ARLT Reading Competition 2010

ARLT Latin Reading Competition 2010

Schools are invited to submit entries from students in Years 10-13 up to a maximum of  two entries in each category.  Students should record themselves reading Virgil Aeneid 6 295-314.  Please preface each recording by stating name, year and school and include these details in the name of the MP3 file. 

Recordings should be emailed in MP3 format to:

craigflower@supanet.com

or sent on disk to Mr David Swift, Taverners, Bankwell Road, Giggleswick, Settle North Yorkshire BD24 0AN

Email submissions should give as their subject the words “Reading Competition\2 and the name of the school.

Advice on pronunciation can be found at:

www.classicsnet.plus.com/readitright.htm

Entries will be judged on accuracy of pronunciation, sensitivity to metre and ability to convey the meaning and mood of the passage.  These features will be given approximately equal weighting.  Elided vowels may either be completely omitted or the two vowels may be combined to fit a single metrical slot (synaloepha).

Advice on elisions can soon be found at http://www.arlt.co.uk/dhtml/competition.php

First, Second and Third Prizes (book tokens for £40, £30 and £20) will be awarded in two categories: Years 10-11 and Years 12-13.

The closing date for entries is Friday 19 March 2010.

Winners will be announced in early May 2010 on the ARLT website and by email to the winning schools.

For further information please contact Hilary Walters on hilary.walters@ntlworld.com or at Loughborough Grammar School, Loughborough LE11 2DU.

CICERO – worldwide

Cicero just goes from strength to strength!

Anne Dicks has contacted me with the following announcement:

Exciting news from CICERO – we have now expanded beyond our original European boundaries and now have centres in Tunisia and Australia!  To celebrate the arrival of our Tunisian partners we have chosen as the cultural topic for 2010 ‘Carthage from Dido to Hannibal’.

At our first international meeting held last weekend at the home of one of the CICERO UK team, our business meeting included partners from France, Italy, the UK and Australia – our new partner Emily stayed up late into the night to join us via Skype!

Our success means that we have had to change the meaning of our acronym CICERO, which now stands for Certamen In Concordiam Europae Regionumque Orbis.  Our new website URL is   www.ciceroconcordia.com (but the website itself has not yet been updated).  Instead, I have created a YouTube account with a few short videoclips  ciceroconcordia

Let’s hope that the competition continues to raise the profile of Classical subjects around the world!  All entrants will be registered in an Event on Facebook so that they will be able to communicate with each other directly.

There will be three venues in the UK for the competition in 2010 on Saturday March 13th : Cranleigh School in Surrey, Birkdale School in Sheffield and Fettes College in Edinburgh.  When I update the website I will upload a registration form which can be posted to me at Malvern St James School, 15 Avenue Road, Malvern, Worcs.  WR14  3RZ

Please encourage your students to enter – it is a very enjoyable day out despite the fact that it is less of a ‘fun’ competition and more like two fiendish examinations!  The students actually enjoy the challenge and if we get sufficient sponsorship we hope to raise the amount of prize money awarded this year.  Any ideas for sponsorship gratefully received!  (If you buy a box of 25 Latin diaries, for example, a donation of £7.50 is triggered to Cicero UK: email  david@generation-europe.org.uk  (£60 per box plus delivery)

Anne Dicks

 

anne@pyrrha.me.uk

anne@ciceroconcordia.com

 

YouTube  ciceroconcordia

 

Pyrrha’s Roman Pages website  pyrrha.me.uk

CICERO 6th Form competition website ciceroconcordia.com

The Fort That Anchored The Wall

My thanks to Marine1 for writing this  guide to Segedunum Roman Fort and Baths at Wallsend, Tyne and Wear, . 

“Segedunum Roman Fort, Baths and Museum at Wallsend on the north bank of the River Tyne is an exciting, interactive museum.

Wallsend, as its names implies was the anchor fort at the eastern end of Hadrian’s wall.  It is the most extensively excavated site in the whole of the Roman Empire and has the only reconstructed Roman bath house in Britain.  The 100 feet high observation tower gives stunning views over both the fort and the surrounding area, including the River………….”

It saves me writing the report I have been meaning to write since August 2006 when I set off from Segedunum to walk the Wall in 6 days, accompanied by friends and supported, crucially by wife.

You can catch marine1’s report  here  http://trifter.com/europe/united-kingdom/the-fort-that-anchored-the-wall/ 

and, if you are the sort that cannot get enough of  someone else’s holiday snaps ( and very many of them) you can go here:

http://www.classicalresourcecentre/wallwalk/wall.htm

Of course, there is a debate about which way to do this walk. Prevailing opinion would have you walking with the prevailing wind at your back, West to East. Forget that. Walk away and leave as far behind as you can the noise of the metropolis, head West and finish in the glorious Solway Firth. Unforgettable.

Pompeiiana – the Newsletter

About Pompeiiana

The Pompeiiana Newsletter was created and edited by Bernard Barcio and ran from 1974 through 2003. Pompeiiana offered a place for Latin students to publish comics, stories, games, and articles, and was a beloved resource for Latin teachers. In 2008, Barcio granted Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers the rights for all of Pompeiiana. This blog will make all 229 issues freely available to Latin teachers, students, and others interested in Classics, one issue per day.

You can find out more and get your Newsletters  here

 

Word histories and a favorite teacher

I am sure that “favourite teachers” can be cited for every possible subject on the curriculum. But it just seems to crop up again and again that the Latin teacher is able to enthuse and leave a lasting impression on so many former pupils. Maybe I’m biased and just blinkered and only see what I want to see.  Of course I am!

But here’s another testimonial for another Latin teacher – and thank goodness she is still alive …..

By FRANK THOMAS POOL

Monday, August 10, 2009

“In a world where we are constantly reminded of the passing of the giants of our childhoods, it was with enormous relief that I learned the rumor of the demise of my best elementary school teacher was false.

Sister Mary Reynold taught me in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades at St. Anthony’s Catholic School. I was blessed with three full years of her teaching at a crucial time in life. Her praises and rebukes alike still live with me, and both have made me a better person. But if there’s any one thing she taught me, it’s the place of etymology in an understanding of our language.

She had a double major in mathematics and Latin, I learned many years later. The math never really took hold of me, but her deep know-ledge of Latin left a lasting imprint on my mind. ….”

read the whole article here

Roman attitudes to magic

“Magic, then, was always something secret and illegal; if, in practice, tolerated so long as no scandal occurred”.  So concludes Roger Pearse after a brief but  scholarly review on his blog. In my experience pupils are always fascinated by the subject and listen more readily, and have stronger views about it than many of the topics with which we try to engage them.

Did you know that 

“There were three sets of Roman legislation relating to magic.[1]  There was an edict in the Twelve Tables (ca. 451 BC); the laws of Sulla (81 BC); and the legislation of Constantine and other Christian emperors (after 312 AD).. . . .. . . .?

You can catch the whole article here

http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/?p=2301

Lavinia – rescued from near oblivion

Another in the series of – “isn’t it time we looked at the story from someone else’s standpoint”. I haven’t read “Lavinia”  and probably won’t,  but any book which draws from someone who has the comment “If you haven’t read The Aeneid, you will want to after this”,  must be worthy of consideration.

Lavinia  B y Ursula le Guin

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

paperback; 288 pp.;

Virgil opens his epic of the foundation of Rome by invoking the muse to sing “of arms and the man.” The Aeneid gives scant attention to women, apart from Carthage’s queen Dido, wracked with love for the Trojan exile Aeneas, and the goddess Juno, forever scheming to thwart his plans to establish a new Troy in Latin lands. Notably neglected is the Latin princess he does battle for, foremother to the Roman rulers. Now, rescued from near-oblivion by Ursula le Guin, Lavinia gives her side of the story. Virgil got her all wrong, Lavinia tells us. It is she, as much as Aeneas, who determines the fate of her homeland. She is also a natural narrator, attuned to the old and alive to the new. Reviewing the book in The Daily Telegraph, John Garth writes: “Le Guin, a doyen of fantasy who has steeped herself in myth and history, is adept at the telling detail. Aeneas emerges a steely man of honour, troubled by his own battlefield excesses against his Latin rival Turnus … Celebrating literature’s power to outlive and outgrow its creators, this novel is neither a complaint against an old dead white male nor a slavish imitation of his work. If you haven’t read The Aeneid, you will want to after this. If you already know your Virgil, you may find Le Guin sending you back for a fresh look. Her achievement is to complement the original epic so distinctively, as if in a dialogue or dance with the poet who inspired her.”

Latin gets revived in Laurel

“It’s not every day that a world-renowned author visits your town.”

 So begins the Laurel Leader News page and you start to second guess who this author might be. There’s a bit of a clue in the title, of course. “Latin” and “revival” are regularly associated nowadays with ARLT’s good friend Barbara Bell and here is another testament to the phenomenal success she continues to enjoy with her litle mouse from Vindolanda.  Read some more and feel good about Latin and teaching:

“It’s even less often that an author who has been honored by the queen of the United Kingdom visits your town.

But, that was just the case when Barbara Bell, a best-selling author and renowned Latin teacher, visited Laurel earlier this month.

Bell, the British author of the Minimus series of books, visited Laurel as part of a national tour aimed at promoting her book and helping train teachers in Latin.

“We’re an endangered species,” Bell said of Latin teachers and experts. “And I think that is a shame because languages are a marvelous thing and must be shown in an exciting light.”

more

Homer Simpson’s Figures of Speech

At the Bristol Summer School a number of us agonised over rehetorical devices in Cicero – and just as much over where we might find Homer Simpson’s guide to figures of speech!  I was next to useless, having never seen a single episode, but I resolved to find the definitive guide. I’m still not sure if this is it, but it will do to be getting on with….

Tripping Over Tropes With Springfield’s Master Rhetorician

By Richard Nordquist, About.com

In this article, we consider some of the ways in which Homeric rhetoric has traveled from The Odyssey to The Idiocy by way of America’s favorite cartoon character. Let’s journey to Springfield to review 20 classic figures of speech.

“English? Who needs that? I’m never going to England!”

 Woo-hoo! The immortal words of Mr. Homer Simpson–beer-guzzling, donut-popping patriarch, nuclear-power-plant safety inspector, and Springfield’s resident rhetorician. Indeed, Homer has contributed far more to the English language than just the popular interjection “D’oh.” Let’s take a look at some of those rich contributions–and along the way review several rhetorical terms.    

Homer’s Rhetorical Questions

Consider this exchange from a Simpson family symposium:

Mother Simpson: [singing] How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?
Homer: Seven.
Lisa: No, dad, it’s a rhetorical question.
Homer: OK, eight.
Lisa: Dad, do you even know what “rhetorical” means?
Homer: Do I know what “rhetorical” means?

    read more

Jeremy Patterson on the Plinth

If you didn’t manage to get down to Trafalgar Square, all is not lost. Catch Jeremy here, while you can :

http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/Jeremy

Thanks to Anne for this link

And if that has whetted your appetite, don’t miss the Latin videos from the Conventiculum Lexintoniense.

 Videos from this year’s conventiculum can be viewed at:

http://rogueclassicism.com/2009/07/22/conventiculum-lexintoniense/

Thanks to Keith for this link.