Emma Williams – Page 4 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Reflections on Failure

Well over two years ago, I resolved to write a blog post every single week. So far, I have managed to do so. One of the many ways that this has been possible is that I forgive myself when the writing and/or the idea I come up with in one particular week is not exactly going to set the world on fire. If I am going to achieve the goal of writing something every week, I need to accept that not every single post is going to be a work of art. I can’t even imagine the pressure of coming up with a weekly Op Ed for a respected newspaper or journal. Indeed, the only paid writing gig I ever managed briefly was fortnightly and even that was one that I had to resign from after a while; the expectation to produce a well-researched, top-quality piece of writing on a topic of interest that was relevant to the right readers was something I simply couldn’t cope with. And by the way, the going rate for writing of this sort is utterly dismal – well below minimum wage if you calculate your earnings by the hour.

One of my earliest blog posts remains one of the ones that I am most fond of. It’s called “The one that got away” and was a reflection on the student that I remember with the most regret from my career at the chalkface. A student I felt I had failed. I’m a huge believer in the fact that one should acknowledge one’s failures and reflect on them. Too often we are encouraged not to even use the word “failure” but I think it’s important. All of us fail. It’s not a dirty word, it’s a part of a full life well-lived and an ambitious career. “Show me a man who has never made a mistake and I’ll show you one who has never tried anything” is a viral internet quote which – in various forms – has been attributed to pretty much everyone including Albert Einstein, Theodore Roosevelt and – my personal favourite – Joan Collins. Whoever said it (and today I truly cannot be bothered to try and find out who did so) was absolutely right.

My failures in tutoring have been few and far between. I say this not to boast about how great I am at what I do but rather to demonstrate how much easier and more powerful one-to-one tutoring is compared to classroom teaching. If you are an expert in your subject (by which I mean the academic content and the expectations of the relevant examinations), plus if you’re used to communicating with students of the age you’re trying to work with, tutoring is a breeze. One-to-one work is so phenomenally powerful that you really don’t need to be a genius at it for it to have a tangible impact. I like to think that I am good at what I do, but compared to the ambition of being a good classroom teacher, being a really good tutor is remarkably easy. Being a really good classroom teacher? Oh my goodness it’s hard. Like you wouldn’t believe. I cannot emphasise this enough. You wonder why teachers are leaving the profession in droves? I’ll give you a hint. It isn’t the salary.

Being good at what you do does not mean you will not fail sometimes. I keep a record of students who have discontinued (as opposed to those who have simply reached the end of their time with me because they have completed the course or finished their exams). There are not many, but given the sheer volume of students that I work with there are always going to be a few. This week I decided to reflect on each case and try to glean what – if anything – can be learned from them. It turns out, they all have one thing in common.

Generally speaking, the underlying reason why a student will discontinue working with me is that they remain reluctant to engage with the sessions. This is sometimes because the tutoring has been foisted on them, rather than something they have asked for themselves, or it’s sometimes when they realise that they will have to do some work during the sessions – a student may have asked for help, but the process is not going to work unless they are up for a challenge. I have worked with scores of students who are deeply reluctant to work independently outside of the sessions, and I always make it clear to the bill-payer that the impact of what I do will be limited when this is the case; yet so long as a student engages with the sessions during our one-to-one time together then it is still possible to have some kind of impact on them. By contrast, a student that really won’t engage with the learning process will not progress. It is often because they are afraid of failure and while I’m pretty experienced with helping a disaffected student to overcome this barrier, I accept that I simply cannot win them all.

So, what can I do to mitigate against such failures? After all, there is no point in reflecting on failure unless to improve. Well, something I have got better at is the early identification of students who are not responding well to the process. I would much rather get in touch with home and have this frank conversation than continue to take someone’s money when I believe that I am unlikely to have much of an impact on that student’s outcomes. Sometimes, that very frank conversation can jolt a student into realising that they have been resistant to the process and if they actually do wish to continue with the tutoring then it’s usually the catalyst towards engagement and progress – a turnaround in what might otherwise have been a failure. If the student does not want to keep working with me, it gives them the opportunity to say so, which is fine too.

Beyond that, another way in which I have tried to mitigate against the risk of failure is to specialise more and more in the areas I know best. I am a GCSE expert and now I am so much in demand then that’s what I offer. I work with students who are preparing for the GCSE or who have it in their sights and am no longer advertising myself as a tutor who works outside of this field: my expertise at working with that material and that age-range is the greatest and the more I am in my field of expertise, the more likely the process is to succeed. My advice would be to be wary of tutors who offer a bounteous range of subjects and/or levels: the best tutors hone their skills in one particular offering and become a genuine expert in what they do.

One of the things I tell my students is that mistakes are important. They inform me of their misunderstandings and misconceptions, so they’re a hugely important part of the tutoring process. Mistakes and failures make us better at what we do and we should embrace them and learn from them, not see them as a reflection on us as a person or a professional. It is not the failures that define us, but rather how we respond to them. Failures can make us more likely to succeed in the future.

Riots and hanging baskets

The recent civil unrest on our streets is the most serious we have seen since August 2011, when a similar spate of violence and looting occurred following the shooting of Mark Duggan by police in Tottenham. I remember the 2011 riots well, because I had not long moved out of that area of London and the shooting itself plus the events that spiralled out of control following it were a stark reminder that I felt lucky to be out of an area that had seen four murders within one mile of my house during one single year.

Shortly after those riots in 2011, my husband and I found ourselves driving through the tranquil streets of Henley-on-Thames, on our way to visit family. My husband remarked upon the glorious hanging baskets and pointed out that one did not tend to hear of riots reported in the heart of towns which were festooned with floral displays. “That’s clearly the solution!” he cried, banging the steering wheel. “Deploy baskets of petunias immediately to all towns across the UK! They are the frontline in riot-prevention!”

He was joking, of course, and the joke relies on an understanding of the fact that correlation is not causation. I’d be willing to place a bet that the presence of hanging baskets would indeed be a pretty reliable indicator that riots have never taken place in a particular town. Yet it is not – as any sane individual would acknowledge – the presence of the hanging baskets which actually prevents the riots. So why might they be a reliable indicator? Why might the presence of hanging baskets correlate with a lack of riots? Well, one can assume, the sorts of towns that are decorated with hanging baskets are also the sorts of towns that tend not to be a hotbed of civil unrest: hanging baskets tend to be visible in wealthy towns, filled with well-to-do people who are quite happy with their lot in life, thank you very much. I may be way out of line here, but I would venture that the people of Henley-on-Thames – generally speaking – have rather less to feel disgruntled about than the people who inhabit the most deprived parts of London, Manchester and Hartlepool. (Apologies if you’re miserable and living in Henley – I’m sure it’s ghastly).

My husband’s wry suggestion that hanging baskets should urgently be deployed in all UK towns for riot-prevention may seem laughable, but unfortunately this kind of ridiculous action is not unheard of in most walks of life. None of us are immune to mistaking correlation for causation, and the issue of separating the two is the main reason why observational studies make for such weak evidence in medicine and in education. Observational studies are considered to be of a lower standard of evidence than experimental studies: not only can they not be used to demonstrate causality (in other words, they identify correlation but not necessarily causation), they are also more prone to bias and confounding as a result. Studies in the area of human health are notoriously difficult when it comes to the confusion between correlation and causation. For example, there is a direct correlation between poverty and the likelihood of an early death. The exact causation behind this is almost insurmountably complex and relates to a myriad of intersectional, underlying causes.

The tendency for those in power to mistake correlation for causation has been something of a bugbear of mine throughout my career and is responsible in part for the slow creep of increasing workload that is driving teachers out of the profession. Another of my husband’s witticisms, which I suspect can be applied to most professions, is a false syllogism that run as follows: “something must be done, this is something, so let’s do this.” I have lost count of the number of times that this syllogism ran through my head as I listened to management announcing their latest wheeze while the minutes of my available professional time ebbed away. Pretty much every single intervention proposed for Pupil Premium students can be placed in this category. And as for the money … since April 2011, when the Pupil Premium system was introduced, the government has ploughed between £1 and £2 billion per academic year into ring-fenced funding for Pupil Premium students. Despite this, the outcome gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students in our schools has remained roughly the same and indeed has widened since the pandemic. The Pupil Premium system is a total failure.

When it comes to the likelihood of schools being in a position to turn this situation around, I must confess to feeling a little dismal. Schools who do manage to buck the trend are largely ignored, especially if their methods do not suit the political bent and social sensibilities of their critics. This year, the Michaela School achieved over 50% Grade 9s in their GCSEs, despite working with an intake of students in a very deprived area. Michaela’s last Progress 8 score (which measures the input that teaching has had on pupil outcomes) placed the school as the best in the country. More than 90% of their children receive passes in English and Maths GCSEs and more than half of them gain a Grade 7 or above in 5 subjects. Yet still their detractors have nothing positive to say about this, nor any suggestion as to how such outcomes could be matched.

It seems to me that a much more scientific and dispassionate approach is required to prove and replicate outcomes in education. We need to ditch all political bias and look at the evidence with fresh eyes. For until we can make this shift, it seems to me, we will be doing nothing more than adorning the most impoverished streets of our most deprived towns with some hanging baskets and expecting that to solve all of their problems.

Hanging baskets in Amersham, featured on the RHS website

Following the Herd

At primary school, I rarely played with other children. For me, playtime usually meant a walk around the edges of the playground, observing others and thinking to myself. There were lots of reasons why I found it difficult to connect with my childhood peers, none of them particularly interesting or unusual, but I have always wondered whether my early childhood experiences have shaped my temperament: to this day, I’m not much of a joiner.

More recently, I have begun to ponder whether in fact my own biology has had more influence on my personality than I would like to admit: as someone who suffers with extremely poor eyesight and less-than-perfect hearing, I am naturally quite cut off from much of the world. In recent years, I have begun to realise how this has in many ways defined how I relate to others and in turn how others respond to me. Motivated by a desire for acceptance, I have always tried to disguise my disablities, to the extent that many people are genuinely surprised when I admit to them. The price I have paid for this – ironically – is that I have gained a reputation of being “stand offish”, with many people firmly convinced that I have ignored or blanked them over the years. So, for anyone reading this who is convinced that I have overlooked them in the street or in the corridor (especially to whomever it was that made me aware of it by writing a rather nasty comment on this blog): the truth is, I probably didn’t see you or hear you. I’m sorry. It wasn’t deliberate.

Large scale groups have always made me feel uncomfortable and I hate the idea of “losing myself” in a crowd. The thought of going to a football match terrifies me. I did a few big concerts in my youth but struggled with the sheer number of people around me and I would not do it again now I’m older. A crowd takes on a mind-set and a force of its own, one that’s both independent from and beyond the control of the individuals it contains. Recent events have served as a horrific and tangible reminder that herd mentality – in all its forms, both ancient and modern – is something that should frighten us all.

Experience has certainly taught me that being part of a group is not in my nature and broadly speaking I am proud of the fact that I won’t play ball for the sake of staying on the team. It may not be my most attractive quality, but it’s one that will drive me to raise the alarm whilst everyone else stays silent. It makes me the kid who will shout that the emperor’s got no clothes on. Some employers have thanked me for this, others have not: it takes a robustly confident leader to tolerate being told that they’re naked in front of the world. There are times when I have reflected that I could have led a somewhat easier life – certainly professionally – had I been more willing to march in time, but generally speaking I quite like being an outsider. This is not to say that my failure to merge cohesively with a group has not caused me some anguish over the years – it can be a lonely existence. In the past, it has meant being kicked out of a group of writers with whom I shared many values, due to my innate inability to agree with them on everything – or at least, to pretend that I did. It meant the Editor of the magazine blocking all contact with me as “no longer an ally” because I asked questions and defended other people’s right to to do so. As a lifelong supporter of social justice, the increasing phenomenon of these kinds of activists, who denounce all forms of debate or discussion, has come as a genuine shock to me.

Until a few years ago, I believed that the fight for equality would usher in a new era of empathy, diversity and understanding – a new age, in which our ability to relate to each other would be improved by our ever-evolving understanding of how human rights intesect and – at times – conflict. It is what being a liberal is all about. Yet it seems to me that most of my so-called liberal allies have been taken over by a collective fear of rejection. Like the teenagers I have worked with over the years, they constantly check in with each other to affirm whether or not what they think is acceptable – and who can blame them? The consequence of dissent these days is excommunication from the tribe. Man, as Aristotle said, is a social animal: rejection is frightening and dangerous.

In the past, I found myself briefly drawn to people who described themselves as “libertarians” – only to find once again that there was a hymn sheet of horrors that I was expected to sing from if I wished to be initiated into the tribe. According to most of the Americans that I met online, to be accepted as a “libertarian” then one must be in favour of guns. Lots of guns. One must agree that the act of carrying a gun is a liberating experience (I mean – what?) and certainly that the act of carrying one is none of the government’s business. Every time I tried to propose a different line of thinking (held by most sane individuals on this side of the Atlantic), I was simply told that I was “not a libertarian”. So there we are. Another crowd to watch from the sidelines as they descend into madness.

Another “libertarian” approach that I struggled to respect was the puerile desire to offend, bolstered by the dubious claim that this is somehow a noble and worthwhile antidote to the equally tedious culture of taking offence. Certainly, I relish challenge and debate, and I also believe that free speech is more important than the inevitable risk of causing offence to some. As Salman Rushdie said following the horrifying attacks on the staff at Charlie Hebdo in 2015, “I … defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.” But in an article on what he has termed “cultural libertarianism,” Breitbart author Allum Bokhari argued that “deliberate offensiveness plays an important role in the fight against cultural authoritarianism, … showing that with a little cleverness, it’s possible to express controversial opinions and not just survive but become a cult hero.” This surely sums up the unambitious and self-seeking aims of the internet-famous shock-jocks, who make it their business to offend – preening contrarians, whose sole function is to cause shock and awe, their online communications a heady mix of clickbait, worthless insults and self-aggrandisement. There is no evidence whatsoever that anyone’s personal liberty is furthered by such infantile sneering, yet swarms of self-proclaimed free-speech advocates rejoice in this toxic effluence with excited applause.

Maybe I’m still that little girl on the edges of the playground, the one with the problem joining in – but as I stand at the periphery, I see the herd mentality all around me. At its best, it gives us a sense of solidarity as we strive for the greater good or find our feet in the world. At its worst, it gives us mindless savagery, the kind of collective violence exemplified and explored in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. On a day-to-day level, however, it results in something much more mundane and insidious: it endorses mediocrity and prevents us from thinking.

This is an updated and adapted version of an article I wrote originally for Quillette magazine in 2016.

Shooting the Moon

During the period when I was writing my PhD, my main source of temptation and distraction was an electronic card game called Hearts. This was before the turn of the 21st century and while there were indeed some strange men in some of the science departments talking about a mysterious and abstract notion called “The Internet”, most of us had not discovered it yet. So, in 1998, I had neither cat videos nor social media to distract me, but I did have Hearts. Traditional card games such as Hearts and Solitaire (which I have always called Patience) were included along with the Microsoft software on my laptop, and it turned out to be a genuinely powerful temptation when the alternative was doing some work.

Hearts is a simple game for four players (or you plus three players driven by the computer). It is an evasion-game, in which you must try to avoid collecting any cards in the suit of hearts, plus particularly avoid collecting the Queen of Spades, which carries a heavy penalty and is essential to avoid. Generally speaking, the more hearts you end up stuck with at the end of the game, the worse your score, plus if you end up with the Queen of Spades you are particularly in trouble. I discovered all of this gradually: the motto in my family has always been, “as a last resort, read the instructions”, so in the style to which I had become accustomed, I plunged into the game and learnt the rules through trial and error.

One day, I was having such a bad round that it became clear that I was going to lose every single hand. Amused, I continued on my losing streak, keen in fact to make sure that I did indeed lose every single hand, purely for entertainment. (Please remember – the alternative was neoplatonic metaphysics). It was through this throwing in of the towel that I discovered the phenomenon of “shooting the moon” – it turns out that that in Hearts, if you lose every single hand and thus collect every single card in the suit of hearts and you collect the Queen of Spades, you actually win that round. It’s a slam-dunk, all-in move, like placing all your chips on one roll of the dice. I never managed to replicate the phenomenon and so only ever managed to win through shooting the moon on that one, accidental occasion.

In the last couple of years, I have become of aware of an increasing number of people who are keen for their children to “complete the syllabus early”. Some parents have expressed their wish that the entire specification be covered by the end of Year 10 (good luck with that!) and others adamant that they want the most complex concepts taught early or taught from the beginning. I have no idea where this notion has come from, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it found its origins on some online parent forum somewhere. Some high-achieving schools used to push this kind of rhetoric but with the shift in 2018 to specifications which are far more content-heavy, most schools find themselves struggling to complete the entire syllabus on time in some subjects, never mind early. The desire to push ahead also fails to take into account the rapid development that children are undergoing in their mid-teens. What a child is capable of towards the end of Year 11 may be poles apart from what they were capable of at the start of Year 10. On the other hand, it may not. It’s impossible to predict and – lest we forget – children are not machines.

One or two parents I have spoken to are so utterly wedded to the idea that the syllabus must be completed months ahead of the exam that they simply cannot be persuaded otherwise. Sometimes they claim that their child is vastly ahead in another subject – often mathematics – and express frustration that this is not the case in all. In the past, I might have accepted their take that their child was indeed in this position and argued that languages are different. Now I am married to a man with a mathematics degree, who rues the fact that he feels – on reflection – that he did not have the intellectual maturity to cope with the more nebulous fields of study that he was exposed to during his degree, it gives me pause. Is there honestly any subject in which a child or a young adult, however intelligent, can advance so rapidly without paying a price further down the line? Do they really understand what they are doing, or will it all come crashing down like the proverbial house of cards when they get a little further down the road? My feeling is that unless your child is some kind of savant (and to date I have never met one of those, so I’m telling you your child isn’t one of them) then you’re taking quite a risk with this approach.

Many parents who want their children to do well are concerned about the trickiest concepts in the syllabus. Sometimes they have feedback from their child’s schoolteacher that they have struggled with one or more of these more complex concepts. What some people find difficult to accept is that much of the time, it is not the tricky concept that is the problem – the problem lies deeper, in the foundational studies that their child may have been whisked through at high speed and left with tiny, often imperceptible gaps in their knowledge. Like the invisible holes in the enamel of a tooth, these gaps store up trouble for the future and before you know it you’ve got a gaping cavity in front of you. It is the rarest of occasions when this is not the case and indeed it is often the children who have historically done well in a subject that are most at risk. The better a child appears to be doing in a subject, the harder and faster they are pushed and the greater the number of tiny, undetectable cracks are formed which will make their presence known in the future. It’s the nature of the beast and nobody’s fault, but parents do need to trust a tutor who tells them that it’s time to go back to basics.

The overwhelming joy of what I do now is having the one-to-one time in which to genuinely test and shore up a child’s fundamental understanding. Asking them the same question in multiple different ways to ensure that they possess a genuine grasp of the topic, not a superficial ability to provide a text-book answer to an anticipated question worded in a style that they recognise. Asking them to define a grammatical term and give an example. Most of all, asking them to explain why a phrase or a sentence translates the way it does – does their translation stem from the ability to skate on thin ice or from a genuine grasp of the underlying principles?

You see, shooting the moon is exciting. But risking it all on one turn of pitch and toss is – as any recovered gambler will tell you – a seriously bad idea. Success comes from baby steps, strong foundations and a genuine grasp of how things are put together. Success in study is a marathon, not a sprint, and if a marathon runner started the race with the speed of a 100-metre sprinter, they would never make it to the end, never mind win. Early and fast does not mean better – quite the opposite. It can mean failure. So be patient and trust in the process. Shooting the moon is both elusive and risky and there are infinitely safer ways to win a round of cards.

See you in three weeks

This week, at a garden party, I chatted to a man in his 80s who reminisced about a school trip he went on in the 1950s. My neighbour’s father was given the opportunity to visit Dubrovnik in what was then Yugoslavia, when another local school had a few spare places for students to join the trip. Nothing seemed unusual or particularly surprising about his story until he reported their arrival in the city.

“So, the teacher pointed out some features at the train station and said that we should meet at the same spot for our return journey,” he explained. “After that, the teacher said, we’ll see you in three weeks.”

There was a pause, while my husband and I stared at Geoff in silence.

“I’ve got no idea what he and the other staff did from that point on,” he continued, “but we didn’t see them until it was time to go home.”

I then had to check in with him that I had heard him correctly.

“Wait … they just left you there to get on with it? For three whole weeks?”

“Absolutely,” he said.

Well. Needless to say, my flabber was gasted. Geoff went on to talk about his memories of the trip, which boiled down to basic survival. He and his friends bought some eggs from a local farm and discovered that every single one of them was bad. He expressed regret that some diaries he had kept at the time had gone missing during a recent move. Let’s hope they turn up at the bottom of an unpacked box somewhere, as they will surely make for fascinating reading when lined up next to the experiences of children today in a school trip setting.

Anyone who knows anything about school trips in a modern setting will be equally struck by the difference between Geoff’s experience and the ones had by students now. I have written before on the pressures of running school trips, most especially school trips abroad, and indeed that piece of writing remains my most-read blog by a considerable margin: it’s been read tens of thousands of times and clearly resonates with teachers who are still faced with the challenge of working in loco parentis. In summary, the original post was an exploration of a case where teachers on a school trip abroad were unjustly charged with “manslaughter as a result of gross negligence” in a French court, seven years after a child had died in an accident on a trip while in their care. Fortunately, the judge threw out the case, but the distress and suffering undergone by those three young professionals can only be imagined. The post also explained how I made the decision several years ago to stop running school trips abroad, purely because I could no longer cope with the stress and anxiety of doing so.

While I would never suggest that Geoff’s experience is one we should try to replicate in the modern world, as it displays a level of naivety and foolishness on the part of staff back in those days that I can only wonder at, it has got me thinking again about what was expected from teachers in the past compared to what is expected from us now. It has also caused me to think deeply about the vast chasm of difference between the day-to-day experiences that were once readily available to young people compared to what we assume is appropriate for them now.

One of the things that Jonathan Haidt explores in his recent book The Anxious Generation is the degree to which children now experience near-permanent adult supervision (to the extent that one might call it surveillance) and thus increasingly less real-world freedom and independence as they grow up; he contrasts this with the complete lack of supervision which most youngsters have when it comes to the online world, which is where – he argues – the worst dangers actually lie. He calls the effect on Generation Z – the generation who grew up with smart phones in their pockets – “the great rewiring” and urges society to roll back on the online freedoms we have grown used to and to replace them with more real-world freedom and risk. Haidt is a Professor at New York University and collaborates often with the American psychologist Jean Twenge, who was one of the first psychologists to argue that the rising rates of poor mental health among Generation Z can be attributed to smartphones. Sceptics of such research argue that young people simply have more things to feel anxious and depressed about, but in my opinion Haidt makes his case pretty persuasively. Earlier generations have also grown up in the shadow of war and global instability, he points out, yet such collective crises in the past did not manifest themselves in psychological distress; quite the opposite, they often engendered a sense of greater social solidarity and purpose, a net positive for mental health. By contrast, the evidence linking mental illness to smartphones and the inescapable and thus addictive access they bring to social media use is genuinely alarming.

Haidt’s argument builds upon a case he has made in his previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind, that overprotectiveness has contributed to the mental health crisis. He argues that Generation Z children are what he calls “antifragile”: they lack exposure to the varied experiences that are required in order to develop resilience. Haidt argues in both books that children ought to be given greater freedom to play unsupervised, free from adult surveillance.

In my last blog post I mentioned that in my last few years at the chalkface it was quite normal to walk down the school corridor and find a child outside every classroom – not necessarily because they had been thrown out of class, but because they were refusing to enter it in the first place due to the extreme level of their anxiety. I have no concrete answer as to why this is happening, but happening it is. There is an emerging school of thought that the well-meaning work that has increasingly been done in schools to address the issue of children’s mental health has in fact done more harm than good. I have recently read Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier and her research most definitely raises causes for concern. Shrier is a journalist and a controversial figure for some, but her concerns echo those raised by numerous psychologists, who talk of our modern tendency to pathologise normal feelings (who didn’t feel genuinely overwhelmed with fear and at times bone-crushingly miserable during their teenage years?) and push children down a path of sickness rather than allowing them to negotiate their way through their feelings and trust that the storms will pass. These concerns are summarised quite nicely here, in a piece from 2022 in the Telegraph.

So, Geoff’s brief and cheerful reminiscence has left me with much to think about. While none of us would dare to send our children out to a foreign country to fend for themselves for three weeks, perhaps we can learn from what was presumably the innocence of our forefathers. There was an enormous plus side to growing up and living without fear; if that kind of life and freedom produced the vibrant man that Geoff remains, then perhaps they weren’t getting it so wrong in the 1950s.

Covered in glory

It is difficult for anyone outside the profession to comprehend the full potential gamut of horror that is the secondary-school cover lesson. Not only does it mean losing what is potentially your only free slot of time during that day, the reality of that cover lesson can be genuinely terrifying.

I recall opening up the cover folder and reading instructions such as the following:

“Explain to students the fundamentals of the carbon cycle”. Um. Okay.

“Invite students to share their views on …” (insert anything here, frankly, for horrors to commence).

“Go through the answers” – when this was Key Stage 4 maths, my blood truly ran cold with terror.

Yesterday, on the platform formerly known as Twitter, Andrew Old (who is a figure that will be known to anyone who does EduTwitter) asked the following: what is the worst cover lesson you have ever had to do? He followed this up with his own entries for the competition, saying that he was torn between an MFL lesson where the work was a wordsearch that didn’t actually have any of the words in, a science lesson where the work was “write a rap about the rock cycle” and “any PE cover where they actually had to play a sport”. The latter brought back a flash memory of one Year 9 tennis cover during my first year, during which I learnt a valuable lesson and a principle that I stuck resolutely to for the rest of my 21-year career: do not – repeat not – go into work with a hangover. You will be punished.

Others on the platform added their own entries to the competition and I share some of these experiences purely so that readers may appreciate just what it is that your average teacher may go through on a typical day. One reported a double-booked room and having to find another room with a class he did not know. One reported the radiator bursting during the session. Too many to account for reported simply diabolical situations that would try the patience of anyone who values their sanity (most of them involving either PE or Music), but I think my personal favourite was the following: “I received a cover sheet. The first instruction was: collect inflatable sheep from sports hall. I replied and said that I would not be covering this lesson”. I think I laughed for 5 minutes about that one.

The only other response I found that involved someone simply refusing to go ahead with a cover lesson was this one: “during my PGCE (first day of my first placement no less) I had to perform CPR on my mentor teacher after he suffered a cardiac arrest. I was asked to cover his lessons for the day after he was taken to hospital. After a pregnant pause I simply said no. I wish this was made up.”

These days, I get to hear about cover lessons from the students’ point of view, and in many ways their accounts are no less gruelling. Students that I work with who attend school in the state sector report teacher absences at a record high and last year I worked with several Year 11 students who had no teacher at all for the majority of the school year; one student was affected in this way in multiple subjects. In the private sector, recruitment and retention seems to be marginally better, but the absence rate remains significant and the quality of cover work an issue. The problem is always particularly acute in minority subjects, when the absence of the subject expert can create an insurmountable vacuum that nobody has the expertise to fill. This was a pressure I felt acutely as the sole Latinist in the school I used to work in. The one and only time in my entire career when I was genuinely too sick to set work (indeed I could not get out of bed and considered the need for medical help), my HoD rang me up to ask me what he should do. I understand, I really do, and it certainly brought home the need for some kind of emergency provision.

One of the things that has struck me since leaving the profession is how little attention most schools give to the inescapable reality of cover and how damaging this is to the student body. I recall school leaders talking about this but in a manner that simply seemed to emphasise how important our presence was in the classroom, not a manner that brought any practical solutions to the unavoidable fact that sometimes we will be absent. School leaders really do need to face up to the reality that every child in their school will face a significant number of cover lessons during every month – at times, during every week. Schools should have a clear and workable policy when it comes to the expectations for a cover lesson, and these expectations should also be shared and repeated as a mantra to the students. For example, one school I worked in had the rule that cover work must be something that students could complete independently and in silence; this was a great rule, but it would have been considerably more powerful if that rule were shared as an expectation with the students!

I realise – now that I am outside the white heat of the situation – how much more I could have done to prepare students for what to do in a cover lesson. I absolutely could have done this myself, although I maintain that it would have been much more powerful to make it a school-wide expectation and something that is displayed for all students to see. All learners could be instructed on what they should do in the absence of specific cover work: for example, learning material from their Knowledge Organiser. With a bit of effort to do the groundwork, this would make life so much easier both for classroom teachers when they end up sick and for those who are providing the cover.

As a professional tutor now, I cannot influence what happens in the classroom, but I can help to make that experience more profitable and worthwhile for the individual students that I work with. I discuss with them what they can and should do when their teacher is absent and many of them take these suggestions on board. There are so many things that a student can use spare time for, but most of them lack the initiative to make use of that time without explicit instructions and guidance. The students I work with always have something that they know we are rote-learning and I talk to them about making efficient use of any spare classroom time to test themselves on whatever it is we are working on. In languages, the list of what students need to commit to memory is pretty relentless, so no student should ever be left twiddling their thumbs: but they really do need it spelled out to them that this is what they should be doing with the time.

Tough love?

Yesterday, I had a bit of an epiphany. It suddenly occurred to me why it is that tutoring can help anxious students so successfully.

Anxiety is not a professional specialism for me, and I’ve never experienced anxiety myself. Like all people, I’ve faced my challenges, but feeling overwhelmed by anxiety has never been one of them. Mind you, in the era I grew up in, such things were not named and certainly not medicalised. Whatever my views on the undeniable over-use of recognised psychiatric conditions to describe normal feelings (and believe you me, I have some), I think it is also undeniable that there is a genuine uptick in young people who experience what I would definitely call anxiety in some form.

When I first started teaching in 1999, I do not recall children’s anxiety even being mentioned as something I would have to deal with during my career. Fast forward to my final couple of years in the classroom, and you could not walk down a corridor without discovering a student outside virtually every classroom: not because they had been thrown out for poor behaviour, but because they were refusing to enter it in the first place. There was – without question – an explosion in students who were citing anxiety as the reason for their reticence. Some of them school-refused altogether and I had more than one student that I would see only once in a blue moon, so chronic was their conviction that school was a terrifying place. I have some hypotheses as to what has changed in society to spark this epidemic, but it is not my intention to explore them here. My intention is to examine the small part I can currently play in getting some kids back into the classroom.

As I have already stated, I would never claim working with school-refusers or children crippled by academic anxiety as a specialism. I have no significant training in this field and if anything I have endeavoured to avoid it. Bottom line, I believe children should be in school. There are exceptions to that rule in extremis, but the current and growing trend towards home-schooling as a viable option causes me genuine concern. Children are better off in school for a whole myriad of reasons, not least the fundamental and inescapable truth that school is the norm and thus integral to one’s experience as being a part of society. Saying this won’t win me any friends amongst my peers and competitors, but here goes: I am concerned that too many people in the tutoring industry find the upsurge in homeschooling professionally very convenient. Homeschooled students – unlike those attending school – open up the opportunity for daytime work, and lots of tutors want that. I worry, therefore, that professional tutors are not as motivated to get kids back into school as they should be. As a result of these concerns, I have increasingly steered clear of working in this field: I do not want to be a part of an industry that benefits financially from children being outside the school system.

Despite all my concerns and despite my lack of training in this field, countless parents have attributed to me their child’s increase in academic confidence and in some cases a return to the classroom. Much of this is in some ways unsurprising. I have written many times on the reasons why one-to-one tutoring is so remarkably powerful and effective, and this applies all the more so when a child has felt isolated, abandoned or forgotten in a classroom setting. But something more is going on with these most anxious of students, I suspect, and yesterday it hit me:

It’s because I can push them, and force them to take risks in a safe environment. Nothing is more effective when it comes to defeating anxiety.

In a classroom, a teacher has to pitch the class at one level for all. Inevitably, this carries the risk of some students becoming bored and disengaged by the lack of challenge, alongside the risk of others failing to understand what is happening. This is not just true of the lesson overall, it is true of every component part. Anxious students tend to fall at every hurdle, as their fight, flight or freeze response means that they spiral into panic and/or give up as soon as they sense danger – in their mind, that “danger” means as soon as things get tricky, as soon as they encounter something they don’t understand or as soon as they get something wrong. In any one lesson, that’s happening constantly, or at least it should be – learning cannot take place without challenge, micro-failure and frustration. In such a classroom setting, anxious students tend to take themselves out of the situation – either by physically leaving the classroom or by staying in their seat and disengaging; for example, answering “I don’t know” every time they’re asked a question, or even refusing to open their mouth at all. Classroom teachers even find themselves instructed by SLT, Heads of Year, SENDCos, parents and others not to ask certain students a question because – we are informed – they are too anxious to cope with it. Nothing could be more damaging to the educational process; if professional adults genuinely believe that a child literally cannot cope with being asked a question in class, then we have a major educational emergency on our hands. The solution is not to stop asking them questions. That simply isn’t good enough.

Happily, now out of the classroom, I can do what I like. When faced with an anxious student in a one-to-one scenario, I can afford to take risks. Firstly, before any risk-taking takes place, I can ensure that they really do understand something on a level that may not have happened for them before. Anxious students are so risk-averse that they are not good at taking a punt or going with the flow – they don’t trust that they understand anything well enough, so they need everything unpacked in detail. Once I have gained that student’s trust (and it doesn’t take long), they can ask all the anxious questions they’ve been storing up over the years and never felt able to ask. In this way, they can gain a command of the basics they’ve never had before, which empowers them to tackle more complex challenges.

At this point, the freedom I possess as a one-to-one tutor is immense and liberating. I can present my anxious tutee with something they never thought they could do and I can push them into doing it. In a one-to-one session, this is partly because the situation allows infinite freedom for row-back: if my instincts are wrong and the challenge is too great, I have the possibility of ditching the idea altogether before things get sticky, or of coaching the student through the process in incremental steps so that they cover the ground they could not have covered alone. Usually, my instinct is to do the latter – the need to abandon a task is vanishingly rare, but the option is always there. As the student’s trust in the process grows, so does their confidence.

Nothing is so wonderful as the look on a student’s face when they do something they did not believe themselves to be capable of. Nothing is more potent when it comes to smashing through the invisible barrier that anxiety weaves around these students. Nothing gives me greater joy than watching them fly past that barrier like it was never there in the first place.

Beginners’ luck

How fortunate today’s new teachers are. This might seem like an extraordinary thing to say, given the recruitment and retention crisis and all that, but I mean every word of it. New teachers entering the profession today have a wealth of materials available to them that should make their transition from novice to expert far smoother than it was back when I trained and few books illustrate this better than a book called What Do New Teachers Need to Know? by Peter Foster.

I purchased this book as a gift for the newly-trained teacher who has taken over my previous job in my local comprehensive. Not only is it superbly informative, it is beautifully written and easy to read. From the very first line, “I didn’t enjoy teaching to start with,” the humility and frankness of the author shine through. He talks of the Monday morning dread, the reality of teaching That Class and how it all “stemmed from this feeling that teaching was something you just had to figure out, a blisteringly frustrating game of Snakes and Ladders where every triumph was followed by a setback.” This was so achingly familiar that what had started out as a cursory glance over my purchase turned into me settling down to give the whole book my full attention.

One of the most radical things about Foster’s book is it values domain-specific knowledge over skills and argues that teachers themselves require an ever-increasing bank of concrete knowledge to draw upon. This does not mean that the book is fanciful or theoretical, rather that it questions the assumption that teaching is dark art, which only the most experienced wizard can practice, rather than a bank of shared knowledge that can be tapped into. Of course, teaching requires practice and nothing can beat a number of hours at the chalkface in the same way that a pilot’s flying hours are relevant to his or her assumed level of skill; but observation, imitation and repetition of good practice allows processes to become automated and innate, freeing up one’s working memory to cope with a greater number of variables. I will never forget having to write down every word I said and every single thing I had to do the first time I stood in front of a class. As time passed, I no longer had to think deeply about certain basic processes because they had become automated. Foster likens the start of a lesson to the opening of a chess game – not because it requires great strategy, but because it is the knowledge of opening gambits that empower the player to make the right moves.

One of the most frustrating things about teaching as a profession is how little focus is given to knowledge at INSET. For a profession focused on imparting knowledge, we do ourselves no justice by neglecting it in ourselves. Foster explores the different areas of knowledge that an effective teacher should be working on at the beginning of and throughout their career, from curriculum through pedagogy and behaviour. His chapter on behaviour focuses on the need for clarity and gives explicit examples of the language that should be used when issuing instructions, expectations, warnings and sanctions. He even gives examples of the questions that a new or inexperienced teacher could ask of their colleagues, something which I have rarely if ever seen suggested: my recollection of training was being told to ask questions, but nobody had any suggestions or examples of what it was I should be asking. For some teachers new to the profession, the whole process can be so overwhelming that they do not know where to begin, so to encounter books such as this which demystify the process is an absolute wonder.

Foster addresses what it means to “know your students” with a level of specificity I have also not encountered before. He explores the limits of our knowledge and looks into how a knowledge of individuals as well as how children learn in general can be of use in the classroom. He counsels against the assumptions we can make that lead to biases in the classroom, something which has always concerned me as a professional. “By paying lip-service to groups of students and gaps between them, teachers and schools can entrench biases rather than topple them,” he warns. It was not so long ago that I was being explicitly told to do things such as mark Pupil Premium students’ books first and indeed to sit them at the front of the classroom. Foster makes the case for equitable treatment and an avoidance of assumption.

Peter Foster has generously shared much of his knowledge for free on his own website, but I would highly recommend any new teacher or indeed any experienced teacher investing in this book. You can buy it here.