About

Story listening activity

Salve!

My name’s Jacob, and I’m currently doing my best to make it through senior year of high school. I’m a Latin enthusiast who does voice acting on the side, which hopefully explains how this project came to be. The main goal of this project is of course to make Latin material more accessible to auditory learners but just as important is the notion that translating and memorizing grammar aren’t the only ways to learn Latin, nor should they be. I hope this blog/website can serve as both an application and documentation of our progress toward these goals. I’m passionate about learning about different ways we can teach languages and questioning whether the way Latin is taught to students today supports or sheds the notion that the Classics are an elitist field.

My experiences:
I currently teach a group of middle schoolers who are just starting out Latin, and it’s been a blast trying out new Comprehensible Input-inspired activities like those featured on Keith Toda’s blog (Toda-lly Comprehensible Latin - in fact, the picture behind the header of this page is one of his activities where the instructor tells a story in Latin while drawing it out to explain the new vocabulary. Really epic stuff) as developing new ones to fit the needs of our classroom.

I serve as the Georgia Junior Classical League’s (https://www.gjcl.org/) 1st Vice President, where I work on getting us out there in terms of publicity and outreach. If you have no idea what the GJCL is, shoot me an email! I’d love to help you get started or even have a zoom call about what we do.

This is my 7th year learning Latin, and I hope to become a Latin teacher for at least a couple of years of my life despite all of the warnings I've received about how difficult it is to thrive. This might be a pipe dream, but I hope we can work together to reverse the trend of obscurity that Latin as a field is currently on by doing whatever we can to adapt to modern times and modern students.

e corde,
Cantatus
jacobsungx1@gmail.com