Cambridge Classics

To Cambridge. While me and Dig are busy, Squirrel spends the hours looking for The Museum of Classical Archaeology (aka the plastercast museum, which she can find here).

I recommend it. We toured before. But even though Squirrel couldn't find the entrance, and trudged back to meet us at the car, it has set me thinking. Cambridge has many lovely features, does it not? It would be a useful point to stop over. En route to beautiful Suffolk and an annual Red Rose Chain theatre, we could take in the Early Music and the Shakespeare Festival, and I could fantasise that we could afford tickets for Cambridge Folk!

I think I might entice one of my children - possibly the Latin-noddled one - to consider a career in Classics, for which Clare College Cambridge has a ring to it.

Dig says it is one of the worst ideas he has ever heard, and if any of our offspring get wind of it, the earth will implode. Nevertheless, let's go forward with all good heart! I have a few years to try it out! Look, already I did the research! Next, that time-honoured home-ed technique I have used: a spot of strewing.*

* The earth is probably safe. My strewing has never worked yet.

Probably out of step with the nation

Repeating the Christmas nativity story. In Latin.


(Ignore the one with the metal detector. He cannot keep his trumpet aloft.)

eheu!

Shark, Tiger and Squirrel attend a Latin lesson at Stowe School, one of the most expensive private schools in England.

No, honestly! I'm not making it up! 

Look, we really did smuggle in the snoffle-grobbling home educated stringlings, Shark, Tiger and Squirrel! Honest! 

I snapped a crafty photo of Stowe entrance hall.

 

Quite frankly, I couldn't believe we were let in the place, knowing how our snuff-grimbling family is one of the nether-dwelling wanglers, only half-a-rung up the social ladder above the stoat lickers and ferret sniffers.

But becoz I is a nice girl, I will draw a discreet veil over the lesson. Commentary would not be right. Even though I haz took a PGCE, haz tort, haz opinions, and woz put in the frame for a teeching job here in 1994. I will merely say that from this experience inside the hallowed halls, my snoffle-grobblers came out with sudden (and not entirely unexpected) grateful thankfulness for our own fortnightly Lingua Latina.

The only other comment to add is that my mother-in-law sent all her juniors to boarding school by persuading herself the reason was educational excellence, when in reality it was so that her offspring would mingle with the right sort of people. Boarding schools perform this social function admirably. As, indeed, does home education.

Here, have an opinion from 2010. It hasn't much changed. Classics should be taught in state maintained schools.

See? We don't even miss out on the school party

It's Christmas! I understand this means the school terms are now drawing to a close.

With the approach of Christmas, your secondary schooled child will naturally assume this run-up confers complete and total right to do sod all, watch videos, play games, turn up late for everything, generally doss about, cover all their folders in glitter and, for a too-brief time, experience the life of a home ed child. All because It's Christmas!

Normally, the end of the winter term and the approach of Christmas holidays make no difference to your average home ed kid. We do each of the above, and more, all year round and only have ourselves to blame. Except, however, when we hire a local ex-school teacher to lead our scholarly Latin groups. She imposes on us a sort of school-based pattern of lessons and terms which end with her becoming a bit giggly and saying This is the last lesson because It's Christmas!

Thus a group of home ed kids studying Latin are commanded to sit in a circle and snatch each other's hats shouting petasus! The game is followed by hunting words, responding to phrases, eating biscuits and learning Latin while pretending not to.

But because this event is led by a retired teacher from the local school, that is enough fun for now. The homework goes IN THE BOX on the way out.

Thank you very much and lessons start again in January.

Perfer et obdura!

Vero, the little grits from the scholae Grit have begun their studies in Latin. With a TEACHER.

Ita vero, you read that right. Her name shall be Lingua Latina and she comes round once a fortnight.

As a real proper ex-teacher of the retired variety and the spit of Giles' Grandma, she wears a gabardine coat, flat woolly hat and a stern expression of grim control. She is to sit at the kitchen table on a stash of Cambridge Latin Book 1 whereupon she will lay down the law regarding glue sticks and pencils.

But I know it for what it is, this teacherly authority over the crayons and the six-year olds, thus cannot help but love her for her weaknesses. I know they exist. I am looking forward to Latin lessons enormously. I have quietly resolved to learn mischievous Latin phrases and drop them in our innocent games of Snap! at unguarded moments. And in this naughty provoking endeavour, I am finding X-treme Latin is helping, enormously.

Sit iucundus tibi dies.