Revelations

One of the strangest things about humans is what they reveal about themselves. Never is this more apparent than at a school Consultation Evening, when the parents or guardians of a child sit opposite their child’s teachers to discuss their child’s progress or – at times – to reveal in glorious technicolour their warped sense of reality and chaotic lives to the person sitting opposite them.

Recently, The Huffington Post invited readers in the teaching profession to reveal the most remarkable things that parents have said to them over the years. “When teachers go into their profession, they do so with the expectation that they will have to deal with some student misbehaviour. … But when you speak with teachers about the behaviours that cause them the most distress, it’s not the students who are to blame, it’s their parents — some of whom seem to badly need a lesson in courtesy, respect and common sense.”

“I had a parent tell me that their child … was a genius and I just wasn’t smart enough to comprehend that” said one. “I had a parent tell me that they didn’t need to teach their child morals, as that is what school should be teaching them,” reported another. Over the years, I also experienced some quite remarkable condescension from some of the adults I had to deal with, although nothing quite this bad: “I once had a parent tell me, ‘I worked in daycare too, then I decided to get a career’,” reported one pre-school teacher with 17 years’ experience. This comment is particularly revealing of a fact that became apparent during the pandemic- how some people see schools as there to provide day care for their children, not an education.

Generally speaking, such people are so rare and so jaw-droppingly ridiculous that I have wiped the recollection of most such comments from my memory. The majority of parents are respectful and only too supportive of their child’s teachers. One memory I do maintain, however, is not of a child’s parents setting out to undermine me, but rather seeming to reveal such malfunction in their own lives that I have never forgotten it. This happened in my very first year of teaching, which is now 25 years ago, so I feel pretty safe telling the story. It was my very first Consultation Evening, one of hundreds that I would attend, and it remains the one I have never forgotten. It was also the time when I truly learnt the definition of passive-aggressive behaviour, or what in modern parlance is often referred to as gas-lighting.

The parents of this particular child were divorcing but were attending the Consultation Evening together with their child. There is nothing unusual about this and most manage to do so with only the faintest whiff of awkwardness in the air. I remain convinced that the overwhelming majority of parents want the best for their children and that includes protecting them from the worst of the fall-out when it comes to a separation. These parents, however, appeared to be going through a particularly acrimonious separation and there had been some confusion (possibly confounded by at least one of the people involved) about to whom communications regarding their child’s progress should be sent. This was made clear to me the moment that the family sat down – the child deposited like a military buffer zone between the individuals at war – and informed me that this was the case. Not a great start.

Neither parent would look at or speak to the other parent, so it was close to impossible to have a normal conversation that would include their child in the process without extreme awkwardness. Nevertheless, I pressed on as best I could, taking the opportunity to explain how well their child had been doing recently (remarkably well, given the family situation in which they found themselves). Just as I was beginning to round up my report, I was interrupted by the child’s mother, who appeared agitated and unable to contain herself any longer.

“I wish to make one thing absolutely crystal clear,” she barked, pointing her finger at me. “I wish to clarify the fact that I have not – nor have I ever – been suffering from any kind of mental illness. There is nothing wrong with me!”

There was a long, mortifying pause.

“Um. Okay,” I said, unsure where this was going but very sure that I didn’t like it or have any idea of how to handle it.

“So whatever has been said about me – and I mean by anyone – is not true. I want it wiped from your records!”

Personally, I was unaware of anything on anyone’s record about mental health issues, and I was genuinely at a loss as to what to say. Now, with more experience, I realise that I should have said something like “you clearly have some concerns, so can I suggest that you speak to …” and pass the buck onto someone considerably higher up the pay grade than I was (which, at that time, was pretty much everybody; I suspect the assistant caretaker earned significantly more than I did). From my recollection, however, I was incapable of anything other than opening and closing my mouth like a dying fish.

“I hope I’ve made myself clear,” snapped the mother, at which point her soon-to-be-very-ex-husband piped up.

“As I was saying,” he remarked, smoothly, “I’m keen to be kept informed of any ways in which I can help with vocabulary learning. Do you have any particular suggestions?”

There was another silence, while I stared at him, then at his trembling wife. It was as if she had not spoken. She did not exist. Her presence was not merely irrelevant, it was a non-fact. He had not heard her, for she was not there.

He continued.

“Just keep me in the loop with regards to anything I can do to help in that department.”

So, that was my stark introduction to the psychological concept of passive aggressive behaviour. I could immediately begin to see where this woman’s apparent neurosis was coming from. When you have someone who quite literally acts as if you have been expunged from the universe, where do you go other than the path of frustration, protestation and rage? What choice do you have other than to act out? I tried to imagine a lifetime of being ignored, of being talked over, of being erased and expunged. I’m not sure I would have handled it with any more dignity or diplomacy than she was managing.

To this day I will never know the full truth behind what was going on in that family, but I do know that the acrimonious divorce took them down a path of heart-breaking consequences for their child. Since they were unable to agree on custody and access and since the child was old enough for the courts to take their individual preferences into account, the child was forced to testify in open court about which parent they would prefer to live with and why. Quite how a couple who once made vows to each other and chose to bring a child into this world can end up so horribly broken I struggle to imagine, but the consequences for all concerned were devastating. So, more than any ignorant insults hurled at me and the profession I represent over the years – and there have been a few – it is this early experience that I recall with genuine regret.

Photo by Megan Watson on Unsplash

Routines and comfort zones

As I write this, I’m in absolute agony. I can barely move without yelping. Rolling over in bed has been a challenge and I am getting up out of my chair like a 70-year-old. There’s me thinking that I normally make myself work hard on my twice-weekly visits to the gym. Turns out that – for quite some time – I’ve just been playing at it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been making progress. On several of the machines, I can now select a heavier option than I have been able to previously, and my strength has definitely continued to improve incrementally. But if I’m honest, that progress has been very, very slow and has quite possibly reached a plateau over the last few weeks.

This week, in place of the deep-tissue massage and advice-session I normally get from my physical therapist, we met at the gym and he coached me in my usual routines. Flipping heck. I truly had not realised just how much I was staying in my comfort zone and what a difference it would make to me, having someone to push me beyond it. While Greg is anything but a Sargeant Major type, it’s amazing what a great motivator it is to have someone beside you, telling you to add more weight, stretch a bit further, try a bit harder.

“What weights should we use for walking lunges?” he asked. “Um … 4s or 5s?” I said, hopefully, knowing full well that he would push me up to working with 6s. Off he jogged to the weight store and returned, brimming with mischief. “They didn’t have any 6s,” he said, nonchalantly. “Try with these 8s.”

Ignoring this transparent deceit and weighed down by an extra 16 kilos on top of my body weight of 47, I waggled my way through a series of walking lunges. Greg did the same beside me, holding more than double the weight and chatting all the time about his son and his daughter. I’ve taught both of them, of course, because, as an ex-teacher in the village comprehensive, it is a local by-law that I have must have taught the children of every single community service-provider: the personal trainer, the Sainsbury’s delivery guy, the gardener, the builder, the roofer, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. While Greg chatted, I puffed and panted and my glutei maximi made it more than apparent to me that there would be trouble ahead. Yesterday and today, that trouble became manifest.

Over the last 48 hours I have felt almost as bad as I did on the very first occasion I tried this new-fangled business of resistance training. Ouch. It’s been a serious wake up call, the sudden realisation that – while habits and routines are essential and the stuff of a (healthy) life – they carry with them the risk of complacency and comfort. Things have been way too easy at the gym recently, because I have let them be so. I cannot remember the last time that I experienced serious delayed-onset muscle soreness after a visit, and that’s something to work on from here.

This week, I also met a new client, one who is struggling when it comes to committing her work to memory. Whether it be the set text, noun endings or vocabulary, there is a serious amount of rote-learning required in the subject of Latin, and many students struggle with the sheer volume of what they need to commit to long-term memory. Supposedly, she has been doing all the right things and has made regular use of flashcards, but the fact that the process is not working is most likely because it’s been too comfortable.

So, I encouraged her to work proactively on selecting the cards that she is struggling with and focus on those. Flashcards are for the words you don’t know, not the ones you do. I also warned against the well-known risk attached to using the flashcards alone, rather than getting somebody else to test you – the temptation to turn the card over too quickly and allow yourself to recognise the answer rather than to hold off until you retrieve it can be great; indeed it can be something that students do unconsciously, without even realising it. Putting somebody else in charge of the cards is a great way to mitigate against this risk. “It should feel uncomfortable,” I preached. “If you’re finding the flashcards too easy, you’re doing it wrong.” Huh. Physician, heal thyself, I thought ruefully this morning, as my muscles caterwauled their protest against Monday’s new and unusual routines.

What has this taught me? Well, it’s been a bit of a jolt. It has reminded me that we are all susceptible to the almost inevitable tendency to settle into a comfort zone, to keep patting ourselves on the back for a job well done when in reality we’ve done very little. It has also reminded me that going it alone is inherently flawed. I really understand why people hire personal trainers on a long-term basis – not because any of the exercises that they are doing are particularly complex or dangerous or requiring an expert, but because it’s just too easy not to push yourself. Paying someone to motivate you can be hugely valuable, and this has given me pause for thought. While I’m not sure it’s necessary for me to hire someone to train with twice a week every week, I can totally see the value in an occasional booster session to question my habits, to shake up my routine and to remind me to push myself harder. That’s something that I shall be investing in from this point forward.

Photo by Victor Freitas on Unsplash

Digital snake-oil

Picture the scene. You’re in a posh restaurant. The sort with linen napkins, thick carpets and snooty waiters. Everyone is dressed smartly and all the subliminal messaging is telling you that – whatever the food is like – you are expected to behave in a certain way.

The couple next to you are hunched over, staring at their smart phones. So are the couple behind them. Your partner is also staring at his phone. When your gaze returns to the table, your own phone awaits. No, this is not an indictment of society’s mass phone addiction, it is an unfortunate situation rendered necessary by the fact that your holiday-provider has decided that Going Digital is A Good Idea. As part of your eye-wateringly expensive holiday package you might be entitled to eat in this restaurant, but apparently you’re not entitled to a menu that you can actually hold in your hands. No, you must access the menu by “following the QR code” using the camera on your phone. Each table has a glass ornament displaying the code, so you whip your smartphone out and away you go.

It was not just the fact that seeing people scrolling on their phones in a restaurant was depressing – which it was. It was also the fact that accessing the menu in this way afforded no tangible gains whatsoever: it was, in fact, a substantially sub-optimal way of looking at a menu. The very need for scrolling was an irritation, when real menus are arranged in a way that allows you to scan the whole offering in one. A traditional menu would have been- quite simply – a hundred times better. Even my husband heartily agreed, a man who had a career in software engineering and is a natural lover of all things digital.

This spectacularly pointless switch to digital puzzled me for the rest of the holiday. With the best will in the world, why would somebody do this? Have we actually hit the point where some people believe that things are made definitively better purely for the reason that they are sprinkled with digital fairy dust? The quite extraordinary stupidity of the whole thing was rendered even more ludicrous by the fact that the holiday company did not even have the imagination to exploit the (albeit slim) advantages that “going digital” could bring to the party. For example, if they were so determined to go the digital route, then why not share the QR code with customers ahead of time and encourage them to start choosing their menu options in advance? This would at least have added a whiff of anticipation, although I still would argue that a traditional menu would have been infinitely preferable once we were sat in the restaurant itself. Easy advance-sharing was literally the only potential advantage I could imagine arising from the digital model, and they didn’t even bother to do that. So, the gormless march towards everything going digital advances, it seems, with no thought applied either to the potential consequences or to how to actually reap the potential advantages it might afford.

Increasingly, secondary school students are provided with “everything they need” online. While digital tools will have meant some investment on the school’s part, I am suspicious that a lot of what happens now is actually about reducing their photocopying budget, an undeniable thorn in the side of every HoD who has responsibility for their department’s costs. Honestly, what schools spend on technology generally pales into insignificance when compared to their yearly photocopying budget. While really successful schools who are getting fantastic results and impressive Progress 8 scores have broadly shifted towards the use of printed booklets for the students and moved away from digital presentations on the part of the teacher, vast swathes of schools (including in the private sector) have shifted towards a digital model, where everything is presented to the students electronically and nothing is printed out. Ker-ching.

I have worked with dozens of students in this position and have seen the disastrous fallout of what this digital model does for students’ learning and understanding. Inevitably, like anything inherently flawed, it is the already-disadvantaged that it leaves behind. People seem to assume that being “disadvantaged” means a lack of access to expensive technology and it is true that there can be glaring differences between what an affluent child has access to by comparison with one who is eligible for free school meals. But this is not the only way that students can be disadvantaged and it is vastly outweighed by other, more serious handicaps. Think prior attainment, think organisational skills, think access to an ever-increasing range of vocabulary, think time and space. Students who are already struggling in class for a myriad of reasons – some of which may or may not relate to poverty – are demonstrably left behind when adults demand that they manage both their time and their resources in such an abstract way, often without guidance.

There is so much nonsense talked about the younger generation being fully au fait with the full range of digital technology on offer, as if being born in the digital age bestows young people with an innate knowledge and understanding of the skills and mindset required to navigate towards progress in the modern age. The reality is that most kids are completely clueless when it comes to managing their learning remotely. Of course they are! Just because a child has been pressing icons on the screen of an iPad since they were a toddler, this does not imbue them with the organisational skills required to manage their learning online. To assume so would be like assuming that a toddler who has mastered the fun that can be had from a pop-up reading book is thus fortified with the skills and knowledge required to negotiate a library full of journals, encyclopaedias and reference manuals.

An increasing number of students that I work with are studying the WJEC/Eduqas GCSE syllabus, the creators of which produce a simply baffling array of resources that even I took a while to get my head around. Some of them are aimed at teachers, some of them in theory designed to be student-friendly. Most schools dump all of these resources into an area where students can access them, a collection of ponderous PDF files that are long and academically challenging. The one file which is explicitly aimed at students is designed as a student booklet, with space in which students can write their translation and notes. Most schools don’t even bother print this one out, instructing the students to work electronically. I have tutees who have not held a pen in class for years, so wedded is their school to the use of tablets or Chromebooks. I could honestly weep for their basic skills and feel outraged that so many schools are so blatantly ignoring the research that we have on the link between the use of a pen and memory. These students come to me with simply no idea what they have supposedly studied, what materials are in their possession and what they are supposed to do with them. They are completely overwhelmed and can’t even articulate the basic content that they have theoretically covered in class.

Technology is an absolute wonder. In the last few years, I have embraced online learning to the extent that I have made a career out of it, I have embraced the time-saving advantages of AI and I am always open to the advantages that technical advances can bring. As someone in possession of the world’s worst sense of direction, I find the smartphone genuinely liberating and life-changing, as it enables me to negotiate my way confidently. It even knows all the local pathways! As someone with poor eyesight, I love the fact that there has been an explosion in the availability of audiobooks, and that I can now access most books and articles in a format that allows me to manipulate the size and shape of the font as well as the colour of the background. This is all wonderful! Believe me, I love technology! But I am heartily sick of two things that the digital snake-oil salesmen seem to have successfully convinced society of: firstly, the blind assumption that digital is always better, when in fact people should be asking themselves whether it is better and if so why – what other advantages might the technology bring and what are the potential pitfalls? Secondly, I am tired of the assumption that children born in the current epoch are all miraculously imbued with innate digital skills and knowledge, a bizarre fantasy which seems thoroughly ingrained, despite the ever-increasing pile of evidence to the contrary.

Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash

Delayed gratification

This week I have found myself having a very stern conversation with one of my cats. Her name is Piglet. Piglet by name, piglet by nature. The animal simply cannot help herself when it comes to food. If she had her way, she’d be the size of a house, hauling her enormous belly around like a competitor in the World’s Strongest Man. Fortunately – or unfortunately, as far as she is concerned – she has mean old me controlling her food intake.

So, Piglet and I had to have a very serious conversation about her life choices. This is a cat that was in line to receive some small pieces of chicken as a treat. See, I’m not always mean: I had even taken the pieces out of the fridge, to bring them up to room temperature. Piglet, however, elected that evening to wolf down the remaining supper of our other cat, who is currently being rather delicate about her food intake. The second cat is in the early stages of renal failure and so is on a specialist prescription diet. When my back was turned for a nano-second, I failed to register that Dolly had walked away from her food and so I turned around to find Piglet urgently inhaling the last scraps of Dolly’s prescription dinner.

“You could have had some chicken pieces this evening!” I admonished her. “As it is, you’ve made the choice to eat the prescription cat food, so now you’re not getting anything else.” She stared at me, unmoved and unimpressed, still cleaning her whiskers after the extra feed she had claimed for herself.

In reality, of course, the cat’s brain is not capable of understanding the point. She’s a very smart cat, but she has not yet mastered English, nor has she worked out that stealing the prescription cat food means missing out on her chicken treats. She is also – being a cat – not capable of making the fundamental decision of delayed gratification, something which human psychologists and the world in general like to cite as a crucial indicator of our future success as adults. Or is it?

I am quite a fan of The Studies Show, a podcast hosted by two science writers called Stuart Richie and Tom Chivers. In each episode, they debunk various stubborn myths that persist either as a result of poor science or as a result of the science being poorly reported or interpreted (or both). They investigate how science is at the mercy of human bias like any other subject, and explain things such as confounding, publication bias and collider bias (I am still struggling to grasp the last one in full). In one particular episode, they explore the experiment nicknamed “the marshmallow test”, which was hailed as a groundbreaking study into impulse control in very young children, with some quite extraordinary claims made about how the findings were linked to future success in several walks of life – in education, in financial stability, in relationships and in health.

In various tests, performed on a group of 4-year-olds in Stanford University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, psychologists offered several hundred children a choice between either one or two sweet treats. The children were offered the choice of either taking one treat which they could have immediately, or if they waited for an unspecified amount of time, during which the psychologist left the room, they would then be allowed two treats. Times that the children were left to wait varied but could be up to 20 minutes. One point, made hilariously by Tom Chivers during the discussion, is to question whether some smart four-year-olds might already have a sound understanding of the value of their own time. “You know what, one marshmallow isn’t worth 20 minutes of my time, mate!” he imagines them saying. Stuart Richie then ponders whether marshmallows were a significantly bigger deal in the 1970s compared to now – what kid in the mid-2020s is going to wait 15 or 20 minutes just for one extra marshmallow?

The issues with the study are many, but the most dubious are the claims that were extrapolated from two follow-up questionnaires, which were responded to by only around 100 of the original 653 participants – meaning that more than 80% of the candidates were not included in the two follow-up studies, which looked at the children in later life. Chivers and Richie also raise the query that the original test was confounded by the fact that different children were given different coping strategies to assist with the waiting time – for example, some were encouraged to use distraction techniques, others to focus on the end reward. This is because the original purpose of the research at Stanford was to try to find out which of the coping strategies would help children most with delaying gratification – the idea of following them up to see which children became more successful in later life came some time afterwards, which may explain why Stanford lost touch with so many of the participants. However, it is the later follow-up studies that caused all the excitement, as they supposedly found a quite remarkably strong correlation between later success and the period of time that the younger children had managed to wait before receiving their reward. The claim – of course – turns out to be nonsense. The correlation only worked with children who had not been offered any coping strategies to help to delay the gratification, which somewhat begs the question why the primary author of the study believed so strongly in the teaching of delayed gratification as a life-strategy. Far more importantly, however, the correlation all but disappeared in replication studies, when controls were introduced for socio-economic background and previous academic success, both of which are far more obvious likely predictors of future academic attainment and overall success.

Chivers and Richie link the wild extrapolations taken from this particular study to similar attempts to introduce the concept of “growth mindset” in schools, another topic of academic research that they take a sledgehammer to in a previous episode. I remember this particular fad very well, as at the time in my school we had one particular Senior Manager who had read Carol Dweck’s book The Psychology of Success and was a shiny, happy acolyte for the concept that the tiniest shift in rhetoric – basically, praising kids for working hard rather than for their smarts – would somehow revolutionise their success in the classroom. It may not surprise you to know that it didn’t, and that the studies in this area have since been shown to prove nothing of the sort.

This is not to say that delaying gratification is not an important skill. It is, of course, an important part of growing up and becoming a successful adult that one learns to some extent to place tasks in an order of importance and/or urgency, rather than focusing entirely on what you would most like to do in the moment. Studying for an exam, preparing for a competition or an interview, exercising and eating the right things for the benefit of your longterm health are all simple goals shared by many which require this skill. In my experience, children acquire the ability to delay their gratification at different rates and while some teenagers have fully mastered the process others are still grappling with their motivation and find it really hard to set aside the things that they enjoy the most to focus on something important but less interesting. One of the greatest things that schools can do is thus to focus on assisting children in their ability to concentrate, as a lack of attention in class remains by far the biggest barrier to academic success for many of our most vulnerable students.

In the meantime, Piglet remains at the mercy of her desires and will no doubt continue to make a lunge for every tasty morsel she can find in her path. I have often said that one of the joys of keeping a cat is that they teach you how to live your life and speaking as someone who doesn’t always remember to reward myself just for the hell of it, Piglet serves as a feline reminder that sometimes making a dive for the thing you crave the most is to be recommended.

Piglet, who can only delay her gratification while sleeping

France is bacon and other misconceptions

When I was young, my father said to me: “Knowledge is power, France is bacon.” For more than a decade I wondered over the meaning of the second part and what was the surreal linkage between the two. If I said the quote to someone, “Knowledge is power, France is bacon,” they nodded knowingly. Or someone might say “Knowledge is power” and I’d finish the quote, “France is bacon” and they wouldn’t look at me like I’d said something very odd, but thoughtfully agree. I did ask a teacher what did “Knowledge is power, France is bacon” mean, and got a full 10 minute explanation of the “knowledge is power” bit but nothing on “France is bacon.” When I prompted further explanation by saying “France is bacon?” in a questioning tone, I just got a “yes”. At 12 I didn’t have the confidence to press it further. I just accepted it as something I would never understand. It wasn’t until years later I saw it written down, “Knowledge is power,” Francis Bacon, that the penny dropped.

Anonymous post on Reddit, 2011.

The ease with which such misconceptions can arise is something that all teachers should be aware of. Most likely, you can remember some of your own from childhood. For me, most memorably, it was the phrase “rich as Croesus”, which my mother used to use regularly. As a kid, unsurprisingly, I’d never heard of the ancient Greek king of legendary wealth, so I heard “rich as creases.” For years I wondered what being rich had to do with having creases, or why creases were considered to be the same thing as being rich. I just put it down to one of those weird things that grown-ups say.

It is important to remember that much of what adults say is inherently puzzling to young children. Before we berate them for a lack of intellectual curiosity (why on earth didn’t I just ask … ?), it is important to remind ourselves that pretty much everything that adults say or do can seem puzzling on some level to very young children. It is not, therefore, surprising when they shrug and accept a saying or something that they are told is a truism that makes little obvious sense: nothing makes obvious sense when you’re small.

Further to that, the account of the child who heard “France is bacon” illustrates the anxiety that most children have that they have at best missed something obvious or at worst that they are inherently stupid. You can feel the child’s unease as they anxiously test the waters with the various ways in which they attempt to have the saying explained to them. Even the teacher completely misses the opportunity to correct the misconception, as they clearly did not realise where the misconception lay. This illustrates the tendency that we have as teachers to assume that we already understand what it is that a child needs explaining to them: in this case, the teacher assumed that the child was puzzled as to the underlying message of the saying – in what sense can knowledge bring power? What the teacher actually needed to do was to quiz the child on why they were asking about it – what was puzzling them about the quotation? Had the teacher done so, the misconception would have been identified and rectified.

One of the things that I love about tutoring is the opportunity that the one-to-one setting brings to uncover such misconceptions or gaps in a child’s knowledge. This is partly because of the time and focused attention that it affords, but it is also because of the opportunity that you are offering a child to ask all of those “stupid” questions that they’ve been bottling up for years. Nothing brings me greater joy than a tutee who develops the confidence to interrupt me and demand an explanation for something, or to ask me a question that I did not realise that they needed to ask. That’s when the relationship between the tutor and their student has really developed, when a child gains the confidence to demand the most out of their sessions.

Just recently, I was reminded how careful we need to be when assuming what a child knows. I showed my tutee the translation of a Latin poem by Catullus, which contains the metaphor “my purse is full of cobwebs”. Now I went in with the assumption that the child might need encouragement to grasp the metaphor, as many children do not find these as easy as you might assume. During the discussion, however, I discovered that she did not in fact know what “a purse” was. There was no chance of her understanding the metaphor until that was rectified! It had not previously occurred to me that this might be a word that a 16-year-old might not know: but if your family have always used the word “wallet”, or your parents carry their change in their jeans, or – as is becoming increasingly the norm – they don’t really carry cash at all, then maybe it is simply not a word you have come across. We should never, ever assume.

Misconceptions that arise from mishearings such as “France is bacon” or “rich as creases” also illustrate the essential importance of dual coding. A couple of years ago, I realised that one of my tutees was convinced that the dative case had something to do with numbers. After a couple of minutes of trying to explore where this misconception had come from, I suddenly realised what had happened: his teacher had (quite rightly) taught his class that the dative case was to be translated as “to” or “for”. My tutee, however, had heard “two” or “four”. He heard numbers instead of words, and he had been understandably confused ever since. Yet had the teacher simply written the words “to” and “for” on the board as well as saying them out loud, this misconception would have been avoided. So many people confuse dual coding with the idea of simply putting a nice picture on their handouts, or the ridiculous belief that illustrations are essential for basic vocabulary learning. Not a bit of it. Dual coding is the process of combining words with visual stimulus. It is used to help the brain to grasp a concept without misconceptions: using a visual representation of what you are explaining in written words, or writing down what you are explaining verbally.

Children will always form misconceptions and that fact is nothing to be feared. It does, however, mean that teachers must be particularly alert to them and the methods that are most likely going to help to resolve them, or to prevent them from forming in the first place.

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

The role of the translator?

The festive season would not be complete without an EduTwitter bust up, and this year there was more than one. Pleasingly, the one that’s rumbled on the longest is a controversy surrounding Homer’s Odyssey, striking a rare burst of attention for Classics in the broader world of education. The debate started with some people arguing about whether school-teachers have or should have read or taught this text in schools. Quite why anybody cares remains a puzzle. After a few days, however, the row spread amongst a much wider audience and mutated into reactions to a recent translation from the original Greek by Emily Wilson, who in 2018 became the first woman to publish a full English translation of the Odyssey, to much fanfare.

Predictably, people’s reactions to Wilson’s translation fall into clear political camps. The Guardian hailed it as “groundbreaking” and a feminist interpretation which will “change our understanding of it forever” while critics more right of centre breathed anxiously in and out of a paper bag and muttered dire warnings about the decline of the West. It’s all very silly, but in amongst all the hysteria has been some unintentionally thoughtful commentary: sometimes, people don’t even realise that they’ve said something interesting while they are trying to score a political point. “The job of a translator is not to attribute postmodern ideas of sex oppression to a writer who has been dead for 3000 years” raged Charlie Bentley-Astor. Broadly, I don’t disagree with her, but I found myself pondering: what is the role of the translator, exactly?

Those who have not studied languages, particularly ancient languages, might find this question bizarre. The role of the translator, surely, is to reproduce the text as faithfully as possible in a different language? Well, yes. But you see, it depends what your priorities are and it depends what aspects of the text you believe are most important to remain faithful to. The spirit and mores of the times? The lyrical qualities of the original? Its readability? And what is the purpose of your translation? To support the study of the text in the original language? Or to open up the text to a wider audience, who will never have the chance to study it in the original Greek? These are just a handful of the questions that a translator must ask themselves. The translations that I produce for students who are studying a text in the original Latin are clunky and unsuitable for publication. This is because their sole purpose is to facilitate the students’ understanding of the Latin text in front of them, on which they will be questioned in an examination: I do not produce my work for the pleasure of a general audience, so I am not aiming at fluidity, readability or beauty, all of which are potentially important when publishing a translation for a wider readership, for people who want to enjoy reading a text for pleasure.

The power of the translator is immense, and those who are exercised by Wilson’s approach are upset by the fact that she has been credited with approaching the text from a more feminist standpoint, potentially imbuing it with a set of values that could not have been imagined by Homer himself. Yet I simply do not understand the hysterical reaction by some conservatives, who seem completely oblivious to the fact that this interpretative dance has gone on since the dawn of time. Every translator inculcates a text with his or her own priorities, and every translator knows that. If you are picking up a translation of an ancient text and you honestly believe that it will be giving you a faithful, full and accurate rendering of the original author’s meaning and intention then you are deeply naïve, for this is impossible. It is for this reason that I have never understood those who claim to understand the “word of God” when they have not studied their own religious texts in the original language in which it was written. So, Christians, off you go to learn Hebrew and New Testament Greek!

Let’s just take one very simple example of the problem. Imagine that I were producing a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. How would I render the phrase “imperium sine fine”, which is what Jupiter states that he will grant to the Romans? The word imperium has multiple meanings and can be translated as “power”, “command” or “empire”. It had some quite specific and technical meanings in relation to the command that a general had over a region but was also tied up with the Roman belief that the expansion of their dominion was a fundamentally good and noble thing: this included the exercising of power over other nations and the geographical expansion of their borders. The phrase sine fine could be rendered “without end” or “without borders” – it refers both to the physical extent of the Roman empire and to their belief that their domination was not only unlimited in terms of their relationship with the world, but that it would be unlimited in time. The phrase is therefore deeply resonant in the Roman mindset – that their empire, their military might, their control over the world was divinely-granted: it had no borders and it would last forever.

I would argue further that it is not only the layered meanings that such a phrase had for the Romans that have to be considered when translating this phrase now. As readers from a modern perspective, in the full knowledge of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, the phrase imperium sine fine has a poignancy for us that Virgil could not have imagined. This does not mean that its meaning to a modern audience does not have value – quite the opposite. There would be little point in the survival of ancient texts if they were not to strike resonances within us as a result of the changes that have taken place since they were written.

The importance of capturing the spirit of a text over and above remaining faithful to its construction is a challenge faced by those who convert a classic novel into a film or a drama. The 1992 film version of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, directed and produced by Gary Sinise and starring John Malkovich is – in my opinion – an absolute masterpiece of this spiritual capture. The opening scenes are entirely invented by the film-makers: a terrified woman in a torn red dress runs across farmland, then we see men on horseback who appear to be in pursuit of the woman’s assailant. Those of you who know the novel will understand exactly the background to George and Lennie’s situation that this represents and in my view it was a brilliant leap of imagination to transfer the information to film in this way.

Conservatives who fear “incorrect” interpretations of a text fail to understand that the enduring appeal of a text lies in its interpretation. Believe you me, Aristophanes did not have a feminist slant in mind when he wrote Lysistrata, a comic play poking fun at the incompetence of the Athenian political intelligentsia, who were doing such a God-awful job that even the women could probably do it better! That was the joke, for the Athenian audience. Yet Lysistrata is – inevitably – read and performed as a feminist play in the modern setting, and I have enjoyed productions that have rendered it thus. Thus, I do find myself chuckling at the rising hysteria expressed by many who seem so terrified by the fact that Homer has now been translated by a woman. I do wish they could understand that Homer will survive: he’s big enough and man enough to take it.

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Stress? What stress?

For various reasons, I’ve been thinking about stress. More specifically, stress relating to the work that people do. As we bed in to the holiday spell (for some, I have read, quite literally), there will be people reading this who find themselves wondering where they will find the strength from to go back into work.

While everyone will experience work-related stress from time to time, it is a truth universally acknowledged that some jobs are apparently more stressful than others. This universally-accepted truth is riffed upon beautifully in an old Mitchell and Webb sketch, which I won’t link to because it gets a bit post-watershed towards the end. The scenario drawn is one partner coming home from a tough day at work as a paediatrician, working with sick and dying children; the running gag is his earnest desire to reassure his partner, whose job entails tasting new products at an ice-cream factory, that their careers are both equally important and equally pressurised. “Just because I’m a paediatrician dealing with severely ill children, doesn’t mean that you can’t have a tough day tasting ice cream,” he says.

People have wildly varied takes on the levels of stress that they assume come with classroom teaching. Some people seem irrevocably wedded to the idea that teachers are work-shy layabouts who finish at 4.00pm on the days that they do work, plus luxuriate in an almost unlimited supply of holiday time when they don’t. I lost count of the number of times someone hurled the “long holidays” at me like it was a brilliant gotcha. After a while, I used to hurl it back. “Teaching is a fantastic job,” I would say. “Did you know that there is currently an enormous drive to get more people into teaching, so given how convinced you are of the benefits, shall I send you a link to the courses that are recruiting? You even get paid to train!” That usually shut them up.

There have always been people who think that teaching’s a breeze. There are plenty of others who believe that it is horribly stressful. At times, they were right. While the average classroom teacher will not find themselves in charge of a multi-million pound budget, nor will they find themselves in a position where they are hiring and firing, nor indeed are they likely to find themselves presenting their work to a roomful of demanding CEOs, I’d like to see those same CEOs try their hand at managing a roomful of Year 10s on a hot afternoon when there’s a wasp in the room.

Let’s be honest. My subject, in the grand scheme of things, is relatively unimportant. While I can bang the drum of what A Good Thing Latin is for all students, let’s not be silly about this: whether or not a student attains a respectable grade in their Latin GCSE is not going to affect their life-chances (unless their life-plan is to become a Professor of Classics, and even then there are ways around that particular problem). However, most Latinists who work – as I did – in the state sector, will find themselves expected to earn their keep by offering at least one other mainstream subject. For me, that was English. As a result, I have found myself solely responsible for the GCSE English grades of several cohorts. This has included sets where there was an enormous focus on what used to be the C/D borderline and sets where their chances of making it to that borderline were considered slim. This, in very real terms, meant that I was directly responsible for a student’s life chances. I am not being over-dramatic, I don’t think. In all honesty, whether a child attains a pass grade in both English and Maths will shape their destiny in ways that few people outside education are fully aware of. A child who does not attain their GCSE English and Maths is largely condemned to a life on minimum wage. This may sound over-dramatic, but it is broadly true. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, including many successful entrepreneurs who take pride in citing their scholarly failures as a badge of honour. I’m glad for them that they overcame this hurdle, but a hurdle it is, and one which proves impossible for the majority to overcome. I have never cried more tears of joy than when my students who had been classified as unlikely to pass managed to do so. For them, it quite literally meant the difference between poverty and a fighting chance. These kids, by the way, fought me every step of the way and if they’d had their way they never would have sat the exam in the first place. That, I would argue, is a considerable pressure, one faced by thousands of teachers across the country every year: helping kids to get over a barrier, with them quite literally doing everything in their power to remain behind it.

Another factor which many people fail to appreciate is the number of safeguarding concerns that your average teacher is exposed to during their career. I never specialised in pastoral care and did not do any training in the field of safeguarding beyond that which is expected of anyone working with young people, yet in my time I came across cases of neglect, of child sexual exploitation, of child criminal exploitation, of illegal drug use and more besides. On the penultimate day of my 21 years at the chalkface I became aware of what I was concerned could be a potential case of FGM and was urgently summoning Designated Safeguarding Leads to my classroom for advice, all while maintaining a calm demeanour and continuing to run the classroom and teach my lessons as if nothing were afoot. This is the kind of thing that teachers do every day and I am not sure whether other people realise this. We don’t talk about it much, partly because it’s not appropriate, but partly because it is – or has become – the norm. It is not unusual for teachers to be working with children who are experiencing genuine trauma; it is not unusual to be painfully aware of some deeply troubling circumstances that a child may be experiencing at home.

For most of my career, I loved my job. I also considered it a considerably less stressful deal than others experienced by more high-powered friends who managed large budgets or were responsible for people’s livelihoods in their business. Yet sometimes I would remind myself that I was, in many ways, responsible for people’s livelihoods. A teacher can shape someone’s future in unimaginable ways and their influence – for better or for worse – can dictate which doors are open and which ones are closed in the future. If you are a teacher, never underestimate that power.

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Responsive Tutoring

One of the most powerful tools for promoting student progress is what’s called assessment for learning (AfL). When I was first teaching and the phrase was all the rage, you wouldn’t have passed an interview without mentioning it. While the acryonym AfL is less often used these days, it still underpins modern teaching.

The thinkers credited with the founding principles behind the use of AfL in the classroom are on record as saying they wish they’d called it something else. Rather than “assessment for learning”, they wish they’d called it “responsive teaching” and I can see why. In many ways, AfL is about neither assessment nor learning – at least, not in isolation. AfL, or rather responsive teaching, is about what a teacher does differently in response to where their students are in terms of their understanding.

While summative assessments (such as a GCSE examination) focus on evaluating final outcomes, AfL is embedded in day-to-day teaching in order to gauge students’ progress, clarify misunderstandings and – most crucially – to guide further learning. Effective use in the classroom presents a unique set of challenges for teachers, especially when working with larger groups. The process is infinitely easier in a one-to-one setting, where the dynamic between the tutor and the tutee shapes the entire process.

Responsive teaching is meant to be a continuous loop, the gathering and interpretation of evidence used to shape a teacher’s instructional decisions. AfL can also be used to help students to recognise their own current level of understanding and set goals to improve. It is meant to be an ongoing, dynamic process and requires teachers to have a nuanced understanding of each student’s needs, strengths, and areas for improvement. To be effective, AfL requires not just frequent feedback but feedback that is individualised and actionable. In a one-on-one setting, a tutor can more naturally meet these requirements, while in a classroom with multiple students, the process becomes complex, requiring considerable skill and resourcefulness from the teacher.

When implementing AfL in the classroom, teachers encounter several challenges that are unique to managing large groups. In a classroom of 30 students, teachers must balance AfL with the demands of covering the curriculum, managing behaviour and addressing a multitude of diverse learning needs. The time constraints are significant. For each student, providing specific feedback and tailoring instructional adjustments is an ideal that is often close to impossible to achieve in practice. In any single lesson, a teacher may only have a minute or two to focus on each student. This time is rarely enough for comprehensive feedback, making it challenging to provide meaningful guidance on areas for improvement.

In larger classrooms, teachers have to rely on quick, general assessments, such as asking questions to the class or using hand-raising methods, but these approaches can miss individual nuances and only provide superficial insights into each student’s understanding. Real-time feedback is essential for the process to work, but logistical challenges mean that teachers sometimes delay feedback until they can examine students’ work. This delay can diminish the impact of the feedback and may hinder a student’s immediate progress. It also places a significant workload burden on the teacher: even schools who have understood and embraced the principles behind whole-class feedback are still placing a considerable assessment burden on the classroom teacher in terms of work that must be completed outside the classroom.

In any classroom, some students may actively participate and show enthusiasm, while others remain quiet or withdrawn. Unless a school has fully embraced and embedded the principles of “no excuses”, teachers will struggle to gauge the understanding of all students. Ensuring equal participation is challenging, and without specific engagement from each student, teachers may only get a partial view of the overall class understanding. Implementing AfL strategies requires significant time and energy, which teachers often need to dedicate to managing classroom behaviour. Students can become disengaged, especially if they don’t immediately understand a lesson or find it challenging. The need for behaviour management can take time away from delivering AfL, reducing the effectiveness of feedback and lesson adaptation.

By contrast, one-to-one tutoring provides an environment where AfL shapes and defines the entire process. In a one-on-one setting, the tutor’s focus is exclusively on a single student and this individual attention means the tutor can tailor questions, feedback, and guidance specifically for that student. Any misconceptions or gaps in knowledge are immediately identified and addressed, without the need for complex assessment. For example, a tutor might notice hesitation in a student’s response and immediately reframe the question to clarify understanding. This kind of personalised, immediate and dynamic intervention is impossible in a classroom.

In tutoring, feedback is instant. If a student misunderstands a concept, the tutor can pause and offer corrective feedback on the spot. There is no need to wait, no need to press ahead with the curriculum. This timely response to a student’s needs helps to solidify learning and build confidence, making AfL truly effective. Tutoring allows for a flexibility in pacing which simply cannot happen in the classroom. A tutor can spend as much time as necessary on a particular concept, adjusting the level of challenge to ensure that a student remains engaged. For example, if a student masters a topic quickly, the tutor can introduce more complex material. Conversely, if a student is struggling, the tutor can slow down, review foundational concepts, or use alternative explanations.

One-to-one tutoring fosters a relationship where the student may feel more comfortable expressing misunderstandings or asking questions. I actively praise my students for interrupting me and asking questions, although I am careful to highlight for them that this is the right environement in which to do so; it is important to me that I support classroom teachers by clarifying to students that they cannot – nor should they – demand this level of individual attention and feedback in the mainstream classroom.

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