The Serbian Language and Literature

This subject has been taught since 1990, the moment this school became a philological grammar school. Since then, our students have attended separate literature and language classes. Each year students have two language and three literature classes per week. In each class students are divided into two groups, according to their level of knowledge. They can always be transferred into a more advanced group if their achievement qualifies them so.

In the first year, students attend a course in phonetics, the history of language and dialects. The curriculum in the second year stresses morphology, and in the third and fourth year it is syntax and lexicology that is studied in more detail. Students also attend a separate course in linguistics in their final year.

Students regularly take part in state organized competitions and they are among the best.

the student can also attend extracurricular lessons of the old slavonic language lead by our russian language teacher. Within the school development team, interdisciplinary courses have taken place. Currently we are planning to make a team with teachers from all of the departments and to realise the project "The Begining of Slavonic Literacy"

The English Language

There are seventeen English teachers altogether. English can be attended as the so-called first foreign language (five classes per week) or as the second foreign language (three classes per week). The language courses are designed according to the most recent methods in language acquisition, the seventeen English teachers are highly skilled and the course books used are those published by Oxford , Longman and Cambridge publishers.

Apart from the regular classes, students also take part in many projects. They have a classroom fully equipped with modern computer technology, which was donated to our school by the Open Society Foundation and the American Embassy in Belgrade .

There is also a drama club. It is called “The Elizabethan Hard-core Theatre” and they have put on two plays in the last three years – “The Wyrd Sisters” and “Little Shop of Horrors”.

The German Language

German is taught either as the first foreign language ( five classes a week) or as the second foreign language (three classes a week). The courses are taught by highly trained teachers who apply the most modern methods in language learning and the textbooks used are Blick, Moment mal and Unterwegs, by Hueber and Laugenscheidt.

The students can take part in various competitions and they are also thoroughly prepared for studying the German language at university.

There is also a German drama club. Our school has a students' exchange programme with a grammar school in Berlin , so the students have direct contact with this language.

The Russian Language

There are three teachers of the Russian language. The students can study it either as the first (five classes a week) or the second foreign language (with three classes a week).

Since 2004, it has been possible for groups of our students to spend the month of September in Moscow where they attend a special language course.

Classical Languages: Students' statements

Classical languages: Why? What? Who for?

Answers:

Languages. The Ancient Greeks and Romans were the forefathers of European culture. Great statesmen, brilliant thinkers, artists, writers, poets, heroes…We should all be proud of our European cultural heritage. Aren't the greatest works of contemporary art and literature inspired by the Hellenic culture? So, classical languages are not dead. We are here to keep them alive.

It is hard, but it is interesting to study classical languages. The teachers do their best to make it all inspiring.

Why? – The usual question. But then again, why not?

De gustibus non est disputandum.

The Model of Multi-frontal Teaching - Petar Savic's New School

The model of multi-frontal teaching by Petar Savic (1910-1993) is an attempt to base the entire teaching process on the foundations different from the ones in the traditional, frontal teaching, the aim is to remove the situations that cause students to be dissatisfied (tedious and tiring ex-catedra lectures, fear of sudden testing the knowledge, fear of poor marks) and put them in a situation where they bring their own decisions and are responsable for their work and its results. This sort of teaching does not include the usual lectures. Students study independently, using textbooks, encyclopaedias, other literature and listen to their friends read papers on various topics..

The teacher's role is to direct, assist, clarify and support the students' efforts. The students decide when they are ready to be tested, their obligation being to show knowledge in all the segments of a certain subject. There are twenty parts that they have to cover in a year. The students also propose what mark they want to have before the testing, and have the right to repeat it if the teacher thinks that it is not at the proposed level. Scientific research into the effects of such teaching have confirmed that it meets its requirements: the students feel more comfortable, more sure of themselves, they can plan their obligations and accept the responsibility for their decisions. Also, the student - teacher relationship is a friendlier one, and better results are achieved in acquiring knowledge than is the case in traditional method.
In the modernised version, the authors of which are Drinka and Dragan Savic, this model has been applied in our school since 1998 in subjects Logic (III year) and sociology(IV year).