um good afternoon everybody uh welcome to this session from the alumni Festival here in Cambridge my name is James Warren I'm professor of ancient philosophy in the facultative Classics and I'm currently chair of the faculty board um we're about to begin a really interesting year in Cambridge Classics in part marking three significant anniversaries um the first which is perhaps the less interesting one for this afternoon is uh not a 2022 marks 200 years since the beginning of the first fully org
anized classics tripos um was was students began to study for a classic strip plus here in Cambridge so Classics had been taught before then of course but the tripos really got going 200 years ago more recently and the subject of what we're going to hear about this afternoon we're now 50 years since the faculty decided to inaugurate a course to teach Greek to undergraduates who hadn't been able to study up to a-level Greek or the equivalent at school um so these were people with a level Latin or
equivalent but had no Greek including um one of our guests uh this afternoon uh my colleague Paul who was one of the first uh cohorts of students to go through that program um I also went through it not 50 years ago but um not that recently either but but you'll hear a bit more about the decisions that went into forming that option and the current state of our teaching Greek to people who haven't done it at school and looking ahead to the future of what we'll be doing um in years to come but we
also are marking 20 years since perhaps a more radical move which was to open up the classics tripos to students who'd studied neither Latin nor Greek at school um up until then you had to at least have done Latin until you're 18. but from 20 years ago we began admitting students who'd done neither Greek nor Latin for the classics course and they take what we call a four-year course they do an additional year at the beginning of the three years and we'll hear a bit more about that as well so wi
thout further Ado let me hand over to um the two colleagues who are going to take you through most of uh the proceedings so these are two of the colleagues who are um absolutely at the Forefront of that language teaching um so Mr Franco basso and Rosanna omitowoju and I think Franco is going to start thank you James so as we had the teaching of Greek and the Cambridge faculty of Classics to students who have not studied it before or not to a level standards at least or equivalent as we typically
add when we write formally about these matters has been a defining feature of the classics teaching at Cambridge for 50 years and this is a long enough time to make its origin now seem a largely a matter of historical interest or perhaps less ambitiously or antiquarian curiosity for those who have that kind of curiosity nothing objectionable with the former and nothing too reprehensible either I hope with a latter what I've discovered is that an exercise in micro history as an exercising micro
history the topic has made it rather unviable by a serious lack of documentary evidence starting from 1970 and with increasing frequency in 71 and 72 the minutes of the meeting of the faculty board which are preserved in The Faculty contain a number of tantalizing references to reports from the faculty planning committee and then from a newly created management committee for beginners Greek but nothing is recorded in the minutes other than the reports have been received and when relevant approve
d the documents themselves are not preserved the substantial document are not preserve in the faculty of Classics or in the factory faculty or classic section in the University archive so one might speculate that the relecation of the faculty to its present building in 1982 may have had an adverse effect on its archival holding and one might hope that perhaps the private files of some former faculty members might still contain some of these documents and my next step would be to try and find out
if this is the case but for the time being of not being able to find any significant document that deals with the creation of the Intensive vehicles so I'll tell you what I have found in the minutes one would expect a matter of such importance to have been discussed informally for some time but the first evidence I've been able to locate in a minute is that of a special meeting of the faculty board on the 23rd of April 1970 in which a recommendation of the planning committee was accept I quote
the classical tribes be revised to make it suitable for entrance with I quote much less knowledge of Greek further decisions were deferred to a later date the wording much less knowledge of Greek seems to be potentially significant both for his vagueness but also and especially for stopping short of introducing the word beginners and does the decision to defer indicates the discussion was still ongoing if so things must have moved rather quickly because on 9th of May 1970 another special meeting
of the faculty board was held at which I quote the report of the committee for beginners Greek was considered and he was agreed to establish forthwith a management bracket not teaching notice committee for beginners Greek and the members of the committee are listed and the minutes conclude with no space that as my colleague would recognize readers rather uncannily prescient it was thought desirable that participation in any teaching course of Greek for beginners should be widely distributed amo
ng the teaching officers of the faculty now minutes of the factory board were taken to record decision or wishes and not discussion so one is inevitably left searching for Clues and there is a real risk of over interpreting but it is noticeable at least that entrance with much less knowledge should be changing to beginners within the space of two weeks the matter was evidently still regarded as in need of discussion because yet another special meeting of the board was held at the beginning of th
e next academic year on 8th October 1970. and that the minute simply record that a draft report for the institution of a beginner's Greek course be sent to the liaison committee for their comments and then submitted to The Faculty board at the annual meeting of November 19th and here again the matter was regarded as sufficiently momentous to require formal approval by The Faculty it's interesting but here again we don't know how the faculty board received it it must have approved it because on t
he 20th of May we find they as well instituting institutive moment the minute says it was agree that the managing committee for intensive Greek be asked to consider means to making known to prospective candidates Etc even though we don't know wow how and why what we do learn from such a scantability that at some point between October and May the course acquired its name intensive Greek that escaped ever since and the choice of name was and remains significant because it points to an approach tha
t has now lasted for for serious reason for half a century because the idea behind the name one I would argue is that if Greek has not been studied before University it will be started at University at such a pace has to make it possible for those who take the course in the first year to continue studying for the classic stripers for the classic stripers that principles is the advanced knowledge of the language and it is remarkable therefore that nowhere in the minutes a reference should have be
en made to the most important important practical consequences of that intensive approach and a feature that is that has Define our working ever since that is the requirement that those who apply for the course commit themselves to learn a significant amount of Greek before they start the course and this remains a formal condition that college you make ecologists make um impose when offering a place and this is where the prospectus that you have in front of you comes in because um you will find
a specific description of what the people who wanted to start the Intensive Greek in 1972 for the first time uh were required to do they were required to attend a summer school and Paul will tell us a bit more in a moment so 50 years may have proven at least for the time being a little bit too many for documentary history but not so for oral history and Dr Miller who took the Intensive Greek course in 7374 in the second year of his existence became a Greek historian and after a few years at Univ
ersal Leicester came back to Cambridge to take up a post in the faculty of Classics for which is only very recently retired in fact we celebrated Paul's contribution to Greek history in Cambridge with a conference in his honor last year but today he has kindly agreed to be interviewed to provide as well the information that the documents don't provide about about the course so my first question will be how did you decide to embark on the task of learning Greek at University two things specified
yes um you talked about uh those involved in setting up the Intensive Greek course one person I know involved in it who's still very much around is Patty stilling um and I talked with her a bit about it and one thing she did tell me if I remember correctly is that one difficulty was a professor page Dennis page the Regis professor of Greek was not in favor of intensity yes so it wasn't possible to go ahead until he retired I think in 1973 um the other thing I'm about to say the second thing is o
ral history is notoriously inaccurate yes and and misleading um and I may have got that wrong if I have I I apologize to the shades of uh Professor page but just to illustrate how things can go around one's memory a few months ago I gave an interview with Mary beard uh talking about times in the faculty and I told her with great confidence that there were four people in my cohort doing intensive Greek as I was told afterwards they were in fact 11. yes so what what I say from now on is not on oat
h right okay but like your question I I began by reading Paul and economics a one-year course and I found out in the in the course of that year that there was a change to the tripods here so it would be possible for me to do Classics without any Greek whatsoever learning from scratch I realized I'd have to choose I'd have to take that moment to make that choice because I'd never be able to do it again but I would emphasize it was not being repelled by economics it was by being attracted by class
ics and I have after all ended up as an ancient economic historian yeah so it's all come right in the end and I think the reason one reason that Moses Finley the professor of ancient history was prepared to take me on as his pupil was because of that rather unusual route I taken into uh into Classics and can you tell us a bit about the the way in which the course was organized yeah well I entered in the middlemas of 1973 as I said there were 10 or 11 of us we were divided up into two groups uh f
or the pre-term course uh a week and maybe more than the week actually if not 10 days a pre-term course um uh there was a sort of more advanced group and they were all people with O Level and a level Greek yes and I've done a quick a level which I thought was a bit of a correspond to the GCSE yeah indeed and there was two of us in the in the other group who had no Greek whatsoever uh and the other person in the group with me was John Wilkins who became professor of Greek at Exeter as I recall um
yeah um the early Greek that we had were two weeks at the summer school then held at Dean close school in Cheltenham pretty spot in place and I must I say uh that has now become Brian's Branson summer school of course organized by The Joint Association of classical indigenous yeah to come to the nitty-gritty um what what books did you read you mean in terms of the teaching that's right what level okay well well as I remember um the grammar the grammar book was provided by The Faculty um but it
it was pretty primitive in that um it wasn't even photocopied it was romeoge duplicated I suppose with the problem of writing of typing in Greek in those days it was inscribed like a what like Wax tablets on a sort of a wax covered skin which was then printful printed off um and uh yeah yes in fact the first page had the Greek alphabet and they'd missed out the letter Tau Yeah by hand now so I I Franco I must have that grammar some somewhere and I I'll give it to you in fact I must confess I use
the gram at the back of a school textbook called for a simicus it might be worth mentioning that the course that we now use which is the joint Association of classical course uh classical teacher schools um that work for it started in Cambridge in you saw two years later the beginning 1974. so it didn't even it was not even yet in preparation and it's possible that that actually one of the reasons why it worked started is in some sort of connection with it with a new course so at what stage do
you begin to read straightforward real Greek as a one real long grammar not made up Greek well it was in that pre-term course uh with Sophocles philictitis um which I found totally incomprehensible with just two weeks of Greek behind me uh my totally inadequate syntax grammar and vocabulary um but fortunately taking the small classifiers with John Wilkins uh was Dr John Killen who was kindness itself I must say in helping me out and finding the all half sentence I could translate from the text a
nd without his encouragement I would have packed it in so you know as often I think a really sympathetic level teaching makes all all the difference um The Daily grammar and syntax classes we were all together all 10 or 11 as for those and they were based on materials in the philictitis which was sensible I guess but rather over focused we had one session entirely on Greek particles in the philippec TTS with their special emphasis on the apixogutic again uh which has stayed with me forever but m
aybe not much else uh from from those classes um yeah was it um so that that the course was effectively exclusively language and and reading a text was that was there any other component no indeed um as I think it says in the the handout you you shouldn't there yeah um in the evening there were um a number of Talks by members of The Faculty which I I do know some of those Frank stubbins gave a brilliant talk about the uh serpent column the Greek Monument for victory over the Persians um and oh y
eah Renford bambra uh the philosopher from Saint John's gave a talk and the member of the teaching team describes him described him to me beforehand as the second cleverest man in England now I I wish I'd ask who the cleverness was but I I didn't also that man in England not person not Britain but but England I regret I cannot understand I can't really quote recall what he what he said but I do remember my colleague Alan crease from Queens being brave enough to ask a question which I certainly d
idn't didn't do so this this was the the initial week or or 10 days yeah and then and then terms started yes so what would happen during internal okay well then we had our regular reading classes um two per week I think it was looking at um sort of set texts or all 11 of us together first one with uh Miss Duke uh looking at a speech by democities against calicles which after philictitis seemed actually doable um in terms of the Greek um and that speech it was a speech a dispute between Neighbors
in the country over damage to property was was one which I used quite a lot in my own work later on in fact uh work on Neighbors in the the ancient Greek world and you were asked to translate from the text yeah from just a straight acting class yeah that's right uh and uh also there was um oh yes the later much missed um John easterling did um plague his apology with us and again that's a text which I've used a lot in my my work ever since and also um Roger door rather astringent on um on the a
lcastis but again later I realized how important that play was in terms of reciprocity in in interpersonal relations so the the certainly been payoffs from the detailed study of these these terms later on but if I understand from from looking at the program as as printed it doesn't look as if there was any other formal um teaching other than these reading classes did you get any help with the with the grammar beyond the the initial week not not from The Faculty but I think in a sense you know Fr
anco we helped each other I mean that I I would spend you know a lot of time talking with John Wilkins and going through the texts with with him um you know I think that um as a result of how can I put it yeah I I think that there was a problem in that there was so much other Classics I wanted to do history philosophy literature Greek and and Latin I did not have enough time to consolidate my Greek to the extent I would like to um and I think I am still learning Greek but then does anyone ever s
ay I have now learned Greek I think probably not I think also it's helped It came it helped when I started leading the uh reading classes later on when I came back to Cambridge and taking intensive Greek reading classes because I was aware how it was possible to work really quite hard but still have extended extensive gaps in your knowledge yeah so you you would turn you would take turn um um to translate but translate and and then what did you do anything else with attacks did you discuss them
no I I there wasn't much time it was not time for much else okay and I I think John Easley may even have laid on an extra class a week to get through this to get through the whole of of of Plato um uh Plato's apology uh I do I do recall um uh who was it Roger door um I think I describe his classes of somewhat astringent um he uh yeah we're doing alchestus with him and uh by using every device possible in terms of dictionaries commentaries translations cribs I go just about make some sort of sens
e of the text and so we started off the first session and he dropped on me to translate which I tried to he said no no don't look at the text the text is corrupt translate what's in the apparatus at the bottom of the page which I thought was deeply unfair rather but at least it made me realize that other readings were possible and what about College college supervisions yes um now this was very important I was very fortunate in having an hour a week with um uh Mrs Eleanor Scott who was a retired
school teacher and she was excellent in that she understood the problems of teaching people Greek from scratch and of course colleagues in The Faculty uh with the best within the world were not used to teaching beginners of Greek and so they were in a sense learning on the job and so you just one one to one with her yeah that's right yes may I they're asking about exams I don't I don't mean your marks I mean the the nature of the exams what what um what were you asked to do in the exam well of
course it was the same the same as for the the other uh prelim uh partner people um but we hadn't of course we had a different Greek paper um and as I recall it was simply translation of passages from those scene texts um so so no unprepared translation well having said that it almost happened in the sat down the exam room for the translation paper the scene paper and to my horror I could make nothing of the of the Homer Odyssey paper so what what's going on here and the hand went up and someone
said you've set the wrong passage you've set the wrong book of Homer uh so some poor chasing examiner was sent off to uh for the copy the right book fortunately well this is a case in which oral history is actually supported by documents because because one set of documents which are still in the faculty is a full set of examination paper and it is indeed the case that for that ear the printed versions is replaced by as an inserted page with someone actually writing up um the the rubric as they
were on the spot they would see um can I ask you about the relationship between that relatively at the time small group of people learning Greek as beginners and the rest of the of the undergraduates the rest of the Court yeah that's a very good question I think I think there was a sense that we felt we were kind of very minor Pioneers in in taking on this this new very new course in a way I think it's the same perhaps still the same with people doing the four-year course you know doing somethi
ng which is really rather different the downside was what I hinted at before is that the teaching had not been very fully developed nowhere near as professional as it is now in in terms of assessment and and Support classes and uh and so on but yeah there was a sense I think of of doing something which was a bit different um let's say when I when I came back in 1983 to The Faculty I was glad to propose that there be abolished the practice of putting on the class list an asterisk next to the name
s of those who've been intensive Greek so they should not be sort of stigmatized in that kind of way but in fact there were almost more people will Nest risk than without but by the time that person strike was canceled again to confirm this and to to to say something about them now and then um in in June 22 the last um the last um timing which um beginner's Creek will examined there were 81 candidates as a total uh for Greek language and text and uh and of these 59 uh attended the Intensive reca
lls and um and it's only a minority third who did not actually learn Greek at University and I'm sure that you'll be pleased to hear that the first six highest results were all achieved by people who did the Intensive roles and on this very uplifting note I will pass on to my colleague Chris say one more thing of course it's just one more thing I I feel I didn't really explain properly why I went back to classics uh but let me say just one cent one is a sentence about that um my own teacher I me
ntioned Mrs Finley always said Classics is not a subject meaning it is not its self or caring discipline if so what is it well I will tell you Classics is a disease a benign disease but once you've caught it you've got it forever and there's no cure right thank you very much hello everyone I'm going to move on to talking mostly about the four-year degree which is an area of the classics tripos the time particularly involved with that's me that's me teaching a very dull person um and like Franco
we're key people in The Faculty for teaching language for running the language courses and for teaching the classes that are associated with that like Franco I'm also at one of the colleges where I have a teaching but also a pastoral role which is in some ways not particularly relevant to my role in The Faculty but ends up having certain crossover elements so I'm going to take you back a little bit fast forwarding a little bit from the time that Franco and Paul are talking about um but to the la
te 80s and a key moment for thinking about the four-year degree is actually the Education Act in 1988 at which point the national curriculum came in and crucially for people who are engaged in the study of the classical world the national curriculum did not include classical subjects in it and that was a very big moment for the strength and health of the discipline in this country in particular it meant that the role of classical subjects within the state sector came problematic became problemat
ic and under real threat schools no longer got kind of brownie points for providing it as part of their curriculum it was easy for it to to drop out of the of the Core Curriculum that state schools needed to provide so that was a kind of very problematic moment for Classics remaining in schools particularly within the state sector and of course this was at a time when universities as a whole but certainly Oxbridge in particular we're thinking more about their relationship with schools thinking m
ore about their relationship to the state sector and the private sector and that's always been a topic that Classics has had to think hard and carefully about so that was a kind of one of the key moments another is tqa tqa stands for teaching quality assessment and it's sometime in the late 90s I haven't done my archival research I'm afraid sometime in the late 90s um the classics faculty was assessed for its teaching for its teaching quality and we were told we were very good boys and girls and
we were doing an excellent job um but that as a faculty we were very much dogged by the fact that we could accept so few people from the state sector because students had to have studied at the very least Latin 2A level to be able to apply to Cambridge to do classics and it was at that point that the faculty jumped on the idea of okay you know we see that problem we feel that problem we want to do something about it and so we propose to the University from scratch Classics degree and the univer
sity responded very positively to that um and we discussed and set up the four-year degree as the name suggests and as James alluded to earlier on the four-year degree is kind of an extra year it's kind of a year built it on the front and there are ways in which that has felt a bit sort of clunky a bit well you know oh we cleverly stuck an extra year out there and people did Latin on one level it's you know it's not the most sophisticated pattern but it has also been one of the great strengths o
f our four-year degree the students do do that extra year but then they're in the same cohort as everybody else it's not been a separate route through the classic stripos it's been this pre-year and then students on the four-year degree are every bit as much full class as this doing the full range of subjects and that's kind of what I mean by access to the full swathe of classical disciplines we were very clear that we didn't want the four-year degree to be only takeable by people who had some s
ort of bizarre enthusiasm and bizarre skill at languages we wanted people to be able to take the four-year degree who were good enough linguists The Classical Languages but who were doing Classics had caught the disease of Classics as Paul called it for all the range of what Classics gives access to people who wanted to be ancient historians and knew that being able to translate Latin and Greek wasn't a part of that people who were very keen literature students and wanted to study the ancient te
xts so people who wanted to be classicists with all the full range of what that means and were prepared to graft at the languages to be able to do that we want it not just to be people who were specific linguistic experts um yeah so kind of access for the rounded classicist and it was a tough call it is a tough call to learn to ancient highly inflicted languages two languages which are only represented by high-end Elite texts from scratch it's a tough call but it works foreign with one of our fo
rmer students so we've had since the inauguration of the four-year degree We Have Heard many cohorts through 20 cohorts through I've got a slide in a minute that shows how the course has grown and our four-year degree class assists have gone on to do the whole range of things which Classics graduates very often go on to do so the obvious things Classics teachers but also sometimes other subjects actors lawyers civil servants academics running on businesses this is an interesting one I have two e
x-students from the four-year degree who are doctors um who decided after their Classics degree to do graduate medicine and are now working as doctors in the NHS and both of these people I'm actually still in touch with both of them are very clear that actually Classics was one of the things that made them feel able to make that switch it was the sense that having taken on and mastered from scratch huge bodies of material that they had to start from the beginning with I lasted in a week that gav
e them the confidence to think that they could of course do that again in terms of turning into turning towards a medical career also of course writers and journalists in a little bit of research I was doing I did find that one of my exfolio degree students is somebody who is who's a journalist with one of their National papers and who indeed was the person who scooped the story that led to various political scandals this year I'll be I'll be discreet and not mentioned more than that so the four
-year degree past present and future here are some stats it's been growing in the early 2000s um we mostly had 10 to 12 students studying the four-year course I think there was one particularly small year where we maybe only had six but it gradually increased over the course of those of the of the early years growing sometimes into the low teens growing into the higher teams even as recently as 2016 to 17 we had a cohort of only 10. I have to say that was quite that was unusual then I think we w
ere mostly closer to Upper teens by that point in 2017 to 18 we had 12 um in 18 to 1921 in 2019 to 20 these are the years that they arrived we had 30 um and in 2021 again 30 20 21 to 228 but then for this coming year we have had another of our quite big jumps and indeed have 41 students who will be about to return um to start their course in a few days time now I use the word return because they have already been here for two weeks the four-year degree students come at the beginning of September
for a two-week intensive language course in Latin they come for these two weeks they're housed in a college not the the college that they're going to be at the housed all together do two weeks of Latin go away for two or three weeks and then come back and that's another great strength I think of the four-year degree those students have bonded they've met each other they've had a bit of a go at what being in Cambridge is like um they've got to know their way around they've got to meet some of th
eir teachers and then they can go away and then come back for the Mayhem and excitement of freshers week and the beginning of term importantly for this coming year just as Franco was talking about how the proportion of intensive Greek students versus post a level students has grown and grown and grown importantly for this year for the first time our four-year cohort is pushing 45 of our total cohort so there's been a real shift in balance in the proportions between the different cohorts particul
arly in recent years so how do we do it well our group's aren't as small as they were in Paul's day with his two people in his class um we're in we mostly teach groups of 789 sometimes ten they have an intensive set of classes students will have at least four for some terms five classes that's sort of roughly one a day um in their first year as well as lectures as well as their supervisions that are put on for them by their by their colleges we teach them intensively I'll come on in a moment to
talk about how we read texts we get them reading texts from as soon as we feasibly can not quite fill up deities within within two weeks of of starting Greek but certainly within a month or so of starting Latin from scratch students will be attempting real unadapted Latin with a lot of hand-holding usually only pedagogical hand-holding actual hand holding if necessary we try to make the experience of starting on real Latin texts fun manageable at times scheduling challenging but something that f
eels doable and that's something that's very important to the way that we try to present it importantly we're gonna try and read texts in a very multi-layered way and that was something that kind of was was alluded to um in terms of the Greek classes as well so here is a little bit of Latin text that I will be reading with students in a few weeks time I won't read anymore you don't you probably don't want to listen to me reading Latin and I'll just pause momentarily I don't know how well you can
see it but I don't know if you can see the background as well as that lovely inscription there the background can anybody work out what the background is so um Zoom actually but you're on the right lines exactly so it's actually a a zoom class that I gave I'm up in the corner there um looking a bit worried I think but the others are all smiling um as a kind of remembrance of how you know of course in the pandemic all of this went on and it went on by Zoom I'm not close and detailed reading of t
exts that intensity of the program that we're offering was something that was incredibly valuable during the pandemic so many students told me how important it was to them to have these small group things that kept happening that had to happen nearly every day that gave them kind of structure and a sense of continuity in a sense that somebody was noticing how their academic work was going during those very difficult days of the pandemic sorry that was a bit of attention okay so one of the ways i
n which in which we read is to pause verbs so I will often have my students and I know it's sort of it's you know it's not glamorous but they'll be picking out and parsing I.E telling me the grammatical information about the verbs in a passage so that might be the first thing that I get my students to do um if anybody wants to tell me what the color coding is they can do that later there is a subtle color coding in the way that I have um marked out those verbs so what I'm trying to get at is tha
t on one level we're reading for the the real nitty-gritty of learning the language you know we're reading for things that say you know we need to be able to spot that guessy is the first person and means I waged doesn't mean you wage it means High wage so at one level we're reading for that absolutely basic understanding the language stuff but we're also reading for a whole hell of a lot of other reasons same little passage we're reading to think about augustus's campaigns what that might tell
us about Roman military practice we're reading to think about Augustine propaganda you know he talks about Waging War he's stuck in that kawalia there Civil War he stuck that in and maybe doesn't want us to notice that he wants us to think think about the externa Bella the great and glorious campaigns he waged outside so we might be thinking about Augustine propaganda we might even be thinking about Empire and its Legacy um we might be thinking about Latin Style this is the Rose guest night it's
not the most exciting Latin relatively elegant Latin that's not even getting into the issue of the fact that there's a parallel Greek text and that's a really fascinating thing about the raised guest eye that we have a version in Latin and diversion in Greek we might be reading it to think about it as a as a monument it was an inscription and as a physical object now while much of the class that I'm teaching will be focused on the linguistic elements all of these kind of things that they're in
the background they might come in at any moment and that might be something that I bring in but it also might be something that the students might ask about so it's a very multi-layered approach which reflects the fact that I want and expect my students to have a multi-layered interest in what they're in what they're reading yes I want them to learn the basics of grammar but I also want to know that I'm getting them to read it for all for a whole host of reasons and the questions that they want
to ask about the text are really important ones too so what do we do for the four-year degree Latin in a year week after Christmas it's quite a busy time we have the September course which I've referred to um we do quite a lot of reading practice so we do start with some course book material to try and build up some basic reading skills but then we'll start this is a slight change with slightly changing syllabus this term we'll start reading Augustus Rose guest die certainly by halfway through t
his coming term probably a little bit sooner than that with some of the groups after Christmas we'll read a book of its Metamorphoses so complex Latin poetry for students who've been doing Latin for about four months but it works I mean partly because of it is so kind of mad and fun and kind of crazy he really draws them in and then we'll read some katellas in the in the final term they start Greek after Christmas um just with with course book of in fact reading Greek that um that Franco alluded
to as being begun quite soon after the Inception of the of the Intensive Greek course they'll start um they'll start with that after Christmas so what about the future because I think we have a strong sense and I think Paul put his finger on this that doing the four-year course is a big undertaking it's a critical and exciting undertaking and it's it's still quite groundbreaking to start from absolute scratch with those languages and get to the same level and often indeed Beyond some of our bes
t students who get the best mugs are ones who've started from from scratch so groundbreaking but also we want it to be somewhere that's going in a process we're expecting the four-year degree to become heading to be 50 50 maybe before too long expecting to have more of our students doing the four-year course than the three-year course particularly depending on the picture of Classics in schools the change from having 4as subjects and then people choose three a levels has been another difficult m
oment for classics um the possibility of a fourth subject when people might have taken Latin or might have taken Greek or might have tried class save has been another moment where Classics in state schools is under great threat um the number of schools where people can study Latin particularly up to a level within the state sector has just taken another perhaps not nosedive but another worrying downward turn so we do have to think about the future we do have to think about how we can make classi
cal subjects Thrive within our educational world and how we can make Cambridge part of that coffee how big can the four-year degree grow well we would like to feel that it can grow as big as it needs to grow um but of course there are there are there were some complicated issues associated with that money students who do the four-year degree end up with 33 more debt than students who don't so the students who choose to take on something like the four-year degree having to kind of invest in that
in a very very real way and that's you know that's tough there's also resourcing implications for us as a faculty you know we've talked about intensity we've talked about the personal touch and how we engage with students very very um individually but that means small groups lots of teaching it costs money these are things that we have to think about and time um I've got a bit of a B in my bonus that learning Classical Languages from scratch has a very particular relationship with with time and
people's time it's time-consuming investment both our teaching but also the time it takes for students to get to the level of competence that they want to and that we want them to get to people have to make a commitment to working in a different way in many ways to how they might work in other aspects of their degree there's a kind of gritty consistent consistency and regularity of work needed to become proficient in the languages so it makes different demands on people's time and students time
we also have to think about the cultural capital that's required to choose to do a subject like classics we know because you know we're long-term sufferers with the disease of Classics we know that doing Classics is a fantastic degree it leads on to all sorts of amazing possibilities kind of because we know that studying the Latin the ancient Greek the ancient Roman and Greek World studying the languages will be looked at very positively by Future employers that it carries a degree of cultural c
apital along with it that means that it's a worthwhile investment of people's time and effort we need to keep getting that message out to a wider section of the UK population as we can because that really matters in classics classics is placed in the in the the world is of course changing all the time has some difficult moments has some really positive moments and again that's something that the classic of the discipline has to keep thinking about to ensure that it remains relevant to ensure tha
t it's something that new students want to come into the disease that people want to catch but it's absolutely worth it these are some quotes from from students um talking about what they've gained or I've just spotted a typo in Me by me in my typing up but never mind ignore the learning please that should be learning um students talking about what studying Classics on the four-year degree has meant to them and I think one of the things that strikes me always about these quotes but also about ot
hers that I've had from other students is how much it's something that they that they personally chose and they feel personally invested in that they got a huge amount out of in all sorts of ways academically in terms of their sense of their future success but also in terms of the friendships that they've gained um both amongst themselves but also people who are still very much in contact with with teaching members of the faculty and still feel that there's that kind of lifelong connection that
has come through this very engaged and tough but very fulfilling process of learning the languages from scratch thank you um thank you I think we have 10 minutes or so remaining in our slot if anyone had any questions to Rosanna Franco or Paul yes oh yes yes because there are people listening online so if you don't mind waiting for the microphone our um other universities in the world adopting a similar approach well in a sense we could very um proudly say no not quite in that um I mean ah obvio
us uh colleagues um and and perhaps uh competitors as to put it like that in Oxford um do um well for a start Ox has always had a four-year course in Classics and um so when they introduced uh the possibility um which also exists in Oxford of learning uh Latin and Greek from scratch they thought that you can't really learn both languages to the same standards within what was that as it were um four-year course as well there was there was no it from their point of view there was no possibility of
adding a fifth year and so they thought that you have to choose so you can either do a Greek course and then do a bit of Latin in the second half or vice versa so in from that point of view the idea of learning both languages uh in four years and by the end reaching the same standards of those who started the course with um a level uh no as far as I know um not in this country I I think from Franco's um description of the inauguration of the intense reports 50 years ago I think the faculty then
took a very wise decision not to offer a different degree it's the same degree so all of our students come out with one and the same Classics degree whether it's taking you three years or four whether you've studied Greek intensively having had Latin before or or no so you don't apply to do classical sieve or Latin or Greek or Classics everyone's doing Classics people are coming from different entry points but the very important point is they all converge as soon as we possibly can manage to do
ing Classics together certainly by the final year of their degree and I that's something I think the faculties really proud of it does cause difficulties because it does mean with all of these different entry points you're having to sort of manage a whole range of um uh of prior knowledge and levels of prior knowledge and trying to sort of make make it all work but I think that's absolutely the right thing for us to do foreign course I guess is a is enabler to allow people to to come to the cour
se who haven't had access to certainly Greek beforehand um I mean in terms of and you talked about the sort of cultural capital what's the sort of Faculty doing about people who don't have that cultural capital and you know don't may not be aware of a sort of Classics course and bringing those well we try we try to do a lot of Outreach work and actually have a have a long-standing tradition of doing that um possibly more so than many other faculties because Classics has been sort of under threat
in various ways for yeah 50 plus years we actually have been it's part of our DNA to do the going out to schools talks to putting on events um the the faculty at the moment is partnered with um an organization called Classics for all and we're running at Greek Academy which is mostly online and is trying to is teaching Greek at a fairly beginner level but Greek to local state school students we run a program where our students go out to teach in primary schools doing a bit of a kind of introduc
tion to Latin so many of my colleagues go out and do schools talks and and big events I mean everyone's heard of Mary beard of course um you know so again it's in our DNA that we go out and try to spread the word um I think part of it I think the Greek and Roman worlds is fascinating and always has remained so and it still is sort of people are aware of it and it it does get embedded at various points in uh key stages as as students go through the the school our job is to make clear that um it's
available as a subject for University level study for everybody that's keeping whatever enthusiasm there was for the Greeks and Romans early on and making it clear to everyone that that's something that that they can with the grit that I think Rosanna was talking about and with all the help we can offer them that's something that they can do at University indeed here in Cambridge thank you um bear in mind how solitary learning is often having a level of learning and then having time to let it s
ettle before you go on to the next level um you spoke about convergence um have you noticed in with your experience as these people have gone through that there's any Divergence later on in what they choose to do or maybe their outcomes and success yeah yeah um I think parts of the of the tripods were there's the sort of toughest linguistic tests um I think it would be true to say that there are points at which certain cohorts within within the from scratch um lot don't perform on average quite
as well as the others within that cohort the kind of what we might think is the most linguistically able the ones who are very um you know very enthusiastic recipients of linguistic teaching actually often go on to do significantly better even in those narrowly linguistic tasks than the people who've come with a level there is however I would say roughly a kind of quarter of the cohort who'll do okay in those but it's never going to play to their strengths however um our you know in our final ye
ar the picture very much evens up and it's our final year that is their degree classification and it's not the case that from scratch students are not choosing to do the literature options they're choosing to do literature options pretty much equally with with other students um so it kind of comes out in the wash um basically that's a bit of a sort of vague answer I think that was one more question here yes so obviously you've mentioned the kind of four-year degree as opposed to the three-year d
egree and the different kind of ways that people come into the degree but they all come out with the same kind of Classics degree in the end what is the relationship between the the kind of group that does latinine group from scratch a group that does Greek from scratch and the group that don't do anything from scratches there are they all quite separate or is everyone together but then some people go off and you smash yourself or sort of all of the above um so the people who who are doing the f
our-year degree they will do their Latin classes in their first year and you know a variety of other things lectures and all of that kind of stuff they start a bit of Greek and then as they move into their second year they will be in intensive Greek classes with students who are coming in having done Latin a level and starting Greek from scratch or from medium scratch or whatever so they'll be absolutely in the same classes with them in fact you know one of the jobs I've been doing this last wee
k is making up those groups and they're roughly half X Fourier degree students and roughly half new people coming in from outside which again I think is a a really nice strength that those new students are in classes with people who've been there for a year and who kind of know what they're doing perhaps it's worth pointing out that this difference in any case only applies to that part of the teaching which focuses directly on the language it's not as if we have separate say history lectures or
philosophy lecture or linguistic lectures for people who know Latin or how depending on how much Latin or Greek they know so there is a lot goes on um in the faculty in the way of teaching that is unites everyone absolutely in fact the majority of what we do actually has everybody in the same room as well yeah and I think the removal of that star on the list I think is a really important marker of of that it's not a badge you carry with you I mean it's it's something that um is just part of part
of what what you are as as we go through the degree together I think we're beginning to come to the end of time so I'd like to thank Rosanna Franco and Paul if you would like to know any more about the classics courses we offer please look at our website um where you'll get some more information about the four-year and the three-year versions and how we see that working um and we're very grateful for all of your support so thank you very much foreign
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