Books – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Who needs decent resources?

It is an absolute miracle. For the first time in the history of the subject, a publisher has produced a complete Anthology, containing all of the OCR GCSE Latin set texts for examination in 2027 and 2028. In an unprecedented move, someone has had the ground-breaking idea of actually publishing the resources that OCR wish teachers to teach and children to study. Such radical thinking can only be attributed to a stroke of genius.

Previously, it may surprise non-specialists to know, only some of the GCSE Latin literature texts were published in a modern format and only some of those publications were formally ratified by OCR. What an incredible leap of imagination it must have taken for the intelligentsia behind the wheel at OCR to think of the idea of a published Anthology of all the texts that they have selected, in the fancy modern format of a book! To be fair, they have been very busy coming up with their dramatic new rebrand, an imminent name switch from “OCR” to “Cambridge OCR”, billed in an email they sent me this week as “an exciting change”. Fundamentally, it means that a group currently called OCR, which stands for “Oxford, Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts” will now become “Cambridge Oxford, Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts”. I hope that’s clear.

Anyway, back to the majestic leap of imagination that is the new Latin Anthology. Not only has someone printed the texts out, they have even glued the pages together! It really is quite the thing. And get this. You can buy it through the publisher, you can buy it through bookstores, you can even buy it on Amazon! Did you know that you can purchase books on Amazon? Imagine my excitement. What relief and joy this publication will bring! Obviously, it will be aimed at students, will it not? Or perhaps aimed rather at teachers, as a complete preparation tool? I was breathless with anticipation. However, within five minutes of glancing through my much-anticipated purchase, it became apparent that this Anthology was an attempt at both of these things and a success at neither.

The first thing to note about the publication is the distinctly bizarre “endorsement statement” from OCR (soon to be Cambridge OCR) at the beginning. It states that while “the teaching content of this resource is endorsed by OCR” (for which I read that they’ve managed to select the correct bits of the text) we are told that “all references to assessment, including assessment preparation and practice questions of any format/style, are the publisher’s interpretation of the specification and are not endorsed by OCR.” Erm, okay. There follows some further language of accountability avoidance that goes on for quite some time, but the general gist is a clear and rather anxiety-inducing attempt by the board to distance themselves from the statement printed on the front cover, which is that the book is “endorsed by OCR”. Does this even happen in other subjects?! Maybe it does, but it seems distinctly odd. Either the book is endorsed or it isn’t, surely?

Things then get worse. The preface and “how to use this book” both seem to slide and shift constantly between the implication that the resource is aimed at teachers for preparation purposes and that it is aimed at students as a workbook. The result of this apparent attempt at dual purpose (or perhaps confusion/indecision as to the purpose at all), is unsurprising: the Anthology fails in its attempt to achieve either of these things. Whether this is the fault of the publisher or the authors is impossible to tell, but it really is a tangible fail.

So far, I have only worked through the Virgil text (extracts from Book II of the Aeneid), and I am already half way to despair. Firstly, despite its promise in the preface to students and non-specialist teachers that the book “aims primarily to help readers understand what the Latin means” there is one rather glaring omission. The authors do not provide an English translation of the texts. For the love of God, why not?! As a friend and fellow tutor put it to me in a message last week, “If [OCR are] going to be so picky as to what they allow … they might as well provide [a translation] and put everyone out of their misery.” Exactly this. In mark schemes over the years I have frequently seen phrases such as “do not accept [perfectly legitimate translation of the word in my reasonably well-informed opinion]”. So, teachers are still expected to somehow divine what it is that examiners will and will not consider to be an acceptable translation of every single word and phrase in every single text. It is genuinely exhausting and I simply do not understand why we have to play this game every single year. Just give us the translation that you approve of, for crying out loud.

The authors’ (or perhaps OCR’s) decision not to provide a translation causes further, compounding inadequacies in their notes, since they frequently fail to give sufficient thought to their suggestions for the translation of individual words. For example, they suggest the translation “waves” for both undas and fluctus, when those two words occur very close together and surely need differing translations to avoid confusion and to mimic the original Latin; in the same lines, the authors provide “raised” for the participle arrecta, then “rise above” for superant, which comes very soon after it. Following their instructions, this would render the lines:

pectora quorum inter fluctus arrecta iubaeque
Their chests raised above the waves and their blood-red crests

sanguinae superant undas.
rising above the waves.

Not only does this fail to do Virgil any kind of justice, it lacks clarity for the novice reader. The authors’ failure to sit down and decide how they would render a full and competent translation of the lines in their entirety (a task which will be asked of the 16-year-old novices who will be examined on this text) leads inevitably to some thoroughly confusing suggestions on their part for the translation of individual words. This is merely one example, but I found multiple cases throughout the Anthology which evidenced this lack of coordinated thinking.

In addition to the conspicuous omission of an approved translation and the knock-on effect that this has on the notes, the notes are disappointing in other ways. While some of them provide useful textual support, there have been times when I have wanted to wail in frustration. My exasperation stems from the authors’ palpable lack of clarity about the purpose of this Anthology, their inability to decide their target audience. Here is just one example of what I mean: at the end of the first section of the Virgil text, Aeneas claims reluctance to recount the painful story of how the Greeks sacked Troy. He says, quamquam animus meminisse horret luctuque refugit, incipiam: “although my mind shudders to remember and recoils in grief, I shall begin.” I would love someone to explain to me the purpose of the facing note in the Anthology, which relates to the final word of this section: it says, “what tense is incipiam?” Ugh. Obviously, I can tell you what tense incipiam is, because I am a Latin teacher: I do not need help with recognising the future tense. But if I were needing help with this (for example, if I were a student, or if I were a non-specialist who was wrestling with the material), then what is the point of asking me a question to which I may not know the correct answer? This is exactly the kind of infuriatingly pointless annotation that is useful to precisely nobody. For a subject expert, it is superfluous; for a novice, it is maddeningly unhelpful.

I am honestly quite a cheerful person, with a positive outlook. Yet, with so many people in institutions that have power and influence over my own working life so unrelentingly mediocre at what they do, it is becoming increasingly difficult to remain sanguine.

The trouble with finding good reads on GoodReads

As an avid reader of fiction, I have a problem. It’s a wonderful problem to have, and illustrates the many and various ways in which the modern world can be truly wonderful. My problem is keeping track of what I’ve read.

Were I not to do so, I’d be in an infinite loop of doubt: “Have I read this?” The feeling can begin at any time: when I look at the cover of a book, read the blurb, hear the name of the author or – perhaps most discombobulating of all – when I’m part way through the book. You might think it shouldn’t matter, but there is a tiny part of me that is undeniably anxious about the number of books that there are in the world and the ever- diminishing time I have available to read them. Accidentally repeating the exercise with one of them sets off the same kind of first-world anxiety that lots of people experience when they realise that they’re not wearing their FitBit when they’re half way through their daily run. That voice in your head that says, this doesn’t count towards my target!

Before I discuss the thorny solution to my problem, I would just like to pause and celebrate the sheer joy that this “problem” exists. When I was a child, and perhaps even more of a booklover than I am now, I used to have a fantasy that I could close my eyes, open my palms and the perfect book for that moment would appear. Since the advent of digital technology exploded into the publishing world, this fantasy is now a concrete, daily reality. I can order a book and – milliseconds later – I can be reading it. The advent of the Kindle and similar devices, followed rapidly by the spectacular surge in the audiobook industry, has made books and their contents more accessible than ever. It enables reading on the go, reading while you’re working on mindless chores that would otherwise be soul-destroying and reading in an instant. It is not only accessible but increasingly affordable. As well as the remarkably affordable global phenomenon that is Amazon that shook the market to its core, there are millions of electronic books and audiobooks available through the library for free and I absolutely love it. I cannot stress enough how utterly glorious this literary digital revolution has been for me, especially as someone with ropey eyesight.

Right – back to whingeing.

To solve the problem I have, which – if you recall – is keeping track of what I’ve read, for many years I have turned to recording what I’ve read on a site called GoodReads. It is by far the biggest and most successful platform of its kind, and like all social media platforms it began as a wonderful idea. A community of booklovers, coming together online, on a platform that exploits all the modern benefits of social media but focuses entirely on books – recommendations, reviews, suggestions and comments. Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? What’s not to like? Well, like most social media platforms, there is unfortunately quite a lot not to like.

Since its launch in 2006, GoodReads has become increasingly dominated by a certain kind of reader. I hesitate to label them as belonging to a particular generation, as I’m not sure it’s that simple, but these readers are the ones who see everything that has ever been written as “problematic”. Ever in search of reasons to be offended, they trawl the corpus of modern and classic fiction, hunting for dissent from their tribal causes of righteousness and sniffing out any indication of a worldview that may jar with their own, even if that worldview is expressed by a fictional character.

It must be a truly exhausting existence, especially if you want to read anything written prior to the 21^st century, which can be a challenge for all of us who have been steeped in modern liberalism. A few years ago, I read Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell and found myself positively wincing at his choice of language. Similarly, it’s been an education to dip into some Agatha Christie and discover the casual classicism and a truly profound contempt for her own sex. This all jars with modern values and if you’re normally a reader of contemporary fiction it can come as quite a surprise. I would happily support a review of such books which said something like, “remember, this book was written around 80 years ago, so the attitudes and views expressed will not reflect 21^st century values”. That is all that needs to be said, a trigger warning for the ineluctably stupid who need it pointing out to them that people in the past didn’t necessarily think the same as we do. If you really want to blow their minds, try asking them what 22^nd century humans will think of their own prejudices; they won’t be able to think of any, because that’s how prejudice works: it’s only obvious when you look back at it.

You’re probably thinking I should give you a couple of examples of the GoodReads phenomenon. Okay. According to the good folk of GoodReads, a Young Adult novel that I enjoyed as a teenager is officially racist because it’s a fantasy novel about astral projection, which is the ability to remove your soul from your own body, and this is (apparently) cultural appropriation from the native Americans. Honest to God, there are people losing their minds over whether the supposed ability to teleport your soul around the world is racist. Some readers lay into the same novel being “sizeist” as well, and I have to say I have absolutely zero recollection of that in the novel. Similarly, there are hundreds of people claiming that Lionel Shriver (she of We Need to Talk About Kevin fame) can’t write, because her recent novel about tone-policing in society is just a little too close to the bone for them. “I feel like if you’re going to try and do Orwell in 2024, you have to try and write at least as well as Orwell” snipes one, whilst in the next beat admitting “I’m not much of a fan of Orwell.” That one genuinely made me hoot. Less so the one filled with expletives that describes Shriver as nothing more than “a well-off, educated white woman” – the ultimate modern-day insult.

I have searched for a better option and there does not appear to be one, so GoodReads is where I’m stuck. The algorithms are useful, in a way that they are not when it comes to other products available for purchase. If I’ve just bought a new dishwasher, then I’m not interested in suggestions for other dishwashers. However, if I’ve just enjoyed a rip-roaring thriller about zombies, I am more than open to suggestions for similar rip-roaring thrillers about zombies, so GoodReads has some value through its automated suggestions. As for the humans that populate the site, I shall endeavour to do my best to avoid their opinions and their tone-policing. I hate to say it, but for once I’d rather listen to the computer.

Call that a PhD?

You could be forgiven for thinking that Gregg Wallace’s video was the most explosive thing to happen on social media this week, but you would be wrong.

Picture the scene: a young, female academic at Cambridge shares a happy picture of herself, smiling and clutching her freshly-acknowledged PhD thesis in English literature. Ally Louks, now Dr Ally Louks, probably thought that her message of celebration that she was “PhDone” would be liked by a few and ignored by the majority. Yet her post at the time of writing has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people and Ally has received torrents of abuse, some of which beggars belief. The whole storm has sparked outraged discussion on all sides – most of it thoroughly ignorant – about what a PhD is or should be.

Here’s the thing, for those of you that haven’t been there. A PhD is like going potholing: you wriggle down into some difficult spaces and explore the subterrain. Nobody will ever know those particular underground passages better than you, because nobody else is ever likely to go there or, indeed, even want to go there. The reason you’re awarded the PhD is because you have traversed new terrain and – in the judgement of the potholing community – you are the first to do so, or you have uncovered a sufficient number of nooks and crannies that previous potholers did not comment upon. Most of the time, you don’t find an underground palace, a glistening river of stalactites or a dazzling crystal chamber: you simply wriggle your way back up to the surface and get on with your life. Your thesis will sit on the shelf of whichever institution recognised it and – if you’re lucky – it will be consulted by a tiny handful of niche-hole specialists over the next few decades, the number of which you could count on one hand.

Personally, I blame Stephen Hawking. During his doctorate, he hit upon a leap of understanding so brilliant that it changed the direction of theoretical physics forever. Most of us don’t manage that. This does not mean that our PhDs are not worthy of the title: it simply means that most of us are – demonstrably – not a genius like Hawking. There is a reason why Hawking has been laid to rest between Newton and Dawin: he is right up there with those two when it comes to the significance of his contribution to his field. Yet many people seem to assume that Hawking is an example of what is expected of a PhD candidate – a particularly famous example, perhaps, but an example nonetheless. In reality, most research is utterly banal and unimportant: it’s not going to shake up our understanding of the fabric of the universe.

Louks’ PhD sounds – to me – rather fun. Okay, I’m one of those wish-washy artsy types that got a PhD in Classics, not theoretical physics, but I reckon her thesis “Olfactory ethics: the politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose” sounds like a more stimulating read than a huge number of PhDs that have passed under my nose over the years (pun intended). In response to the unexpected interest in her work, Louks shared her abstract, which only further made my nostrils twitch. Her thesis explores “how literature registers the importance of olfactory discourse – the language of smell and the olfactory imagination it creates – in structuring our social world.” Her work looks at various authors and explores how smell is used in description to delineate class, social status and other social strata. I mean … fine? No? Quite why a certain type of Science Lad on the internet decided that this was a completely unacceptable thesis baffles me. Apparently, there is a certain type of aggressively practical chap, who believes that exploring how things are represented in literature and how that literature has in turn helped to shape our world is utterly unworthy. Well, more fool them. They should read some literature. I suggest they start with Perfume by Patrick Suskind, a modern classic that is quite literally a novel about smell.

I’ll confess that the whole thing has left me feeling quite jumpy about my own thesis, which in 1999 was welcomed as an acceptable contribution to my very narrow, very obscure corner of the underground caves. Once I had seen the reaction to Louks’ abstract I decided to re-read my own. Having done so, I concluded not only that it would sound utterly barking to the rest of the world, it sounded utterly barking to me! This was a field in which I was immersed at the time but have read nothing about since I walked out of the room in which my viva took place.

The viva itself is something that most people do not really understand and is difficult to explain. It is not an examination. Short for viva voce, which is Latin for “with the living voice”, the viva is there in principle for the PhD candidate to demonstrate that they are the author of their own work. In practice, it is also an opportunity for the examiners to quiz the candidate and explore their hypothesis further. The examiners may have questions and it is common for them to advise corrections and amendments; often, the examiners make the passing of the thesis conditional on these amendments. Best case scenario (and one enjoyed by Ally Louks), the examiners pass your thesis with nothing more than a few pencil annotations, none of which require attention for the thesis to be accepted. Worst case scenario, they say that your thesis is a load of old hooey and that you should not – under any circumstances – re-submit it, corrected or otherwise.

While the worst-case scenario is rare and indicates a profound failure on the part of the candidate’s supervisor, who never should have allowed the submission, it does happen on rare occasions. The last time I saw one of my old lecturers from my university days, he reported being fresh from a viva on which he had acted as an external examiner and had failed the thesis. This happens so rarely that I was agog. Having been so long out of the world of academia, it is impossible for me to express in simple terms the intellectual complexities that he explained were the reasons behind his decision, so I shall have to quote him directly: apologies if the language is too academic for you to follow. “Basically, it was b*****ks,” he said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was kind of brilliant b*****ks: but it was b*****ks nevertheless.” That poor candidate. I ached for him. I also found myself recalling the gut-wrenching moment during which Naomi Wolf’s PhD thesis was exposed as fundamentally flawed by Matthew Sweet, live on Radio 3. If you’ve never listened to the relevant part of the interview, I highly recommend it: it is – especially for those of us who have submitted a thesis for judgement in the past – the most toe-curling listen imaginable. Wolf’s entire thesis appears to have been based on a misunderstanding of a legal term, which Sweet discovered simply by looking it up on The Old Bailey’s website. Wolf’s thesis had been passed at Trinity College, Cambridge, an institution that would be hard to beat in terms of intellectual clout and reputation, so quite how this happened is mind-boggling and shameful.

The reaction to Souks’ thesis does, I suspect, have a great deal to do with the increasing suspicion with which academia is viewed, and in many ways I am not unsympathetic to people’s disquiet. There is, without question, a good deal of nonsense (or b*****ks, to use the technical term) talked in a lot of fields, particularly in the arts and social sciences. Yet the vitriol with which Souks was criticised has nothing to do with this. Her abstract, to anyone with even a grudging respect for the field of English literature, makes intellectual sense. No, the roasting of Souks and her work betrays a profound and depressing ignorance as well as a nasty dose of good old-fashioned cruelty. Before people decide that an entire field of study is unworthy of merit, they should maybe ask themselves whether there is even the tiniest possibility that they perhaps don’t know enough about it before they pounce. One can but hope that these people who value their rationality so much will next time run a more scientific test, rather than dunking the witch to see whether she floats.

Fulfilling your destiny

“Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.”

Jawaharlal Nehru

Currently, I am obsessively plugged in to an audiobook, the latest release from my favourite author, Liane Moriarty. Moriarty writes what is often scathingly referred to as “chick lit”: a genre which at its worst can be undeniably vacuous, but no more so than the two-dimensional thrillers churned out by authors marketed to men. The withering contempt with which “chick lit” is viewed says a lot more about how society treats the everyday lives and concerns of women than it does about this particular genre of popular fiction.

It is undeniable although perhaps a little depressing that Moriarty is an author unlikely to be read by vast quantities of male readers. Her stories revolve around people – mainly suburban women – and the thoughts inside their heads. Often there is an unfolding plot, but the focus is on the development of character and relationships rather than on action or suspense. Moriarty is an absolute master of the genre and writes with an effortless charm that belies her talent; the best authors make it look easy when it isn’t. It’s a great shame that more men aren’t interested in some of the things which interest women, and a truth that I have pondered the reasons for on and off. I speak as someone who has read quite broadly and have flirted with books categorised in modern times as “lad lit”: I am a huge fan of Martin Amis and if you haven’t read David Baddiel’s forays into novel writing in this genre then you should – they are annoyingly good. So if I, as a woman, can enjoy books written from a male perspective and read by men, I find it somewhat irksome that so few men have the desire to show any kind of interest in the fiction favoured by women. Anyway, I digress.

Much as many of Moriarty’s books (perhaps most famously Big Little Lies) focus on the lives of suburban women, some of them are intricately plotted and follow the lives of a complex set of characters, all of which cross paths in various ways and with a myriad of consequences. Because of this, I was greatly surprised when I heard the author interviewed and she revealed that she writes without a plan. Prior to her most recent release, the last novel she wrote called Apples Never Fall followed the tensions and anguish within a family from whom the matriarch has disappeared: most of the novel we spend wondering what has happened to this character (including whether she has merely walked out of her life or has been horribly murdered by someone within it), and Moriarty reports that she too spent much of her writing time wondering the same thing. She had not, by her own account, decided what had actually happened to this key character when she began to write the book. She started with the idea of the disappearance and discovered the truth behind it along with her characters. It is perhaps this very unconventional approach to plotting that enables her to write with such authenticity – she’s not dropping hints or trying to plant red herrings in relation to the real outcome, for she has no idea what that outcome will eventually be.

I am around one third of the way through Moriarty’s latest and am gripped as ever by her writing. Here One Moment is perhaps her most ambitious novel yet as it circles around the idea of free will and destiny. In summary, the scenario is that a group of people on a flight from Hobart to Sydney are each pointed at by a woman on board the flight and told the supposed time and manner of their death. Some passengers are given what amounts to welcome news by most people’s standards (heart failure, age 95), others – inevitably – are told that they will die very young. Some are even told that their death will be as a result of violence or self-harm. The rest of the novel is about the fall-out from this thoroughly alarming and unscheduled in-flight entertainment.

One of the ideas explored in the novel is the impact that such an experience might potentially have, not only on the feelings of those receiving the predictions but on their actions too. One of the passengers pays a visit to another “psychic” after the flight, and this “psychic” points out to him that he will not be the same person after the reading as he was before it. He points out that whatever he says to his client will make him act differently and that this will then potentially have an impact on the outcome of his life. Moriarty refers constantly to the idea of chaos theory throughout her writing – the idea that one small event in nature has a ripple effect that causes huge impact in other areas. At the point in the novel where I am right now, a mother who has been told that her baby son will die by drowning while still a child has elected to take him to swimming lessons. He takes to the lessons like the proverbial duck to water and it becomes clear that he is going to become a huge lover of swimming. As readers, we now sit with our hearts in our mouths and await the inevitable: will the mother’s decision to take her child to swimming lessons, sparked solely by the psychic’s so-called prediction, end up leading to the death of her child in the future?

The same thought experiment was run by a Greek playwright called Sophocles almost 3000 years ago. He wrote what I would argue is perhaps the most influential work of literature ever published, in the form of the tragedy called Oedipus Rex. Most people know the name “Oedipus” only as a result of Freud’s early 20th century ramblings about motherhood and sexual repression; very few people have any idea what a frankly brilliant and chilling story that of Oedipus was when it was written. It is emphatically not a story about motherhood, nor is it a story about sexual repression; to be honest I don’t think I can ever forgive Freud for making it so. Oedipus Rex is a story about destiny, about free will and about the extent to which we have control over either of those things. If you don’t know the story, it can be summarised as follows …

In ancient Greece, a king and queen are horrified to be told by an oracle that their baby son will grow up to murder his father and marry his mother. Terrified by this ghastly prediction, they send the baby away to be exposed on the hillside and die. The kindly old shepherd gifted with the unhappy task cannot quite bring himself to do the dreadful deed, so he ends up passing the baby to another ruler and his wife in a far-distant land who are childless, and they bring the baby up as their own. The baby is named Oedipus. He has no idea that he is adopted.

When Oedipus grows up, like all curious young men, he too consults the oracle and asks his destiny. The oracle tells him that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he does the only sensible thing: he removes himself from his family home and goes off on his travels, thus removing any possible risk of somehow murdering his father and marrying his mother. Oedipus believes that he has taken control: he is the master of his own destiny and he has cheated the oracle. Trouble is, remember … he doesn’t know he is adopted.

Several months into his lonely travels, Oedipus gets into an altercation on the road with an arrogant older man who tries to tell him what’s what. Long story short, Oedipus does the only thing any decent red-blooded young male would do, he kills the old fool. Afterwards, he continues on his travels and eventually comes to a kingdom which is in a bit of trouble because it’s being harassed by a nasty monster. Clever Oedipus defeats the monster by solving its riddle and – would you know it – it turns out that the king of this particular dominion has recently died and they’re in need of a chap to take over. What a stroke of luck! Oedipus marries the widowed queen – who is granted a little older than him but still young enough to bear children – and becomes King of Thebes. The rest, as they say, is a truly horrible history.

The whole point of Oedipus’ story is exactly the thought experiment that Moriarty is playing out in her novel. To what extent does a sense of destiny itself predetermine our actions? To what extent do people inevitably fulfil the path that they are told lies in front of them? It is easy to point out that if the oracle had not said what it said – on either occasion – the story of Oedipus would not have unfolded as it did. In the ancient world, the story was taken as a morality tale about man’s arrogance: humans are convinced that they can outwit the gods and cheat their destiny, and that arrogance begins and ends with asking the question. If nobody had asked, would nothing have happened? Does the asking trigger the event?

It is easy to assume that these big philosophical questions don’t affect our lives on a day-to-day basis, but in fact this loop of thought is inescapable and resonates in daily life. During my career, a trend came and (thankfully) went of sharing what were laughably called “predicted grades” with students. These grades were not teacher predictions (although teachers are indeed asked to make such psychic predictions and that nightmare continues) but based on a crushing weight of data that looks at “people like Student A” and attempts to make a mathematical prediction about how “a person like Student A” is most likely to perform in an exam. All sorts of data get included in the mix, from prior academic performance to socio-economic background. The happy news that a bunch of data analysis that hardly anybody fully understands “predicts” that Student A is likely to get a Grade 3 or below was – until alarmingly recently – shared with Student A. What an absolute travesty. I will never forgive the system for sitting a child down and telling them that the computer says they’re likely to fail. Likewise, I have seen children who are “predicted” a line of top grades spiral out of control under the pressure. For heaven’s sake stop telling kids what “the data” (our new name for the divine oracle) says about their destiny. It’s a seriously grotesque thing to do.

For similar reasons, I know parents who are understandably jumpy about their children being labelled as anything. Who doesn’t remember well into middle age having “he’s shy” or “she’s anxious” being said over their head, while they were going through an entirely normal phase of being wary of strangers? Before you know it, the label of “shy” or “anxious” or whatever the grown-ups have decided befits you becomes you. I am absolutely in support of my friends who will not have their children referred to in this way: if history teaches us anything, it’s that people tend to fulfil their destiny. So be careful what path you pave.

In Praise of Idleness

When I was around 13, my grandfather advised me to read an essay by Bertrand Russell called In Praise of Idleness. I don’t recall what his point was at the time, but it was probably a side-swipe at what he rightly saw as my privileged middle-class upbringing compared to his own. Well, better late than never, so almost 40 years later and 30 years after his death, I have taken my grandfather’s advice and read the essay.

Since giving up my full-time career at the chalkface, I have been plagued by more or less the same question from everyone. “What are you going to do with yourself?” asked my mother. “What have you been up to?” asks my sister, almost every time we speak. “Doing anything today?” asks my hairdresser every six weeks. “What are you doing for the rest of the day?” asked the fellow tutor I met for a Zoom coffee yesterday. Now I am not working in a job that is universally acknowledged to be all-consuming, people have suddenly become fascinated by what I must be doing with my time. The pressure is on to come up with something life-affirming that I can cite as evidence for the validity of my existence on earth. Usually, I come up blank.

Partly, I think, it’s because I struggle with this kind of small talk. While I literally cannot bear to outline to someone else the uninteresting activities that will, inevitably, form part of my day, most people seem only too happy to share the most mundane aspects of their lives under the apparent the assumption that everyone else is fascinated by them. In the modern world, this is evidenced by the quite remarkable plethora of social media posts in which people inform everyone else of every single unremarkable act they perform. Doing was always the point … if you recall, when Facebook first came up with the idea that people should post updates on their own lives, the status bar read “Emma Williams is …” and you had to fill in the rest. There was a huge campaign to remove “the mandatory is” and Facebook listened. The rest is history, if you can bear to read it. I can’t.

You see, I simply cannot be bothered to say, “well, today I’ll go to the gym, then I’ll come back and write my weekly blog post, then I might do 5 minutes of mad dancing because that’s what I do for my regular dose of HIIT to get my heart rate up, then I’ll make coffee and I might treat myself to an episode of The Mentalist on Amazon Prime as I’m really into that, then I’ll finish my work on the last OCR set text, which I need to translate and put onto Quizlet for my students, then after lunch I’ll make sure my evening’s lessons are prepared. Oh, and there’s a load of washing to do, Sainsbury’s are coming with our groceries and David wants me to put the lawn sprinklers on and I might also go to Morrisons at some point. Are you bored yet? I mean … who gives a rat’s ar*e? And that’s all before I actually start tutoring in the evening, when I will do the work I am paid to do. See, I am perfectly happy with my day today, indeed I am really quite looking forward to it: that does not mean it’s interesting to anybody else.

Russell would argue, I think, that I have not had sufficient education in order to make the most of my abundant leisure time. According to his essay, an education is required for the wise use of leisure and without it then we are prone to time-wasting, examples of which include watching the football. Despite this, Russell is actually trying enormously hard not to be a snob, and I love the fact that the whole point of his essay was to challenge the assumption that “workers should work” and to float the idea that everyone, including the working classes, should be working significantly fewer hours: his model actually argues for everyone working four hours per day instead of eight. He attacks the futility of unfettered capitalism (although, by the by, he’s got some spectacularly naïve views on the equity of Russia’s economy) and takes a very pleasing swipe at the way in which the Christian work ethic has been used as a mechanism of control, to keep the workers in their place. He ruefully observes that “Athenian slave-owners … employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system”, although he later goes on to show some insight into the fact that not all of intelligentsia are deserving, remarking that – for every Darwin, “against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting.” Bravo, Bertrand.

All in all, I really enjoyed the essay and am drawn to read the next one in his collection entitled “useless knowledge”. I am still not sure what reason my grandfather had for recommending it to me, but it is rather nice that his recommendation has come in handy some 40 years later in order to help me express my current thoughts on my relatively free and easy life compared to the one I was leading a few years ago. One of the things that I have taken back with both hands is the opportunity to read, which I all but lost during my busiest times. Would I have found the time to read a philosophical essay when I had a full day’s teaching ahead of me? Like heck I would. Such time in itself is a luxury and one which I value enormously.

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.

Derivatives

It was the year 2000, I was an NQT and I was standing in front of a class, teaching a subject I had not trained in, perhaps rather less well-prepared than I should have been.

The class were reading The Turn of the Screw, a novella I felt reasonably confident I could bluff my way through for half an hour, but the inevitable happened – I was presented with a word I had never seen before. The governess in the novel was describing how much the children in her care were absorbed in their imaginary games and how they would assign to her a role in their game that was befitting of her position – “a happy and highly distinguished sinecure.” I had never seen the word sinecure before.

Given my knowledge of Latin, alongside the context of the passage, I was able to deduce that sinecure meant something that required little effort: sine in Latin means “without” and cura means “effort, care or worry”. This is just one of a thousand ways that a knowledge of Latin can help widen your scope as a reader – it can help you to deduce the meaning of a word you have never met before.

Most students find derivatives much more difficult than adults imagine, and this is something I have only come to realise in recent years. The derivatives question in the OCR GCSE language paper is worth 4 marks – that’s 4% of the whole paper – yet most classroom teachers (and I include myself in this) have not prepared students well for it. It is easy to assume that students will be able to do the question without any support or guidance, but in my experience the marks that students score in this element of the paper do not bear out this assumption.

I’ll be honest – I don’t like the derivatives question and I don’t think it should be there in its current form. The question significantly advantages students who have read more widely, students who like and respond well to reading and who have been exposed to a lot of challenging books from a young age. Yet even they sometimes struggle with the question unless they are prepared for it.

The GCSE question in its current form looks like this: students are asked to state an English word which derives from the Latin and to define the English word. It is the latter that even strong readers can struggle with, given that parts of speech are no longer something which their English teachers will be making much reference to. Asking students of 16 years to give a dictionary definition of a word is a fair bit more challenging than one might assume. The question always gives an example to show students what to do, but they still need to practise it.

I used the above example this week with a very intelligent and very well-read student. His mother is an English teacher. He could not come up with a derivative for annos – fascinatingly, he came up with annular, a word which I had never heard of, but which derives in fact from the Latin for ring (anulus, also spelled annulus, meaning “small ring”). The word therefore means “ring-shaped” and I believe that he knew the word because he does astronomy! He could not think of the word annual and only recognised it when I gave him examples of it in compound words such as biannual. The second word in the question gave him no problem and he confidently both named and defined sedentary; but in my experience this is very unusual for a 16-year old, as most of them have not heard of this word and are more likely (if they can come up with anything at all) to draw on their studies in geography or chemistry and come up with sediment.

Common Entrance papers in the past have taken a slightly different approach to derivatives questions. They used to say something like “explain the connection beteeen the Latin word sedebat and the English word sedentary“. This at least gave students the derivative rather than expecting them to come up with it, but it still advantaged strong and/or experienced readers because they were still going to struggle if they had no experience of the English word.

In terms of how students can get better at this question, I’m afraid I feel a little dismal about it because “read more widely” is advice that they need to have been given from an age when really responsibility lies not with them but with their parents or guardians. The extent to which children struggle with this question is just one tiny example of how important reading is and how much advantage it gives to those whose parents have had the money, the time and the education to promote its importance at home.

I certainly recommend to all GCSE students that they get hold of a copy of Caroline K. Mackenzie’s GCSE Latin Etymological Lexicon. The book works through the whole of the GCSE vocabulary list and explores suggested derivatives for each word, so it is definitely worthwhile as a supplement volume for students who want to gain mastery in this part of the exam.

One thing I would recommend from experience is that students come back to the derivatives question during the spare time that almost all of them have at the end of the language paper. Many students plump for a poor choice of derivative, my favourite example of which is when shown a Latin word such as audivit (he heard) and asked to give a derivative, nine times out of ten they will say “audio”. Now, audio is in the English dictionary. But can they define it? Of course they can’t. Much better to give the matter some more thought and come up with audition, audience or audible, all of which are likely to be words that they know and can define.

Cambridge Latin Course 5th edition

Book 2: radical changes

Last week I reviewed the 5th edition of the Cambridge Latin Course Book 1. While the changes were notable, they were perhaps only apparent to someone who knows the course inside out. By contrast, the moment one opens the second book and compares it to its 4th edition predecessor, it is apparent that the changes here are far more radical. From the very first set of cartoons, the difference it striking.

Okay. Full disclosure from the outset: I don’t like Book 2. As a result, I’m afraid that this review is not going to be gushing. It is difficult enough to hold the attention of Year 9 (especially once they’ve chosen their options, which happens remarkably early in the academic year); with CLC Book 2, it was nigh on impossible and I have never felt so liberated as when I ditched it altogether. Yet the authors of the 5th edition have clearly made significant improvements to make the transition from the first to the second book is more palatable. To date, students have struggled to move on from the loss of Caecilius and other favourite characters, so the authors of the new edition have done the right thing in attempting to give Quintus more character in Book 1 and providing him with a new companion to accompany him on his travels. I retain my reservations about Book 2, even in its new format but, with such radical changes employed, it is undeniable that the authors have given it their best shot to adapt it.

The first stage of the book (Stage 13 in the series) has been radically altered. The lazy slave motifs of yesteryear are gone, and the opening cartoons demonstrate this from the outset. The monumentally dull opening story Tres Servi has been removed and replaced with a much better story entitled Romanus Vulneratus, which introduces us to Salvius in the distance, observed by a local farmer and his family. This is a much cleverer way to spark interest in the story Coniuratio which follows, and which we now hear as an explanation as to how the wealthy Roman Salvius came by his wound. I think the very idea of seeing these Roman characters through local eyes is excellent and a terrific approach taken by the authors throughout the new edition.

Rufilla is given a more dominant role, notable in the way the cartoons are presented and how the story of Bregans is shaped around her rather than Varica. The story is now divided into two parts, but still introduces the dog sent as a gift by King Togidubnus (renamed in line with updated research). A new character of Vitellianus is introduced and there is much better story-telling, with Rufilla noticing that her husband is wounded, and much less “Romanising”, with Bregans no longer being the stupid, lazy slave. The twins, Loquax and Anti-Loquax, are notable by their absence in this Stage. Salvius Fundum Inspicit has been renamed Fundus Britannicus, and once again this story has been adapted to reflect the viewpoint of local farmers living under the Roman occupation.

The order in which the grammar is introduced throughout Book 2 remains the same. For example, Stage 13 still introduces the verbs volo, nolo and possum used with the infinitive, and this grammatical point is rather better represented throughout the stories than it was before. I still ache for the lack of exercises provided; regretfully (and – as I undetstand it – deliberately) the CLC still relies heavily on the classroom teacher supplementing students’ studies. The authors have moved the practising the language exercises to the back of the book and added in extra comprehensions in every stage; given that the exercises require extensive vocabulary support, I do wonder whether the authors have considered just how much work the CLC demands of the clasroom teachers who work with it. When I think of the thousands of Latin teachers all over the country typing out hundreds of exercises on the most basic of grammatical principles, it makes me want to weep at the inefficiency. Changes have been made to the vocabulary checklists, largely (although not entirely) to better represent the list of words required at GCSE. I retain serious concerns about the vocabulary used outside of the checklists, which I shall come back to later.

The authors have decided to ditch the motif of Rufilla as the nagging, 1970s-style housewife, which is a great relief. She has an equally if not more dominant role in Stage 14 as before, but the row between her and Salvius, in which she was portrayed as fickle and spoilt, has been replaced with Familia Occupata, in which her focus is preparing the guest bedroom – a much better way to build anticipation about who that guest might be. The household slaves are also much better represented throughout Stage 14 in the build up to Quintus Advenit, now renamed Familiaris Advenit to allow students to discover the guest’s identity for themselves as they translate. The story of the silver tripods remains, followed by a new story for comprehension, which once again replaces the exercises now moved to the back of the book. This certainly cements the “reading course” approach – to those of us unconvinced by that philosophy, I fear it is another nail in the coffin for the CLC. Many teachers, however, will be very pleased to see some beginners’ level literary criticism brought in – I am aware that some schools take this approach with the CLC already and it seems the team has taken it on board.

It is notable that the background sections, which continue to exploit the idea of the characters appearing as talking heads, are now spread out more widely throughout some of the stages, meaning that teachers are perhaps more likely to weave the background material into their lessons as originally intended by the philosophy of the CLC. Women are better represented (i.e. they are represented full stop) and there is a pleasing exploration as to why we know so little about them and indeed about anyone who was not rich, male and powerful. I will not explore and discuss the changes to the background in depth because – like many state-school teachers, I had no time for them anyway and therefore lack the expertise. Suffice to say it is clear that the changes are radical, thorough and for the better, so schools with the time to explore them in depth will have much better quality material to work with.

The changes to the stories in Stage 15 appear less radical and therefore what’s most noticeable is once again the practising the language being a comprehension rather than exercises, which have again been moved to the back of the book. There is a welcome change to the cartoons at the start of Stage 16, which previously had the most extraordinary representation of enslaved people with dwarfism, randomly juggling for the entertainment of some dinner guests. While it is absolutely undeniable that the Romans did this kind of thing, to make this image the only representation of disability within the pages of the CLC and drop it in without comment was frankly appalling and something that I am very glad to see the back of. These unfortunate (and nameless) characters have been replaced with the previously absent twins, named in previous editions as Loquax and Anti-Loquax, who make an appearance here although are not named. In the same set of cartoons the authors have also removed the bizarre and frankly distracting moment when a dancing girl appears out of an enormous egg and have replaced her with some birds. Below is the image as it appears in the 4th edition followed by its replacement in the 5th.

I was pleased to see Quintus De Se still in place, as this is a pivotal and grammatically useful story, where Quintus articulates his trauma and which I used to use in an adapted form to test students on verb endings. The story has some pleasing tweaks, incorporating the fate of Lucia, Quintus’s sister, and explaining how Clemens found the two siblings after some time and gave Quintus the ring handed to him by Caecilius at the end of Stage 12 (which to my recollection was never mentioned again in previous editions).

But Stages 15 and 16 in general are the point where the CLC starts to go a bit wild, in my opinion. To my dismay, the authors have chosen to keep the storyline about Belimicus, the tedious boat race and the bear – in my experience, children honestly do not find these stories even half as exciting as the authors seem to think they are, but maybe other teachers have found differently. And yes, of course, I used to throw myself into it, get the children to act out the stories, draw diagrams of the race, label what happened at each point, you name it, I did it. We were all doing it back in 2010. Some teachers are still doing it. What an epic waste of class time! Let’s focus on the language: in my experience, by this point in the course, the amount of unusual vocabulary weighs so heavily upon students that they find themselves endlessly frustrated by the translation process and therefore lose heart with it. My concerns in this regard are perpetuated in this new edition, where the authors have elected to continue to use relatively unusual vocabulary to introduce and demonstrate core grammar. As just one example, the sentence which demonstrates the pluperfect in Stage 16 is constructed almost entirely out of words which do not appear on either of the GCSE specifications, nor in Dickinson’s One Thousand: artifices, qui picturas pinxerant, peritissimi erant. Other than the verb to be and the relative pronoun, these words are frankly irrelevant and I think it’s madness, given the depth of the overhaul that this course has undergone, that the authors haven’t taken the opportunity to resolve this issue. I suspect it is because they genuinely don’t see the excessive amount of unusual vocabulary as an issue to the extent that I have found it to be in the classroom.

Stages 17-20 remain, as in prior editions, a flashback to Quintus’s time in Alexandria, with the notable change that his sister Lucia, introduced in the new 5th edition of Book 1, is also a survivor and therefore joins Quintus on his travels. An extra story in Stage 17 entitled Tres Aves focuses on her and makes further pleasing mention of the siblings’ losses in Pompeii – in previous editions, there wasn’t enough opportunity taken to make links for the characters with their past, so this is really good to see – the course and its narrative certainly feels more coherent now. Stage 18 retains its focus on Clemens, his Alexandrian shop and the protection racketeering and Stage 19 still introduces the characters of Aristo, Galatea and Helena – mention is now made in the cartoons that they are friends of Barbillus, which goes some considerable way towards maintaining the thread of the storyline better than in previous editions. Lucia is also woven into the stories of Stage 19, with this being the focus in a total re-write of Dies Festus. The story of the hen-pecked Aristo has – mercifully – been removed and we are then into endgame, with the story Venatio depicting the scenario which will finish off Barbillus, who has thus been much better woven into the extended narrative throughout Book 1 and Book 2. Barbillus’s demise seems much more poignant, not just because he has been better painted as a character and friend of the family, but because his will is represented nicely in the book and the relationship between him and the siblings Quintus and Lucia is much more explicitly drawn.

While the storyline hangs together really well and the narrative is undeniably entertaining, I maintain that the vocabulary of Book 2 is overwhelming for students and that this burden will continue to cause them to lose interest, both in the narrative and in the language itself. Were I still a classroom teacher I do not believe that I would have re-embraced the use of Book 2, solely due to this fact. While Book 1 requires heavy supplementation, this is just about manageable and definitely worth doing. But when I found myself glossing virtually every single word in a lengthy story – as I did for Book 2 – and when those words are, on the whole, not useful for GCSE, I had to ask myself what purpose the book was serving. My professional judgement that Book 2 was not serving my needs as a time-pressed classroom teacher sadly remains the same having examined the 5th edition: the authors simply haven’t addressed the core reasons behind why I ditched it in the first place. Others will feel very differently of course, and I suspect that ardent fans of the course will be delighted with the changes.

I was always going to be a tough audience, with my fundamental dislike for Book 2 and my sincere belief that it is pretty much irreconcilable with the needs of the classroom teacher, particularly in a comprehensive setting. I remain convinced that the CLC and its usefulness starts to crumble beyond repair at this point. The passages are packed with too much difficult, irrelevant and overwhelming vocabulary and – perhaps most crucially of all – far too much relies on the classroom teacher to produce countless supplementary worksheets; the requirement to do this is so onerous that one is left wondering why one would invest in these expensive text books at all, when they fail so fundamentally to provide the core content of a Latin course.