Rapping with Miss Ho-Jo (in Latin)

After school, 27 girls from an inner-city comprehensive stay behind voluntarily to study Latin. Sam Leith sits in on Eugenie Howard-Johnston's remarkable GCSE class to see how she inspires them

• To hear Eugenie interviewed - and reading her Latin rap - listen to today's Telegraph podcast.

'Miss!" says the girl three-quarters of the way towards the back of the class, hand shooting skyward and excitement filling her voice. "I know what a demonstrative pronoun is!" She is, maybe, 14 years old.

"Then you're a superstar," replies her teacher, without missing a beat.

Now, that is not an exchange you expect to hear every day. It is an exchange you'd expect still less to hear - given what we read more or less daily in newspapers about the lead-helicopter trajectory of state education - in the classroom of an inner-city comprehensive. Still less, even, when you consider that it takes place in an entirely voluntary, 27-strong after-school class of 12- to 16-year-olds.

And less, even then, when you consider that the subject in hand is Latin. I could go on.

"Miss" is Eugenie Howard-Johnston, a pretty 24-year-old woman who could easily be mistaken for a sixth-former in her own school. She doesn't look much like a Latin master - at least not to those of us with the dubious privilege of having schlepped through Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer and A Path to Latin (frontispiece, invariably, altered to read "A Bath Before Eating") in the mouse-infested classrooms of our ancient public schools.

There is no squeak of chalk on blackboard; no whistle of wooden board-rubber through the air; none of the sepulchral silence that, in my memory, followed the mistaken application of a supine.

And although there are no official figures on the subject, it is a fair bet that Eugenie Howard-Johnston's twice-weekly, after-school Latin class is the biggest of its kind in the country. It aims to take pupils from a standing start to GCSE in two years.

Some things, here in St Saviour's and St Olave's school in Elephant and Castle, south London, will be familiar to anybody who has been through the education system in the past 20 years. There are lockers, strip lights and pinboards, and the walls are constructed of custard-coloured breeze blocks. But the whiteboard appears to be Windows-compatible and the lesson is delivered with the help of a PowerPoint presentation.

St Saviour's and St Olave's, an all-girl Christian school founded in 1571, is far from being a sink comprehensive. But it is not the sort of school at which you'd most obviously expect to witness a revival of the classics. For almost 40 per cent of the pupils, English is a second language and 35 per cent qualify for free school meals.

It was here that the Prime Minister chose to launch his 2001 election campaign - posing memorably in his shirt-sleeves in front of a stained-glass window and taking the opportunity to warn his bemused teenage audience of the perils of the bad old days of boom and bust.

The warm glow left by the Prime Minister's visit has cooled. A few days before I visited St Saviour's and St Olave's, the higher education minister, Bill Rammell, said that the decline in university applications to read classics was "no bad thing". In that, he no more than echoed Charles Clarke, who in 2003 said that he would be little concerned were the study of classics to go the way of all flesh.

The Government, perhaps remembering the established verse formula of the discontented pupil - "Latin is a dead language, as dead as dead can be. It killed off all the Romans and now it's killing me" - has come to bury Latin, not to praise it.

According to Peter Jones, of Friends of the Classics, only 10,000 children a year take GCSE Latin, of which 85 per cent are from private schools. "If this lady is teaching a Latin class that big, in a comprehensive, she's doing very well indeed," he says. He describes the situation at GCSE level, nationwide, as "stable, if not encouraging".

The lookout for Latin at primary-school level, however, has been given an enormous fillip by the Minimus books, following the adventure of a Latin-speaking mouse. Seventy thousand copies have been sold and, Jones estimates, "as many as one in 10 primary schools may be teaching some Latin".

"In 1973, there was a serious survey done in Indianapolis on the effects of teaching Latin on 400 sixth-grade children in six schools," he says. "After five months of Latin, they discovered that the children had advanced eight months in word knowledge, one year in reading, one year and one month in language, seven months in maths, nine months in problem-solving… These are only the most dramatic results, but they show what can be achieved."

Howard-Johnston's methods are determinedly 21st century. She encourages her pupils to rap in Latin, sends them on Latin treasure hunts, and even writes a blog (www.missminerva.blogspot.com). In the poem above, you can see the sort of streetwise, mishmashed Latin/English with which she seeks to liven up the language for those pupils more open-minded than, say, the minister for higher education.

The blackboard monitor is designated "Chicka Maxima". Big, yellow, handwritten cards have been issued to lucky students, with words on them such as "Nihil", "Etiam", "Quamquam" and "Nunc". The one marked "Sed" has on the obverse the word "But". This is illustrated by a crude cartoon of a lady's rear view. "Maybe a smaller butt…" muses Miss.

"You have to accentuate the curves," pipes up a pupil.

O tempora, thinks your reporter. O mores…

At one point, Miss Howard-Johnston makes a Delphic reference to "Grammaticus Maximus". "Who's he?" I hiss at the nearest available pupil. "That's her boyfriend," she says.

Grammaticus Maximus was in fact a suggestion box, adorned with a photograph of Brad Pitt in the film Troy. But then he disappeared, presumed to have been stolen by a member of the class who took a dim view of Brad's charms. "Gone to a better place" is how one class member, not naming names, explains his disappearance. He wasn't popular.

"Bow-Wow" is the replacement Miss Howard-Johnston suggested as a compromise candidate, referring to a rap star. "Isn't he called L'il Bow-Wow?" I ask, hoping to appear streetwise.

"He's just Bow-Wow now," says Miss. O tempora, I think again…

The class I sit in on kicks off with the naming of parts. The pupils take it in turns to assume the role of the "Goddess of Interpretation" - each one reciting the principal parts of a given verb in a given verbal style. So, we catch a whole class chiming in to deliver interficio (I kill) in the manner of "an Irish pigeon" and ruo (I rush) in the manner of a "happy rhino".

"Sad whale", "angry warthog", "frustrated management consultant" and "Australian beekeeper" also feature. And who could resist a smirk on hearing vulnero (I wound) delivered by a classload of young teenagers of all races in the imagined voice of "the President of the United States"?

"I never - never - wanted to be a teacher," says Howard-Johnston. "I think I teach the way I do now because I hated it so much when I was at school."

There seems to be a structural rigour to her technique, though. Instead of rote learning, she borrows techniques from modern-language teaching and applies them to Latin. The girls are encouraged to see grammar as "like a detective story or a jigsaw puzzle".

"What does traho go like?" asks Miss at one point. A hand shoots up. "Traho, Miss." Miss presses a button. The whiteboard, thanks to PowerPoint, flashes: "Duh!"

There are giggles. Miss's methods seem to work. There is a lot of muttered backchat going on, but most of it, as far as I can hear, seems to be about the vocabulary lists on the side of the girls' copies of The Cambridge Latin Course.

The girls I speak to seem genuinely keen on the whole project. Thirteen-year-old Ayomide laughs: "My dad says: 'That's a dead language. It's no use. I don't know why you learn it.' " She pays her dad no heed. "Translating and acting," she says, "helps the language go in. You understand it more."

Jess, also 13, says she started doing Latin "to help my German", but that she is now considering dropping German and keeping on with Latin.

The end of the lesson consists of the girls dividing into groups and acting out, with much hamminess, a brief dramatic scene they have just translated as a class.

A few weeks ago, Howard-Johnston took the girls on a trip to Oxford, where they heard and, by all accounts, enjoyed an undergraduate-level lecture by a distinguished academic on the role of women in ancient Greece; poked around the Ashmolean museum's collection of vases; and went wild for Keble College, where they had lunch, on the grounds that its dining hall looked remarkably like the one in the Harry Potter films. There are now plans for a four-day trip to Rome in July, which she hopes could be achievable for £150 per child, given the right subsidies.

It was through a programme called Teach First - designed to bring bright university graduates into the system as teachers - that Howard-Johnston first arrived at the school, where she also teaches English and Media Studies (despite having given up English after GCSE). Latin, in fact, is the academic area in which she feels most at home as a teacher, although, by her final year at university, she came close to loathing the subject after so many years of study.

Having been through Cheltenham Ladies' College, read classics at New College, Oxford, and being in possession of an inescapably double-barrelled name, she was initially nervous. She had been given no more than six weeks' teacher-training and had memories of being bashed up in Cheltenham as a teenager for being a "posh cow".

In the event, she says, the double-barrel fitted in fine. "So many of the girls have double-barrelled names, for other reasons, such as their parents are divorced and they've taken both names. It's not an issue at all. I just get called 'Miss H-J' or 'Ho-Jo'."

Ho-Jo or no, establishing discipline from the outset was a priority. For the first class she taught, she wrote a "classroom contract" - "Item three: keep my hands, feet and negative comments to myself" - and asked all the pupils to sign it. As she describes it, the moment before the first girl consented was one of stomach-churning panic.

But once the first put pen to paper, the others followed. She earned further kudos on a school trip to Devon. During a karaoke night, the equipment broke down and she filled in with an a cappella rap of Boom! Shake the Room! Her performance in a local disco cemented her reputation as "Miss Maniac-Dancer". At any rate, the girls seem to have decided that she is cool.

Certainly, she is now hip to more than Li'l Bow-Wow growing up. Most of us know the "W" mime for "What-ev-err", but she can, with impressively fluent hand gestures, signal: "Whatever. Your Mum Works In McDonald's For Minimum Wage." Not to mention a standard deprecation to do with the interlocutor's mum being listed on Ebay and still not having been sold.

Not long ago, she asked a pupil what she had given her boyfriend for his birthday and was told: "a bottle of shower gel and £20."

"Twenty pounds?"

"He's saving up for a bullet-proof vest, Miss."

Latin, you almost start to feel, might work as - well - a lingua franca.

In the pub, after the school day is over, Howard-Johnston settles down - somewhat intimidatingly - to give me a quick Latin lesson of my own. She presents me with two envelopes. One bears a two-line poem by Catullus, each word of which is on a separate card. The other contains the same poem in English. My job, with the help of a sheet of clues, is to assemble the poem.

Hmm. Pink seems to be verbs. Yellow looks like conjunctions. I start to shuffle the contents of the Latin envelope around first, without reference to the English.

"Ah," she says. "You're doing what's called 'self-differentiation' by ability: making the puzzle harder for yourself." Trying to show off, I think she means.

In truth, there's no reason for me to be at all "self-differentiating" about it and I'm resorting to the English faster than you can say ad hoc. All the Latin I can remember, I admit fuddy-duddily, apart from maybe four consecutive words of Virgil, is how to run through second-declension nouns ridiculously quickly.

"Blumblumblibloblo," says Howard-Johnston, as if competing for that instant on It's a Latin Knockout. "Blablablorumblisblis."

You can hear Eugenie interviewed - and reading her Latin rap - on today's Telegraph podcast, or go to podcast.telegraph.co.uk