Are you daunted by the sheer volume of Martial poems?

I've stumbled across a site, in the form of a Blog, that displays one poem of Martial each day, in the original Latin with an English translation. Thanks to Atriades for the link.

Today's poem is mildly obscene, as so many of Martial's are, but if you don't mind the obscenity you might let me know if you agree that the last line is so mistranslated as to lose the point of the poem. – Ah! (note added Saturday 11th) Either I was cross-eyed yesterday, or the translation has been changed and is now right!

I've added the link to the Blog links on the right of the page.

Study: PCs make kids dumber

Students who use computers frequently at school perform worse than their peers at maths and reading, a study claims.

Those using computers several times a week performed “sizably and statistically significantly worse” than those who used them less often.

Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Woessmann of the CESifo economic research organisation in Munich base their conclusions on an analysis of test performance and background data from the 2000 PISA study. This study involved tens of thousands of students in 31 countries, including the UK, organised by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Read the article.

Muzzy in Latin? Is there anyone out there to create it?

Non-urgent post piles up in my house, until I have something important to do, and then I open the old post as a displacement activity. That's why I've only now read an advertising brochure under the BBC logo for Muzzy language courses for children.

Muzzy is apparently a green animated cartoon character from outer space, who appears in a set of 4 DVDs, one CD rom. one audio CD, with book of scripts and parents' guide. He teaches one of Spanish, French, German or Italian (or EFL) for about £150.

The part that interests me most is the suggestion, backed up by quotations from experts, that they are most effective with babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers. The blurb claims that the window of opportunity for language learning closes at age 12. And when do we normally begin Latin?

Here's a bit of the blurb, complete with original exclamation marks and inverted commas, reminiscent of Private Eye's St Albion's parish magazine:

“The most startling revelation in all the new neuro-research is that the 'window of opportunity' actually closes! Learing a language later in life doesn't quite become impossible. It just becomes a lot more difficult!

“But all the intellectual benefits of early learning are lost.

“Here's what happens: around age twelve, the brain 'prunes' or discards the connections that are not being sufficiently used. This process has been described as 'relentless'. It discards the circuitry that might have become the open path to learning French or Spanish or German [or Latin, we might add]. For example: the dendrites (receptors of new brain circuitry) associated with hearing will be pruned, leaving a student unable to 'hear' (as a child would) the pure sounds of a language. At best, his speaking will always sound English in accent.

“And the ease that nature intended to accompany the young's acquisition of language will be gone.

“Forever.”

Would you dare teach like this?

I came across this memorable lesson when browsing old articles in Education Guardian. You can read the whole article here.

One lesson I remember was during my A-levels. We were working on the Comedy of Errors – the soliloquy that starts “I to the world am like a drop of water” – but instead of sitting in class, we had to memorise a line, then run around the hall each saying our own line in order. Because we were running around, we had to shout our lines, and really listen to the lines being said. It made you concentrate on the words, and the theatricality of them, instead of just sitting analysing text.

How would this work with the choruses in Agamemnon? Just a thought.