This is the first of five posts about long-forgotten Latin and Greek coursebooks which I discovered while rifling through the bargain boxes of the Hellenic Bookservice. This series will set out how they have inspired my teaching: check them out for yourself and please share your views below!
No.1: Roma by C.E. Robinson and P.G. Hunter
Cyril Robinson achieved a feat rather rare for mid-20th century Classics masters: a Wikipedia entry.
The short biography of his life (son of a Victorian vicar; Marlborough to Oxford; Winchester until retirement) is dwarfed by the list of books he wrote, presumably during his holidays. Most are accessible narrative histories of Greece and Rome, but in amongst them is a 110-page gem- Roma: A Reader for the Second Stage of Latin, published in 1938, when continental history was again hotting up.
So what does it offer?
In short, Roma offers GCSE-friendly unseens which tell the story of Rome and allow your class to construct the big historical picture while their language skills are developing. My experience is that pupils respond really well to ancient history and that dripping history into language lessons is a sure way to boost engagement.
What I had lacked was a way both to approach Roman history systematically and to yoke it properly to the language work – until I found this book. The first 50 unseens take you chronologically from Helen’s elopement with Paris to Trajan’s answer to Pliny’s letter about the Christians, with plenty of highlights along the way. Have a look at the two pictures below, which show the difficulty level at beginning and end.
These snapshots reveal another attractive aspect of Roma: the passages are short. Most are under 100 words, while those in John Taylor’s Essential GCSE Latin, for example, tend to be around 150. Surely I can’t be the only teacher who finds most commercially available unseens too long? Rarely do I finish them, and they’re usually too long to set for homework in their entirety. The passages in Roma need only take up part of a lesson, allowing for a greater variety of task.
When should you use it?
This book is a perfect accompaniment for a home-grown Latin GCSE course, to be started sometime in year 9 or possibly year 10. The constructions set for GCSE are gradually introduced over the first 38 passages (50 once you count ‘a’s and ‘b’s separately), as per the scheme pictured.
In the back are neat explanations of how each construction works, together with supplementary exercises.
The last 27 passages offer general revision and range across Roman history.
Anything else worth saying?
The first 20 or so passages have vowel lengths marked using macrons to aid pronunciation– what luxury! There is also a handy six-page summary of Roman history to get pupils fired up for what’s to come.
If you have any thoughts on Roma, or other ways to deliver history through language, then comment below. Positive or critical, we want to hear your views!
