I Colori del Bianco is an exhibition of ancient sculpture with original pieces set beside replicas which have been painted as the originals certainly once were. Some examples are on this Blog, and a further selection can be found here.   more »

From an otherwise interesting piece on Homer by Robert McCrum from The Observer of Sunday May 16, 2004 - sorry, I've only just come across it.   more »

A pink leaflet tumbled out of the envelope just before Christmas, and since it wasn't a Christmas card I set it aside to look at later. Now I've looked at it, and it turns out to be the programme of the events planned by about 20 local branches of the Classical Association. Most of the branches are in England, with three in Scotland and one pretty active branch in New Zealand.

I checked with the CA web site, to see if they were there, but that particular page has yet to be updated, so I've given the events a place on the web on my own private site, here.   more »

We in the Classics world hope very much that Latin teaching will return to the maintained sector, but in the meantime, although there are a few state schools that still have the good sense to offer Latin, it is mainly the independent schools that are keeping the flame burning. It is therefore good news that the government threat to remove the charitable status of independent schools seems to have diminished. The Times reports:   more »

On the so-called 'Pisa' tests, comparing achievement in various countries:

The OECD has set its face against measuring achievement in relation to the curriculum, preferring to try to capture "literacy" or "the ability to use knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges".   more »

Ofsted reported yesterday that the brightest children in deprived areas were not, in some schools, being given the chances that the government wanted for them. This 'levelling down' attitude, that refuses chances to those who would benefit from them, on the grounds that not everyone would be able to take advantage of them, is just what took the chance of Latin away from the students in my home town, a decade or more ago. ..   more »

Vassilka Nikolova e-mailed me a week or two ago, and the following is her fuller explanation of a request for a British school to take part in a linguistic project. Anyone interested?   more »

From the papers today I have picked up a few facts and opinions about the new Secretary of State for Education:   more »

Our new Education boss is Ruth Kelly. This is what she says about herself on her website:   more »

You may be familiar with the Times Educational Supplement message board, which they call TES Staffroom. The Classics teachers congregate here.

There has recently been a merry colloquy about singing in Latin, with a ..   more »

These audio files are not the high quality ARLT productions, which concentrate on verse set texts, but a personal contribution by the Blogger, offered for what they are worth.   more »

Having been given a nudge by a teacher who is beginning to teach a Common Entrance form in a prep school after Christmas, I looked up the non-linguistic syllabus and cobbled together a page of links to sites that might be helpful. It's here.

It's not finished yet, but there are 27 hand-picked links there already, on such topics as ...   more »

Don't you wish all your pupils/students showed this much enthusiasm? Here's the original if you want to check its authenticity.   more »

The words of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer in Latin (sort of), and an mp3 of a choir singing it in a very polished performance, are here.

Is there a better Latin version knocking around?   more »

I've stumbled across a site, in the form of a Blog, that displays one poem of Martial each day, in the original Latin with an English translation. Thanks to Atriades for the link.

Today's poem is mildly obscene, as so many   more »

Students who use computers frequently at school perform worse than their peers at maths and reading, a study claims.

Those using computers several times a week performed "sizably and statistically significantly worse" than those who used them less often.   more »

Non-urgent post piles up in my house, until I have something important to do, and then I open the old post as a displacement activity. That's why I've only now read an advertising brochure under the BBC logo for Muzzy language courses for children.

Muzzy is apparently a green...   more »

I came across this memorable lesson when browsing old articles in Education Guardian. You can read the whole article here.

One lesson I remember was during my A-levels. We were working on the Comedy of Errors - the soliloquy that starts "I to the world am like a drop of water" - but instead of sitting in class, we had to   more »

Shakespeare, Latin and philosophy: in polite society, to admit ignorance of any of these three subjects will cause you to slip, subtly but surely, in your standing.   more »

Not so surprising when you think about it. A survey of all the UK Members of Parliament in May during Adult Learners' Week by the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (Niace) found that more MPs could communicate in Latin than in Italian or Spanish.   more »

I've only just picked up this item from The Guardian of October 26th. It seems our brightest and best is studying Latin and Greek at A level. Other bright students please copy.   more »

The news that Finnish children outperform the rest of the world (again) was reported in a lacklustre way by The Times, but the Guardian article has some explanations of what the Finns are doing that we aren't, mostly provided by Ted Wragg. So it's worth reading.   more »

I pass on a message just received from Lyceum Artis, Bulgaria. It could be interesting. I'll ask Mrs Nikolova for more details, but do feel free to contact her direct. I have tampered with the e-mail address to foil spammers. Just restore the @ for AT.   more »

I have just added a page (http://www.arlt.co.uk/dhtml/christmas_cards.php) of Latin greetings and quotations, together with images, which can be printed off and given to a class as ingredients for making a Latin Christmas card for a friend (amico, amicae) or parents (matri, patri, parentibus).   more »

We can now supply three new tests on Seneca set texts and some Cicero practice unseens, thanks to Hilary Walters. They are in the password-protected section (For Teachers) of the ARLT web-site.

A word of explanation about registering for the 'For Teachers' section. When you fill in the form ...   more »

PUPILS from Hexham’s Queen Elizabeth High School carried off a clutch of prizes in the annual two-county Classical Association Recitation contest.

Nearly 100 youngsters from all over Northumberland and Durham displayed their skills at declaiming the words of great classical writers like Virgil and Cicero, and English translations of Greek playwrights such as Euripides.   more »

The History Today site offers a time-line that makes clear some interesting simultaneities (if that's a word). The above link should bring up the Fifth Century B.C. Sure enough, there is the building of the Parthenon, but what was going on in Africa at the same time?   more »

Polly Toynbee writes about government plans for child care in today's Guardian - complete article here - and claims that 'a whole new profession is born - the pedagogue, combining nurturing and teaching.' That sent me to find out about the ancient paidagogos. Here's the relevant paragraph from Polly:   more »

Naturally OCR is an interested party in this matter, but its submission responding to the Tomlinson report is worth considering. We certainly need most of students' exam work to be externally assessed. Coursework, and the proposed extended assignment, are just too wide open to cheating - and the boundary between legitimate help from a teacher (let alone a parent) and plain cheating has always been a fuzzy one. Anyway, here's how the Guardian reports OCR's views today:   more »

Just another example to add to my depression about 'real education'. It's from today's Education Guardian. I have no other comment to add.

Newcastle drops physics degrees

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David Starkey used the phrase 'national Altzheimers' in a Radio 5 discussion on our ignorance of history today. Apparently a survey has found that:

LONDON - Nearly half of Britons in a poll said they had never heard of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in southern Poland that became a symbol of the Holocaust and the attempted genocide of the Jews.   more »

I've written recently about the difficulties that Modern Languages are having. Now, it seems, other 'proper' subjects are not only in difficulty - university departments are being shut down. This is from today's Times:

Several universities have announced plans to end the study of chemistry. The latest, Exeter, declared last week that closure of its department, along with at least one other, was necessary to cut losses of £3 million.   more »

Damian Whitworth (35 1/2) of The Times spent a week in an independent school and a week in a state school. He wrote up his experiences in two articles this week. I have chosen the bit about the Latin lesson to reproduce here:   more »