The following speech was given at the annual Summer School of the Association for Latin Teaching, held at Haberdashers’ Monmouth School for Girls in July 2015.

The aim of this study is to assess the pedagogical soundness and validity of introducing an overarching gamified lesson structure to a Year 10 Latin class. Gamification can be defined simply as the process by which elements of game design (for example competition and point scoring) are incorporated into alternative contexts, including education (Yee, 2013, p. 335). This study will seek to measure the effect of a gamified course structure on two elements: students' ability to fulfil lesson objectives, and their general attitude and motivation towards formative work. Very recently, examples of gamified learning environments have arisen in the Latin classroom (Gloyn, 2015 and Pike, 2015). Although this is a small pool of samples, the contemporary nature of the publications shines a light on the possibility that gamification is an emergent pedagogical tool. This has provided the impetus for the following study of the effectiveness of an overarching gamified structure on Year 10 students' attainment and attitude towards the study of Latin. If successful, this topic has promising transfer potential, as it could be used as the basis for differentiation, a praise system, or even as a sister project, which provides a structure for tracking and rewarding formative work outside the classroom.

Latin teaching is stereotypically associated with rote-learning or as Mount (Amo, Amas, Amat … And All That, 2006, p. 13) summarises the experience: ‘learning dreary declensions and conjugations’. When I tell people that I am training to teach Latin, the most common response that I get in reply is something along the lines of ‘Oh, I did Latin in school…I wasn't very good at it… but I can still remember –bo, -bis, -bit…’ and they continue to conjugate in front of me. For many people their only memory of Latin is a joyless experience of grammar by rote, inspiring such rhymes as the one above. Although currently pedagogically unfashionable, there must be some value in rote-learning if people can still recite grammatical paradigms decades later. Inspired by this, I wanted to explore rote-learning in the modern classroom by utilising current research on methods of teaching Latin in the primary sector. Primary Latin teaching often includes sound and movement to engage learners, whilst retaining a heavy emphasis on grammar. I wanted to explore whether such techniques would work at secondary level.

Every Latin teacher has at some point been asked to justify why the study of Latin, a dead language, matters today. SAT scores, success in the medical and law fields, and its basis for the Romance languages are often cited as valid justifications to study Latin (see the NCSSFL “Benefits of Latin Study”); but these reasons are devoid of any true meaning or purpose, and I cringe when I hear them, even if they do help bolster enrolment.

I teach Spartan history at the University of Leeds both as part of an introductory course about the Greek World and also as part of a range of more closely-focused Special Subject modules for second and third year undergraduates, including Image of Sparta and Classics on Screen. I use the film 300, and other modern popular culture material, in different ways in each of these modules: as a subject in its own right for Classics on Screen, focusing on questions around what the material says about contemporary culture; and, in Image of Sparta, as a coda to the course's survey of ancient ‘images’, which allows for reflection back over the ancient material. Blanshard and Shahabudin suggest that cinematic output can be ‘…an important vehicle for discussing the values, history, and cultural politics of the classical past. It demands that we think about what are the key elements that make the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean so distinctive and worthy of study’ (Blanshard & Shahabudin, 2011, p. 1). While modern popular receptions of ancient Greek history are not actually on the AS or A Level specifications (perhaps they should be!), they have some potential for teaching at this level if a teacher wants their students to get to grips with the particular topic of Sparta.

Over the course of the year, it has become clear to me that when students are faced with the task of translating a passage into Latin, a significant amount freeze, panic occurs and they cannot make any sense of what they see in front of them. This is despite a lot of them having a secure grammatical knowledge of the language, which they can recognise perfectly well, when looking at sentences in isolation. This study will be looking at two particular students in a Year 10 class, both of whom score exceedingly low in assessed translations. My study will focus on why there is such a significant gap between their class attainment and their attainment in the translation aspect of assessments and whether this is an isolated phenomenon in their Latin class.

This article examines how a number of teachers of Classics at secondary school level say they deal with sensitive topics, such as violence, religious belief, death and sex and sexuality. In the secondary school original texts are read partly for improving the students' understanding of the language and partly for the study of other aspects of the ancient society, such as the subject matter and the process of a legal case, for example. Therefore, sensitive topics often arise incidentally during the reading of a text rather than because they are the particular feature of the reading. Should teachers brush past such an topic for fear of causing offence or getting into trouble with school authorities or parents, or should they use the topic to develop their students' understanding of the topic at hand – and if the latter, how far should they go?

How many interactions do you have with students on a daily basis? In these interactions do you lead the conversation or do the students? Do students in your classes have the confidence to speak rather than listen? This is what this article is about: giving your students the ability to confidently assert their opinions and ideas. Classical subjects are some of the few subjects where students learn about rhetoric, what it is and how the ancients used it; yet they often do not necessarily know how to use rhetoric or employ rhetorical skills themselves. Most students, who have taken a Classical subject, will consider the term rhetoric to be connected with the sorts of rhetorical devices common in Cicero and speeches in Greek drama. However, rhetoric is used by everyone. Rhetoric is found everywhere in every type of communication, and it is almost impossible to escape from it. Rhetoric embodies everyday communication skills, how we speak, what we write, the debate in a discussion, how we present ourselves in meetings, how we teach and our online presences on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. Rhetoric is a useful skill and at the heart of the concept is the ability to express oneself effectively orally and in writing; what are more commonly known as communication skills. Oracy is part of everyday rhetoric: it encompasses how we are communicating with our intended audience and others around us through spoken language, body language and gestures.

Is my PGCE drew towards its end, the prospect of my first teaching job loomed large in my mind. I had been forewarned that 50% of my teaching workload would consist of teaching Classical Civilisation, and that the majority of this would be at A Level. However, I did not have personal experience of the subject as a school pupil (I studied Latin, Greek and English Literature at A Level – there was no Classical Civilisation option), so I had no personal frame of reference or pre-formed opinion of how it might be taught best. The final research project of the PGCE course presented an ideal and much-needed opportunity to investigate the possible teaching strategies I should consider in preparation for my own teaching of the subject. I was particularly interested in how to ‘get through’ the seemingly vast amount of text which teachers often cited as a real challenge.

Terence Tunberg is a professor of Latin Language and Literature at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. He is a world-renowned proponent of Latin speaking as a means of helping with language learning and, for more advanced students, as a way to consolidate knowledge of the language. He is the founder and convener of the Lexington Latin Conventiculum, a week-long total immersion seminar in active Latin that takes place each July. Mair Lloyd, a PhD student at the Open University, first met Prof Tunberg when she attended the 2014 Conventiculum and that experience became central to her PhD researching the communicative approach to Latin teaching through a sociocultural perspective on Latin learning. This interview was recorded shortly after she and Prof Tunberg took part in a panel on Living Latin at the Classical Association conference in Edinburgh, in April 2016. A link to recordings of the four panel papers can be found at the end of this article. The fourth recording shows Prof Tunberg demonstrating some of the techniques he uses in his teaching at the Conventiculum.

For the last few years, I have been working on an extensive digital model of ancient Rome as it appeared in the early 4th Century AD. This sort of visualisation lends itself to many applications in diverse fields: I am currently using it for research work into illumination and sightlines in the ancient city, have licensed it for broadcast in TV documentaries and publication in magazines, and am working with a computer games studio to turn it into an online game where players will be able to walk round the streets and buildings of the entire city (when not engaged in trading with or assassinating one another). Later this year I will be making a free online course, or MOOC, about the architecture of ancient Rome, which will largely be illustrated by this model.

Book Seven of Herodotus’ Histories contains his account of the Persian expedition against Greece led by King Xerxes in 480 BCE. This campaign followed from the one undertaken ten years earlier on the orders of his father, King Darius. That Persian force had landed at Marathon and been defeated by the Athenians in a famous battle that has ever since been considered a victory of European freedom over Oriental despotism. Xerxes, determined to avenge his father's defeat, raised a force reported by Herodotus to be of as many as two and a half million fighting men, only to come up against the 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae. This narrative of these and the subsequent battles of Salamis and Plataea has been well known from its Herodotean source ever since; and the muscle-bound and blood-drenched deeds of the 300 have recently been made famous again by the movie of that name. The more recent sequel to 300 begins with a less accurate account of the Battle of Marathon; and, where the first movie ended with Plataea under way, Rise of an Empire ends with victory at Salamis all but won. Courses in Western or World History are likely to come upon the Persian Wars, and the recent popular movies might serve as an accessible and engaging introduction to these historical events and developments. But Herodotus’ account of how Xerxes came to his decision to invade Greece, with its consideration of politics, rhetoric, and religion, is, if not as thrilling, at least as telling. It tells the standard narrative of the conflict between East and West, and it tells of many ways in which the conflict was more complicated than that. It tells not just how the Greeks and Persians came to fight each other, but who the Greeks and Persians were that they might have fought, or not, but did.

The Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions Project (AshLI) is a three-year collaboration between the universities of Warwick and Oxford, and the Ashmolean Museum. Its remit comprises, aside from photographing, cataloguing and translating the Museum's collection of more than 350 Latin-inscribed objects, a wide-ranging programme of public- and schools-engagement: as well as the epigraphers (inscriptions specialists), imaging experts and digital encoders, Professor Alison Cooley's team also includes a PGCE-qualified Classics teacher and blogger, and a trained podcast producer. Their aim is to tell stories of Roman life, using inscriptions as a starting point, through INSET days, free teaching resources, short films and regular podcasts made available through the project's blog ‘Reading, Writing, Romans’. In 2015, the team organised the first in a series of large-scale, direct public engagement events, when it staged a Roman funeral procession in the Ashmolean Museum.

On Saturday 10 June 2016, the Ambassador of the Hellenic Republic to the UK, Mr. Konstantinos Bikas, and the Classics in Communities project hosted a conference celebrating the teaching of Greek language and culture in the UK at the Hellenic Centre in London. The conference had multiple aims: to bring together a variety of teachers, committees and associations to discuss the state of Greek language and culture education in the UK; to anticipate and confront the challenges; and to collaborate to find solutions and action plans for its survival and growth.

It is commonly known that in Latin, the verb that means to teach (docere) takes a double accusative: you teach a subject and a student. After a Master's degree and 12 years of teaching at the secondary level, I feel like I am pretty good at teaching my subject. But what I have come to realise is that the Latin teacher training program I graduated from did not prepare me quite so well as to teach my students – in the sense that there was a very important aspect of teacher training missing from my program and, as far as I knew, every other program out there. I never formally learned the importance of an inclusive and affirming classroom and curriculum, or how to achieve it.

Nearly every – no, every – Greek grammar and course book, even the most comprehensive (in English, at any rate), gives a very skimpy, perfunctory and unhelpful account — insofar as it gives any account at all – of what ‘aspect’ is and how exactly it is related to verb tense and time (which tend to be conflated). Most of the books and articles on the subject of the aspect of the Greek verb are accessible only to the professional philologist, and can't therefore be easily applied by non-specialists to the understanding of the actual usage of Greek writers or to the imitation of their usage when translating into their language. This article sets out to remedy this situation by giving a clear and (within limits) comprehensive explanation of aspect as it applies to the Greek verb.

Way back in the late 70's when I was studying Classics at Cambridge, I had to take some courses on Roman Britain. Try as my lecturers would, they could not make it sexy. Not compared to debauched Rome and sun-soaked Greece…

We have been delivering the A Level Classical Civilisation unit ‘Roman Society and Thought’ on the OCR specification for a number of years at Peter Symonds College. This paper focuses on the delivery of one of the four set texts for this AS unit, Petronius' Dinner with Trimalchio. It points out some of the challenges teaching this translated text and then explains a number of the teaching methods and resources that we employ to enable our students to understand and learn this tricky piece of ancient literature. Petronius is one of the texts on the draft proposal for the new A Level Classical Civilisation under the section ‘Literature written in Latin’ under the sub-section ‘Novel & Fable’ and therefore this paper should aid teachers considering it as a unit option.

Having decided to leave Haberdashers’ Monmouth School for Girls (HMSG) after 23 years in 2013, most of my former colleagues were under the impression that I was planning to retire. To an extent that was true; I did decide to take my teachers’ pension early after a talk about pensions on an INSET day a couple of years earlier (and here I must apologise to younger teachers for whom this may not be a choice). There were some startling statistics about retirement age and the likelihood of death if left too late. Someone suggested it was probably a ruse by the governors to get rid of expensive teachers. If so, it worked. As far as I was concerned, it was one of the most worthwhile INSET days during my career.