Teach Latin online in English

Latin is a language almost nobody learns to speak, and one people meet everywhere. It is in the names of muscles and bones, in the maxims lawyers still quote, and on the periodic table, where Fe stands for ferrum and Au for aurum. Students come to it to read Virgil and Cicero, to make sense of a medieval charter or a parish register, or to follow the Latin of their own profession.

What makes Latin hard for an English speaker is the thing that makes it Latin. English shows who did what mostly through word order, so “the dog bites the man” and “the man bites the dog” are different stories. Latin does it with endings. Canis virum mordet and virum canis mordet say the same thing, and a learner has to stop reading from left to right and start reading the ends of words. English keeps only a few traces of this, in pairs such as he and him or who and whom, and a good tutor builds on exactly those.

Why Clasora is looking for Latin tutors who teach in English

Clasora shows students the tutors who teach in the language they use the site in. Someone browsing Clasora in English is shown tutors who teach in English, so if you explain Latin in English, those are the learners who find you.

In Latin, the language of explanation carries much of the lesson. Nobody picks Latin up by immersion: the grammar is explained, and every passage is translated, sentence by sentence, into the student's own language. An ablative absolute such as urbe capta has to become “once the city had been taken” or “after taking the city”. A tutor who writes good English can show the difference between a version that is merely correct and one that reads well.

English also gives a learner a head start. A student who knows “portable”, “aquarium” and “dormitory” already has portare, aqua and dormire half learned. The same knowledge sets traps. Virtus means courage before it means virtue, and egregius is praise, while “egregious” has come to mean the opposite.

Clasora does not employ tutors, and this is an opening, not a job. You work independently: you set your own prices and your own hours, and you teach as much or as little as you like. Some tutors keep it to a few evenings a week as a side income. Others teach enough hours for it to stand in for a job.

What teaching Latin online on Clasora looks like

The opening is fully remote. Every lesson takes place online, and you teach from wherever you live.

Students book from your calendar. They only see the times you have marked as free, shown in their own time zone, so nobody has to work out a time difference. You decide how much notice you need before a booking and how far ahead people can book.

Lessons run in the browser, and neither of you installs anything. Latin suits a shared screen. Put a few lines of Caesar up and work through them together: underline the verbs, box the subject, give each subordinate clause its own colour, and link an adjective to the noun it agrees with three words later. Many tutors keep a shared document open in which the student types a translation and the tutor comments line by line. The in-call chat is handy for sending a form with its macrons, such as mālum (an apple) against malum (an evil), and background blur keeps your room out of the picture.

Between lessons, each student has a conversation with you. They can send the lines they translated at home, and you can return them corrected. Messages, files and shared links sit next to the sessions they belong to, so weeks later you can still find the sentence you took apart together. Your declension tables and annotated texts can live in your personal file area, and documents can come across from Google Drive. If you plan your week in Google Calendar, it can sync with your Clasora calendar.

What students usually want help with

Nouns and adjectives: the five declensions, the six cases and what each one does, including the many jobs of the ablative.

Verbs: the four conjugations, principal parts, the passive, and deponents such as loquor and sequor, which look passive and mean something active.

The subjunctive: purpose and result clauses with ut, cum clauses, indirect questions and the sequence of tenses.

Participles and infinitives: the ablative absolute, indirect statement, and gerunds and gerundives, as in Carthago delenda est.

Reading real texts: moving from adapted passages to Caesar, Cicero, Virgil and Ovid.

Prose composition: turning English into Latin, which shows up every gap in the grammar at once.

Verse: scanning hexameters and elegiac couplets, and reading poetry aloud in its rhythm.

Later Latin: the Vulgate, Augustine, Aquinas, medieval chronicles, and the Latin of Erasmus or Newton.

Latin for medicine: anatomical terms such as musculus biceps brachii, and why their endings change.

Latin for law, theology and the sciences: Roman law, maxims such as pacta sunt servanda, church texts, and binomial names such as Quercus robur.

Old documents: parish registers, deeds and manorial records, for family and local historians.

A test or an exam: unseen translation, vocabulary, and working to time.

Who we are looking for

You read Latin with confidence: you can parse any word in a sentence and say why it takes the form it does.

You explain clearly in English, and you can show a student how to work through a long sentence instead of guessing at it.

You are patient with endings. When a student still cannot tell a dative plural from an ablative plural, which look exactly alike, you find a new way in.

You might teach Latin already, hold a degree in classics, history or theology, be a classics student with a firm grasp of the language, or read Latin at work as an archivist.

You have a computer with a camera, a microphone and a steady internet connection.

You are 18 or older.

Teaching experience helps, but it is not required.

What you get

No commission. Clasora takes nothing from the price you set.

Free to join and to publish. There is no subscription and no listing fee.

Your own prices. You set a price for each session length, and you can offer a free first session.

Your own hours. You choose your weekly hours and your days off, the notice you need and how far ahead students can book.

A public listing page. Your listing is a page of its own that search engines can find, shown in the language each visitor reads, with your photo, an intro video, what you teach, the languages you speak and your price for each session length.

Reviews on what matters. Students rate you on knowledge, clarity and engagement.

Checked qualifications. You can add your degrees and teaching qualifications to your profile, and a moderator checks them.

Lessons in the browser. Video with screen sharing, background blur and in-call chat, and nothing for you or your students to install.

How to start

Create an account with the button on this page.

Publish a listing for Latin.

Open your calendar and mark the hours you are free.

It takes a few minutes. You accept the terms when you become a tutor, and a moderator checks your listing before it goes live.

Questions tutors ask

Do I need a degree in classics?

No. You need a sound command of Latin and the ability to explain it clearly in English. If you do hold a degree or a teaching qualification, add it to your profile and a moderator will check it.

Should I teach classical or church pronunciation?

Whichever you use. Students who only read and translate rarely mind, while students of theology often want the church pronunciation. Say in your listing which one you teach.

Can I teach only medical or legal Latin?

Yes. Your listing says what you teach, so you can offer the whole language or one area of it, such as anatomical terms, Roman law or old documents.

How do I get paid?

Card payments are not switched on yet. For now a booking is confirmed without a card, and you and the student settle payment directly between you. Clasora takes no commission on what you charge.