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salve Reader! Many students get a surprise result in January. Perhaps your mocks didn't go as expected, or perhaps your efforts have paid off with an Oxford offer (sorry if you applied to Cambridge: there are still 8 days to go!). Janus, god of transitions, doorways and January I see both sides of this January coin. One day, I receive an email from a student with an offer to read Classics at Jesus College (btw, well done if you are reading!), the next I get a call from a parent who did not...
salve Reader! After a rather eventful 2025 (photos at the bottom of this email), 2026 promises to be as Roman as ever – hence calling it 2779, which is what it would have been for the Romans. Note: Romans counted ab urbe condita, from "the foundation of the city", so the counting starts 753 years before the birth of Christ. I have been finalising courses, trips and publications (yay!) for this year, so this is email is short a quick selection of notices to keep you updated. Courses: My Latin...
salve Reader! Today I was working on some new resources, and a fun discussion I had with a student last year came to mind. It went like this: We were joking about looking up easy words in the vocab list due to lack of confidence, and as an example he mentioned aut ('or'). When I told him that that would indeed be quite unlucky, as the word is not in the OCR vocabulary list for GCSE, he just would not believe it and ended up, ironically, looking it up. Surprise: OCR does not require aut (as in...