Emma Williams: Latin tutor – Latin teaching and online tutoring

Off my trolley

It seemed simple enough. It even seemed like a good idea. Something I had done before and not struggled with, an easy way to earn my Good Citizen badge for the day.

On my regular route to a local megastore, I pass a garage with a carwash. For some inexplicable reason, the footpath next to the carwash has become a dumping ground for supermarket trollies. Without fail, every time I make my way through this pass, there is an abandoned trolley, standing askew. I have puzzled as to why this particular place is where someone consistently no longer has need of the trolley that they apparently did need to take out of the supermarket carpark, but the logic escapes me. Still, given that I am able-bodied and on my way to the very megastore to which the abandoned trollies belong, I always take hold of the forsaken four-wheeler and push it back to its home.

On this particular occasion, in the hiatus between Christmas and New Year, I happened upon no less than four of them, nosing each other like abandoned dogs in the underpass. Can I manage four? I mused to myself. Of course I can, beamed my gym-going, over-confident self. Four trollies will be a breeze. Of course, I hadn’t factored in the treacherous nature of supermarket trolley-wheels combined with a sharp corner, heavy traffic and a steep slope: nevertheless, I eventually made it to the trolley park, breathless but triumphant. The park was completely empty of trollies. I kid you not, not one single person appeared to have returned their trolley to its rightful home on that day. In smiling possession of four, I was thus immediately set upon by multiple shoppers, all of them making a grab for one of the trollies I had brought. You’re welcome!

I grant you that it is all too easy to bemoan the state of modern Britain, but sometimes it’s the little things that get you down. I’m not sure if I can put a date upon when the shift occurred, but I’m sure that there were indeed halcyon days when people dutifully returned their trollies to the trolley park for the benefit of others. At the risk of sounding a little deranged, I’ve been pondering this for a week or more: when and why did people stop thinking that they had to return their trolley? After much musing, I think I’ve hit upon the source of the problem. It isn’t a symptom of poor parenting, it isn’t the state of our schools and it isn’t that people have somehow become inherently worse than they used to be. The issue, I believe, is that very few of us do our shopping in anything that even remotely resembles a community any more.

When my parents speak of their youth (a timespan ranging from the mid 1930s to the post-war period), both of them talk about local shops and local tradespeople. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, for better or for worse, and local businesses were at the very heart of the community. Shops and services were run by people you knew and that meant that those shops and services were places that expected and demanded respect and acknowledgement. Shop-owners were not a faceless corporation, they were members of the inner circle. If some local scallywag caused trouble for a local shopkeeper, there would be consequences and those consequences would have an impact on family and friends.

In such a community, it was shameful to be caught doing something thoughtless, because reports of such behaviour would be shared with other members of the neighbourhood. Both my parents recall being known to all the adults in their area and they can acknowledge both the privileges and the responsibilities that came with that fact. The privileges included feeling safe and looked after in their community, the sense that they could knock on anyone’s door at any time and ask for help; the responsibilities included knowing that any misdemeanours would get straight back to their parents! It suddenly occurred to me that very few of us feel either looked after or indeed feel judged and monitored in this way any more.

Very few of us feel vulnerable to any sense of shame about our routine behaviours, because we move through the world so anonymously, or at least we feel as if we do. Small acts of selfishness such as dumping our trolley at the side of the street will rarely if ever receive any kind of direct challenge or lasting consequence. As a result, people have gradually and unconsciously learned that they can get away with such thoughtless behaviour without an impact on their own lives. I honestly don’t believe that we are any less innately thoughtful than we used to be — it doesn’t make sense for such a seismic change in human nature to have happened so quickly; rather, it is the case that we operate in a world that does not expect us to be thoughtful and in which there are no consequences for our thoughtless behaviour.

There is so much to regret with the loss of local shopping: when I think of all the hand-wringing that is done about the state of the environment, so much of that could be solved or at least mitigated against if we simply went back to local stores. Out-of-town supermarkets started to become the norm somewhere between the 1960s and the 1980s and I would argue that this caused a shift in people’s attitude towards buying produce. At one stroke, we started to feel like we were giving our money to big corporations, nameless and faceless profiteers that we all began to resent whilst at the same time demanding more and more of their wares. Within the next two generations came the internet and online delivery, meaning we didn’t even have to leave our homes to give our money to invisible people. As a result of all of this, retail as a concept has taken on an identity of its own and is completely detached from humanity.

When we do leave our houses to circulate around the premises that such corporations set up for their customers, the distate on all sides is palpable. Despite what the advertisements would have us believe, it is obvious that customers feel no liking nor obligation towards such corporations and likewise the companies themselves display barely-concealed disdain towards their customers. Buying and selling now operates in an open atmosphere of mutual contempt. If you think I’m exaggerating, then perhaps you’ve never shopped in a large megastore in one of the poorest parts of the country. To quote the words of Jarvis Cocker in his 1995 classic, Common People, “I can’t see anyone else smiling in here.” Nobody smiles and nobody talks to each other. Everyone beats a path to the automated check-outs so they don’t have to interact with a human being before they leave the store. Virtually everything is tagged because theft is so rife, another consequence of people feeling so detached from their store-merchants: research indicates that most people now believe shoplifting to be a victimless crime.

But before we get too depressed, let’s all resolve to do better. While we might indeed be forking out our money to a giant company we don’t care for, in itself owned by one of the handful of global corporations that appear to own and control the entire universe, let us not forget that within those conglomerates there are hundreds and thousands of individual people like us, people who work and shop on their premises. Let us not lose sight of our individual humanity, which I believe we still possess in bucketloads: it is simply that we are operating in a world that makes us feel isolated and unmoored, disconnected from the sometimes bewildering number of other humans that move around us. As the population increases, there is a painful irony in the fact that we all seem to feel more and more alone inside it. But as just a tiny drop in what could be a potential antidote, how about this for a New Year’s resolution? Next time you see an abandoned trolley and you’re heading towards its homeland, why not pick it up and take it with you? You might be surprised how good it makes you feel.

New Year celebrations: a Roman legacy

While people around the world have been engaging in the tradition of celebrating the New Year, have you ever wondered where this custom originated from? To uncover the roots of New Year celebrations, we must (of course!) journey back to ancient Rome, where the calendar and many of the traditions we take for granted today began to take shape.

The Roman calendar initially had little resemblance to the one we use today. In its earliest form, the Roman calendar was a 10-month system that began in March, a month named after Mars, the god of war. The year ended in December, with a winter period left unaccounted for in the calendar — a gap that made the year phenomenally difficult to track. I have written before on the phenomenal mess that the Romans got themselves into with their calendar, so I shan’t re-hash it all here, but suffice to say they really did make a right old business of getting it wrong.

Back in 713 BCE, Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, introduced two additional months, Ianuarius (January) and Februarius (February), to bring the number of calendar months up to twelve. The month of January was placed at the beginning of the year and dedicated to the god Janus, making it an appropriate time for reflection and planning for the future. Janus was the god of beginnings, transitions and duality. Often depicted with two faces — one looking to the past and the other to the future — Janus symbolised the liminal space between old and new, making him the perfect patron of New Year’s celebrations. His domain included doorways (ianuae in Latin), thresholds and gateways, such as the beginning of a journey or a new phase in life.

In Roman religion, Janus was invoked at the start of any significant endeavour, whether it was the launching of a military campaign, the construction of a building or the start of the agricultural season. His presence at the beginning of the calendar year cemented the idea of looking both backward in gratitude and forward with hope. Naming the first month after Janus thus underpins the idea of the New Year as a moment for reflection and resolutions.

The start of January was a time for Romans to engage in rituals and festivities. Celebrations included exchanging gifts, such as coins or small tokens, which were thought to bring good fortune for the year ahead, and decorated laurel branches were also exchanged, symbols of prosperity and victory. The Romans adorned their homes with greenery and light candles, symbolising the hope for illumination and guidance in the coming year. Sacrifices to Janus were made, and prayers were offered for peace and prosperity. The tradition of making new year’s resolutions can trace its lineage back to this time, when Romans would pledge to improve themselves in the coming year, offering vows to Janus as part of their commitment. The Roman empire’s vast reach ensured that its calendar and traditions left a lasting imprint on the regions it governed. Even after the fall of Rome, the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BCE, remained in use across much of Europe.

Caesar’s calendar reforms, which I discuss in my blog post on Roman calendars, was significant not only for standardising the length of the year but also for firmly establishing January as the beginning of it. This decision was partly practical and partly symbolic. By aligning the calendar with the solar year and by dedicating its beginning to Janus, Caesar reinforced the notion of January as a time for renewal. Over time, Christian Europe adopted the Julian calendar, and while some regions initially celebrated the New Year on different dates, January 1st eventually became the standard.

While many modern New Year customs have their roots in Roman practices, they have evolved over centuries and absorbed influences from various cultures and religions. For instance, the Christian Church initially resisted the celebration of January 1st as New Year’s Day, associating it with pagan rituals. However, by the Middle Ages, the Church had incorporated the date into its liturgical calendar, marking the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus.

New Year’s Day stands as a testament to humanity’s enduring desire to mark the passage of time and embrace renewal. The Romans’ choice of January, their veneration of Janus and their customs of gift-giving and reflection have profoundly shaped the way we celebrate the New Year. Though centuries have passed and cultures have changed, the essence of New Year’s traditions—hope, renewal, and connection—remains timeless.

So, as we ring in the New Year, we honour not only our aspirations for the future but also the rich tapestry of history that has brought us to this moment. In every resolution made and every toast raised, the spirit of Janus lives on, guiding us through the thresholds of time.

Felix Nativitas

Christmas did not begin its story in a vacuum. It arose within the vast and vibrant Roman Empire, a place where countless gods, rituals and traditions were already woven into the rhythm of everyday life. When early Christians eventually shaped their own celebrations, they did so whilst living among people who already marked their calendar with festivals, feasts and customs. Christmas was a celebration which developed in conversation with the pagan world around it, and echoes of ancient Roman festivities can still be heard to this day.

Before Christmas ever graced a church calendar, the month of December belonged to Saturnalia, the most beloved festival in the Roman year. Dedicated to Saturn, the god of agriculture, Saturnalia was a season of feasting, public merriment, exchanged gifts and an inversion of ordinary social rules. Slaves were permitted to dine alongside their masters, ordinary citizens dressed in colourful clothing and laughter filled the streets. For the Romans, Saturnalia was a cherished invitation to joy and generosity, when daylight was at its shortest.

As Christianity spread across the empire, its followers could hardly avoid the fact that they were living beside these exuberant customs. They worked, traded and travelled among people who had long found comfort in Saturnalia’s festivities. Even while Christians rejected the worship of pagan gods, the rhythms of the culture around them could not simply be dismissed. The earliest believers did not yet celebrate Jesus’s birth. Easter, with its promise of resurrection, held far greater importance at that time, and still does in many parts of the world. But the season of Saturnalia left a deep imprint on the Roman imagination, an imprint that would shape the Christmas period in centuries to come.

Another celebration, emerging later but carrying immense symbolic power, prepared the ground for what would eventually become Christmas Day itself. On the 25th December, the Romans honoured Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. This was the moment in the year when the sun, having reached its lowest point in the winter sky, began its slow ascent once more. Light returned, day by day, and darkness lost its hold. As a sufferer of mild Seasonal Affective Disorder, I am still somewhat obsessed with this, and track the progress of the sun’s re-emergence quite obsessively on an app on my phone. The emperor Aurelian was perhaps a fellow sufferer, for he elevated the sun god to renewed prominence in the third century, building a temple in his honour and giving the festival the stamp of imperial authority. The symbolism was unmistakable: the rebirth of the sun signalled renewed strength, hope and the promise of triumph.

The imagery of light returning to the world resonated with early Christians. Long before Christmas existed, the early Christian writers were already describing Jesus as a radiant presence — a light that shines in the darkness, a sun of righteousness. When the time came to choose a date to mark the birth of Christ, an alignment with the festival of the Unconquered Sun carried a poetic logic. Winter solstice celebrations already existed across many cultures and Christians, surrounded by a world that already rejoiced at the return of daylight, found in them a natural metaphor for their own faith.

Yet the decision to celebrate Christmas on December 25th did not happen quickly. For centuries, Christians debated whether Jesus’s birthday should be celebrated at all. Some early theologians went so far as to criticise such birthday celebrations as pagan excess. In the end, theological reasoning blended with cultural reality, and a compromise was reached. The celebration of Christ’s nativity was drawn into the orbit of Rome’s winter festivals.

Once Christianity gained legal recognition under Constantine in the 4th century, church leaders faced the challenge of guiding a vast and diverse population into a new religious identity. The empire still had the legacy of the customs of Saturnalia, the reverence for Sol Invictus and countless other local traditions. Abolishing such celebrations outright would have caused confusion and led to civil unrest. Instead, Christian leaders chose the path of least resistance: they recast familiar festivities with new meaning. They did not graft pagan worship onto Christianity, but they repurposed cultural habits — gift-giving, feasting and decorating homes — to fit the story that they wanted to tell. In doing so, they allowed people to continue the customs they loved whilst shifting the spiritual focus.

Christmas grew within this climate of adaptation and reinterpretation. Many of the customs that now feel inseparable from the holiday were once part of Roman winter traditions. The exchanging of gifts, once associated with Saturn’s festival, found a new home in the tale of wise men bearing offerings for a newborn child, and in the Christian emphasis on charity and care for the poor. Feasting and joyful gatherings continued, now wrapped in the language of celebration for Christ’s birth rather than Saturn’s agricultural blessings. Lights and candles, once meant to honour the returning sun, became symbols of the divine light that entered the world in Bethlehem according to Christian belief. Even the greenery that adorned Roman homes during winter — a symbol of life persisting in the cold — persisted in later centuries as wreaths, boughs and eventually the Christmas tree.

Such continuities do not make Christmas a pagan holiday in disguise. Rather, they reveal how cultural transformation naturally unfolds. Christianity, growing from a small sect into the dominant religion of a sprawling empire, had to find ways to speak to the hearts and habits of its people. In Rome, this meant placing the celebration of Jesus’s birth in a season already rich with meaning, then slowly reshaping that meaning through worship, stories and symbolism. As centuries passed, Christmas continued to evolve. Medieval Europeans added their own layers of traditions of plays, feasts and symbolic foods. Later still, modern customs from Victorian England and American culture reshaped the holiday yet again, giving us carols, cards, Santa Claus imagery and the commercial bustle that now defines the season, for better or for worse. But beneath all these layers, the ancient Roman foundations still flicker like candlelight. The joy of gathering with others in the dark of winter in anticipation of the increasing daylight to come; the encouragement to be generous and think of others in need; the glow of lights that promise warmth and renewal. All these traditions echo the old festivals that once marked December long before Christ was born.

Understanding this intertwined history should not diminish Christmas for anyone, Christians included. The holiday stands as a testament to humanity’s enduring desire to find meaning in the dark months, to celebrate hope’s return, and to bring warmth into the coldest part of the year. Through Christianity’s encounter with Rome’s festivals, the season became a bridge between worlds — between old gods and the new faith, between ancient customs and evolving traditions, between winter’s chill and the promise of returning light. In that sense, Christmas is not merely a date on the calendar, but a centuries-long story of cultural evolution, a process that is still unfolding each time December rolls around.

Going in stealth

One of the things I love most about what I do now is the stealth and anonymity. As a frontline classroom teacher in a modern educational setting, you are constantly exposed. Teaching means being quite literally on display at the front of the classroom putting on a show for multiple classes, multiple times per day. You’re also putting on a show for management, who in turn are putting on a show for each other, for parents, for OfSted or for the ISI. Everything, frankly, is performative. The whole world’s a stage.

Even more stressful than this is the fact that your results are under scrutiny. The pressure of this will vary from setting to setting, but there are vanishingly few schools now which do not now make individual teachers directly accountable for the academic results of the students in their classes. At the high-achieving grammar school I first worked in, the Headteacher would meet with every academic department every year and go through A level results with a fine-toothed comb. Every member of the department had to prepare for the meeting and bring along their justifications as to why some students may not have made the grade. It was a toe-curling and sometimes genuinely upsetting experience.

These days, with the work that I do, I am very much behind the scenes. I’m the person you’re not supposed to see. Black leggings and a balaclava have replaced the vibrant costumes I had to wear for my classroom performances. While there are some students or parents who inform the classroom teacher of my existence, most do not. I hear reports of teachers that are amazed, delighted and genuinely mystified as to how a student has made such a marked improvement in a short period of time. Some of them must (surely?!) hazard a guess as to how this might have happened, but many seem to remain in the dark, along with my services. In terms of the results that my tutees achieve, those results go on the books of their regular classroom teacher and they are welcome to them. I know the truth, as does the tutee and their parents who paid for my work. There is something strangely satisfying about it. I genuinely love being the secret silver bullet, the hidden reason why a child makes the shift from the bottom of their class to the middle or even to the top. I cannot tell you how exciting and rewarding it is.

One student brought me up short this week when she described the situation in her classroom. In a high-achieving school, in which many of the students studied Latin from an early age in prep schools, she has always felt slightly behind the curve and I knew this already. What I did not know was the extent to which the classroom teacher relies on the fact that students have prior knowledge and thus doesn’t feel the need to teach new concepts in anything like enough depth for a novice.

“You’ve actually taught me this stuff,” my tutee said, as we celebrated her improved understanding of the uses of the subjunctive. As I listened while she elaborated, I became more and more horrified. She explained that the classroom teacher pitches the work in a manner that works for those to whom the material is not new. The overall assumption seems to be that the students already know the basic grammatical structures and thus the teacher’s job is simply to give them a quick reminder plus some further practice. The problem is so bad for those in the class that do not have the prior knowledge that several other students have also acquired a tutor over the last few months, since they too are struggling to keep up. “What I find really funny,” my tutee said, who is wryly perceptive for a young person of her age, “is that everyone who needs one always gets a private tutor, and then the school congratulates itself every year on amazing results.”

While I have never taught in the private sector, I have some experience of this phenomenon in the grammar school I used to teach in. We had a couple of teachers who were basically ticking off the days until retirement and quite frankly they were diabolical. As an A level student, if you were put into Mr Dudley’s German class, you knew that you would never get through the exam without external help. As a result, every single member of Mr Dudley’s class was given the benefit of support from a private tutor by their families. (Parents who have got their kids into a grammar school are usually well on board with the idea of private tuition: it’s how most of them got their kids into the school in the first place). So, Mr Dudley’s class would crash its way through an untaught syllabus, with lesson after lesson being provably and audibly chaotic. But guess what? Mr Dudley’s results were better than all of ours put together. And he got the credit for it, despite his palpably dreadful teaching. To be honest, it used to drive the rest of us wild.

Private tutors’ work is incredibly difficult to track because its behind-the-scenes nature means that is not systematically recorded. Without centralised data collection or mandatory reporting, it is impossible to measure how widespread private tuition is or indeed how significantly it affects educational attainment and inequality. But when a high-achieving school boasts consistently outstanding results on their website, I must admit I do find myself wondering just how many tutors there are behind the scenes to make them possible.

Reflections on Inflection

One of the biggest challenges that confronts students of Latin is that it is a heavily inflected language, meaning that the endings of words carry a large portion of the grammatical information.

English, by contrast, tends to express meaning through word order or auxiliary words. In Latin, nouns, pronouns and adjectives change their endings to mark case, number and gender; this means that a single word can appear in numerous forms that look unfamiliar at first glance. Verbs also change their form extensively to indicate tense, mood, voice, person and number. As a result, learners cannot simply scan a sentence from left to right and piece together meaning based on the sequence of words in the way they might in modern English. Instead, they must train themselves to recognise patterns in the endings, identify which role each word plays in the sentence, and mentally reconstruct the basic structure before a translation can emerge. This process of analysis can feel especially daunting for the novice.

Likewise, when learning vocabulary, it is not enough to learn the basic word. If a student simply learns that ferre means “to carry” (it’s the origin of the word ferry in English) they then fail to recognise it in most other forms. In the perfect tense, the verb changes completely: “they carry” would be tulerunt. Likewise, it’s participle is different again: “carried” (or “having been carried”) is lati. These forms need to be learnt if the student is to stand any change of recognising the word in a translation.

To be clear, all languages do this to some extent. Whenever a student is despairing as to the myriad of ways in which a Latin verb can change, I like to point out to them that if they were learning English as a non-native speaker, then they would have to learn that the verb “to be” changes from is, to are, to were, to am, to has been and so on. They would have to learn that the comparative of good is better, that the superlative of bad is worst. All languages have such challenges and while there are always underlying patterns that one can work with, even these can seem overwhelming at the beginning.

It is an easy assumption for novices to make that they can do their vocabulary learning entirely on their own, without a subject expert. While it is true that such learning is something that can and should be done regularly as part of private study, it is in fact essential that a tutor get involved with it in order to support students with the process of learning how the words look in different forms. Much of what I spend time on is the process of showing students words (most especially verbs) in their different forms, especially those which occur most commonly in the examination. A student may have learnt the fact that cado means “I fall”, but does this mean that they will recognise ceciderunt as “they fell”? Without support, this is highly unlikely. One of the skills of what I do is to focus my support on such words and to advise students and those supporting them on the learning that they can do on their own: for example, adverbs do not conjugate or decline, so those are a really good area where students can invest the time at home.

Very few schools test their students on the vocabulary list in different forms, but the very best ones do. I can count on one hand the number of schools where this is done regularly and effectively, but the difference between a student drilled in this way and one that has been merely tested on the original form of the word is palpable. Some schools invite students to learn the principal parts of verbs but this is relatively unusual and most commonly treated as “a bonus” when the reality is that learning verbs without a knowledge of their inflected parts is actually a waste of time.

One of the biggest problems with all existing text books is their lack of focus on vocabulary acquisition. While modern languages tend to build units of learning around vocabulary and place the accretion of key words at the centre of students’ learning, Latinists continue to treat vocabulary learning as a bolt-on and place little to no emphasis on weaving it into the grammar teaching that goes on. This really is bizarre and with the advent of Chat GPT and other free platforms capable of generating simple Latin sentences there really is no excuse. Schools should be re-writing the curriculum and basing the sentences used for grammar practice exclusively around the GCSE word list. When it is now possible to dump a word list into your AI platform of choice and ask it to churn out as many sentences as you desire using that vocabulary and practising the grammar point you are working on, there really is no excuse whatsoever.

While schools continue to rely on text books such as the Cambridge Latin Course and Suburani, students will continue to be let down when it comes to vocabulary acquisition, never mind the grammar. As we await the inevitable changes to the GCSE course it is difficult not to feel somewhat depressed about what will happen next. A new vocabulary list will be issued, not dramatically different from the last one, but different enough to mean that all previous materials will require checking and editing. (Last time it happened, 25 words were removed from the prescribed list, and it took a couple of years and a lot of begging for the board to release the list of words that they had removed rather than leaving teachers to work it out: as I recall, it was produced on request at various INSET gatherings and was never in wide circulation). Current text books such as Taylor & Cullen’s Latin to GCSE will thus remain useful but not quite in line with the examinations on offer and most schools will continue to use already-published courses which bear little to no relation as to what’s on the GCSE list. When I start working with a student, I already know which words will be a problem for them. For example, every single student that has studied using the Cambridge Latin Course will think that the common word poena means “poet” when in fact it means “punishment”. This is because the CLC teaches them the word poeta early on and never introduces them to the word poena.

When practice makes too perfect?

Every teacher wants their students to succeed. All teachers put in hours of effort to build the competence and confidence of their students. Yet across most schools in most subjects, there is a subtle but pervasive problem: teachers giving students tasks that directly contradict the conditions under which students will ultimately be assessed. Perhaps the most common way I see this manifested is when teachers set an exam question for homework but do not set a time limit. Students are encouraged to produce their best answer, without the contraints of timed conditions. On the surface, such a task may seem not only harmless but supportive: but what are the risks involved?

Teachers rarely encourage harmful practice out of sheer carelessness: quite the opposite. Such practice arises from good intentions. Teachers often want their students to slow down, to think carefully and to produce their best work. Removing time pressure feels like a way of fostering both their learning and their skills. Teachers are also conscious that timed tasks can cause stress and many, understandably, fear overwhelming their students; ironically, it is most often the already-anxious student that is most damaged by the practice of no time-limits, since the temptation to spend an excessive amount of time on a task in order to produce a perfect answer may be overwhelming for them. Likewise, such students are usually the most deeply affected by the looming prospect of time pressure in an exam. Thus, in their desire to reduce pressure on their students, teachers may unwittingly create more pain for the most anxious of students in both the short-term and the long-term.

Another reason why teachers may set a task without time parameters is that when students are given more time, they often produce more complete work. Completed work gives the teacher more to comment on and the student more to reflect on. Students are more likely to manage to write something at length if they are not under strict exam conditions and thus teachers have more to work with when it comes to marking and feedback. Again, however, we are faced with a painful irony as a result: not only are students practising the wrong skills, their teachers’ time is being wasted as it is being spent giving detailed feedback on irrelevant skills. To be frank, everybody loses.

What is thus most surprising about some teachers’ reluctance to impose time-limits on their students is that they fail to see how setting time-limits is a win-win situation for everyone. Not only will the student benefit from the fact that they are practising precisely what they will need to do in the examination, that student will benefit in the short-term from a homework task that is time-bound and manageable. Far too often, students are set open-ended tasks which can expand to fill the time they have available: for anxious and/or high-achieving students, this can be almost infinite. Likewise, the time that teachers have to spend on marking and feedback is minimal and needs to be tightly-managed, for the sake of their own workload and to ensure that the time they do spend on that task is valuable and effective. I will never forget Professor Paul Black (50% of the brains behind the now-ubiquitous educational concept of Assessment for Learning) stating to a roomful of teachers that we were all marking too much, too often, for too long and (here’s the really devastating bit) that we were all wasting our time. That was 25 years ago. And we’re still doing it.

Outside of workload, a further risk that arises from setting students exam-style questions with no time limit is the illusion of competence. Cognitive psychology has repeatedly demonstrated that students — and indeed their teachers — can be misled by what feels effective in the moment. When a student has unlimited time on a practice essay, their cognitive load is relatively low. There is no pressure to recall information quickly, organise ideas under time constraints or make strategic trade-offs between detail and speed. As a result, tasks feel more manageable and the final product looks polished. Students and teachers might both reasonably conclude that they are exam-ready on that topic, but this belief is built on a false foundation. What are they actually ready for? In real exams, time limits force rapid decision-making. Perhaps what is most important is that students must develop an understanding that examinations do not demand perfect, polished answers: to expect this under time pressure would be grossly unreasonable. Students must learn the importance of producing a sensible, structured response that is as well-crafted as can reasonably be expected in the time allowed. This is not the same thing as what one might produce given infinite preparation and review time, for example when drafting a manuscript for publication. When exam practice is performed without time constraints, students may master individual components of the task (knowledge, technique, structure) but they will fail to integrate them at speed during the exam. Students who have never practised in timed conditions may also experience extreme panic when they first encounter them, at a time when it is too late to build that resilience.

Research tells us that learning sticks when students are forced to retrieve information under conditions that mimic the challenge they will face. Slow, open-book, or time-unlimited tasks do not recreate the retrieval demands of an examination. They allow students to look things up, pause, think in a leisurely fashion or redraft their answers. Yet again, they are practising the wrong skills, as these behaviours are impossible in an exam room. For a skill to transfer from practice to final performance, the practice must include the key features of the performance context. Practising sections of a piano piece slowly can help with accuracy, but to perform at performance tempo, you must ultimately practise at performance tempo: you must also avoid repeating mistakes in your practice, lest they be embedded. The same principle applies to writing essays, solving equations and analysing sources.

Musical practice is not the only example of a process that academic teachers could learn from. The older and more experienced I get, the more I realise what an oversight it is that academic teachers do not listen to and learn from our sporting peers. Athletes understand the training process: they understand how to break challenges down into achievable goals and what is needed in order to practise for a final performance. More and more, I talk to my students about their studies in a way that draws on the processes used by competitive sports men and women.

With many students facing their Mock examinations at around this time, the extent to which they are prepared for those is very much on everyone’s mind. Without a doubt, most teachers understand all too well that students need to be familiar with the look and feel of assessment questions, and try to produce questions which mimic the phrasing and typical format of the questions that they will face. They also know that students need to practise retrieving their knowledge without notes, prompts, or textbook guidance. Yet the thing that is most commonly overlooked with exam-matched practice are realistic time constraints. I would argue that to encourage students to practise answering these without the additional parameter of time constraints is a dangerous and counter-productive waste of everyone’s time.

Little boxes, little boxes

Last week, I rearranged my tupperware cupboard. Do you have a tupperware cupboard? One whole kitchen cupboard dedicated solely to plastic storage boxes? If not, quite honestly, what have you been doing with your life?

Previously, all of my tupperware was at the bottom of a kitchen cupboard and the chaos was palpable. Like a flash of lightning on the road to Damscus, it suddenly occured to me that the bottom cupboard was an inconvenient location for items that I use so frequently. Whilst crouching down to retrieve the relevant box was definitely adding to my daily squat count, it was also extremely annoying. Add to this the fact that I could never locate the matching lid for said box and the whole thing was becoming something of a nightmare, the kind of ridiculous domestic trigger that can tip you over the edge.

Not only was the cupboard inconveniently located, it was also a total mess. Is it only my plastic storage boxes that multiply like gremlins? One day I’ve got a tidy little stack of three, the next morning they’ve somehow birthed a blended family of seventeen, none of which are the same size or shape. Most infuriatingly of all, they all look like they are the same size and shape, but when you try to marry them up they suddenly declare irreconcilable differences. I shudder to estimate how many hours of my life I have spent hunting for the correct tupperware lid. Tupperware lids are treacherous liars. You pull one out with confidence, thinking finally, this is the one, only to find that it’s a centimetre too long and wobbles on top of the box like a toddler’s drawing of a hat. Meanwhile, the lid that should fit has vanished into the void along with odd socks and your sanity. You try every single lid in the pile, and somehow none of them are right, even though you definitely own at least four of that exact same box. I mean, what is going on? How many versions of a plastic box can there be in the world?!

I am not the only one with this problem, I assure you. I recall having this conversation with a colleague several years ago. Like me, she would often bring her lunch into school in a tupperware box. One day, I noticed that her box was labelled with a letter of the alphabet and asked her what that was about. She told me that she had labelled all of the boxes and their lids, in the hope that this would help her to match the right box with the right lid and thus solve all of her tupperware-based problems.

“Has it worked?” I asked.

“No,” she said, grimly.

Now, I tell you, these anxieties are in the past. Since I dedicated an hour’s planning and labour to my tupperware management, I am in a brave new world. I have taken back control. Boxit means Boxit and there will be no more stray migrant lids entering my sacred space via any route, authorised or unauthorised. My borders are tightly controlled and every single box — not to mention its lid — has its own ID card and legitimate address. I police the area with sniffer dogs. Every single box knows its place and there will be no rebellions. When it comes to tupperware, I’ve gone full authoritarian. The area is laid out with military precision. China is taking note.

It’s quite remarkable how tackling a domestic problem that’s been draining your energy since time immemorial can feel like a kind of therapy. My life is genuinely improved. I mean, obviously, this is all relative. When I lie in bed at night, pondering the value of my existence and my contribution to the world at large, I don’t actually comfort myself with the thought that I can at least look back on some well-managed tupperware. We’re not talking the enlightenment here. What we are talking is that a stupidly annoying little thing that has been winding me up on a daily basis has now been sorted out, with quite remarkable ease given how long the problem has been niggling at me. Now, I can locate exactly the right box with exactly the right lid whenever I need one and it’s genuinely bizarre how much of a difference it has made to my daily irritation levels.

In all seriousness, this daft little episode has made me wonder just how many other minor domestic hassles I could improve with a little thought and application. We are creatures of habit and it’s amazing how long we can continue to go about things in a way that causes us a degree of low-level stress when it isn’t really necessary. I am now pondering what other minor bugbears I can eliminate from my life and thus resolve further daily headaches. I might even get through less Nurofen.

On Fish

Some local lads have started fishing on the canal. The likelihood of these young scallywags having a licence to do so is slim, but likewise their level of success when it comes to catching anything seems equally dubious. I have observed them occasionally, waving rods across the water to no success, but this week I came across three of them at the side of the water, making loud retching noises and shouting.

As someone not long out of the mainstream classroom, it is something of a habit to pause and query the antics of young teenagers, so I stopped and observed the melodrama.

“We’ve caught a carp!” one of them shouted, somewhat unnecessarily, given the fact that I was standing less then a metre away from the unfortunate creature. It looked more like a pike to me, but I wasn’t going to argue. Whatever the species, it was very, very dead.

“Okay,” I said, cautiously.

“It STINKS!” said another boy, in between making gagging noises.

“Well, boys,” I said. “If it smells bad, I wouldn’t eat it if I were you.”

“We’re not going to eat it!” said the first boy, his tone making it clear that the very suggestion was utterly ludicrous.

“So what are you going to do with it?” I asked.

“Take a picture of it and then throw it back,” said one of them, like this was the most obvious thing in the world and I was from outer space.

“Well, I’m not sure I approve of this,” I said, in my best middle-aged woman voice. “You’ve just killed a creature for no good reason.”

“We didn’t kill it!” said the first boy, incredulously. “It was already dead!”

I sighed. Of course it was. The boys had somehow dragged a long-dead, semi-rotten fish out of the canal and were very excited about the whole business. How else does one spend a Sunday afternoon when one is thirteen, I suppose? Ah, those halcyon days. I decided I had little to contribute to the situation and I left them to it.

Pike or carp? I pondered absent-mindedly, as I made my way home. Fish names are something of a sore spot for me. There is an interminable list of them that crossword setters like to make use of in their clue-constructions. Whenever I see the word “fish” embedded in a clue, my heart sinks. I swear, you can string any handful of letters together and it will turn out to be an obscure species of fish: from ayu to ziega, amur to zingel, if there’s a fish involved in a crossword, then I’m on a hiding to nothing.

Whether the unfortunate beast was indeed a pike or a carp, it seemed obvious on reflection that it had been dead for some considerable time. Not only were the boys’ fishing skills and equipment highly unlikely to have extended to such a princely catch, the creature itself was stiff and motionless. Do fish go through rigor mortis like mammals? I wondered. Now, there’s something to Google. In a flash, I remembered that the treatise on which my PhD was based at one point likens something to “a fish out of water”. I recall going down something of a rabbit hole, as I found myself pondering how much the ancient writers knew about what happens to fish when they’re out of water. Sure, they would have observed what a fish does when this happens, but what did they conclude was going on? I remember asking Professor Bob Sharples, an expert in the field of ancient thought and something of a walking encylopaedia, whether he knew of any mentions of the topic in the Greek and Latin corpus. “Indeed!” he said. “In fact, Theophrastus wrote a whole treatise called On Fish. I wrote an article about it five years ago.” Of course he did. How foolish of me not to know this.

There seems to have been something of a discussion in the ancient world about how fish respire. Aristotle observed that fish died quickly when removed from water and inferred that water must contain a life-sustaining substance that was analogous to air on land. He noted that fish possess gills instead of lungs and correctly proposed that these organs play a role similar to breathing in humans and other land-based animals. Aristotle also distinguished between different aquatic animals, and seems to have understood that creatures such as dolphins and whales have to surface for air, whereas fish use their gills to extract what they need directly from the water. The much less famous Theophrastus (the subject of my Professor’s article and Aristotle’s successor as head of the Lyceum) seems to have taken quite an interest in fish. He observed that fish depend on the continuous flow of water through their gills and that stagnation or poor water quality can harm them.

Roman naturalists, including Pliny the Elder, inherited and popularised this understanding. They also observed that gills serve as the essential respiratory structures of fish and that water somehow provides the equivalent of atmospheric air. While none of these men could have known about oxygen or understood the biochemical processes of respiration, they did accurately describe the observable mechanics: water passing over the gills. These observations laid the groundwork for the later scientific recognition of the fact that fish extract dissolved gases from water. The ancient thinkers demonstrated a surprisingly advanced understanding for their time, the kind of understanding that comes from empirical observation and underpins the modern scientific method.

To conclude my canalside meanderings, it is coincidental that fish are something of a hot-button topic inside our own household this week, as my husband is currently resurrecting our long-disused fish tank. It already looks marvellous, a veritable panorama of underwater plants, but is yet to welcome its piscine resident as the water quality needs to be perfect and the tank needs to be a properly functioning eco-system before it can sustain life reliably. My husband is not the kind of man to bung a fairground fish in a plastic bag: he takes his responsibility as the prime mover very seriously. I am told that we will have one solitary fish, because it will be one of those fish that likes to fight other fish. A pugnacious pollock. A bellicose barracuda. I am looking forward to seeing it, staring out of the tank like a prize boxer eyeballing his opponent before the fight.