Emma Williams – Page 14 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Facing down your Fears

What’s my logo? I don’t have one. Snappy name for my business? Don’t have that either. My business is me: my knowledge, my skills and my experience. I am my business. That might sound potentially arrogant. Actually, it’s a little terrifying.

A few weeks ago, as I always do, I woke up at the beginning of a new week and listened to two excellent podcasts aimed at tutors and education businesses, both of which release on a Monday. If you haven’t come across them, I do recommend. One is called the “Upgrade Your Education Business” podcast by Sumantha McMahon. The other is the “Love Mondays Club” by Helen Dickman. While both of them spend a good deal of time talking about things on a scale not only beyond my reach but frankly beyond my desires, I have continued to enjoy listening to them and have gained a huge amount from doing so. Both podcasts have encouraged me to think about and to question what I’m doing; both have solidified some of my thinking about what direction I want to go in and what I do and don’t want for my business. Perhaps most importantly, they have helped me to crystalise in my mind what is unique about what I offer, and this has helped me with how I present myself on my website and on social media. I am enormously grateful to both of them for the sheer number of tips, ideas and questions they have put out there for free.

It was on the Love Mondays podcast that I heard Helen – a very successful tutor and business coach – talk about her own fears of being in front of the camera. This was something of a shock given how much she places herself front and centre of her promotion campaigns! Helen acknowledged that people who have met her online as she presents herself now will probably have assumed that she is fine being in front of the camera, and has no qualms about placing herself at the centre of her promotional material. But she revealed how she used to hide her face on social media, using her pet dog instead of herself as a muse and generally avoiding showing herself on screen. Everything she said rang true with me, and I started to wonder just how many other apparently confident and successful business owners feel the same.

On this particular podcast, Helen had a guest: the photographer that she had commissionaed to take the professional images that she is currently using on her website and on social media. Kika Mitchell, who specialises in family shoots and personal branding, had me laughing within minutes. She came across as the funniest, most self-effacing and genuine character one could hope to meet. I felt the same when I got in touch with her; I felt the same when I spoke to her on the phone; I felt the same when she came to my house and made me front and centre of my very own photo shoot: something I never could have imagined myself agreeing to.

If you’d asked me a few years ago whether I’d consider myself a person who needed to employ a photographer to improve my personal branding, I’d have hooted with laughter. But the more I listened to Helen’s podcast and listened to Kika talk about what she does, the more I came to realise that’s exactly what I needed. It had been on my mind for months that my website was looking a little tired. Beyond that, the reality was that I had one photo – one! – that I was comfortable sharing on social media. As they said in Roman times, vincit qui se vincit: the one who conquers themselves conquers overall. I knew I had to face my fears and conquer them.

In a business like mine, when I am fundamentally selling myself, I understand that people want to see the person that they’re investing in. Of course they do – I feel the same! There is no way I would feel so comfortable picking up the phone and talking to someone about something as person-centred as tutoring unless I had seen an image of them looking warm, open and humane. So my personal loathing of being in front of the camera was a huge problem. Not just that, I do genuinely look awful in photographs: not because of my appearance per se – I understand that my hang-ups about that are personal – but because whenever a camera is pointed in my direction I immediately tense up and look tense and awkward. On our wedding day, my instructions to the photographer were: I don’t want to know you’re there. I knew that this was the only way we stood any chance of capturing an image of me looking happy and relaxed. Point a lens in my face and – as a rule – I look like a complete weirdo. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Fortunately, he took me at my word, and did a great job in capturing both me and my husband without my knowledge.

Having convinced myself that a professional photo shoot was something I should do, I decided that choosing someone I felt comfortable and relaxed with was going to be essential. This is what’s so great about Kika. She seems particularly adept at working with people who feel as I do – people who find the idea of having a camera pointed in their face genuinely awful. Kika’s skill lies in forcing you to be yourself. She was mercilessly insistent that I should be smiling and laughing and achieved this by … making me smile and laugh! I laugh a lot in real life. On camera, not so much; but Kika managed to capture me laughing and smiling, and those images have turned out to be some of my favourites.

I’ll be honest and say that I do hope these images last a fair while; I am not sure that I am miraculously converted to the thought of being a model in the longterm! But if Kika can take a series of images of me that I am comfortable with, I’d say she can do it for anyone.

Reading like the ancients did, thanks to modern technology

I have a deep-rooted terror of not being able to read. I don’t mean that I’ll forget how to do it – I have always been an irritatingly confident reader and complex texts hold no fear for me; I’m talking about the physiological process of focusing your eyes on a page.

Born with little to no sight in one eye and now in my late 40s, I have inevitably started to experience further changes in my one sighted eye (and that one’s not particularly great, by the way). I suffer constantly with eye strain. My optician told me (cheerfully) that this was inevitable and expected. I’m embarassed to say it’s not something that occurred to me as likely when I was younger. Like most youngsters, I just assumed I was invincible.

The potential failure of my sight is just one of the reasons why I feel so viscerally irritated by the mantra that “real books” are better than electronic ones or indeed than audiobooks. The whole thing seems so tied up with an air of smugness and is usually disguised as a humble-brag such as “I guess I’m just old-fashioned.” But the underlying implication is always that there is something soul-less and empty about you if you don’t prefer “real” books to the modern alternative. Well, try reading a small-print book (especially one of those 1970s paperbacks) in poor lighting with sight like mine. It simply can’t be done. So when a device came along which allows me to select the font style, font size and page colour: forgive me for doing a little happy dance and never looking back.

On holiday once, I was berated by an elderly Yorkshireman for “staring int’ computer again.” It took me some considerable time to convince him that I was actually reading a book and even when convinced, he shook his head in disapproval. His supposed reasoning was about the “feel” of a book, and it was irrational but not unusual. The fact that books feel and smell like what they are – ink on paper – seems to be the core reason why many people reject eReaders.

I clung to the notion myself for a while. My first eReader, a Sony, was beautiful but felt strange. In the end, the hassle of plugging it into a computer and remembering how to download things proved to be too much of a challenge. I am a lazy technophile and I expect my gadgets to do everything for me in the style of ’70s futuristic Sci Fi. But lo, then the Kindle appeared. It’s easy to forget just what a short time we have all had access to this joyous wonder of modern technology. And when audiobooks exploded into my life, my cup overflowed. I now “read” around 100 books a year; I use scare-quotes because there are plenty of anti-audio-snobs who will tell me that I am not really “reading” at all. But the audiobook has freed me up, not only to read all the time without tiring, but also to experience novels that I know, hand on heart, I would not find the mental energy to get through on my own.

How anyone who claims to “love books” can be suspicious of either the Kindle or of audiobooks amazes me. As a child I had numerous book-related fantasies, and I’m not talking about the book-smelling that I mentioned earlier; I mean the heady fantasies of a child who spends most of her waking hours living and breathing the narrative of her current favourite story. One of my abiding fantasies was to be able to open up my hand and summon a book of my choice in an instant. With the Kindle, my fantasy became a literal reality. As for audiobooks, they allow us all to fulfill the book-lover’s ideal of “always having a book on the go” – quite literally.

But how should one experience a book? In the ancient and medieval world, the oral tradition was dominant. Not until the invention of the printing press was literature widely disseminated, and even then much of it was the preserve of the wealthier classes. Mass availability of literature in print, let alone through the wonderful range of electronic options we have now, is in itself a modern privilege and one I am unspeakably grateful for. With my eyesight, even as it is, there is no way I would ever have learned to read, never mind been able to continue to do so into my middle age and my dotage.

We have little to no idea what percentage of people were taught to read in the ancient world, but let’s talk about those who were. People would most often have read out loud – not because they lacked the capacity to read in silence (there is plenty of evidence from classical texts that they could do so), but rather because accessibility was an issue. It would certainly not be the norm for an ancient family to sit about reading different texts – they simply did not have access to them. Performance aloud was therefore considered normality, and readings and recitations were the standard way of sharing literature in the ancient world. Recitation was basically publication – it was how your work was disseminated. Do audiobooks perhaps take us back to reading as the ancients experienced it?

When it comes to the suspiscion with which some people view the process of listening to a book rather than reading it, I wonder whether they were not read to beyond babyhood. My childhood was different. Both my parents, but particularly my father, read aloud to the whole family throughout my formative years and into my teens. I was read books at an age when I could not (or would not) have read them myself – Treasure Island, some Dickens, dozens of novels by John Wyndham, some classic ghost stories. So I come from a family where reading as a group was a thing. My parents still read books together and I sometimes choose books for them to read together rather than individually. Perhaps that is why audiobooks appealed to me so readily. I saw reading aloud as something to be celebrated and something of value; it certainly never occured to me that it was second best.

When I mentioned to my late father-in-law that I was culling my book collection, for I was tired of the excessive number in the house, his reaction was one of horror: “I couldn’t possibly get rid of a book!” he thundered, as if my decision to donate around half of my ludicrously large collection to charity were an outrage to Jehovah. Not that I ever actually saw him reading a book, mind you, and by his own admission he tended to sample a small snippet before he got bored and moved onto another. This is something, incidentally, that the Kindle is perfect for; he wouldn’t even have had to leave his chair. Audiobooks, I grant you, are less ideal when it comes to this approach; but they are good for short attention spans and you can always rewind them. They are also ideal for making mindless tasks more bearable.

I assumed that I would meet with more rational thinking at work, but yet more irrationalism greeted my pragmatic remarks on space and the relative likelihood of me ever actually getting round to reading Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. (I mean … really?! Where did I even get it?!) Most of the romantics that I used to work with were considerably younger than I, yet they spoke in the same terms as the elderly Yorkshireman and my father-in-law. (God help us). More mumblings about smells and the rustling of paper, more lofty claims about how wonderful it is to live surrounded by a myriad of book-spines. I wonder how many of these people have had to move in and out of countless college rooms, jobs and houses with a large book collection? I spent eight years in Higher Education, and for some of that time I had to move in and out of my room six times a year. When I moved into lodgings near my first place of work, I was given a month’s notice in the first few weeks. Flat shares followed and a good deal of further moving before I even began to settle down. Then I met my husband and moved again, twice in one year. Since moving to our current home I have moved my books on and off temporary shelves and up and down stairs ad nauseam, as we progress through a decorating process that will probably never finish. And by the time you have moved hundreds of books hundreds of times, trust me: you start to resent them. Not their contents, you understand, but their physical presence.

In Stephen Fry’s first novel, The Liar¸ the wonderful Professor Trefusis, a character who lives surrounded by improving volumes in what he calls his “librarinth”, is similarly fed up: ‘Waste of trees. … Stupid, ugly, clumsy, heavy things. The sooner technology comes up with a reliable alternative, the better.’ A wise man, Professor Trefusis, who elsewhere in the novel points out that the physical existence of a book is irrelevant to its intrinsic value: ‘Books are not holy relics. … Words may be my religion, but when it comes to worship, I am very low church. The temples and the graven images are of no interest to me. The superstitious mammetry of a bourgeois obsession for books is severely annoying.’

Books are a vessel for learning, a gateway to knowledge or a vehicle that can transport you to another world. They are not of intrinsic value, yet what they bring to those of us that love them is incalculable. For me, anything that speeds up and facilitates that process is a Godsend.

Sick bugs and toxic policies

This week, I’ve been thinking about illness and absence. As someone who has entered the post-pandemic trend of working from home, I feel remarkably cushioned from the winter bugs currently circulating. By this time of the year, as a full-time teacher, I would have been hit by at least one virus, maybe two. I worked in a building filled with over a thousand teenagers and around one hundred adults. The results were inevitable.

The news is currently filled with the tangible threat of being in such close proximity with others. It seems unsurprising that cohorts of children, who have spent a significant part of their formative years in lockdown, are now experiencing a surge in both viral and bacterial infections, a spike in cases which might otherwise have been spread out over the last two years. I have around 30 online clients who are under 18 and every single one of them has been suffering with something over the last few weeks – even those who are home-schooled, since they live with siblings who attend school and bring the bugs home. It’s simply unavoidable.

One of the few positives that I hoped would arise out of the recent pandemic was a shift in attitude away from dogged presenteeism and towards a more pragmatic approach towards what it means to keep your colleagues and your schoolmates safe and healthy. The schools I have worked in were as guilty as most when it came to dolling out awards for 100% attendance, something which has always made me acutely uncomfortable.

My own attendance record as a colleague was excellent, but something which colleagues will not have known about me was that my school attendance as a child was absolutely dire. Percentages weren’t recorded in the 1980s with the same zeal as with which they are now, but I would guess that my attendance hovered at 70-80% – well into the “danger zone” by modern standards. I have no desire to bore you with the reasons in detail, but suffice to say I was in and out of hospitals a lot plus I was – to be frank – just a sickly child. If I got something, I got it with bells on, and I usually lost several kilos in weight during the process. All in all it was not a happy time – for me, or for my family.

Thankfully, in recent years there has been some pushback from professionals against the use of attendance awards, with several high-profile voices in education raising the obvious point that they are discriminatory. This is especially true of awards which pool the results of a group or a cohort, thereby harnessing the toxic influence of peer pressure. A student such as I was, with complex medical issues leading to unavoidable absences from school combined with what amounted to a string of bad luck, would have been hammered mercilessly by the modern system. Not only that, but the students who are the real targets – you know, the ones who could definitely do with getting their tails into school a little more often – remain markedly unmoved by the whole system.

It never ceases to amaze me just how much schools somehow convince themselves that their rhetoric and pressure-systems will have any effect whatsoever on the miscreants they are supposedly aimed at. As it happens, my oldest friend was one of those miscreants. She was perfectly fit and healthy but managed to attend school rather less frequently than I did. She just didn’t like school (or at least, she didn’t that particular school, a sentiment with which I have some sympathy). And yet, when our maths teacher lost her cool with my friend, and let it slip one day in front of the entire class that she was nicknamed “the part-timer” in the staff room, she embraced the title like a badge of honour. I still throw the so-called insult at her occasionally, and it still makes us both laugh nearly 40 years later. The very notion that she would buck her ideas up and attend school more often as a result of this gibe is utterly laughable to anyone who remembers what it was like to be a teenager. Why on earth would she have cared? Get real, Mrs Rutherford. Yes, I remember you.

Of course, attendance is important. But it is unrealistic to think that our pathetic attempts to maniupulate the teenage mind is having any effect on the Ferris Buellers of this world. More than this, our heavy-handed systems are indeed having an effect: they are pressurising the most anxious of students to attend school when they shouldn’t. I can name countless students over the years who dragged themselves into school when they should have been at home in bed. Not only was this detrimental to their own health, it was detrimental to the rest of us who were exposed to their viruses. Even worse than this, I have known students distressed that their attendance record might be affected by their presence at a family funeral or arising from otherwise distressing circumstances. This is madness. And it’s our fault. Presenteeism is a horrible curse upon the dutiful, the well-behaved, the sensitive and the anxious child – and that’s before we even return to the issue of students who suffer from underlying medical conditions or disabilities which require regular medical attention and/or intervention. By contrast, it has no impact whatsoever on young Ferris.

As if these systems being used on children were not bad enough, many of us on EduTwitter were made aware this week of a school which has been marking its staff’s identity badges according to whether that member of staff had achieved 100% attendance at work. The justification for this was that it would “raise a great opportunity for staff to start conversations with students about the importance of attendance.” Not only was I blown away by what a spectacularly toxic thing this is to do to your staff, I once again found myself thinking of the vanishingly small handful of staff that this policy is (presumably) aimed at.

Come on, admit it. We’ve all worked with at least one or two of them in our time; the one whose name appears on the cover sheet with such glorious regularity that it becomes a kind of performance art. But will they be shamed by a policy like this? I guarantee you that they will not – they certainly weren’t shamed by me covering their lesson for the umpteenth time in a term, so I fail to see why anything so prosaic would make a difference to their attitude. Once again, we have a system which punishes the dutiful and fails to address the actual problem. Poor attendance by individuals (a rarity in schools in my experience, but something which does occur on occasion) is something which needs tackling directly, frankly and robustly by SLT; manufacturing a shaming system for every staff member that falls foul of this year’s worst winter virus is heartless in the extreme.

When it comes to both staff and students in schools, we need to stop idolising the notion of “in at all costs” for the costs are too great – costs to the sick individual and costs to the community. If your child is ill, they should be at home. They should also make a conscious and proactive effort to catch up on their return. Schools should have an effective and workable cover policy, one which leans towards usage of set work and does not pressurise the sick individual to be sitting at their laptop at 4.30am writing cover sheets (which I have done in my time). Schools also need to face up to the fact that policies need to focus on making life less comfortable for the individuals that do make a habit of their absence – not introduce shaming systems which will harm members of the team who are trying their hardest.

Don’t mock the afflicted

Something which has struck me this year is the huge variation between schools when it comes to handling their mock examinations. Some schools have set them in November, some in December, some in January. Some schools have provided infinite details and guidance as to what the examinations will contain, some have not. Some of my tutees didn’t even know how many examinations they were due to have in each subject and on which topics, although I am hyper-aware that teenagers are not always the most reliable of sources! It is always interesting to ponder just how accurate a reflection of reality I am receiving from the outside …

Mock examinations are important to schools for a number of reasons. As a general rule, they are considered to be an indicator as to whether a student is on target to achieve their predicted grade, although the jury is still very much out on the accuracy of this process. Most schools put their staff through an agony of results analysis, with students being flagged or colour-coded as to whether they are on, above or below target. Sometimes this coding is even passed on to the students. I have heard of schools that hand out the results on colour-coded paper: green for on/above target, amber for close to but below target, red for well below. Apparently it can make for some very interesting reactions, when students who might otherwise have been pleased or distressed at their results were shown them in the context of how they were performing against their targets.

Personally, I don’t like target grades, as I feel that they categorise children unfairly and set up a mindset that is not always helpful. Students with very high targets can feel overwhelmed by the pressure, students with lower ones can feel like the system doesn’t believe in them. So in my eutopia we wouldn’t have them at all. I once met a Headtacher who worked in an outstanding school with outstanding results. They gave every child the same target – to get as far above the pass grade as they could.

One disadvantage of mock examinations is the amount of curriculum time that is eaten up by the very process of examining, a factor which led directly to the demise of the AS/A2 system at Key Stage 5 – losing most of the summer of Year 12 to an examination period was considered simply too costly. In Year 11, however, the mock examination period is mercifully short, with most schools cramming all of their examinations into a two-week or three-week window. The price is paid by the students and by the staff, who face a very intense time during that period.

But, despite the gruelling nature of the winter exam-sprint, mock examinations are truly essential for Year 11 students. In many schools this is the one and only time that students experience a practice run of what it will be like to sit their final papers in the summer; many schools don’t have the physical space to facilitate formal examinations for all year groups, so it’s really important for Year 11 to get this one real chance at experiencing what it is like to line up as a year group according to a designated seating plan, file into the room in examination conditions and sit a series of examinations, one after the other. Students experience what it’s like to receive formal instructions from the Examinations Officer, to be told to hand in their mobile phones and check their pockets for banned materials (pretty much everything), to have to have their equipment in an appropriate clear container and to surrender any equipment that is more modern than an analogue timepiece.

All of the above can create tension for students, but it is hugely important for them to experience the process so that they know what to expect in the summer. It can be a real balancing act for schools to create the right atmosphere – just the right amount of gravitas so that students experience the seriousness of the real thing, without sending the entire year group into a state of controlled (or, even worse, uncontrolled) panic.

One of the things which students struggle the most with when it comes to their first experience of examinations is timing, and this is indeed one of the many reasons why mocks are so important. There’s nothing like the full experience of being in a large exam hall and having to work to timed conditions to make you realise that this is something that you need to practise, practise and practise again. There is no point in working on exam-style questions if you are not doing so in timed conditions – in fact, I would argue that doing so could potentially be damaging in the long-run; if a student gets used to tackling a question over a longer period of time, they’re going to struggle to adjust their performance to what is required in the final paper. This is why it’s important to practise things under time pressure from the very beginning.

But mock examinations are more than just an opportunity to experience “the real thing”. They are (or should be) an opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. Teachers expect some students to read the paper wrong, to answer the wrong section, to tackle too many questions or not enough. The point is that they get to experience the impact of this and learn how important it is to approach each paper in the right way. Beyond that, they also get to dissect their performance in detail and (in an ideal world) receive thorough, individualised feedback from their teacher. The mock examinations should highlight areas of weakness and shine a light on the skills which need honing and improvement.

So what of the worst case scenario? A student totally bombs in the mocks? Well, even that’s not a disaster. I have seen students turn things around in a manner that I might not have believed possible had I not seen it with my own eyes. A real stinker of a performance in an examination can even be the catalyst that some students need to get them focused – if no amount of their teachers or their parents telling them to buck their ideas up has worked, then sometimes totally crashing down to earth with truly disastrous grade can be the ticket.

So do not despair. We have around six months until the final examinations in the summer. That’s more than a quarter of the curriculum time remaining. Time to re-group and time to focus. Success may be closer than you think.

Reinventing the wheel?

This week I’ve been thinking about resources. On my never-ending list of Things To Do has been the project of sourcing or creating some more GCSE-style language practice papers that won’t risk wrecking a school’s assessment process. It is crucially important to me not to use actual past papers from the current specification, unless I know for a fact that the child I am working with has already been exposed to that particular paper in examination conditions. The risk of me inadvertantly showing them a paper that will then be used for in-class assessment or – even worse – for their Mock examination, is simply too high. Much as my students would I am sure be delighted to have an advance stab at their Mock paper with a tutor’s guidance, this would be unforgiveable and would entirely undermine the purpose of the Mock.

As a result of this personal rule, I use a bank of papers that I created from the old legacy GCSE to give my students more practice. Prior to the specification change in 2018, dozens of examination papers existed that could be made to fit the new specification with some relatively minor tweaks. I have around 10 or 12 of these already, which I made several years ago, but I have always wanted more.

As so often happens, once I put my mind to it, I found that I had a folder of stuff I had sourced from heaven knows where and saved into my “look at this at some point when you’ve got time” folder – a folder which is pretty enormous, as I never seemed to find said time. One folder in a folder in a sub-folder turned out to have a set of practice papers created by another teacher, all of them recognisably from papers from the dim and distant past or from relevant text books. So someone else had the same idea as me but used different sources to create them, and I’ve managed to get my hands on their work. Halle-blinking-lujah.

But this got me thinking. Something that friends and family find it hard to understand is that even though a huge amount of my time is spent working on resources, none of these can be monetised. I am grateful for my background in academia, a period during which a paranoia about plagiarism was drummed into me – and rightly so. There have been numerous cases of teachers monetising resources that have then turned out to be based on the work of others. Much of the time, I honestly believe that this may not even have been entirely deliberate. The way that we work means that it can become genuinely difficult to remember where your work ends and that of another begins. Teachers tend to be the curators of an ever-evolving bank of resources that many others have influenced in different ways over the years. I am acutely aware that pretty much everything I produce as a working resource for students started its life somewhere else – as a passage in an old text book, from a bank of files kindly shared by a colleague, on a dim and distant exam paper from days gone by. Very little of what I produce, therefore, can be claimed as entirely original and monetised. If you’re still not convinced, take a look at what happened on The Classics Library website, where resources being shared entirely for free fell foul of copyright laws and had to be taken down as requested by Cambridge University Press: anything which even relies on the ideas and concepts created by others is not entirely your own work.

Given how many times this issue has been raised in relation to the monetised resources on the TES website, I do worry about the number of teachers and tutors who are now monetising vast quantities of resources. I do hope that every single one of them can truthfully claim that every single word of what they have written is original to them and didn’t start life as part of a set of departmental resources or as a piece created by a colleague or a trainee. Personally, I can lay claim to very little that is entirely original to me, because I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel unless I have to. Much of my time is spent hunting for useful resources, then reimagining them in a format that I find most useful or compelling. To use a rather sickening phrase, I take a resource and “make it my own”. But it is not my own, in the sense that I can lay claim to its birth and monetise it as my own work. It simply isn’t. Even if it is barely recognisable from its original, it is still not mine to claim. And certainly not to sell.

A regular occurence for me throughout my career has been that I manage to get my hands on a bank of departmental resources only to find that they are using something that I wrote 15 years ago. There are numerous advantages to taking on a trainee teacher, and one very useful one is harvesting what they have brought from other schools; the number of times I have opened up a file with great excitement only to go … hang on … this looks familiar … oh yeah, I think I wrote that. Or did I just adapt it? Who knows?

So, while my resources are all available to the students I work with and I share them gladly, they are not something that I can actually charge for because they are the result of my work combined with that of others – sometimes another person that is known to me, sometimes a whole list of people whom I have never met. I’ve always known this and have always found it to be in stark contrast to how things work in academia, a world in which you have to footnote every giant’s shoulders on whom you stand. The trend of teachers and tutors monetising resources does give me pause for this reason; I only hope that they are aware of the rules, and can hand-on-heart swear that everything they are selling started life in their own head and came to fruition by their hand alone. If they can, then wow – they’re definitely a hell of a lot more original than I am.

Keeping it short

New clients are often surprised by the fact that I recommend sessions of just 30 minutes. Many are swiftly converted to the idea when I give my reasons, but some remain deeply sceptical; I have even lost one or two leads as a direct result.

Given how critical many people are of the shortness of their own child’s attention span, and also given the fact that most people approach me because of the very fact that their child is struggling to cope in my subject, I do find it strange how bitterly wedded to the hour-long model some people are. I also find it strange how many tutors are still working to it.

The latter is perhaps easily explained: to be frank, it is easier as a tutor to fill your books and your time in hourly slots, as going with the half-hour model means that you have to source double the number of clients to make the same amount of money. However, I don’t believe that this is the reason why so many tutors are sticking to the hourly model, not least because I know so many who are already over-subscribed. I think it’s got far more to do with habit. We’ve always done it this way, so let’s just carry on. Some tutors to whom I have suggested the 30-minute model have reacted to the idea as if it’s some kind of revelation – it had literally never occured to them to tutor for any period of time other than an hour. Yet in the world of music teaching, for example, 30-minute lessons are really quite common.

The hour-long model for tuition is in many ways a hang-over from when all sessions were face-to-face and practicalities therefore came into play. Parents bringing their child to a tutor’s house probably preferred an hourly session; at least it’s enough time to nip round to the Co-Op and pick up a few basics, or do another quick errand. Half an hour would mean that they would probably have no choice but to sit in the car and wait. Yet these days, with online tutoring, 30 minute sessions are a viable, workable model and students gain untold benefits from working in this way.

Here are just a few of my key reasons for going with the 30-minute model.

Most tutoring sessions are very intensive and can be taxing on the working memory, which is exceedingly limited. Over-burdening a child’s working memory is counter-productive and will hinder their progress.
Tutoring is expensive for the client. Given what I have said in number 1, I truly believe that I am giving better value for money, because a child is more able to focus intensively for the whole session. Why pay for extra time that is potentially less valuable? This is why I recommend two sessions of half an hour if parents are really keen for their child to have an hour of my time – they pay me the same amount as they would at an hourly rate, but they’re getting better value for money.
Not all children are exactly thrilled at the notion of spending extra time being coached in a subject that they are struggling with and/or that they don’t (yet) like. This is especially true of teenagers. A 30-minute session is a much easier sell to a disaffected, disgruntled Year 11 student, especially when they see how much progress they can make in that short time. I have had teenagers request to go up to two sessions per week once they realise the progress that they can make in a 30 minute slot. We must all try hard to remember what it feels like to be 14, 15 or 16 years old. An hour feels like an absolute eternity. I remember being almost in tears before double geography, just at the thought of the interminable boredom. (Sorry, Mrs Winslow).
On a related note, 30-minute sessions also mean that I don’t get bored. Sorry if this is a shock to anyone, but tutors are human and we get tired during sessions as well, especially if that session involves the patient repetition and re-explanation of very simple concepts, multiple times, which it often does. I work with numerous students who need remedial help on very simple concepts. Keeping their sessions short keeps up the sense of urgency and the interest; I am fresh, focused and your child is getting me at my best.
The 30-minute model means I can help more people. I currently have almost 40 students on my books and there is no way I could work with that many clients in hourly slots. I am already getting to the point where I am turning people away: while I do have some slots available, unless a parent can agree to a very specific time, I am currently having to pass them on to other tutors. If they have selected me for a specific reason (usually because they have read my website really carefully), this can be disappointing for them, however wonderful I know my recommended tutors are. I understand that, and I want to work with as many people as I can who want to work with me.

Finally, some thoughts about schools. While many schools work with hourly lessons, this is not true for all and indeed it is the most academic schools that tend to favour shorter lessons. The grammar school I used to work in had eight lessons per day, each one of 35 minutes. The pressure to get the students in, settled and working as soon as possible was high; as a result, every minute felt urgent and pressured, and that’s actually very conducive to a thriving learning environment. One of the biggest changes I noticed when I left this grammar school and joined a comprehensive was a terrifying lack of urgency when it came to lesson time. I remember being totally taken aback by a student who once commented “is it even worth starting this? We’ve only got half an hour.”

Many schools worry that the introduction of shorter lessons would lead to wasted time, as students will be moving between classes more often. In my experience, the exact opposite is the case. Shorter lessons put the pressure on both students and staff, and it’s easier to promote the sense that we must be making the most of every minute.

INSETs I wish I’d walked out of

When I reflect on the hundreds, possibly thousands of hours I have spent sat on a plastic chair designed for children, listening to half-baked, poorly-researched, unevidenced clichés and banalities, it’s actually quite difficult not to be angry.

Like anything in life, you have to be detached from something to get it into perspective: and more perspective makes me more cross rather than less so. How much of my time was wasted at tax-payers’ expense? Even worse, how many children continue to be taught badly while undiscerning leaders pump out empty platitudes instead of making themselves aware of and sharing the wealth of information that we do have about how humans learn?

I wish I’d been braver. I wish I’d voted with my feet and walked out of some sessions, rather than saving my disapproval for the anonymous staff surveys. It’s easy to say now, I realise that, and when your salary is being paid by those presenting at INSET, it might seem a little foolhardy to make your feelings so apparent. But the SLT in the school in which I spent the last 13 years of my career were pretty good at taking things on board. They weren’t tyrants; they were humane, benevolent and willing to be challenged. Maybe if I’d been a little bolder I could have helped to drive them towards evidence-informed pedagogy a little sooner. As it was, I had to wait for some personnel changes at the top and for some of the figures at leadership level to start reading the right material. It took years. It was infuriating.

Even more than this, I regret not following my instincts in the early days of my career. In particular, the instinct that if something sounds, feels and smells like unscientific hokum … then that’s exactly what it is. I knew that “Brain Gym” was an unrelenting stream of hogwash. And yet I sat there and listened to it (eyebrows in my hairline, but still I sat there). Now I feel dirty and used. Fortunately for all of us exposed to this achingly bad presentation back in around 2006, on the next day, another colleague – one of the scientists, I suspect – pinned an article by Ben Goldacre onto the staff room noticeboard; the piece was a precursor to Goldacre’s book Bad Science, which I later read, exposing “Brain Gym” and its ilk as pseudo-scientific snake-oil. Thanks to that article, and to the teacher who anonymously shared it, the use of “Brain Gym” was quietly shelved by anyone in the school who was even borderline capable of critical evaluation.

“Brain Gym” wasn’t the only bad science that I had to endure. Within the last decade the school where I worked invited in an outside speaker (at I know not what grotesque expense) to tell us all that mind maps were the only way for children to learn because they look a bit like your brain does under a microscope. I kid you not, he showed us an image of neurons and pointed out how similar mind-maps look, like it was some kind of gotcha. He also espoused the “left-brain/right-brain” hypothesis, admitted that “neurologists think it’s a little bit more complicated than this” (they do?! It is?!) but then declared breezily that “for our purposes” it was “a good working model”. Right. Presumably his definition of “a good working model” was the fact that it enabled him to keep rolling out his useless PowerPoint rather than telling us anything that was actually true about the brain. The only thing that got me through that particular session was another colleague: every time this fraudulent salesman made a statement of about the brain, the biologist sitting next to me muttered “no, it doesn’t”. And thank heaven for her.

Bad science aside, the number of INSETs I wish I’d walked out of simply as a statement that SLT were wasting my time remain alarmingly high. Here are some further examples of some of what I have been made to endure and/or partake in over the years:

VAKing, now fortunately condemned to the bonfire by anyone who knows anything. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t agonising sitting through this claptrap at the time, then being made to interview children about what they felt their preferred “learning style” was (some schools put a sticker on the front of children’s exercise books, naming their “preferred style”. We got them to colour it in). The very concept of preferred learning styles is unscientific hogwash; unfortunately is still being peddled in some places, especially in the US.
It’s all about growth mindset. No it isn’t, nor was it ever, and now we have the evidence to prove that its impact in schools amounts to net zero. Next?
Drumming. Ah what an INSET that was. We each had to choose our own percussion instrument, and this in itself was made out to be some kind of personality test. We then all “learned” to perform a short percussive work. I believe that the message was something about working as a team for the greater good. Inspirational.
Juggling. Here the message was that it’s difficult to learn a new skill and we should remember that when we’re teaching. I am unclear as to why it took two hours of me attempting to catch small bean bags to drive this message home.
Guess what’s in the trainer’s head. I have a genuine issue with someone standing up at the front of the hall and asking me to guess the correct answer to a question they are then going to give me the answer to. How many cases of child neglect were reported in the Surrey area during the last academic year? I have no idea – why would anyone who hasn’t just checked the figures have any idea? I assume you’re planning to tell me, so can we just move on to the bit where you provide me with the actual information, rather than ask me to guess?
Death by PowerPoint. The trainer reads everything that’s on every slide then assures you that it will be on the shared drive for you to access, which begs the question why on earth you had to sit and listen to him reading it aloud.
Death by Ted Talk. No. Just no. If anyone is still in some kind of idealistic bubble in which they think that any Ted Talk is profound and worth hearing, then de-program yourself by watching this. “Let’s look at a picture of the planet for no reason” is I think my favourite moment.
Look at me and my big book. This was a recent lethal mutation from the welcome move towards schools becoming more research-informed. In this genre of INSET, a manager that you know full well rarely if ever opens a book puts the image of the front cover of one he’s been told to read on a projected slide so he can demonstrate how research-informed he is.
Mindfulness. Again, I’m afraid that the research on the impact of this in schools simply isn’t there. Until it is, I don’t want to hear about it and I certainly don’t want to do it with colleagues. Asking me to lie on the drama-room floor (seriously?!) while someone talks in a soothing voice is also a big no.
Bad quotations. Even if correctly attributed, there is nothing more cringe-worthy than an “inspiring” quotation on a PowerPoint slide. And I don’t know a single manager who hasn’t used a falsely-attibuted one at some point or another.

As Abraham Lincoln famously said, the trouble with quotes on the internet is you never really know whether they’re genuine.

In the customs of our ancestors

November is a time for remembrance and at this time of year I am always reminded of the man who brought me to the study of Latin, the teacher who had the most profound effect upon me. It was a shock to find out in November 2014 that he had died. It was even more of a shock to find myself organising his funeral.

Tony was a difficult man to define. A magnetic personality, he threw himself into school life with passion and verve, yet it was painfully obvious to many of us that his private life was a lonely one. As someone with virtually no family and with a tendency to push even those that he cared for away, my beloved schoolmaster was left lying in a hospital mortuary for over a fortnight whilst a solicitor, his sole executor, waited and hoped that a friend or a colleague would come forward for him. For reasons which still escape me, nobody did.

A ritualistic response to death is one of the things that defines us as a species. Tentative evidence of burial or funerary caching goes back to the Stone Age, and it seems clear that our earliest ancestors began interring their dead, sometimes with personal effects. Interestingly, some anthropologists immediately jump to the conclusion that these relics must be evidence for a belief in some kind of afterlife, in which it was assumed that the deceased individual would require the tools of his trade; others are more cautious, and argue that grave goods are simply evidence of individualisation and respect – religious or not, we like to bury a person’s things with them, as symbolic markers of who they were and the impact that they had on the world.

Certainly, everyone that knew Tony would have been acutely aware that he would not have wanted a fuss. I am told that it took some persuading to make him attend his own retirement party, a fact that does not surprise me in the least. However, people still went to the trouble to convince him, and with good reason: retirement parties matter. People want to offer their thanks and to acknowledge the contribution that somebody has made, however much a man like Tony would have waved his hands dismissively and insisted that he had been simply doing his job.

In the same way, but even more so, funerals matter. They matter because someone has lived; they matter because someone has died; they matter because we have to say farewell to their body and, in that inevitable moment, accept that they are gone. ‘People talk about “going through” grief,’ a friend once said to me; ‘the truth is that it goes through you.’ We can’t escape the physical, the visceral nature of loss, and our farewell to the corporeal entity that was once a vibrant individual is a painful but inescapable necessity. For all these reasons, I could not stand by and leave my dearest old teacher’s send-off to the reluctant whim of his legal executor. I simply couldn’t bear it.

Tony left no instructions, but from my memories of him, one decision was mercifully clear: without hesitation, I asked the funeral director to book a humanist celebrant. Those of you who have read some of my articles will know the kind of school that I attended and therefore where Tony worked, an institution shrouded in religious superstition and dogma. Tony had a profound influence on me by modelling informed dissent; this was a man who pointedly read a book in the Chapel services he was obliged to attend, and who summarised religion quite simply as ‘a load of old hooey.’ In a tightly-controlled environment, where religious doctrine ruled and questions were ignored, it was frankly thrilling.

The other decisions I had to make for him were much harder, but I was fortunate to have the proactive support of another ex-pupil. She suggested a poem that she had studied with him, Poem 101 by Catullus, a poignant tribute to his dead brother from which the title of this blog is taken; she was willing to read the poem for us in the original Latin, and she did so magnificently. I chose music that reflected Tony’s career as a Classicist, from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and from Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. Who knows what he would have made of it all, but I hoped it was acceptable. I was also lucky enough to have the services of an outstanding celebrant, accredited by the BHA (now Humanists UK) and meticulous in his approach. Philip Scott drove all the way from Reading to meet me at my place of work in Woking, for he insisted that we must meet in person and not discuss the funeral over the phone. He listened with care and asked searching questions, he chased up the few leads that I was able to give him and ultimately he pieced together a moving yet respectful tribute to a man who was intensely private – a difficult task indeed.

Planning Tony’s funeral with minimal support was challenging and stressful. There were times when I doubted myself, when I agonised about the decisions that I was making and fretted that I was making the wrong ones. For several nights in a row, I barely slept. But despite all of this, I would do it again in a heartbeat. Tony’s legacy persists in the lives that he touched and I am just one of so many students that owe him the due honour and respect that he deserves.

As Aristotle said, teachers who inspire children successfully should be held in the highest esteem. A parent gives life to a child; a teacher shows them the art of living well.

Tony Garner: photograph from Queen Anne’s School, Caversham

Tony Garner died in November 2014 and this post was originally published shortly afterwards in Humanist Life magazine.