The modern world is increasingly baffling. If I feel like this at the age of 50, what’s it going to be like in another 30 years’ time, assuming I am granted the good fortune to make it into my twilight years?
Yesterday, I visited eBay, browsing for an item I was (unbelievably) struggling to find on Amazon. I did a couple of searches for the item on their site, before getting bored and closing it down. Within hours, I received an email from the computerised bots managed by the team at eBay headquarters. They were keen, they said, to learn about my experience.
When did the most banal of activities become an experience? It is a remarkably recent phenomenon, but one we have apparently come to accept. I am asked to rate my experience of everything from browsing a website to attending an appointment at the hairdressers, at the optician, at the gym, at the dentist. The dentist! Do they really want my honest opinion regarding lying flat on my back while a man fires a high-frequency jet of freezing water against my gums, then offers me patronising, unsolicited advice about how to brush my own teeth, followed by a bill for over £100?
On some level, I get it. Of course. I am self-employed and there are times when I have to ask clients to throw me a bone by leaving me a review somewhere that can be verified. This all helps me to get seen in a noisy, overcrowded online world, and I would struggle to source clients without a little of that kind of support. Some people are kind enough to offer, without being asked. But I hope to God that I have never asked a client to “rate their experience”, nor pestered them with multiple messages when they promised to leave a review and then never got around to it. Most people don’t realise how much small businesses rely on this kind of thing, and I understand completely that it is not top of anyone’s list of priorities to be rating me on Google. I am enormously grateful for the people who do so and think no less of the majority who don’t.
When I was first setting up in my business, watching the last few arrivals from the regular salary I had taken for granted for over 20 years, I read and listened to a good deal of business advice. Much of it involved the use of social media, which I dabbled in before realising what a right royal waste of time it was, plus email marketing, which I am glad to say I resisted with pride from the very beginning. Nobody – least of all me – wants their inbox jammed full of self-congratulatory “news” from someone they employ, nor do they want constant exhortations to “let us know how we did”. The ruthlessness with which I police the contents of my own inbox and indeed my phone have become somewhat legendary, indeed I recently had to rather shamefacedly get myself back onto a list of an organisation I belong to, who had taken on board the fact that I had unsubscribed from all email communications and taken myself out of their WhatsApp group. I don’t mean to be unfriendly; I simply don’t want the bombardment of standardised self-promotion which inevitably follows. I habitually set up filters for anything unsolicited that arrives to be deleted automatically – it doesn’t even go to my spam folder, which I have to monitor as sometimes a new approach from a fresh contact will end up in there. Nope, with the filters as I have them, it goes straight in the bin.
The irony is, because I am self-employed and I understand how important ratings and reviews can be for small businesses, I am really diligent about doing them. If a local professional of any stripe does a good job for me, I make sure to ask them where they would like me to leave a review and I make sure that I do it: Google, Check-a-Trade, whatever they wish. If they’re really good, I will also send their details directly to any local friends who might benefit from their services. It’s one of the really nice things about living in a community that one can share this kind of thing and help local businesses to benefit from word of mouth. Everybody wins that way: the business is rewarded for doing a good job, the people in the community benefit from reliable and trustworthy service-providers. What’s not to like? But in the hands of the big corporations, this simple, organic and entirely benevolent system has somehow morphed into a beast, a system to be exploited and turned into yet another way to hassle their customers online. Well, I’m not having it. So, I shall continue to police my inbox with more rigour than has ever been managed by US border control.
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One of the multiple joys about tutoring compared to classroom teaching is the minimal amount of disruption. Barring technical difficulties, which do happen on occasion, my sessions with students these days are mostly uninterrupted bliss. Lest you think that my working life is now perfect all the time, I shall start with the few occasions on which I have found my one-to-one sessions rudely interrupted, before I move onto more painful recollections from the classroom.
Technical issues in tutoring usually stem from ropey broadband and much of the time can be alleviated by sharing the screen and/or turning cameras off, so the internet has less to cope with. Some clients seem to think that WiFi is not required; my clients this year are pleasingly home-based, but I have had clients in the past who seem to believe that online learning can be conducted on the go. I’ve had students in the back of the car on their way somewhere (I think my favourite was one session that was interrupted by the father 5 minutes in who announced to the child that they had to get in the car – she had no idea where they were going – and continue the session on the hoof). I have met with one student who was all dressed for riding and actually at the stables, attempting to concentrate on boring old Latin right before she got on her horse. I did point out to her parents that this was quite a big ask for an 11-year-old girl who is quite understandably obsessed with ponies, and they took it on board.
Even when at home there can be the odd glitch and sessions with one client have recently assaulted my ears with such an appalling electronic scroobling noise that I could barely hear the child over the din. It sounded like a cross between a fax machine (remember those?) and the old dial-up connection from the early 2000s (remember that?) The problem seems to be fixed now, thank heavens, but it was excruciating while it lasted. Some families need to have it explained to them that conversations in the background can be heard by me through the microphone – this can be quite remarkably distracting. Less distracting but often more painful are the sounds of cooking, cleaning or loading the dishwasher. Many families plug their children into headphones and seem to think therefore that the problem is solved, forgetting that if they are using an open microphone, I can still hear everything that is happening in the vicinity.
None of this, however, comes even close to the agony of what are laughably called “low-level disruptions” in the classroom. This week I read a discussion on EduTwitter that took me back to those days with such accuracy that I felt positively triggered. It is impossible to explain to those who have not worked in the mainstream classroom how utterly dispiriting the slow drip-drip effect of low-level disruption can feel like when you experience it multiple times a day and on every day of the week. You see, in life it’s the little things that grind you down. If a child’s behaviour is massively challenging, that isn’t fun or easy by any means, but it’s A Big Deal that will lead to inevitable consequences. The situation will undoubtedly disrupt your lesson and those consequences may well cause you a whole pile of work, but consequences there will be. Low-level disruption, on the other hand, is tolerated in all but the most well-run (and – for reasons which baffle me – most controversial) schools. Every single example of disruption that I am going to give you will sound unbelievably petty and trivial on its own – but what you have to imagine is those actions performed by dozens of students multiple times per day and causing a glitch in learning. You also have to understand that in schools where the culture is that these things are considered acceptable (which are the majority) you get really hard pushback from the students when and if you challenge it. As a result, much of the time, you have no choice but to accept it. And believe you me, learning suffers as a result.
In the discussion, most of the teachers focused on behaviours which cause a small but excruciating noise in the classroom. Several mentioned the clicking of pens. Several also mentioned the crunching of plastic water bottles; indeed, water bottles in general are an indescribably irritating source of disruption, with children crunching them, shaking them, complaining that they’ve spilt them and asking to refill them. How those of us that attended school in the decades before it was decided that all small humans must have minute-to-minute access to liquid in order not to immediately dehydrate is anybody’s guess. Plastic water bottles are awful but so are those trendy reusable ones, which result in an unholy din when they come crashing to the floor (as they inevitably do). Lest we forget, as a result of all this 24-hour hydration, the number of requests by children to go to the toilet is quite literally insane.
Beyond the realms of noise, we have the next level of physical disruption, which happens most among younger students who seem used to milling about the classroom as if it’s a set of stalls for browsing. I have no idea what goes on in some primary schools, but the most inordinate number of Year 7s seem happily convinced that roaming about the classroom is perfectly acceptable, and some of them doggedly continue with this belief into their later years. A student will suddenly decide that it’s essential for them to put something in the bin, which will of course require sauntering past their mates. Likewise, many students simply cannot resist the urge to turn around, then will argue either that they were not turning round or that they were turning around because somebody asked them an important question or had a simply desperate need to borrow an essential piece of equipment, one which they were supposed to have in the first place. Equipment hassles cause no end of tedium and if I had a £1 for every student who has at some point sliced up, flicked across the room or eaten the shards of their rubber, I would be a wealthy woman.
Other behaviours mentioned included tapping, fake coughing/sneezing and general wriggling, in addition to students putting their head on the desk in a last-ditch attempt at silent protest. At least it’s silent, I suppose, but it’s nevertheless still distracting for those around them and does not indicate a great deal of engagement from the student in question.
Of course, those of us capable of teaching like John Keating in Dead Poets’ Society, who had all of the students in raptures and simply hanging on our every word, prepared to stand on their desks and applaud at our remarkable ability to inspire them, suffered none of these hassles. It is a demonstrable fact that every child who spent more than a few minutes in my presence was simply gripped by imagination and motivated to do their best from the very moment they opened their books. Every single one of them lived and breathed their desire to grasp the fundamentals of the indirect statement and to rote-learn the endings of the 4th declension. No exceptions for me. I merely write this blog to show my empathy with those who may – at times – have not held the room so successfully and so rousingly as I did.
Perhaps the funniest moment ever photographed by the press in a school. A child did a faceplant in frustration (at her own performance!) while being tutored by the then Prime Minister. The various images captured were quickly dubbed, “child speaks for nation”.
The Roman intelligentsia never really understood the rise of the demagogues. Those who saw it coming were those who viewed Rome as in decline, at the mercy of mob rule; they never understood the needs and legitimate frustrations of the ordinary people, who counted for little as far as they were concerned. Those caught by surprise had only a hazy grasp of their own handle on power.
The authority of the Senate was based on custom and consent rather than upon the rule of law: it gave advice, but could not enforce its rulings. The Senate thus had no legal control over the people or their magistrates. This uneasy rule by consent lasted for a while, but complacency and arrogance ultimately led to the Senate’s authority being dismantled in all but name.
The Optimates were the dominant group in the Senate, those with families dating back to the mythical good old days and the easy confidence that aristocracy brings. They consistently blocked the wishes of others, who were thus forced to seek support for their measures via the tribunes, who led the tribal assembly. These men were called the Populares or “demagogues,” by their opponents. The Optimates tried to uphold the oligarchy and thus maintain their aristocratic stranglehold on power; the demagogues sought popular support against the dominant aristocracy, sometimes in the interests of the people but also to further their own personal ambitions. To be clear, both groups of men were eye-wateringly wealthy: this was in no way a rise of the working man. The demagogues achieved some success via purely political means, but ultimately the generals who commanded military forces in the provinces (also fabulously wealthy) began to realise that there was an opportunity here. The Roman elite found out the hard way that those who win the hearts and minds of the military are the ones who hold power. And it was still all about money – you didn’t make it in this battle for power without it.
It is difficult and not to say puzzling to watch the existential crisis being experienced by Democrats and their supporters across the Atlantic. Rarely has a nation been so divided and so unable to listen, although I am experiencing uncomfortable flashbacks to our own country during the fallout after the Brexit vote. I cycle through news channels on an endless loop and find person after person talking, talking, talking. Talking to each other, talking at each other, talking over each other. Nobody’s listening. Although a passionate supporter of people’s right to protest, I am beginning to lose my faith in even this simple kind of expression, for in today’s world it seems always to descend into people screaming at each other, nose to nose across the barricades. But you can scream as hard as you like. It doesn’t matter if nobody’s listening.
I do not claim to know why the American people voted as they did. I have my own pet theories, but these are shaped and coloured by my own peculiar interests and passions, and therefore too biased to be of relevance. I can only say what I see, and what I see is a population that feels betrayed by politics. I see people who are sick of being told what to think or – even worse – being told that they don’t think, that they are incapable of it. That their small-town lives don’t matter, that their values are old-fashioned and need to be consigned to history, that they need to get with the programme, wise up, wake up, listen up, sit up and shut up.
The trouble with democracy is you ask people what they want and they tell you. It may not be the result you were hoping for. Winston Churchill no doubt thought when he saw his country through the second world war that the next election was in the bag. In fact, he and his party were voted out of office. To quote the man himself: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
Cicero denounces Catiline, fresco by Cesare Maccari, Palazzo Madama in Rome
As the leaves turn and the nights draw in, many cultures prepare to celebrate festivals that explore the boundaries between the living and the dead. Halloween is a festival steeped in history and rich in symbolism and so this year I am trying to be less grumpy about it. I’ve never liked Halloween and tend to lock myself away in doors, but I have decided to embrace the spirits and attempt to understand why so many people feel drawn to this festival.
To appreciate Halloween’s origins, we must travel back to its Celtic origins and also to ancient Rome, where festivals of the dead held significant cultural and spiritual importance. Modern Halloween is heavily influenced by Celtic traditions, particularly the festival of Samhain. The Celts celebrated Samhain at the end of October — marking the transition from harvest to winter — and believed that the boundary between the living and the dead was at its most attenuated during this time. Roman practices undoubtedly shaped the evolution of this festival into what we now call Halloween. As the Romans expanded their empire, they encountered various cultures and incorporated aspects of their beliefs and practices. This cultural blending likely contributed to the transformation of Halloween from a purely Celtic observance into a more widespread celebration that includes various elements from different traditions. Many see Halloween as an American export and in multiple ways it is; but we can thank/blame the Romans for most things, so I don’t see why Halloween should be any different.
One of the most important Roman festivals dedicated to the dead was Feralia, which in itself was part of larger nine-day observance called Parentalia, dedicated entirely to ancestors. During Feralia, families would visit the graves of their loved ones, bringing offerings such as food, wine, and flowers. It was a time to reflect on the lives of those who had passed, and rituals often included prayers and sacrifices. Many modern Halloween traditions across Europe involve remembering loved ones who have died; altars, decorations, and memorials are common in many parts of the world during Halloween, reflecting the human desire to honour those who came before us. A ritualistic response to death is one of the things that defines us as a species and tentative evidence of burial or funerary caching goes back to the Stone Age; it seems clear that our earliest ancestors began interring their dead, sometimes with personal effects. Some anthropologists argue that such relics are evidence for a belief in some kind of afterlife, in which it was assumed that the deceased individual would require the tools of his trade; others are more cautious, and argue that grave goods are simply evidence of individualisation and respect – religious or not, we like to bury a person’s things with them, as symbolic markers of who they were and the impact that they had on the world.
Another notable Roman festival of the dead was Lemuria. This festival is perhaps closer to that of Halloween, for it focused on the appeasing of restless spirits, particularly those of deceased family members who had not received proper burial rites. The father of the household would perform a series of rituals, including throwing black beans over his shoulder and chanting incantations to exorcise the spirits. The beans symbolized the offerings made to the dead, while the rituals aimed to ensure peace for both the living and the dead. Echoes of our festival of Halloween are obvious in the theme of dealing with spirits. Many Halloween customs, such as carving pumpkins to ward off evil spirits and dressing in frightening costumes, are deeply rooted in the idea of confronting and appeasing supernatural entities. The shared emphasis on rituals and offerings reflects a universal human desire to connect and to address fears of the unknown.
The Roman festivals of the dead offer us an insight into how ancient cultures grappled with the concept of mortality. In an ever-changing world, the rituals surrounding death and remembrance remain vital to many people. Whether through offering food to the spirits, lighting candles, or sharing stories about loved ones, we find ways of engaging with those we have lost. Halloween serves as a reminder of our connection to those who came before us, a celebration of life, death, and the enduring bond between the living and the dead.
The modern festival of Halloween is rather characterized by a mix of fun and irreverence and most of my students absolutely love it. Trick-or-treating, ghoulish fancy dress and haunted houses dominate the festivities and many of these traditions do hail from our friends across the Atlantic. Many people argue that the act of dressing up in costumes can be seen as a way to confront the idea of death and the unknown, much like the Romans did during Lemuria; all of that said, I’m not sure how many of my students see it as anything other than a jolly good excuse to eat vast quantities of sweets and – bonus prize – scare the absolute willies out of the grown-ups.
This week, I had an appointment with a man who mainly works with people who have sports injuries. This might seem totally mad, since I do not partake in any sports and – to all intents and purposes – I am not injured. So, what on earth am I up to?
More than one local friend had spoken highly of Greg and I was intrigued to see whether he could help me. As someone who lives with chronic scoliosis I have seen various osteopaths over the years, but that has reached something of a plateau in terms of how helpful I am finding the sessions. Furthermore, I suddenly realised that I was becoming somewhat frustrated by the gloomy outlook taken by the osteopath who was treating me. He was well aware of the fact that – despite my lifelong recalcitrance with regards to all things exercise-related – I now attend a local gym and have successfully improved my overall fitness, particularly my muscle strength. My range of movement, however, has proved to be a more stubborn nut to crack. When I asked him for suggestions as to what I could be doing that would help with my restricted mobility, he shrugged and stated that there was nothing that would help in that department.
Now, it is true that I have an untreatable and irreversible spinal condition which is not going to disappear. Nothing will fix the curvature of my spine, nor unfuse the bits which are resolutely fused together. I will never attain perfect posture nor the mobility of someone with a normal spine. And yet … I remember a time when I wasn’t in pain or discomfort. I remember a time when my mobility was dramatically better than it is now. So, despite the reality of a chronic condition, I simply refuse to accept that the way things are at the moment – which, to be honest, is pretty awful – remains the harbinger of my future. I refuse to believe that this is as good as it gets and that it’s downhill from this point on.
So, in a fit of self-investment, I’m trying a new approach with this recommended local physical therapist. I explained my situation to him and gave him plenty of room to turn me down, stating that I would understand if he felt that I was not a suitable client for his expertise. To my delight, he was really keen to help, so we met within a couple of days. His assessed me as I was, whilst asking me a considerable number of questions about what I currently do in terms of exercise as well as what my goals are – something nobody has ever asked me before: not the numerous consultants I saw as a child, not the (mainly useless) physiotherapists provided by the NHS, not the several private osteopaths I have seen over the years. To be fair, Greg was probably pretty relieved to be told that I am not planning to enter any iron-man endurance races or aim at the next Olympics, but he seemed to share my determination and my enthusiasm for the idea that things could be greatly improved from the state of near-seizure that I am currently in. He wrestled and pulled me about for a bit in the manner that these specialists like to do, then carefully taught me some new suggestions for exercise, bespoke movements which he felt would benefit me and work against my most troublesome symptoms. This is exactly what I was looking for and I am already beginning to notice a difference.
While very much a realist, I cling to the idea that most of us can make improvements to our own health and wellbeing; I believe that pain can be reduced with the right kind of management, one that doesn’t involve taking more pills or drinking more alcohol. I am determined to find ways to ameliorate my situation whilst I am still young enough and fit enough to find the energy to do so, to instill good habits in myself that will benefit me as I age. Unless I do so, I fear that the prospect of ageing is pretty bleak.
It is often said (a quotation usually misattributed to Einstein) that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. If I want to experience change, then I need to make those changes happen; kick-starting that process means investing in someone who agrees with me that change is both desirable and possible. At the end of my first session, I felt the way that many of my clients report feeling when they have met with me for the first time: that feeling when you’ve found the right kind of person with not only the experience but the confidence and the belief that they can potentially help you. It’s the kind of conviction that years of experience brings, as well as a genuine passion for what you do. Greg’s energy for and interest in what he does shone through from the moment I contacted him, and I realised with a jolt that he had communicated this to me before we even met, in just a few simple words. He wrote: “I’ll bring the ideas”.
As soon as I read that message, I knew that I had potentially found the right kind of person to help me. I’d been experimenting with difference types of exercises and had become deeply frustrated by my lack of progress. I was all out of ideas and so was my osteopath. As for the physiotherapists I have tried in the past, the last one genuinely shrugged and said, “you seem to be managing okay.” Sure, I’m managing okay … I mean, I’m standing upright. But is that honestly as good as it gets? Is there no hope for improved mobility, reduced discomfort and better prospects for old age? For me, “managing okay” is no longer acceptable and I’ve decided to believe that things can be better. It feels great to have found someone who agrees.
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
Andy Warhol.
If you regularly peruse my blog for the vague philosophical musings and/or feminist rants, this one may not be for you. For on my mind this week is a spreadsheet I’ve been creating, which logs the frequency and regularity with which individual grammatical constructions come up on the GCSE Latin language paper, both for OCR and WJEC.
Yes, I’ve had quite the rollercoaster of a week so far.
For some time, I’ve had the feeling that time phrases are under-taught in most schools. It’s an easy fix, so it’s something I have always addressed with all of my students unless they show immediate and obvious evidence of confidence with them (which is rare). Imagine the validation I felt, therefore, when my analysis of all the exam papers available to us so far (a total of eight years) revealed that time phrases are one of the constructions which occur with the highest frequency in both examination boards.
There are a grand total of 23 time phrases in OCR language papers to date, a number equalled only by the ablative absolute, which also occurs 23 times, and exceeded only by the indirect statement, which comes up a whopping 28 times in the OCR papers; the indirect statement is universally acknowledged to be a tricky construction, so most schools spend a great deal of time on it (often, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, to the detriment of student understanding, but that’s another issue). The indirect statement occurs far less frequently in the WJEC examination (only 12 times) and its complexity is limited by the fact that students are not expected to know the range of infinitives that are required by OCR. Compare this to the fact that time phrases occur on the WJEC papers with a greater frequency than any other construction – a total of 18 appearances, with the next highest being the indirect command and the purpose clause, which both occur 13 times across the eight years.
Time phrases are not complex but they are – in my experience – something which students grasp with less ease than most teachers assume. In this blog post, I plan to explore why this is and to make the case that they should be addressed more frequently and with more care than is currently occurring in most classroom settings.
Time phrases are used in Latin to express either how long something went on for, or to specify when an event occurred; sometimes they are also used to indicate the period of time within which an event occurred, but the latter is infrequent at GCSE level. The reason that students find the construction more puzzling than their teachers perhaps assume is the nature of how these constructions translate into English.
The accusative case in Latin is used to express how long something went on for. Here are some examples:
milites duos dies pugnabant The soldiers fought for two days
in taberna tres horas manebamus We stayed in the pub for three hours
The use of the accusative to express length of time is perfectly logical to a subject specialist. We understand fully that the accusative is used to express passage of time and motion towards and we therefore find the translation into “for two days” or “for three hours” perfectly natural. For a novice, however, who is still wrestling with the very concept of noun cases and how to express them, the use of the word “for” in our English translation is deeply confusing. Isn’t the word “for” how the dative case is expressed? It is essential therefore to explore and unpick this potential confusion and explain to the novice that the English language is using the word “for” to express an entirely different concept here. The dative case means “for” as in “the slave prepared the meal for the master” – in other words, for the master’s benefit. This is quite different from the use of the word “for” to express how long something went on for, which is expressed by the accusative case in Latin. The use of the word “for” in our translation has to be tackled head on and explained carefully until the novice fully grasps the difference between the concept of the dative (“the slave prepared the meal for the master – i.e. for his benefit”) and the accusative (“the slave prepared the meal for three hours – i.e. that’s how long it took the slave to prepare it”). This cannot be skimmed over, otherwise a novice’s understanding is likely to be shaky – the knowledge will not stick, because it is built on shaky ground. Virtually every single student I have worked with have furnished me with evidence for this – only those carefully drilled in one or two schools with a reputation for extremely rigorous grammar teaching have not fallen prey to this misunderstanding.
The ablative case is used in Latin to express when something happened. Below are some examples:
milites prima luce oppugnaverunt The soldiers attacked at first light
amici illa nocte advenerunt The friends arrived on that night
milites nocte fugerunt The soldiers fled by night
Here, students can experience some confusion due to the myriad of possibilities when it comes to rendering the ablative case in a translation. The variety with which English expresses the concept of when something happened depending on the vocabulary used can be really confusing, so once again the novice must be taught carefully. It must be thoroughly explained that “at”, “on”, “in” or “by” are all possibilities and the students must be given lots of practice in selecting the most appropriate choice. Only when students have seen multiple occurrences of these time phrases and thus practised all the different possible ways that they might be translated can they be said to have gained full confidence in this concept.
Having worked in a state comprehensive I understand better than most that classroom time is a precious and finite resource. Yet having performed my analysis of exam papers I feel I have a strong case that teachers should be devoting more of their chalkface time to this concept. All students can grasp it and they all stand to make tangible gains in the examination with the full understanding that more thorough teaching will afford them.
This beautiful photo is by Aron Visuals on Unsplash. I have used it before and I absolutely love it.
“Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.”
Jawaharlal Nehru
Currently, I am obsessively plugged in to an audiobook, the latest release from my favourite author, Liane Moriarty. Moriarty writes what is often scathingly referred to as “chick lit”: a genre which at its worst can be undeniably vacuous, but no more so than the two-dimensional thrillers churned out by authors marketed to men. The withering contempt with which “chick lit” is viewed says a lot more about how society treats the everyday lives and concerns of women than it does about this particular genre of popular fiction.
It is undeniable although perhaps a little depressing that Moriarty is an author unlikely to be read by vast quantities of male readers. Her stories revolve around people – mainly suburban women – and the thoughts inside their heads. Often there is an unfolding plot, but the focus is on the development of character and relationships rather than on action or suspense. Moriarty is an absolute master of the genre and writes with an effortless charm that belies her talent; the best authors make it look easy when it isn’t. It’s a great shame that more men aren’t interested in some of the things which interest women, and a truth that I have pondered the reasons for on and off. I speak as someone who has read quite broadly and have flirted with books categorised in modern times as “lad lit”: I am a huge fan of Martin Amis and if you haven’t read David Baddiel’s forays into novel writing in this genre then you should – they are annoyingly good. So if I, as a woman, can enjoy books written from a male perspective and read by men, I find it somewhat irksome that so few men have the desire to show any kind of interest in the fiction favoured by women. Anyway, I digress.
Much as many of Moriarty’s books (perhaps most famously Big Little Lies) focus on the lives of suburban women, some of them are intricately plotted and follow the lives of a complex set of characters, all of which cross paths in various ways and with a myriad of consequences. Because of this, I was greatly surprised when I heard the author interviewed and she revealed that she writes without a plan. Prior to her most recent release, the last novel she wrote called Apples Never Fall followed the tensions and anguish within a family from whom the matriarch has disappeared: most of the novel we spend wondering what has happened to this character (including whether she has merely walked out of her life or has been horribly murdered by someone within it), and Moriarty reports that she too spent much of her writing time wondering the same thing. She had not, by her own account, decided what had actually happened to this key character when she began to write the book. She started with the idea of the disappearance and discovered the truth behind it along with her characters. It is perhaps this very unconventional approach to plotting that enables her to write with such authenticity – she’s not dropping hints or trying to plant red herrings in relation to the real outcome, for she has no idea what that outcome will eventually be.
I am around one third of the way through Moriarty’s latest and am gripped as ever by her writing. Here One Moment is perhaps her most ambitious novel yet as it circles around the idea of free will and destiny. In summary, the scenario is that a group of people on a flight from Hobart to Sydney are each pointed at by a woman on board the flight and told the supposed time and manner of their death. Some passengers are given what amounts to welcome news by most people’s standards (heart failure, age 95), others – inevitably – are told that they will die very young. Some are even told that their death will be as a result of violence or self-harm. The rest of the novel is about the fall-out from this thoroughly alarming and unscheduled in-flight entertainment.
One of the ideas explored in the novel is the impact that such an experience might potentially have, not only on the feelings of those receiving the predictions but on their actions too. One of the passengers pays a visit to another “psychic” after the flight, and this “psychic” points out to him that he will not be the same person after the reading as he was before it. He points out that whatever he says to his client will make him act differently and that this will then potentially have an impact on the outcome of his life. Moriarty refers constantly to the idea of chaos theory throughout her writing – the idea that one small event in nature has a ripple effect that causes huge impact in other areas. At the point in the novel where I am right now, a mother who has been told that her baby son will die by drowning while still a child has elected to take him to swimming lessons. He takes to the lessons like the proverbial duck to water and it becomes clear that he is going to become a huge lover of swimming. As readers, we now sit with our hearts in our mouths and await the inevitable: will the mother’s decision to take her child to swimming lessons, sparked solely by the psychic’s so-called prediction, end up leading to the death of her child in the future?
The same thought experiment was run by a Greek playwright called Sophocles almost 3000 years ago. He wrote what I would argue is perhaps the most influential work of literature ever published, in the form of the tragedy called Oedipus Rex. Most people know the name “Oedipus” only as a result of Freud’s early 20th century ramblings about motherhood and sexual repression; very few people have any idea what a frankly brilliant and chilling story that of Oedipus was when it was written. It is emphatically not a story about motherhood, nor is it a story about sexual repression; to be honest I don’t think I can ever forgive Freud for making it so. Oedipus Rex is a story about destiny, about free will and about the extent to which we have control over either of those things. If you don’t know the story, it can be summarised as follows …
In ancient Greece, a king and queen are horrified to be told by an oracle that their baby son will grow up to murder his father and marry his mother. Terrified by this ghastly prediction, they send the baby away to be exposed on the hillside and die. The kindly old shepherd gifted with the unhappy task cannot quite bring himself to do the dreadful deed, so he ends up passing the baby to another ruler and his wife in a far-distant land who are childless, and they bring the baby up as their own. The baby is named Oedipus. He has no idea that he is adopted.
When Oedipus grows up, like all curious young men, he too consults the oracle and asks his destiny. The oracle tells him that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he does the only sensible thing: he removes himself from his family home and goes off on his travels, thus removing any possible risk of somehow murdering his father and marrying his mother. Oedipus believes that he has taken control: he is the master of his own destiny and he has cheated the oracle. Trouble is, remember … he doesn’t know he is adopted.
Several months into his lonely travels, Oedipus gets into an altercation on the road with an arrogant older man who tries to tell him what’s what. Long story short, Oedipus does the only thing any decent red-blooded young male would do, he kills the old fool. Afterwards, he continues on his travels and eventually comes to a kingdom which is in a bit of trouble because it’s being harassed by a nasty monster. Clever Oedipus defeats the monster by solving its riddle and – would you know it – it turns out that the king of this particular dominion has recently died and they’re in need of a chap to take over. What a stroke of luck! Oedipus marries the widowed queen – who is granted a little older than him but still young enough to bear children – and becomes King of Thebes. The rest, as they say, is a truly horrible history.
The whole point of Oedipus’ story is exactly the thought experiment that Moriarty is playing out in her novel. To what extent does a sense of destiny itself predetermine our actions? To what extent do people inevitably fulfil the path that they are told lies in front of them? It is easy to point out that if the oracle had not said what it said – on either occasion – the story of Oedipus would not have unfolded as it did. In the ancient world, the story was taken as a morality tale about man’s arrogance: humans are convinced that they can outwit the gods and cheat their destiny, and that arrogance begins and ends with asking the question. If nobody had asked, would nothing have happened? Does the asking trigger the event?
It is easy to assume that these big philosophical questions don’t affect our lives on a day-to-day basis, but in fact this loop of thought is inescapable and resonates in daily life. During my career, a trend came and (thankfully) went of sharing what were laughably called “predicted grades” with students. These grades were not teacher predictions (although teachers are indeed asked to make such psychic predictions and that nightmare continues) but based on a crushing weight of data that looks at “people like Student A” and attempts to make a mathematical prediction about how “a person like Student A” is most likely to perform in an exam. All sorts of data get included in the mix, from prior academic performance to socio-economic background. The happy news that a bunch of data analysis that hardly anybody fully understands “predicts” that Student A is likely to get a Grade 3 or below was – until alarmingly recently – shared with Student A. What an absolute travesty. I will never forgive the system for sitting a child down and telling them that the computer says they’re likely to fail. Likewise, I have seen children who are “predicted” a line of top grades spiral out of control under the pressure. For heaven’s sake stop telling kids what “the data” (our new name for the divine oracle) says about their destiny. It’s a seriously grotesque thing to do.
For similar reasons, I know parents who are understandably jumpy about their children being labelled as anything. Who doesn’t remember well into middle age having “he’s shy” or “she’s anxious” being said over their head, while they were going through an entirely normal phase of being wary of strangers? Before you know it, the label of “shy” or “anxious” or whatever the grown-ups have decided befits you becomes you. I am absolutely in support of my friends who will not have their children referred to in this way: if history teaches us anything, it’s that people tend to fulfil their destiny. So be careful what path you pave.
Classroom teachers are expected to be psychics. According to the Teachers’ Standards, which are many and complex, every classroom teacher must not only understand how children think and learn but must know when and how to differentiate appropriately, using approaches which enable pupils to be taught effectively; they must have a secure understanding of how a range of factors can inhibit pupils’ ability to learn and how best to overcome these; they must have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with special educational needs, those of high ability, those with English as an additional language and those with disabilities; they must be able to use and evaluate distinctive teaching approaches to engage and support all of these different young people … and all of this must happen while there are 30 of these diverse learners in the same room.
Much of what is demanded of the average classroom teacher is impossible. I say this not to be a doom-monger or to preach the acceptance of mediocrity – far from it. Throughout my career I strived to be the best teacher I could possibly be. Yet in reality, we cannot be all things to all men and we cannot possibly fathom the inner workings of every single one of the minds that are sat in front of us.
I have written numerous times on the differences between classroom teaching and tutoring but this week something hit me that had not occurred to me before. While I have always been aware that one-to-one sessions give me an insight into the misconceptions each child may have and thus the ability to address those, it has not previously dawned on me that tutoring a large number of students in the way that I do has given me a broader insight into how children think and learn in a way that I could not have experienced as a classroom teacher. Working one-to-one means that I get to listen to how my students think and reason in real time.
It is often said by modern cognitive scientists that education has placed too much focus on the diversity of learners in the past. While every parent likes to think that their child has a unique set of needs that can only be met in a unique way, the reality is that there is far more that unites young learners than divides them. We now know a great deal about how memory works and how best to support students with the learning process: this is not to say that some will not find it harder than others and require more time and effort than others, but broadly speaking the approaches that work for those with special educational needs in fact work well for the mainstream classroom as a whole. If you tailor your classroom towards providing the best learning support for your neediest learners, everyone benefits as a whole.
Working one-to-one with the huge number of students that I do has furnished me with a real insight into how students tackle the process of translating and what the common pitfalls are when they are doing so. It has also provided some perhaps surprising insights into which constructions that children tend to be able to translate on instinct, without a full grasp of understanding. This information is actually gold dust and links to what I blogged about last week – the necessity of designing a curriculum around the learners sat in front of you and in relation to the time you have available as well as the end goal when it comes to examinations. I have realised in the last year or two that there are some complex constructions which many classroom teachers tend to focus too much time on, to the detriment of the basics, when in fact many students could translate those constructions without difficulty so long as they had a grasp of their verb and noun forms and their vocabulary.
Working one-to-one has given me more of an insight into what doesn’t need to be taught as well as what does. While most of my students have gaping holes in their basic knowledge, many of them have spent an unnecessary amount of time being taught things that they do not need to understand in detail. Sometimes, a construction has been so over-taught that a child has been left in complete confusion; their natural grasp of it, one which they would in all likelihood have stumbled upon if given the right basic tools and a decent dose of confidence, has been lost forever.
I am still pondering what to do with these insights as it occurs to me that they could quite honestly be of enormous use to any classroom teacher who is willing to listen. For now, my understanding of how children go about acquiring the skills that they need to do well in Latin is ever-increasing and remains endlessly fascinating to me.
