November 5, 2024

Why I wrote… Clarke’s Latin

When asked why I embarked upon writing Variatio: A Scholarship Latin Course – the two-part primer I published in 2015 – I have always had to elaborate upon the details of my own early education.

Our prep school headmaster was in office for a grand total of fifty-one years from 1948 to 1999, garnering him the title of Britain’s longest serving head. By the time I joined the school in 1997 he was already dictator in perpetuo, a towering authoritarian of the old school who saw no need for such footling irrelevancies as governors and deputy heads. He was a talented Latin master, if prone to occasional bouts of violence, and my experiences at the school were the prime motivation for me to enter into a teaching career myself.

We learnt from L. A. Wilding’s trusty Latin Course for Schools, a wonderfully rigorous introduction to the language first published in the late 1940s. (I still use it, occasionally, for extra unseens.) By the time I began teaching, however, in 2012, I found my pupils to be somewhat bewildered by the old-fashioned turns of phrase – ‘whither’, ‘whence’, ‘lay waste’, ‘take by storm’ etc. I wrote Variatio essentially as a modernisation and expansion of the Wilding model.

I remain proud of Variatio and am pleased that it continues to sell, often for use with top sets. Yet it is only over the past five years that I have fully understood the sheer quantity of exercises required for weaker students to get to grips with such alien concepts as cases, mood and agreement. I have found myself endlessly creating basic sentences for classes needing further practice, hampered always by the limitations of vocabulary and grammar. Just how many subject-object-verb sentences can one create, using only the 1st conjugation, the 1st declension and Level 1 CE vocabulary?

Thus I began work on Part I of Clarke’s Latinnamed after my Twitter handle – in an effort to combine ample resources for the weakest with the more challenging tasks built into Variatio. I have been helped significantly by computer technology, through which it has been possible to generate sentences using every possible permutation of the specified vocabulary. While I began Variatio I with sixty basic verbs, Clarke’s Latin I has a thousand – followed by just shy of a thousand nominative-verb sentences. It is in a workbook format, eliminating the need for exercise books (and, hopefully, simplifying marking to a significant degree). Sentences use solely the specified vocab, so that the limited lists of words may be committed thoroughly to memory. Where passages use more complex vocabulary, it is glossed every time. You can get an idea of the layout and method in the images below.

The Contents
Typical sentence work and exercises on English derivatives

A key tenet of Variatio was prose composition from the very beginning. I have ensured that Clarke’s Latin also features considerable English into Latin work, as well as grammatical exercises, the formation and analysis of individual words, derivations and comprehensions.

This remains very much an ongoing project, with six volumes my ultimate goal, but Part I is in the proofing stage and I hope to have Parts I-III published next summer. I hope that they serve the purposes I have outlined and prove of value to my fellow Classics teachers upon their release next year.

Ed

I began my career as a private tutor before teaching at Cranleigh and subsequently taking on the post of Head of Classics at Highfield School, Hampshire. I am the author of “Variatio: A Scholarship Latin Course”, IAPS Classics Adviser, former editor of the SATIPS Classics Broadsheet, vice-chairman of the Conservative Education Society and a member of the ISEB Classics Consultation Committee. I have written for The Spectator, the TES, The Independent and the Journal of Classics Teaching, addressed conferences for IAPS and Keynote and debated “Classics in the 21st century” at the IOI’s Battle of Ideas. I campaign for traditional, knowledge-rich teaching and tweets at @ClarkesLatin.

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