There were about 1000 people in the audience and he gave a 10 minute eulogy on the benefits of a classical education. I could have hugged him. His main point was   more »

But if Latin died in our mouths, we'd just stop talking   more »

A blog on the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean has just begun (first post on 28th May) and is already deep in child sacrifice.   more »

Thanks to Explorator I've been looking at these really interesting pages on Roman food, and winemaking in amphorae. They could be an addition to lessons on Cambridge Latin Course Book 1.   more »

Who is going to write in and tell Mr Kerevan that he is wrong, and that Latin adjectives do have plural forms? A nice exercise for your Latin class, perhaps!   more »

A wonderful detour from the set list then reared its head with the Latin-spouting classic   more »

IN how many British schools might you hear "Good King Wenceslas" sung in Ancient Greek? After Thursday evening of last week's Its My Story � the Retiring John McKie (Radio 4), I can name one: Hutcheson's Grammar School in Glasgow. Except,   more »

Kathimerini again, this time with the welcome news that Greek museums and major sites will stay open until 7.30 p.m. this summer, instead of closing at 2 as many do   more »

The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post have reviews of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Hecuba in the Kennedy Center.   more »

An article in Kathimerini says that the Greek alphabet will be permissable for web site names soon.   more »

I see that Solihull School is advertising for a Classics teacher for September. The advert is   more »

This Wisconsin native, plumber's son and graduate of Milwaukee's former St. Anne Parish grade school has come a long way from the world of beer, brats and bubblers.
But not so far that he doesn't still routinely wear plain blue work shirts and pants from J.C. Penney.
He is the pope's senior Latinist, a gifted and demanding linguist   more »

Giving life to a dead language

Who said Latin class was a snore? Not these Free State High students. The two are among a growing number of teens turning to Latin for an academic challenge, a bit of fun, and an edge if they ever find themselves on a television quiz show.   more »

A Classically inclined lady of my acquaintance has just sent me this:

Followed a Masarati down Putney High Street yesterday with the registration   more »

The good news is that Latin continues its upward trend: enrollments in the schools (elementary through high school) remain strong, college enrollments are WAY up (especially   more »

Flattery gets you a long way - so I read with great interest this e-mail from Tom Cotton with its complimentary opening, and then used the link to visit his Phaselus site.   more »

I must admit that I didn't get all these answers without seeing some of the letters provided by crossing words. So if you got them without such help, many congratulations.   more »

Some more crosword clues, mainly from the Guardian, where a Classical education may help the solver.   more »

I've just added a picture of Julius Hipponicus to the ARLTblog, and it strikes me that schools would like to ...   more »

I had an e-mail today that floored me. It was asking about the kind of essay questions that - but I'll paste the e-mail here, hoping that someone will be more inspired and better informed than I am:   more »

Clearly, the implication is that if you have only one or two children of high ability, then they get lost in the system and dont get the support they need. A lot of these kids are not delivering their potential.   more »

Not mainstream, but someone may be attracted by a short stay in Clare College, Cambridge, with papers on Latin Pastoral in the 15th to 17th centuries this September. I once gave a paper surveying the pastoral tradition from Theocritus onwards -   more »

The BBC Radio 4 show for children, called Go 4 it!, contains a very mixed bag of magazine items. Today it was the Chelsea Flower Show, an un-favourite record, the second half of Hans Andersen's 'The Nightingale', and an interview with Caroline Lawrence.   more »

The Daily Telegraph reports in a chatty way about finds in Chester.    more »

Melvyn Bragg often has a Classical theme for his intellectual discussion programme 'In our time. The latest edition was on the philosophy of Beauty, with a great deal about Plato.   more »

Radio 4 this morning asked Stephen Usher about the rhetorical powers of George Galloway, after his belligerent appearance before a US Senate committee.

Stephen Usher, Former Senior Lecturer in Classics, Royal Holloway College, compared him with Cicero.   more »

Educators say Latin is the most rapidly growing language of study in Connecticut.   more »

Student effort to preserve Latin a success

Raffle nets $1,000 and raises profile of dead language

Latin courses cut from UCF's curriculum were abruptly reinstated after a campaign launched by concerned students   more »

I could post a news item like this every couple of days, I guess. The US national Latin exam happened in March, and schools have been putting their successes in the local papers ever since. All good publicity. What is our UK equivalent?   more »

Lee Ann Shupp, 31, is too young to remember when Roman Catholic priests celebrated Mass facing the altar, not the congregation, and said Mass in Latin, not English. ... Afterward, she vowed to return.   more »

Spurred on by the last two posts, I have begun to compile a page of Classics Department web sites.   more »

What makes this a bit different is links to all sorts of interesting places like a   more »

Emanuel School in South West London has a page or two for each curriculum subject, but the Classics page links to the Classics Department web site.

This is an arrangement that many other Heads of Classics could imitate.   more »

If only a few students want to study Latin or computer programming, an online class might make that possible.   more »

the student body is expected to grow to 15 to 20 students this coming year. All students study Latin, logic, rhetoric and theology, in addition to the usual curriculum subjects.   more »

From today's edition of Explorator I looked up three links and found:

1. A collection of latinised songs at   more »

Hankies at the ready in this real-life version of Goodbye, Mr Chips.

Classics master John McKie has taught at the same school for 38 years but a new headmaster has instisted that he should retire.   more »

My hand goes up. Yes, I did it. I spent about 4 hours this week watching 'reality TV' in the shape of "The House of Tiny Tearaways" on BBC3. With this in mind, I read with interest the following, from yesterday's Guardian report of the Independent Schools conference:   more »

Like British universities, Dallas is finding it has to offer Classics from scratch for students whose schools have deprived them of the chance of learning Latin or Greek. This news is from the Dallas University Student Newspaper:   more »

Here's a good example of using the local press to boost your Classics department. There doesn't seem to be any ...   more »

This short article about programming languages and algorithms may be absolutely correct and wise, but the write illustrates his point by reference to a way of Latin teaching that I hope our pupils would not recognise. I quote three paragraphs.   more »

A heartwarming tribute to a Latin teacher by a school leaver. Why can't we in the UK be as open and positive as this American school leaver? Surely we have lots of Latin teachers like Mrs Blount Smith?   more »

Here are the words the Pope used yesterday to announce that there would not be a five year wait for the process of beatification to begin. Your class might be asked to guess what the abbreviations at the beginning stand for. My guesses are   more »

Some of them drive for more than an hour to hear the sounds of a dead language in a church.   more »

See new blog   more »

Do you like a good time? Have a good laugh? Would you like to improve your ability to read Latin texts? At the same time? Yes!   more »

Andrew Adonis was given the junior ministerial posting, together with a seat in the House of Lords...   more »

Education Secretary and Bolton West MP Ruth Kelly had been rumoured ...   more »

News from The Times today suggests that some universities are to run a quota system limiting the proportion of Independent School candidates they admit. While the majority of State Schools deprive their pupils of the Classics, it occurs to me that this could lead to a reduction in Classics undergraduates.Make your own judgement:   more »

Heritage of Latin Mass returns to Cathedral   more »

As light relief on this morning's 'Today' programme, the election predictions of pollsters was compared with the findings of Peter Jones, who took the auspices, appropriately ...   more »

...a production of Julius Caesar starring Denzel Washington is proving a huge hit, attracting vocally enthusiastic audiences who have clearly never seen Shakespeare before. ...   more »

I haven't recommended a TV programme for some time, since there are so many vaguely Classical documentaries on the various channels these days, and David Swift does such a good job in tracking them down and advertising them here.

A photo of one of the Riacce bronzes, however,   more »

Before giving you the answers to the clues in the previous post, let me commend this idea to you. Do what a Latin teacher did some 20 years ago in her London school: Get a 6th form general studies period timetabled for doing one of the cryptic crosswords from a serious paper. She used The Times, and was so confident that she took that day's crossword into class, knowing that she would be able to solve it extempore. More cautious souls might prefer an old crossword, where the completed grid has been published.

This teacher said that it was an excellent intellectual exercise. It made her students (I think we called them pupils in those days) concentrate on reading accurately, use logic, think laterally, and extend their vocabulary.   more »

I confess. I am a crossword addict. I send myself to sleep with a downloaded Guardian crossword, and usually find that in the morning, my mind refreshed, I can polish off a few more clues that seemed impossible late at night.

Here are a few recent clues that Classicists might enjoy.   more »

Teachers know all too well that the government insists they use computers in their subject teaching. Why this requirement? The argument seems to run:   more »

"The Oxford Student" reported last term on a forthcoming production of a play based on Ovid's Heroides. It seems an interesting project. Did you see it, and if so would you like to review it here? Here's part of the report:   more »

An enjoyable part of my Sunday routine is to read the e-mail newsletter (on mainly ancient history and archaeology) called Explorator from David Meadows, to follow some of the many links it provides, and often to find a site or a news item that I share with you on this blog, remembering, I hope, to credit Explorator with the link.   more »

(PRWEB) April 28, 2005 -- Vespers? Benediction? Mass � in Latin? Many Catholics have never even heard of these things, much less ever participated in them. But for the Juventutem crowd, such ancient Roman Catholic devotions are a typical part of their ordinary day.   more »