Admissions / Common Doubts / I of XI

Can an online class really hold my child’s attention?

The short answer: Yes, because the class is not a lecture. For most of every two-hour class, your child is answering, not watching.

The worry is reasonable, and most parents who have it are thinking of a particular kind of online class: a teacher talking, a grid of small faces, a child quietly opening another tab. That class cannot hold anyone’s attention. It is a lecture with worse sound.

Our classes are built the other way around. Each one opens with a certamen, a quick round of questions in which any student may be called on next. Children who know they might be asked something in the next thirty seconds do not open another tab. From there, a new point of grammar is explained as briefly as it can be, and the rest of the class belongs to the students: reading aloud, translating, answering questions, defending an answer, arguing in a short Socratic seminar about what the Romans meant. In the younger classes, the questions are asked in Latin and answered in Latin.

A screen also has advantages a classroom does not. There is no back row. Every student is the same distance from the teacher. A shy student who would hide behind a taller classmate cannot hide on Zoom, and often discovers that she did not want to.

Parents are sometimes surprised by who adapts fastest. It is usually the youngest children, not the oldest. A ten-year-old who is asked a question every few minutes finds that two hours go quickly. Every class lasts two hours, once a week.

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