Latin Workout:Get a Head Start on Next Year

What You Will Learn

Latin rewards consistent, attentive engagement—and summer is a good time to build the confidence and fluency that makes the school year manageable. Sessions are a genuine scholarly encounter with the language: you read closely, you translate, and together we work out what the text means and what its authors were doing.

• Grammar consolidation—Noun declensions, verb conjugations, and the syntactic patterns that unlock Latin sentences
• Translation of original texts—Reading Caesar, Cicero, Vergil, Ovid, and others in the original Latin
• AP Latin preparation—Caesar’s Gallic War and Vergil’s Aeneid; reading, sight translation, and essay strategies
• Vocabulary in context—Building Latin vocabulary through reading, not flashcards
• Syntax and word order—How Latin constructs meaning across a sentence and a paragraph
• Author interpretation—What Caesar is doing rhetorically; what Vergil is doing poetically
• Prose composition—For students who need to write as well as read in Latin
• Medieval and ecclesiastical Latin—For students in religious studies, history, or advanced coursework

How Sessions Work

Steven often opens a session by asking you to teach him some Latin—a move that surfaces what you know, exposes what you don’t, and makes the material feel immediately more manageable. From there, you read aloud; he corrects in real time; and together you work out what the text means—not just the words, but what the author was doing and why.

One former student put it this way: “Reading Latin has gone from being an unbearable torture to a tolerable, and even sometimes enjoyable, task. Steven adds his intellectual sense of humor to transform the subject into a more interesting and fun pursuit.”

About Your Instructor

Steven B. Killion holds a PhD in Medieval Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill, with a specialization in classical and medieval Latin. His doctoral dissertation traced the transmission of Bede’s scholarship through Irish Carolingian schools via Hiberno-Latin glosses—work requiring extensive original reading in Latin across a millennium of texts. He has tutored AP Latin students, college students, and graduate researchers for decades. Steven teaches every session personally.