When I first dreamed about leaving my textbook behind in any serious manner, the thought was spurred by a post authored by Audrey Watters in her blog Hack Education, ‘Hacking the Textbook (Open).’ In her post, Watters describes an event in which teachers are trained to create, cultivate, and collectively share their own curriculum content. I had already spent years modifying my textbook to make it work with the way I teach, and while I still believe that it is the best textbook for a Comprehensible Input-based class, I found myself struggling more and more against the book the further students progressed just to maintain a semblance of comprehensibility. Whether or not the text was compelling—another pillar of Comprehensible Input—was not even a concern at that point.

It's the first day of instruction following the holiday break, and you and your students are eagerly anticipating returning to the lengthy Latin reading required for the springtime exams. You take a step back to observe how your students are approaching a new text for the first time as they turn the page to the next selection from one of the canonical Roman authors. Each student dutifully has laid out before them the Latin text, their notebook, a pencil, a Latin dictionary, and any other references or charts they might find valuable in the moment.

Three and a half years into my journey of using Comprehensible Input and leaving the textbook behind, I started doing research on Free Voluntary Reading. As a child, I had greatly enjoyed reading and it was something my students had a hard time grasping. Similarly, my own brother nearly stopped reading all together when his school adopted the Accelerated Reader program, which assigns points for reading and testing on books. His love for reading was later reignited when, as a family, we started reading the Harry Potter series. I want my own students to have a similar experience and enjoy reading.

As a Latin teacher, I think a lot about reading. Without texts I would not have a subject to teach, and the goal of many Latin programs (including my own) is teaching students to read Latin texts. I began my Latin teaching career while teaching the language to myself as well. The goal (both for myself and my students) was to read Latin confidently and fluidly, from left to right, processing the meaning of the words as my eye scanned the pages. Yet my good intentions were soon frustrated, and I was baffled by a problem which I soon realised was not unique to my situation: despite years of training, neither I nor my students could read Latin in a natural, fluid way. Furthermore, textbooks and colleagues seemed resigned to the view that such a goal was unrealistic or unobtainable. Best to treat language as a puzzle to be solved, or linguistic knot to be untangled, rather than a language expressing a message. Only the most intellectually gifted students continued in my ‘puzzle-solving’ course; consequently, my enrolment dropped off steeply after the second year. Looking for more help, I even implemented various ‘rules for reading’ and ‘reading strategies’ advocated by others, yet rather than improve student reading ability, I felt my curriculum begin to feel increasingly cluttered with activities and processes that stole away from my students the valuable time needed to interact with the language itself. It was not until I began investigating the field of Second Language Acquisition (hereafter SLA) that I discovered some simple, yet fundamental principles about language that helped explain my students’ struggles and helped me rethink language teaching in general.

Krashen's Comprehensible Input theory proposes that we acquire language when the brain understands messages. The practical question then arises: how do we make the foreign words in the message comprehensible to the brain?

This article introduces an approach to teaching ancient Mediterranean religions by using types of classification to compare ancient to modern groups. A brief narrative introduces pedagogy challenges around understanding the multi-various intersections of ancient group affiliations with other aspects of society. Different modes of classification and comparison are presented as a way to enable such understanding. Finally, worksheets meant for copy and classroom use are presented, explained, and detailed for their potential in Classics pedagogy at both the secondary and tertiary levels.

With the changes made in the new US Standards for Classical Language Learning, pedagogy needs to develop to better meet the updated standards for student learning. One of the major changes is that reading Latin is no longer the sole pursuit of a high school Latin class (Standards, 2017; Natoli, 2018). The new standards recognise that students learn in diverse ways and that students need to learn about and interact with the cultures they are studying.

(The reader must decide whether to take the proposal seriously. It is no more of a maggot than Swift's modest proposal.)

‘Why would you choose Latin?’ I have been asked an overwhelming amount of times, to which, over time, my simplified answer became ‘because I didn't want to do drama’. I realised that my initial wearisome and somewhat preprepared speech wasn't able to effectively communicate my admiration for the intricate and sophisticated subject. Not only for how it enriches the mind in school but also how studying the history that comes with it leads to the understanding of the impact the classical times has had on our society, from the way it works to the way it doesn't. For these reasons, I firmly believe that all school pupils should have the opportunity to study Classics.

In late 2017, the Classical Association of Scotland, in association with Classics for All, hired a co-ordinator to commence a programme of outreach and public engagement activities across the country. In this article, the national outreach co-ordinator reflects on the progress made to date, the difficulties faced, and hopes and plans for the future.