Academy
An academy that began with one student
In 2015, in Apgujeong, Seoul, a teacher named John Cho took on a single student: a boy from Chadwick School who wanted to learn Latin, for the SAT and for the medals he hoped to win in Latin contests. He won his medals. Every student since has been taught by the same teacher.
What became of the first student
His father soon asked for more than Latin. With his teacher’s help, the boy applied to summer programs while still in high school, was admitted to every one, and attended them all: at Stanford, Yale, Duke, Johns Hopkins, and Princeton, and one summer in Rome, reading Latin for college credit. When the time came, his father asked the same teacher to help with the college essays.
He applied to twenty-five colleges. He was admitted to twenty-three, among them Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Brown, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, Northwestern, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, and was placed on the waitlist at the other two, Harvard and Dartmouth. He chose Stanford.
Latin did not get him in. He did. But we have never forgotten whose story the academy began with.
That student was the first of many. The small Latin tutorial in Apgujeong was the beginning of Emerson Academy, which soon had courses for every age from the fifth grade to the twelfth. Families heard about it the way families in Seoul hear about anything worth hearing about: from one another. Students began arriving from international schools across Korea, and then from boarding schools in the United States and Britain during their holidays, and then from cities on nearly every continent.
In 2023, the academy moved online entirely and became Emerson Latin LLC, registered in Texas. It has no lobby and no bell. What it has kept is the thing families came for in the first place: one teacher, who knows every student by name, teaching every class himself.
- FoundedSeoul, 2015
- Online since2023, as Emerson Latin LLC
- StudentsGrades 5 to 12
- TeachersOne, for every class
- CoursesLatin, Stages I to IV; Humane Letters
- ClassesLive on Zoom, in English
Why one teacher
A growing academy usually hires. Emerson Latin has not, and the reason is not modesty. When one person teaches a student from her first Latin sentence to the AP exam, nothing is lost between teachers, because there are none. Every weakness noticed in the fifth grade is still remembered in the ninth. Every course is built to lead into the next, because the person who built it will be the one teaching the next.
It is also a plain guarantee. A family that meets the teacher in a fifteen-minute conversation is meeting the person who will actually teach their child, not a director who will hand them on to someone else.
The limit is time, and we say so plainly: a single teacher can teach only so many classes a week. That is why every class is recorded, and why we would sometimes rather a student wait a term than join a class that does not suit her.
The teacher
John Cho teaches under the name Ioannes Magister. He began Latin at twelve, at a Catholic seminary in New Hampshire, the Immaculate Conception Apostolic School, and later the College of Humanities in Connecticut, where Latin was the language of prayer, of song, and of argument. He went on to study Classics, Philosophy, and Literature at California State University, Long Beach, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, and the Golden Key International Honour Society. Before he founded the academy, he taught English literature and writing in Seocho and Daechi. More about the Magister →
What happens here every time
Some schools have traditions on paper. A small academy has to keep its traditions in practice, every week, or they are not traditions at all. These are the ones we keep:
- Every class opens with a certamen, a quick round of questions on the last lesson, the way Latin contests have been run for generations. Why?
- Every class is recorded and posted to the student’s Google Classroom.
- The year runs in five named terms: Fall, Winter, Spring, Trinity, and Summer. Why Trinity?
- Every evening at 10 PM Korea time, one Latin sentence, parsed word by word, is posted for anyone to read.
- Students are honored by name in Commendations, for contest results, and in Laurels, for milestones of their own.
- Every term ends with a report card, and every Humane Letters Volume with the Collections, a written letter on the student’s work.
- Humane Letters students are admitted by a Viva, a conversation about a poem, and are called Emerson Fellows.
We promise only what we can keep, and we keep what we promise.
The record
Results are not the reason to study Latin. But a parent is entitled to know whether an academy’s students do well. Every result is recorded, with the student’s permission, as it comes in.
Our students have gone on to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, and Dartmouth; to liberal arts colleges such as Amherst, Williams, and Pomona; and in Britain to Oxford, Edinburgh, Imperial College, and the London School of Economics. We do not claim the credit; they earned their places. We do notice that students who learn to read a Latin sentence properly tend to do well wherever they go next. The schools and universities →
A teacher, in an age of machines
A machine can now explain a declension at two in the morning, and do it well. What it cannot do is know a student for six years, notice the week she stops trying, ask her to defend her translation out loud, and answer for the result in May. That is the work of a teacher, and it is the work this academy was built to do. Latin in the age of AI →
Standing
- Emerson Latin LLC is a limited liability company organized in Texas.
- The AP Latin syllabus has been authorized by the College Board through its AP Course Audit.
- Emerson Latin is a registered chapter sponsor of the National Latin Honor Society through the American Classical League, of which its founder has been a member since 2019.
- Courses follow the Carnegie Unit standard of American secondary schools, and students who have needed credit transferred to their schools have received it. Accreditation with WASC is in progress.
Why the name
Ralph Waldo Emerson is remembered as the philosopher of self-reliance. Fewer people remember that he entered Boston Latin School at nine and Harvard at fourteen, and that he never disowned the training. “It is better to teach the child arithmetic and Latin grammar than rhetoric or moral philosophy,” he wrote, “because they require exactitude of performance.” And elsewhere, in the sentence this academy is built around: “The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.” Why Emerson Latin bears its name →
If someone asks you about us
“It’s a small online Latin academy. The founder learned Latin at twelve, in a seminary where it was part of daily life, and he teaches every class himself. Every class starts with a quick Latin quiz game. They read Cicero and Vergil, not worksheets, and his students do well on the AP exam and in the international contests.”