“Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in while, or the light won’t come in.”
Alan Alda, American actor
One of the biggest luxuries of one-to-one tutoring compared to classroom teaching is the opportunity it gives you to make no assumptions. In the classroom, hauling large cohorts of students through a curriculum means that you have to make assumptions sometimes: you can explore responsive teaching and effective questioning all you like, but fundamentally the class has to move on. Without (or even with) some quite remarkably skilled classroom practice, a few may still be left behind. In an ideal world they wouldn’t be, but we don’t live in an ideal world.
In its best and most effective form, one-to-one tutoring is an opportunity for the tutor to make no assumptions and — as a result — for the student to gain understanding at a level that they may never have experienced before. This applies no matter what level they are working at. Those who appear to be thriving can be challenged and have their understanding tested. Such examination can really shore up their mastery by picking holes in any misconceptions that they may be harbouring, misapprehensions which may trip them up at a later date. Whenever I have a student who is performing at a high-grade level, I remind myself of the number of students I have worked with who are working at a low grade and who report high performance in their first two years of the subject. Never. Make. Assumptions. Just because someone appears to be thriving does not mean that their understanding is perfect or complete, nor does it mean that they will not struggle at a later date.
Here’s another assumption for you. When working with high-performing students, many teachers and tutors assume that “stretch and challenge” must mean new material, going beyond the curriculum. This absolutely has its place and may well be warranted in some cases. But in my experience, those cases are phenomenally rare in Latin. In this highly-inflected language, a subject in which the greatest gift you can offer a student to guarantee future excellence is a cast-iron grasp of the basics, I have yet to meet a student that does not benefit from being challenged to justify and unpick their understanding of the work that’s already in front of them; this applies especially to students who claim to find such work “too easy”. There are times when a high-performing student can translate a GCSE-level passage with relative ease and it would be tempting to nod along and congratulate them. But making assumptions based upon their apparently confident performance is letting them down. Asking them a range of pertinent, incisive questions and challenging them to explain and justify their translation usually reveals a myriad of tiny holes in their presumed comprehension. This is by no means a disaster, it is rather something to be celebrated. Through this process, a student working at a high level can improve the quality and depth of their understanding and that can make all the difference to their ability to thrive at the next level in the future.
Many students come to me with their own assumptions. A common belief that some students hold is that it is only the difficult material that they are struggling with. They base this supposition on the fact that they started to experience problems as the material became more challenging. But with rare exceptions, it is seldom the case that the so-called “difficult” material is the problem. I could take a student’s assessment of their problem at face value, and start tackling their knowledge of the indirect statement, the ablative absolute or the uses of the subjunctive. But I have learnt that this is a false assumption. Instead, I start by showing them a basic table of noun endings and ask them how familiar they are with that material. I then ask them whether they can name all the noun cases in the correct order and tell me exactly how those cases are used and translated. In all my years of tutoring, it has been an extremely rare occurrence that a student can do so without mistakes or hesitation: it’s happened maybe once or twice. This is because such students will have been taught the basics a very long time ago and then their teacher has assumed that these basics have been retained ad infinitum. If I could advise classroom teachers of one crucial tweak to their classroom practice, it would be this: get properly informed about memory and retrieval practice and use it proactively to revisit the basics. It will be a better use of classroom time than anything else you are doing at the higher level. For example, as a starter task, ask your Year 11 (or even Year 12 or Year 13) students to write down the cases in order and also give a rough summary of how each case is used. You will be amazed at how many of them cannot do it.
Students also have assumptions about themselves or their own abilities, all of which require challenge. Presumptions such as “I’m no good at this” or “I can’t do it” are obviously damaging, but perhaps even more so are postulations such as “I know the basics”, indeed these blithe suppositions can actually be more difficult to overcome. Students who are convinced of their own weaknesses can be easy to work with, as all you need to do is use the power of one-to-one support to show them that they absolutely can do it: the revelation is so exciting and inspiring for most of them that they tend to be an easy convert to the tutoring process. A harder sell can be persuading those who are convinced that their early progress in the subject is not to be questioned and who thus request a focus on the most complicated constructions. It can be something of an unpleasant shock for them when small fissures are revealed in what they were convinced were solid foundations and it is these students who actually require the most reassurance. Students who have found the subject difficult from Day 1 are used to the struggle; it is those who hit problems later down the line that can falter at the very suggestion that they might need to revisit the subject at a rudimentary level.
