Well, we survived yesterday’s hot weather with the help of a paddling pool in the garden in the shade. The small people sat in the water, the grown-ups sat on garden chairs in the shade. Then we all retired to the coolth of the basement kitchen to eat. Not a bad way to spend Sunday afternoon. Today is probably too hot even to sit out in the shade. I ran round the village first thing when the temperature was around 20°. According to my weather app it was up to 29° by midday with 32° predicted for later in the afternoon. Thank heavens for an old stone-built house with a cool basement! Thank heavens for being retired. My last classroom was like an oven on days like today, especially if we decided to use the computer-based language lab. Our daughter is teaching in a classroom with windows on three sides!! And it may well be too hot for her opt for outdoor activities for her class!
I read that they are reintroducing wild bison into Kent. They say “reintroducing” but I wonder if that is the correct term as it’s been thousands of years since they roamed our green and pleasant land. However, there it is, three female bison have been let loose, an older female from the Highland wildlife park in Scotland, which will be the matriarch of the herd, plus two young females from Fota wildlife park in Cork, Ireland. “We could not have asked for a better matriarch,” said Donovan Wright, one of two new bison rangers employed by the project. “She’s very, very calm, she’s very confident.”
They will be joined by a young bull from Germany in mid-August, whose arrival was delayed by import complications related to … wait for it … yes, you’ve guessed it! … Brexit!
The idea is that they will help to “rewild” their new habitat, opening up wooded areas by doing their bison-like activities and thus allowing different plants to flourish. It is hoped that herd will flourish too … assuming the male gets here. They are being set free but I think their new home is limited by electric fencing. We don’t really want them wandering onto motorways or into town centres, after all! We could end up like Los Angeles and Mumbai (still Bombay in my old atlas!) with mountain lions and leopards as close neighbours. So far we only have urban foxes but Spain and Italy have wolves and wild boar.
When I was in sixth form and it became clear that a friend and I were going to do well enough at A-level to apply for the sort of universities that demanded an O-Level (GCSE in modern terms) in Latin, the school paid for us to have private lessons with an old gentleman from the boys’ grammar school. My friend and I had not been deemed good enough to be in the Latin stream at an earlier stage in our school career and had learnt Spanish instead, alongside our French. The old gent struggled to work us through classical latin texts which seemed to be full of battles, blood and a mysterious substance called “black gore”! Fortunately we both passed with flying colours and went on to our chosen university.
Recently I read this:
“A popular Latin course used to teach generations of British schoolchildren has undergone its biggest overhaul in 50 years to include more prominent female characters and better reflect ethnic diversity in the Roman world.
A fifth edition of the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC), a mainstay of mainly private schools since the 1970s, is being published later this month, in response to concerns from teachers, academics and students about the representation of women, minorities and enslaved people in earlier versions.
Girls studying the course, which is story-based, complained there were not enough female roles, and that those included were passive and undeveloped. There was also criticism that the Roman world was incorrectly depicted as predominantly white, and objections to the way in which slaves and slavery were represented.”
Here’s a significant fact:
“About 10,000 students sit GCSE Latin each year and most of them are in private schools despite government attempts to lift numbers in the state sector. According to a recent British Council survey, Latin is taught in less than 3% of state schools, compared with 49% of independent schools.”
Maybe someone should point out that it is no longer compulsory to study a modern foreign language to GCSE! Perhaps if study of French, Spanish, German, Italian or even Double-Dutch were to be encouraged, progress could also be made in the study of Latin.
In the Letters section of the Guardian there was this bit of correspondence:
“Your article on the overhaul of the Cambridge Latin Course reminded me of my days learning Latin at school. Back then, students taking three A-levels were encouraged to add an additional O-level alongside them. Given that our subjects were modern languages, a friend and I opted for Latin. We were the only two in the sixth form to do so, and our teacher, newly released into the wild from teacher training college, was obviously at her wits’ end faced with two recalcitrant 17-year-olds.
Eventually, with enviable resourcefulness, she bought a Latin translation of Winnie the Pooh with the original illustrations, entitled Winnie Ille Pu, and we were hooked right from the opening line: “Ecce Eduardus Ursus scalis nunc tump-tump-tump occipite gradus pulsante post Christophorum Robinum descendens.”
In the end only I turned up for the exam, but the fact that I can proudly show a C in Latin I put down to Eduardus Ursus.
Virginia Orrey
Cowes, Isle of Wight”
I think my friend and I would have enjoyed Pooh Bear in Latin, back in the day. When Phil and I were learning Italian, Phil boosted his vocabulary by reading “Winnie Puh” and “La Strada di Puh”. I had already embarked on the A-Level Italian course and was having to read proper Italian books! We both still say “Noia!” on those occasions where Pooh Bear would have said “Bother!”. So it goes.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well everyone!
At my school, Boston Latin School, some teachers used Latin translations of Astérix and Obélix to
ReplyDeleteTeach us Latin. I think it worked. Unfortunately, the ones I had were quite dull!
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