Reading Caesar Against Himself — Classroom Pack on Source Criticism (ages 14–18)

Reading Caesar Against Himself is a classroom pack from Writesides of History for upper secondary students, ages 14 to 18 (UK Key Stage 4–5, US grades 9–12, NL havo/vwo bovenbouw). Two lessons of sixty minutes, in a teacher edition and a student edition, each in A4 and US Letter.

It is not a pack about Julius Caesar. It is a pack about what a student is allowed to say once they know where a claim came from — and Caesar is the material, because his is the rare case where the only witness to a war is the man who fought it and needed the votes of the people reading about it.

The pack is worked on a real published record rather than on a worksheet: 35 distinct military operations in Gaul, Germania and Britannia between 58 and 50 BC, each row cited to the book and chapter of the Gallic War where it appears. That record is free. Students download it as a CSV from the Writesides of History website under a Creative Commons licence, count from it themselves, and check any line of it against the text it rests on.

The lesson starts from a number they can verify in five minutes: 28 of the 35 operations are scored as a Roman victory, in a record built entirely out of the account of the commander who won them. What that ratio is evidence of — and what it is not evidence of — is the whole pack.

In the teacher edition: learning objectives, a minute-by-minute plan for both lessons, four cases, four assignments, twelve multiple-choice and six extended questions, a full answer key with a mark scheme out of 36, five differentiation routes including a no-devices route, a note on the three decisions the compiler of the record made, a glossary and a chronology.

In the student edition: the record, the four cases, the assignments and the questions, the glossary and the chronology. Not the answers.

Nothing in the pack is a quotation of Caesar. Every passage is a summary, marked as one, with the book and chapter where the original can be read — which is the lesson rather than a limitation.

Every figure in the pack is counted from the record at build time rather than typed in, so the teaching material and the table it is built on cannot drift apart.

Format: four PDFs — teacher and student editions, each in A4 and US Letter. Licence: personal and classroom use, including one printed copy per student in a class you teach.