, and just started wondering about the general level of unfamiliarity with this sort of thing, and what that virtual nescience might mean, if anything.

It occurred to me that some months back I had taken note of a poem quoted and comment noted by Guy Davenport in his book, The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature & Art (Counterpoint, 1996) in an essay titled "The Comic Muse," a review of The Oxford Book of Comic Verse.  The excerpt is from pages 310-311:

Why is this humble verse, poet unknown, comic?
     Carnation milk is the best in the land.
     Iʻve got a can of it here in my hand -
     No teats to pull, no hay to pitch:
     You just punch a hole in the son of a bitch.
Elizabeth the first would have laughed; Victoria wouldn't.

I noted at the time that if you haven't got a clue who Elizabeth the first and Victoria were, you haven't got a clue what his comment means.

There was an article in Time in its March 3, 1923, issue concerning the debate at Yale over the desirability of retaining Greek and Latin as requirements for the B.A. degree.  The author concluded:

If the great universities, with their manifold departments and courses and degrees retain no common courses in any way related to the history of the race they will graduate men and women who will have nothing in common but their clothes. They will not even talk the same tongue, though they may all speak a dialect of one language. They will be free and unrestrained individuals. And they will have no ancestors whatever.

If we have not quite arrived at that point, we are rather considerably closer than we were in 1923. 

Postal Service Pettiness

According to my Quicken program, it was on March 5, 2011 that I purchased a roll of a hundred forever (currently 44 cents) stamps and a roll of a hundred 17 cent stamps for $61.00.  On Tuesday, August 9, I used two of the last few stamps on that roll of a hundred 17 cent stamps to mail two number 10 envelopes that weighed - according to my fifteen or twenty year old postal scale - between one and two ounces each.  They were mailed from Bedford, Pennsylvania, that afternoon respectively to Levittown and McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania.
The following Saturday morning, August 13, the one addressed to McConnellsburg showed up in my post office box bearing a scrawled notation: "postage due 3¢".  I gave the clerk a dollar bill and a piece of my mind while she added three cents worth of postage to the envelope and returned my ninety-seven cents change. Apparently the envelope had been to McConnellsburg and back in the intervening four days.  Some fanatical bean-counter in the system somewhere a couple days away had decided to teach a postal regulation scoff-law (yours truly) a lesson and sent the thing back through channels.  The other one - same exact weight, same exact amount of postage - has never returned.
The clerk told me she thought the seventeen cent charge for the second and each succeeding ounce on first class mail had been changed to twenty cents around "tax day" (as she put it) - I suppose April 15 or whatever day this year tax returns were due.
I recall seeing nothing about that increase in postal rates.  Of course, that doesn't mean that there was no public notice given or that there was not some piece in the newspaper about that time.  But I genuinely don't remember seeing anything.  Nor has there been any notice posted in the post office, which I visit daily, since I have a post office box, about the three cent increase on the second ounce for first class mail.
Apparently I have been mailing things that weighed more than one ounce with at least three cents postage due on them since the middle of April.  It took me a total of about five months to use up the hundred seventeen cent stamps.  I am now the proud owner of a roll of twenty cent stamps (purchased August 11), which I have been using conscientiously.
My initial reaction was to feel ill-used by the Postal Service; however, now I am wondering whether a humble penitence would not be more appropriate.  After all, about four-fifths of my mailings of more than one ounce the last five months have been three cents short.  That would work out to a free ride of about two dollars and forty cents I have enjoyed at the expense of the Postal Service.  Maybe I should send them a check, or better yet, buy two hundred forty one cent stamps (or a hundred twenty two cent stamps or eighty three cent stamps) and just put them indiscriminately, if entirely unnecessarily, on envelopes until I've used them all up.
Still, I could wish the Postal Service had been as scrupulous about giving public notice of this rate change as it has been about warning potential armed robbers about the consequences of their intended crime, as in this poster prominently displayed on the door of my local post office:

There must be scores if not hundreds of drug or alcohol-addled, marginally literate, firearm wielding felons dumb enough to want to steal a bunch of junk mail, social security checks or rolls of twenty cent stamps who have been definitively deterred by this very scary, very red notice.  It certainly got my notice.

Contemporary Nonfiction - Latin used well; Latin used poorly

 I - Well

It was over the winter just past that I discovered David Foster Wallace, in the form of his essay for Harper's Magazine (April, 2001) entitled "Tense Present: Democracy, English and the Wars over Usage," ostensibly a review of Bryan Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, but actually a very winningly articulated discussion of the "usage wars," in which he seems to lay the groundwork for a kind of post-prescriptivism that would combine a friendly good sense with a sane respect for tradition.

He begins his piece with the tag: "Dilige et quod vis fac. - St. Augustine."  In a way this sums up his basic point about close questions of usage.  Who, however, would realize that?  The Latin is from the seventh of a series of homilies by this Patristic author on the First Letter of John in the New Testament.  In Latin the name of this collection is In Epistolam Ioannis ad Parthos Tractatus Decem.  Here is the section of this sermon containing this line:

Hoc diximus in similibus factis. In diversis factis, invenimus saevientem hominem factum de caritate; et blandum factum de iniquitate. Puerum caedit pater, et mango blanditur. Si duas res proponas, plagas et blandimenta; quis non eligat blandimenta, et fugiat plagas? Si personas attendas, caritas caedit, blanditur iniquitas. Videte quid commendamus, quia non discernuntur facta hominum, nisi de radice caritatis. Nam multa fieri possunt quae speciem habent bonam, et non procedunt de radice caritatis. Habent enim et spinae flores: quaedam vero videntur aspera, videntur truculenta; sed fiunt ad disciplinam dictante caritate. Semel ergo breve praeceptum tibi praecipitur: Dilige, et quod vis fac: sive taceas, dilectione taceas; sive clames, dilectione clames; sive emendes, dilectione emendes; sive parcas, dilectione parcas: radix sit intus dilectionis, non potest de ista radice nisi bonum existere.

You can find a translation at the New Advent website.  It can scarcely be more conservative and traditional than to cite St. Augustine for anything these days, but of course, like most condensations of wisdom, there is undoubted truth in this nugget, even if, misunderstood, half-understood, or twisted by fanaticism, it could be advanced as justification for the worst sorts of wickedness. 

Was Wallace familiar with the source - i.e., had he read Augustine in the original Latin - or was he aware of the quote from elsewhere - note that as a string in quotes the Latin sentence fetches some 227,000 hits on Google?  Or is the more pertinent question really what sort of readership had Wallace in mind. Consider the other sprinkles of Latin in the essay:

• Not more than a couple pages later, we encounter the second Latin expression:  "A Dictionary of Modern American Usage has no Editorial Staff or Distinguished Panel.  Itʻs conceived, researched, and written ab ovo usque ad mala by Bryan Garner."  (p. 42)  
• On the same page he appends a footnote [he loves footnotes] to the use of a cardinal number in stating the age of an individual: "(7. Garner prescribes spelling out only numbers under ten.  I was taught that this rule applies just to Business Writing and that in all other modes you spell out one through nineteen and start using cardinals at 20. De gustibus non est disputandum.)" 
• Another shot of Latin is not injected until page 46, again in another footnote: "19  Standard Written English (SWE) is also sometimes called Standard English (SE) or Educated English, but the inditement-emphasis is the same.    SEMI-INTERPOLATION    Plus note that Garnerʻs Preface explicitly names ADMAUʻs intended audience as "writers and editors."  And even ads for the dictionary in such organs as The New York Review of Books are built around the slogan "If you like to WRITE. . . Refer to us." (Yr. snoot rev. cannot help observing, w/r/t these ads. that the opening r in Refer here should not be capitalized after a dependent clause + ellipse -- Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.)"  
• Not until page 51 do we encounter a little more Latin, this time the title of a book, again in a footnote: "33  (Q.v. for example Sir Thomas Smithʻs cortex-withering De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione Diologus of 1568.)" [note that unfortunately a spelling error has intruded - Diologus should of course be Dialogus - and note if youʻre interested you can get a reprint of the book from Amazon].  
• The last bit of Latin appears at page 57: "Garner recognizes something that neither of the dogmatic camps appears to get: Given 40 years of the Usage Wars, "authority" is no longer something a lexicographer can just presume ex officio."  

I have provided links to Wikipedia explanations of all these expressions.  Note that Wallace never offers a translation or explanation (other than what may be gleaned from his immediate context).  But note as well that every use of a Latin expression adds something, ordinarily to the meaning itself of what he is saying, but in every instance certainly to the tone and style with which he says it.  Still remains the question what sort of person did Wallace expect would be reading this?  Certainly he was assuming a readership such that either he did not even consider using English equivalents instead of the Latin, or he considered and rejected the idea.

I pass over the fact that Wallace does not seem to have a solid grasp of the Latin abbreviation q.v. (quod vide).  He uses it on three occasions.  In each, as in footnote 33 page 51, he seems to really mean vide.  At least he does not use cf. when he only wants to suggest that the reader look at something else.

II - Poorly

In contrast to the deft and appropriate use of Latin in Wallace's article, consider this passage from another book I recently read, Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System", pp. 166-7: "When we define what matters in education only by what we can measure, we are in serious trouble.  When that happens, we tend to forget that schools are responsible for shaping character, developing sound minds in healthy bodies (mens sana in corpore sano), and forming citizens for our democracy, not just for teaching basic skills."  Here, the Latin is almost perfectly pointless.  It is nothing more than a sort of translation into Latin of the preceding English phrase "sound minds in healthy bodies" - I say sort of since it ignores the plural/singular issue so as to stay with the proverbial original.  It adds no twist or comment.  It is a mere redundancy.  It seems to have been added - and parenthetically at that - only as some kind of citation to ancient authority in support of the proposition that it is a good idea to have a sound mind in a healthy body.  For some 160 pages I had been following her arguments, thinking them pretty sound and pretty effectively marshaled, and only mildly annoyed by her habit of name-dropping, when this infelicity appeared.   It leaves me wondering why on earth did she bother dropping this Latin nugget into her sentence.  Recall that the author holds a doctorate in history, writes extensively on the history of education, and has filled a number of impressively named posts in government (Bush I and Clinton administrations) and private institutions.  This is all the Latin she could muster in support of any of the ideas in her book?

Poe's preface to The Pit and the Pendulum

What's up with prefaces in Latin?

Consider Poe's 1842 story The Pit and the Pendulum, which he introduces with this pair of elegiac couplets:

           Impia tortorum longos hic turba furores,
           sanguinis innocui non satiata, aluit.
           Sospite nunc patria, fracto nunc funeris antro,
           Mors ubi dira fuit, vita salusque patent.

He adds this note: "a quatrain composed for the gates of a market to be erected upon the site of the Jacobin Club at Paris." He apparently got the lines here.

This introduction sums up the entire story. The impia. . . turba. . .sanguinis innocui non satiata - the bloodthirsty Inquisition dedicated to rooting out and destroying religious heresy - can hardly not be equated with the Jacobin Club - the bloodthirsty revolutionaries dedicated to rooting out and destroying political heresy. This unholy mob has fed its longlasting insanity, but now the land has been made safe, the murderous pit has been eradicated and where once there was terrible death, now there is life and well-being. In short, the narrator will not die. There will be a rescue.

This might seem to imply that for the author the ending of the story has almost no importance [note that this notion derives some support from the very abruptness and brevity of the concluding paragraph of the story], that the key thing is to have his reader focus on the elegant effectiveness of his evocation of the dread, terror and despair of someone undergoing this sort of physical and psychological torture. Of course the ending is not without any importance. Probably it was also one of the objects of the author to induce by means of his artistry, not only the necessary suspension of disbelief for any work of fiction, but also a certain oblivion with respect to the already known outcome. In other words one wonders more at the power of the prose for having been duped by it into vicariously participating in the narrator's struggle for life in the midst of such desperate circumstances. Note that without this consideration, the whole conceit seems silly: since the tale is told by a narrator, obviously he must have survived the experience in order to be telling it. With the preface Poe puts the silliness on the table and says to his intelligent reader: "I know you know how it ends - I just told you - now come with me into the mind and body of this narrator and watch me recreate the experience."

Poe could assume a readership adequate to his Latin preface in 1842, a readership knowledgeable about the major events of the relatively recent (within the preceding forty or fifty years) upheaval in France. I doubt that this is any longer the case. Indeed it is probable nowadays that not one in ten thousand high school English teachers (nor one in a million of their students) can read and understand this Latin preface, or know a Jacobin from a jack-ass.

If only a very few actually "get" the preface and its relation to the story, what really is the point of teaching The Pit and the Pendulum in the modern classroom? Is there much left of the story without the preface besides overwrought 19th century guff?