Teaching history between tradition and innovation

During the late Roman Empire a teacher, whose name was Probus, made a compilation of the most common grammar mistakes made by his students. Next to every mistake, he put his correction, like: "Columna, non Colomna"...

 

Sometimes, the grammatical forms that he marked as wrong were in fact precursors of the modern Italian language. For an Italian speaker is remarkable the overwhelming charge of innovation hidden between the 'wrong' grammatical forms indicted by Probus.

 

Despite this fact we found in him a clear example of what a teacher is: a person informed about a discipline who is leading his students in their personal route to knowledge.

 

The example of Probus show us that teaching has never been a simple job: a teacher is a person who is doing his best, for the best of his students, facing both tradition and innovation.

 

This is the starting point of our reflection: history is so beautiful that we can't avoid telling it, but how can we do it in the best way in a context that evolves in such fast way? We should search a way to innovate our methods...

Columna, Colomna or Colonna?

Finally, between the several examples presented by the Appendix Probi, we decided to use the word Colomna. This happened because the most of us lives in a small town of Celtic or Etrurian origins, in which the tracks of Roman colonization are still remarkable,  and one of them is exactly a "Roman Columna"...

 

Now this archaeological evidence is the symbol of our town, and a local tradition requires the major of the village, after the election, to swear his loyalty to the citizens holding his arms around the column. So, Columna, Colonna? Or definitively Colomna?

Our column
Our column