Inner-City Latin

Teaching and Learning Director, Jonathan Goddard (37), on a typical day’s teaching in London schools with The Latin Programme. He tells us about the challenges and rewards of the innovative Programme to help improve literacy in schools. He tells us about the daily challenge schools face and why you should support the Programme’s future.

Early Rising

"I usually wake up early – between 4 and 6am while my wife and 18-month-old son Blake are still sleeping. It’s a good time for creativity and for thinking about things that nourish my work. I like to take a moment to visualize what I want to achieve with my day. I’ll then have porridge or cereal with my son and drink a lot of coffee because I'm tired.

I leave my home in Peckham, South London at around 7.15am to make sure I’m in school on time and photocopy teaching resources. There’s often a queue for the photocopier and schools have a really limited budget for this so that is what made me think of designing some new interactive resources this year for iPads (Jonathan has designed a new Interactive Latin Textbook for iBooks coming soon).

School staff are always friendly and really welcome you as one of their community. That’s really nice but it also suits my nature to travel from school to school for my teaching. I like to be independent and be in different environments. Each day I will teach six classes of between 20-35 pupils in two different inner-city London schools. Sometimes I’ve even taught classes of 43-43 pupils. There’s not much space to move around in classes as big as that."

 A Typical Lesson

"Teaching starts at 9am. A lesson will start with an interactive activity or role play such as Gladiators, ‘Simon Says’ in Latin, listening to a song or doing a clapping game. I use these exercises to get pupils moving and establish a tone in the room before we settle down to work.

Then we usually introduce a grammar point in English. Literacy is a big challenge for many of the schools we work with and it really lays a foundation for success across the whole curriculum, even subjects like maths. After that, we’ll begin linking this grammar with the Latin, applying the same rules and relating them constantly back to English. 

After 3-4 hours of back-to-back lessons I travel by train or bus between schools on my lunch break and try to eat something on the way. Once a week I can sit down and eat some West Indian food in the Roxy Bar in Hoxton."

The Pupils

"At the end of each day I’ve taught over 150 individual pupils. They are little firecrackers: absorbent and ambitious. They want to do well but sometimes need to be shown how to persevere, how to structure their thoughts and work independently. By the end of the Programme they have learnt as much in weekly lessons as pupils in private schools who have three times that amount of Latin lessons per week.

I love the challenge of teaching such difficult material: material that requires real intellectual discipline to master it. When pupils develop these skills it is incredibly satisfying. It is wonderful to hear stories of my former pupils who are going on to study languages at secondary school or even university and see how excited they are about this new content and how much they’ve achieved.

I’m not a classics scholar. I stopped studying Latin at School when I was 18 and I was skeptical at first about the Latin Programme, but it has proved robust. What I see more and more in schools today is the challenge that literacy presents but the schools we work in are addressing that challenge creatively. And it is working.

I think The Latin Programme has a great future."

This week I…

• Read lots of conspiracy-related trivia, Aesop's Fables, The Alphabet Book.
• Heard the 'Basketball Breakdown' podcast, 'In Our Time' and Wes Montgomery
• Watched: Lots of YouTube videos