Teachers encouraged to use Taylor Swift lyrics and ‘Minecraft’ to teach Latin
Categories: US Education News
Latin teachers are being encouraged to use Taylor Swift’s lyrics, Disney songs, Minecraft and fan fiction to help make the ancient language of Virgil and Cicero more accessible to their 21st-century students.In recent decades, schoolchildren – mainly in private schools – have mastered the early stages of Latin through the tales of Lucius Caecilius.
A Pompeii banker who lived in the first century AD, and his family, as described in the popular Cambridge Latin Course, soon to be published in its fifth edition. Currently fewer than 10,000 students sit GCSE Latin and they are overwhelmingly in private schools. According to a recent British Council survey, Latin is only taught at key stage 3 – the first three years of secondary level education – in 2.7% of state schools compared with 49% of independent schools.
As well as making the case for “active” Latin in the classroom to engage learners, Hunt’s book details a series of innovative ways of developing students’ translation skills. In one example from a research paper, a university tutor struggling to get his students to engage with Virgil’s poetry, asked them to translate well-known songs instead.
Among their successes was Taylor Swift’s hit Bad Blood, the chorus to which was translated as Quod, care, nunc malum sanguinem habemus. “The trouble with Latin teaching is that it’s never been subject to thorough academic investigation; we tend to rely on anecdotal information about what seems to work,” said Hunt, who hated Latin when he first studied it at the age of 11 and is horrified that he once taught Latin using texts which trivialised slavery and stereotyped female characters.
Last summer the Department for Education announced the launch of a £4m scheme to encourage Latin among secondary state school students, starting initially in 40 schools in England, as part of a four-year pilot programme for 11- to 16-year-olds.
“Latin’s role as the gatekeeper to an elite education is over, but involving more students, especially in state schools, remains a problem,” said Hunt. “The challenge for teachers in the years to come will be whether they are prepared to grasp these opportunities to present the subject differently, and widen the appeal for students, or whether they prefer to stick to familiar routines.”