 I am Driz De Krom and I am a teacher of classical languages at TST. Classical languages, that means Latin and Ancient Greek. So my courses are a bit peculiar because they are essentially language courses, but of course Latin and Ancient Greek are dead languages. They are not spoken by anyone alive at this time. In my courses I try to give students the knowledge and the skills and the confidence they need to read Latin and Greek texts on their own. I think that being able to read texts in dead languages, Latin, Ancient Greek, but other ancient languages as well, is a very important skill to have in the 21st century and also a very healthy skill to have. Because I like to think of reading, for example, in ancient Latin texts, as slow reading. So it requires you to really dive into the texts, sometimes interpret word for word because it isn't always immediately clear what the author means or how to interpret the text. And that basically goes against the current that we are currently living in of consuming texts really fast, of consuming images and data really fast. When it comes to teaching, I like to think that there are two fundamental rules. The first one, also the easiest one, is that you have to be an absolute expert in the subject you are teaching. I think that goes without saying. The second one is, and this might sound a bit exaggerated, but the second one is that you love your students unconditionally. And for me, that means that you respect your students, you give each of them the respect he or she deserves and that you will do everything in your power to help your students succeed. And all the rest follows from there. Teaching classical languages in the 21st century is very much about living in two worlds at the same time because the tools I use range from medieval manuscripts to knowledge clips, from ancient papyrus texts to online quizzes, searchable databases, specific language software and so on. Before I started working at Tilburg University, I had been teaching for several years already in high school. So I had been teaching teenagers and then moved on to adult students. The interesting thing is that I found out that the secret of effective teaching, effective in the sense of making your students succeed, is the same, no matter at what level you are teaching. So there's a few basic ground rules that I tend to follow. The first of them is making the goals of a lesson, of a course, very clear for your students so that the students know where they ought to arrive in order to be successful. And then of course you have to help your students attain those goals by very clear instructions, by activating students as best as you can, by giving tons and tons of feedback, by repetition, by letting different concepts, bits of knowledge repeat themselves throughout the course. And last but not least, by cooperation. I think teaching is very much, well learning is very much a cooperative effort between students but also between a teacher and a student.