Found in Antiquity

Welcome to this series of posts about tiered readers written in celebration of the impending launch of my book, The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4. I hope you can join me on Saturday 23 for the Livestream launch party at this link (or click the thumbnail below). For this post series leading…

I developed this flowchart as a way to visualise how a student could use explicit knowledge of Latin case endings to arrive at a set of possibilities for what those forms could signify. I said ‘explicit knowledge’. I’ve been thinking more about the role of explicit knowledge in second language teaching. We shouldn’t reject a…

If we promote CI teaching on the grounds that we are using a more rigorous, research-backed methodology, we need to base our pedagogical advice on what actual research is saying, or at least make it clear when we are speaking from carefully tested science and when we are speaking from messy, subjective experience.  ‘Shelter vocabulary,…

Edit: I read aloud this essay in the two videos below! I started writing this essay, which grew to over 16,000 words, with the goal of explaining ‘how to learn Latin on a budget in 2023: the most cost-effective autodidact strategies’. But during its month-long writing process, the essay turned into ‘how not to be…

TL;DR? Click here to jump straight to the table without any preamble. We’ve had a look at the options for taking live online Latin classes in 2023, but what if the pressure of keeping up with a cohort of students is not best suited to you? What if you need something more flexible to your…

TL;DR? Click here to jump straight to the table without any preamble. In the last decade, even before the pandemic, we’ve seen an increase in the number of adult learning programs which teach Latin via natural methods through online classes. Shall we say, there’s been a boom of Latin taught on Zoom. These programs are…

I posted this on the Latin teacher facebook group, Latin Best Practices: The Next Generation in Comprehensible Input, talking informally about the kinds of problems I’ve come across in my first year of implementing Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), a reading activity where you allow students to select a novella of their choice and read it…

In 2022 I made a Latin video in which I retold the Christmas nativity story in Latin using pictures from a picture storybook. (The version below is told in Classical pronunciation, but I also made an Ecclesiastical version in case that was your school’s preferred pronunciation.) Now I’ve made a sequence of lesson activities for…

The following is a transcript of my long-form video essay, “Why the Cult of the One True Textbook Has to Stop”. In short, if we truly care about improving language pedagogy, we have to stop worshiping Ørberg. Salvēte omnēs, ego sum Magistra Hurt. I am one of the most vocal critics of the Nature Method…

Update: Here are the takeway points in this article, distilled into a YouTube video: If you want to practice your Latin writing skills, is it still worth the drudgery to work through an old-fashioned course in “Latin Prose Composition”, or are there more enjoyable and effective alternatives? This is the question I ponder frequently while…