It was a wonderful day at the Joint Association of Classical Teachers' annual Conference in the British Museum, where Boris Johnson congratulated the winners of the CICERO competition. The winner of the whole competition was from this country this year! Ben Slingo from Bedford School was the outright winner of the cultural section on Hercules so the tie-breaker question did not have to be used and he was also the winner of the Upper 6 translation test in the UK Please send this information to Dr. Federico. I think he would approve of the subject of the Latin translation - a passage where Cicero is examining the reasons why human beings live in communities rather than in isolation from each other, and wondering how the concept of citizenship affects a person's ideas of right and wrong.
Photographs 1. Boris is holding the list of CICERO winners.
2. Professor Thomas Harrison, Chair of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers 3.Anna Bayraktar, Administrator of JACT whose encouragement and support over advertising helped CICERO to get off the ground in the first place last year, and Judith Affleck, the Director of the Conference.
Boris gave an excellent speech in which he paid tribute to all the work done by so many dedicated Classics teachers around the country. He said it was a disgrace that while there are 70 Classics teachers retiring each year there are only 30 places for training each year. He said that Classics, far from being an elitist subject, was something which all schoolchildren should have the opportunity to learn and as far as he was concerned, one Classics lesson was more use than ten Citizenship lessons - the theme of the JACT conference was 'Citizenship'. He pointed out that the people of London had chosen a Classicist as their Mayor! The Minimus course means that more primary school children are learning Latin and the Cambridge School Classics Project has an initiative (which MSJ has been heavily involved in) to help state schools to offer Latin even if they have no Classics specialist.
Thank you so much for your continuing support,
from Anne
Anne Dicks
Pyrrha's Roman Pages website pyrrha.me.uk
CICERO Latin competition website ciceroeuropa.eu
Suki's own website pyrrha.demon.co.uk/suki.html
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