Hurrah! An English secondary school has got into the local paper for its Latin, the way American schools seem to do all the time.

This is from the Beverley Guardian

Latin alive and well at Longcroft

STUDENTS at Beverley’s Longcroft School and Performing Arts College have been proving that Latin - often referred to as a dead language - is still very much alive.
Over the past year English teacher Ruth Beckett has been running a popular Latin Club, in which students learn not just about the language itself, but also the culture and history behind it.

To mark the club’s success, Will Griffiths, director of the Cambridge School Classics Project, visited Longcroft earlier this month to see at first-hand the progress students had made.

He presented prizes to Ben Cooper, Benedict Stanforth-Sharpe and Sam Hutchinson for their work in Latin during the academic year.

Perhaps this one really will happen.

From Variety

Brit helmer John Boorman is reviving his long-mooted project about the life of Roman Emperor Hadrian, most famous in Blighty for building the eponymous wall that separated England and Scotland.

U.K.-based Handmade Films has boarded the $50 million-$60 million project and will be fully financing “Hadrian.” Rome-based Olympus Films will co-produce.

Boorman, as well as Handmade chairman Patrick Meehan and Olympus topper Enzo Peri, who acquired the rights to Marguerite Yourcenar’s bestselling novel “Memoirs of Hadrian,” are casting the lead role.

Boorman is co-writing the script along with frequent collaborator Rospo Pallenberg, who previously worked with the helmer on King Arthur epic “Excalibur” and “The Emerald Forest.”

Principal photography is set to start next spring in Morocco, Rome and Spain.

The resurrection of the project coincides with the British Museum’s blockbusting Hadrian exhibition, dubbed “Empire and Conflict,” which looks at the period from 117 to 138 A.D. when Hadrian ruled over a Roman empire that spanned much of Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East.

“The project says so much about the nature of empire, leadership and human aspiration,” Boorman told Daily Variety. “The time of Hadrian marked both the height of the Roman empire and the beginning of its decline. It’s the irony of his rule.”

Handmade Films Intl. will be handling worldwide sales on “Hadrian.”

As an alternative to the commercial Quia, teachers might like to try out Quizlet.

There are many Latin quizzes and tests already there, and by free registration (they promise they will send no spam to those who register) you can make your own.

From a quick look at the forum section, I conclude that it’s chiefly students who use that facility, but I imagine the tests are all devised by techers.

The video diary is here. (4m. 10s.)

On Thursday Will Griffiths and friends led 3 sessions on using IT in Latin teaching. There’s a glimpse of the course group photo, and a mention of the AGM, and of Dr Mark Bradley’s lecture on Colour and Meaning in Ancient Sculpture. There’s a bit of an explanation of the entertainment to be held on Friday evening.

The video diary is here (5m.37s.)
It includes a fairly full report of Tom Harrison on [modern scholarly trends on] Herodotus, with shorter mentions of Dr. Kathryn on Cicero and Wilf O’Neill on Classical motifs in the modern world. The trip to Lincoln is mentioned, but will have its own slide show on line soon.

The video diary is here. (4m. 34s.)

It covers the Tuesday. There are comments on breakfast-time behaviour, another Option Group, coffee time underneath the colonnade, Dr Kathryn Tempest on Cicero’s first Catiline, and Ashley Carter on the new A level syllabus in Latin. There is a brief excerpt from a choir rehearsal.