Learning Classics is a bit like putting on a magic pair of 3-D glasses. Once you start delving into the language and the culture, you'll start to see it all around you. This blog is a record of the club's journey through the worlds and language of ancient Rome and Greece... and through modern times, too, searching for the influence of classics all around us. You'll also be able to find vocab, home tasks, links and generally enlightening info here, too.

07 May 2016

Lesson 20 - an imperfect world

I used to walk the dog ever day
Today, after recapping the third declension, we tackled a new tense. The imperfect tense is used to describe past actions that are in some way unfinished or ongoing: so the ending on a Latin verb not only tells us who's doing it, but also when the action happened. We did a few quick-fire matching exercises on the board, then we tackled a worksheet, matching imperfect verbs to their English translations, and then turning present tense verbs into the imperfect.


Democracy: not Plato's first choice
Next week we'll be exploring a different kind of imperfection: the human kind.
In the last couple of weeks, we've seen how Plato postulates that humans are more complicated than we may at first seem on the surface: the reasons why we do 'the right thing' are debatable, as we saw in the tale of Gyges. In The Republic, Plato goes on to consider methods of rule and which one is the best. Next week, we'll consider the five systems analysed by Plato, and debating on whether we agree with his (some say controversial) ranking of them. In the run-up to next week's lesson (which has changed to P2, AF04 for Week 2), get busy Googling and see if you can identify the methods of government that Plato subjects to scrutiny. In the meantime, have a look at the brilliant Ken Taylor below, and hear his modern take on Plato's opinions.