TEP’s curriculum deliberately does not offer students a variety of choices; all students at all grade levels take Latin and Music. TEP believes that middle school students are, in large measure, learning how to learn and that students most effectively develop their capacity as successful learners when exposed to depth within a discipline.

Learning Music and Latin for 4 years enables students to go beyond a cursory survey of the subject matter (as would be the case if students chose two different “electives” each year) and to become masters of advanced content. Moreover, this curricular emphasis on depth over breadth helps students become self-disciplined learners since developing advanced skills and content knowledge (e.g. performing a complex musical piece or translating a Latin poem) requires a high-level of persistence and endurance as well as a particular attentiveness to detail.

Why Latin & Music?

The study of Latin and Music highlights TEP’s intensive focus on language development.

Educational research has demonstrated that the study of Latin has strong positive effects on student reading ability, vocabulary development, and grammatical facility in both English and Spanish. In 2006, in addition to outperforming students of all other foreign languages on the Critical Reading and Writing sections of the SAT Reasoning Test, Latin students achieved a mean Critical Reading score that was 68 points higher than the national average and a mean Writing score that was 51 points higher than the national average.

TEP’s music program – four years of classes in music literacy, performance, and history – is the other programmatic component related to the school’s emphasis on language development. Numerous research studies have documented the powerful link between the study of music and linguistic development in young children and adolescents. In 2006, the mean scores on all 3 sections of the SAT Reasoning Test (Critical Reading, Mathematics, and Writing) of students who studied music were between 41 and 61 points higher than students who did not have any art instruction, with the most significant differences in the reading and writing scores. With the exception of those studying acting, students who studied music also scored higher than students taking any other type of arts course.