Grammar Latin

Stage I · High School

By high school, I teach Latin the way it's been taught to serious students for close to two centuries: grammar first, real Latin from the first session, no narrative scaffolding between your child and the rule. The grammar-translation method took its present form in the Prussian secondary schools of the early 1800s, then spread across European and American classrooms and dominated language instruction for roughly a hundred years before anything else seriously challenged it. It fell out of fashion for teaching living languages decades ago. It never left Latin, for a simple reason: with no native speakers left to talk to, the actual goal was always to read the language well, and nothing trains that faster than confronting the grammar directly. The underlying course is an established one; the pace, the structure, and the rigor around it are mine.

How the Course Is Built

Grammar Latin runs four terms, moving through forty chapters of grammar in sequence. Each term completes a coherent stage of the language before the next begins. By the end, a student has covered the complete grammatical and syntactic system of classical Latin: every declension, every tense and mood, the constructions that make real Latin prose readable rather than merely decodable. The material itself is college-level Latin coursework, not a simplified high-school adaptation of it.

How a Session Runs

Every class opens with an oral round in the tradition of academic certamen. I question each student in turn on morphology, vocabulary, and grammar, the oldest form of Latin instruction there is. The center of the class is mastering the grammar or syntax principle under study and applying it directly to real sentences. The first half of the session works through that principle at an approachable level. The second half moves to authentic Latin sentences, drawn from famous Roman and medieval authors, not sentences invented to illustrate a rule. This begins on the very first day of the course: a student works with real Latin from chapter one, rather than waiting until the grammar is finished first. Between sessions, expect roughly four hours of preparation. If something in that preparation is not landing, a student is not simply left to wait until the next class. I record a short video made for that specific question, walking through the point directly. I have done this for years now, and it has made a real difference for the students who use it.

On Pace

We meet once a week, for two hours. A typical school meets five times a week. Even so, Emerson Latin students move through the material faster than a standard school course, boarding schools included. Speed, or celeritas, has been a hallmark of how I teach since the beginning, and two focused hours arranged around a single coherent method covers more ground than five shorter, more scattered ones.

Where This Leads

Every session, from the first chapter to the last, is taught with the AP Latin examination already in view, alongside the IB Latin examination and the British A-Level, since the grammatical foundation these all require is the same one. A student who completes all four terms moves on to Stage II, Latin Literature, and, after at least two literature courses, to AP Latin Prose and Poetry with the precision that exam actually requires: not introduced to the grammar, but finished with it. Separate contest-prep courses run in the weeks before each competition, building directly on what is learned here.

On Credit and Standing

Emerson Latin operates on the Carnegie Unit standard used across American secondary education, and is a registered chapter sponsor of the National Latin Honor Society through the American Classical League. I am also pursuing accreditation with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). To date, every student who has needed to transfer high school credit for a course taken here has received it, based on our syllabus and transcript, at international schools across the Pacific.

One Honest Note

This is the most direct route I offer, and it asks more of a student up front than Natural Latin or Oxford Latin do: no story to ease into, just the grammar, from day one. I choose it at this age because that directness is usually the faster path, not the harder one.