I was practising natural medicine up to 2010 when my father happened to need help with his Latin teaching, which he was doing over the internet.
Although having not experienced when at school the traditional, systematic way that my father was using with such extraordinary success in terms of results, I quickly saw the dramatic difference between this teaching and the modern teaching I had experienced, and had no difficulty in picking up quickly what I must call “real teaching”, and witnessing its effectiveness for myself.
I then switched careers completely, and teaching became my full-time profession. And not long afterwards, we started up GwynneTeaching and have built up a small but powerful group of teachers who all teach according to the traditional method that works. Some were actually our pupils.
That was fifteen years ago, and now I love teaching more than ever. I can claim wide experience, since I have been teaching people from all ages, from three year olds to “seniors”, with pupils in places all over the United States and Mexico, The West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, Italy, Ireland, and … even the U.K.! I use different textbooks depending on the age, needs and goals of pupils, but also make up many of my own sentences for illustrating something, and with these I aim to make pupils smile!
My teaching media have been mainly the Internet but also formal classrooms as in the Idler Academy in London, where I have given courses of six or eight weeks in both Latin and in English Grammar.
I have also been invited to visit schools in England and America where I demonstrated traditional teaching in action.
To see how people have gained from my teaching, my testimonials are perhaps the best evidence, and I hope you will look at these.
Even more vivid may be a rather typical piece of anecdotal evidence. I gave a fairly testing English sentence to translate into Latin to a student of mine aged twelve whom I had been teaching Latin for two years. He took twenty minutes over it, and got it completely right. That very same sentence had been given earlier to an eighteen-year-old who had just got an A* in his Latin A-level and was about to go to Cambridge to read Classics there. He made no fewer than twelve mistakes. Yes, twelve. Nothing could show up more clearly the difference in effectiveness between the traditional tried-and-tested teaching and even the best of the modern ones, or for that matter, the extent to which the collapse of the learning caused by the modern methods is disguised by the system of marking in present-day exams.
Pupils’ and parents’ testimonials about my teaching methods and results can be seen HERE.