Lesson 14 - What's Latin for velcro?

Making the accusative singular feminine

The session started off with a verb warm-up, translating from Latin to English, using three new verbs: amare (to love), dare (to give) and festinare (to hurry). You're all getting pretty quick and accurate. Good stuff. And so onto something similar with nouns. By the power of velcro, we took masculine, feminine and neuter nouns and conjured up variations in nominative and accusative cases, and in the singular and plural. Then, putting our work with nouns and verbs to good use, we tackled some pretty tricky translations on paper.

So focused were we that we almost ran out of time for our weekly dose of Dyskolos. We recapped Pan's prologue, which sets the scene for the play. It's the usual tale of boy meets girl, girl's father won't like it, boy is forced into all kinds of schemes to win the object of his affections. We looked at the (slightly complex) inter-relationship of all the characters in the play: 

Next week, we'll be multi-tasking, making masks for the characters in Dyskolos, while at the same time performing a read-through of the play. Ambitious: could this all go horribly wrong? Quodlibet*. I'm sure as long as we all end up laughing, the ghost of Menander will look kindly on our efforts. Anyway, if you want some inspiration for your masks, have a look here at some pictures of both ancient and modern ones.


*=whatever

Lesson 13 - Cases and comedy

I can't believe how much hard work Classics Club did today. After warming up with some quick-fire present tense verbs (Latin to English and English to Latin), we tackled nouns in the nominative and accusative. To help you remember which case is which, here's that rap I showed you...

Jaszmine tackles cases expertly

We then set about doing quite a tricky exercise, identifying the number (singular/plural), gender (masculine/feminine/neuter) and case (nominative/accusative) of various Latin nouns, alone and in sentences. Here's that table again to remind you of the endings:

	masculine		feminine		neuter
	singular	plural	singular	plural	singular	plural
nominative	us	i	a	ae	um	a
accusative	um	os	am	as	um	a

The descendants of Aristophanes

After about forty minutes of taxing language work, we started on our journey into the (sometimes strange) world of Greek comedy, tracing its influences on modern comedy. We identified:

• fantasy choruses, still used by The Muppets
• satire and social commentary, like in The Simpsons
• layers of deception, such as Shakespeare uses in many of his comedies

Lesson 12 - what makes funny funny?

Loads of language work today. We recapped all six present tense verb endings, then went one step further as we synthesised Latin verbs by playing the Flower Game. In teams, we wrote the infinitive in the middle of the flower, rubbed off the 're' and then added the correct 'person' ending. This acted as a warm-up for our first passage of Latin text about a visit to the doctor, where we applied all of our learning so far: verb endings, noun genders and case endings, and a bit of adjectival agreement. Plus a new skill: using a gloss to help with words we'd never seen before.

That was forty minutes of pretty hard graft, so you all deserved what came next. We're about to tackle Menander's Dyskolos ('Grumpy Old Man'), but to help frame our work, we had a think about what makes stuff funny. Three theories:

1) Social bonding - laughter brings a group together. Not only do we all like a good in-joke, but even the very act of laughter unites us. This footage managed to raise a few laughs in the classroom...

2) Schadenfreude, or enjoyment at others' misfortune/pain. When your mate wipes out and lies groaning on the floor, it's sometimes hard to suppress that chuckle. Some psychologists think this reaction may be an instinctive relief at bad things happening to someone else instead of us. Many of us (definitely me, I have to confess!) find humour in other people's physical or social misfortune. You've Been Framed would be out of business if we didn't. Here's a classic clip of how funny it can be when someone else hurts themself and looks a right idiot in the process...

3) Incongruity & the unexpected: weird situations and surprising people. Sometimes, things are funny simply because you're not expecting them. Who would think that this disruptive, rude, 'am-I-bothered?' pupil could do what she does at the end of this clip?...

So, have a think about what makes you laugh and we'll see next lesson if it's the same as the ancient Greeks. See you all in two weeks (next week's an INSET).