Classroom teaching – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Babies and bathwater

A recent study reported in the press this week has apparently found that strict bans on mobile phones in schools have “close to zero” impact on student learning and show no evidence of improvements in attendance or online bullying. If we take such findings at face value and conclude that school phone bans are like to be ineffective, we are not only misreading the data but also misunderstanding the purpose of removing smart phones from our schools. The crucial point is not whether removing phones from the classroom instantly boosts results or turns around behaviour in schools that have problems; it is that schools have an opportunity to model healthier norms and support families in standing against what has become a tidal wave of addiction for the next generation.

The recent study cited in headlines found minimal measurable differences in academic outcomes or attendance between schools that banned phones and those that did not. Yet even the researchers themselves cautioned against interpreting this as evidence that bans are pointless. This is because educational outcomes (such as grades and attendance) are blunt instruments for measuring complex behavioural and psychological phenomena. Countless variables such as family life, socioeconomic conditions, prior attainment and curriculum quality cannot be neutralised simply by removing a device during school hours. Expecting a ban to produce immediate, measurable improvements is akin to expecting a single dietary change to transform long-term health overnight: I am currently trying to reduce my LDL cholesterol levels, and I don’t expect to see results in less than six months, nor do I necessarily expect to see them at all, as my high cholesterol may be genetic. (I strongly suspect, however, that my genetic inheritance might be a love of cheese rather than a fault in my liver’s ability to process lipids).

To understand why it is a good idea to remove smart phones from the school enviornment, let’s look at the broader research on smartphone use and adolescent wellbeing. A growing body of evidence points to significant associations between problematic smartphone use and mental health difficulties. For instance, research funded by the NIHR found that teenagers exhibiting problematic smartphone behaviours were twice as likely to experience anxiety and significantly more likely to suffer from depression and insomnia . Importantly, this research distinguishes between mere “screen time” and patterns of use that resemble addiction in the form of compulsive checking, distress when separated from the device and displacement or even rejection of other meaningful activities in favour of the device. It is this compulsive, immersive use that appears to be most harmful to young minds.

Other studies reinforce this pattern. Reviews of digital media use consistently show associations between heavy engagement and increased symptoms of anxiety, depression and isolation, while clinical research links intensive social media use even with suicidal ideation. Longitudinal studies suggest that adolescents with increasingly addictive patterns of screen use are two to three times more likely to develop suicidal thoughts over time. These findings are not trivial. They point to a behavioural ecosystem in which smartphones are not neutral tools but powerful, psychologically immersive experiences that can shape mood, identity, and social experience.

Government-commissioned reviews have noted concerns about severe harms including bullying-related distress and premature death among young people in digital environments. Parliament has examined evidence that cyberbullying via smartphones can lead to self-injurious behaviour and suicidal ideation. While causation is complex and multifactorial, coroners’ reports in the UK have increasingly referenced online experiences, including exposure to harmful content and sustained digital harassment, as contributing factors in youth suicides. Most famously thanks to her grieving father’s tireless campaigning, Molly Russell’s death was linked directly by the coroner to “the negative effects of online content”. It would be irresponsible to ignore this accumulating body of concern simply because a short-term study fails to detect immediate improvements in outcomes.

Moreover, the effects of smartphones extend beyond mental health into the texture of daily life. Young people now spend several hours a day on their devices, often displacing sleep, face-to-face interaction, and focused attention. Many platforms, driven by algorithms optimised for engagement, deliberately encourage habitual checking and prolonged use, creating feedback loops that are difficult for adolescents to regulate: frankly, they are difficult for adults to regulate. I chose to step away from social media entirely for personal use and the platforms I maintain for business I have removed from my phone, so that I can only look at them on a laptop: this helps to mitigate against their addictive nature, which is palpable and undeniable. The addictive design of social media platforms is driving a broader shift in how young people experience boredom, social interaction and cognitive effort. Schools, as institutions dedicated to learning and development, cannot simply ignore this shift, indeed they are experiencing the fallout firsthand. Ask any teacher (myself included) who has worked with young people both before and after the advent of smart phones and they will tell you: smart phones are detrimental to children’s ability to focus and concentrate. They are a net negative.

This is where the true rationale for banning phones in schools becomes clear. It is not about improving outcomes, it is about creating a protected environment in which alternative norms can be experienced and practised. Schools are one of the few spaces where society can collectively decide how young people spend their time. By removing phones, schools model a way of being that prioritises sustained attention, face-to-face interaction and engagement with the immediate environment. These are not trivial skills: they are foundational to learning, relationships and mental health, and they may not be being modelled at home.

Critics might argue that such modelling is paternalistic or authoritarian, but this fundamentally misunderstands how behavioural norms are formed. Young people do not develop their habits in isolation, they are shaped by their environments. If every space they experience, including their classroom, is saturated with digital distraction, then the idea of focused, device-free engagement will seem completely alien to them. Conversely, if schools consistently enforce phone-free environments, they can provide a counterweight to the rest of the day. Over time, this can help recalibrate expectations about when and how phones are used. Even if the measurable impact on grades is initially small, the long-term cultural effect may be substantial.

Equally important is the role that schools can play in supporting parents. Many parents currently feel overwhelmed by the challenge of managing their children’s phone use, particularly given the social pressures involved. If one child in a friendship group is allowed unrestricted access, others will quickly follow. School policies can shift this dynamic by creating a shared baseline and encouraging parents to listen to the instincts that are telling them that these devices are a threat to their children. When phones are banned during the school day, it becomes easier for parents to enforce limits at home, knowing that expectations are consistent across the community. In this sense, school bans are not isolated interventions but part of a broader ecosystem of guidance and support. The messaging becomes clear that smart phones are a cause for concern, in the same way that alcohol anc cigarettes are a cause for concern: while schools can’t prevent all children from discovering the highs that can be found via alcohol and nicotine, they can at least model the principle that these substances are problematic and undesirable.

It is also worth noting that the absence of immediate measurable benefits does not mean the absence of meaningful effects. Some studies have found improvements in classroom behaviour or reductions in distraction, even when academic outcomes may remain unchanged. These are valuable in their own right. A calmer, more focused classroom is a better environment for both teaching and learning, even if its impact on examination grades takes time to materialise. Education is not a simple input-output system: it is a complex, cumulative process.

Phone bans are not a silver bullet, they are one tool among many, to be used alongside education about digital literacy, parental guidance and broader societal conversations about technology use. Expecting them to single-handedly reverse trends in mental health or academic performance is not just unrealistic, it sets them up to fail. When the inevitable modest results appear, critics can then dismiss the entire approach, reinforcing a cycle of inaction. You throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Smartphones are deeply embedded in modern life. Schools cannot control what happens outside their gates, but they can shape the environment within them. By doing so, they send a signal about values: that attention matters, that conversation matters, that not every moment needs to be mediated via a screen. Ultimately, the debate about phones in schools is not just about education policy; it is about the kind of childhood and adolescence society wishes to cultivate. In that context, focusing solely on short-term academic metrics is a profound misreading of the issue. Schools cannot solve the problem alone, but they can play a crucial role in modelling a different way of living and learning: one that recognises both the power and the peril of the devices in our pockets.

Effective study

Examinations are looming on the horizon. This year’s GCSE candidates will no doubt be receiving revision advice, yet I fear that much of it will be inadequate. While there are some schools that are doing a great job on this, others are still behind the curve when it comes to their knowledge base: teaching is sadly a profession that has been historically prone to fads and unevidenced practice, something I witnessed during my training and throughout my career. In recent years, many individual teachers have gone out of their way to inform themselves about what cognitive science has to say about effective study, and this increasing knowledge and understanding about memory and learning is finally beginning to impact upon the advice that is given to students. This can be seen in the sheer number of teachers who choose to attend ResearchED conferences on a Saturday during their own time, to inform their understanding of good learning techniques. Despite this quiet, grassroots revolution, there is still a remarkable amount of misinformation out there, and I still occasionally reel in mortification at the sorts of things that are said to my tutees when it comes to revision advice.

Much of the problem stems from the very language that is used by teachers, students and parents when it comes to revision. It is hard to know where that language comes from, but much of it seems to be ingrained and on an infinite loop, like a scratched record. Students still frequently say to me that they need to “go over” something, which by its very nature implies revisiting the content to refresh their memory. In practical terms, the advice that a student needs to “go over” something encourages them to reread their notes. A student who is attempting to be proactive about their studies may highlight key information while they read. Yet cognitive science teaches us that reading and highlighting in this way are entirely ineffective practices, for they provide the learner with a feeling of familiarity without genuinely increasing or securing their knowledge-base. Reading and highlighting can feel genuinely productive, to the extent that the student believes that they are actively engaging with an effective learning process; in reality, they are giving themselves false reassurance and not practising the process of retrieval, which is essential both for learning outcomes and for examination practice.

Kate Jones, a teacher and an expert in sharing good practice for effective, evidence-based learning, has this week published a short blog on the Evidence Based Education website, highlighting the importance of what she calls responsive revision. In the blog she did what she does so well, which is to summarise and consolidate what we know from cognitive science into a practical and effective format that is easy for both classroom teachers and students to apply. Responsive revision, according to Kate Jones’ blog, is “a deliberate, structured method of independent study in which students use retrieval to generate evidence about what they know, what they can recall, and where gaps remain. They then respond to that evidence by directing their time and effort towards strengthening those gaps. It shifts revision from passive review to informed action. It also ensures students don’t keep going over their favourite or familiar topics but instead identify and tackle gaps in knowledge and understanding.”

One of the most important things for students to understand is the difference between what feels familiar (the process of recognition) and what is genuine recall (the process of retrieval). When a student rereads their notes or sits and listens to a concept being explained to them again, the material will feel familiar. This gives them the illusion that they can remember something when in fact, under pressure, they will not be able to recall it. The illusion can be so convincing that it can even cause the learner to fool themselves in the process: for example, research shows that many students have the tendency to use flashcards wrongly by turning over the card too soon, resulting in the phenomenon of them recognising the answer and then convincing themselves they did indeed know the answer. The trap is surprisingly easy to fall into. One simple way to guard against it is to work with someone else and to put them in charge of flipping the cards over. Because recognising information is so much easier and more comforting than the process of forcing yourself to recall it independently, students often cling to methods that allow them to experience the process of recognition, like a comfort blanket. They may even insist that the method is working for them, because it feels safe and encouraging and gives them the illusion that their knowledge base is strengthening. In reality, they are doing nothing to aid their recall under pressure.

In her blog, Kate Jones argues that revision should generate evidence, and by that she means evidence of absence as well as evidence of knowledge. Students need to test themselves in order to evidence the knowledge that they possess and to reveal the gaps in that knowledge, keeping themselves in a constant information loop of what they can retrieve successfully and confidently, what they can partially remember, and what they cannot yet call to mind. Armed with that information, the student can then take effective ation, a process which she explores in her blog.

If I could convince any learner of one thing that seems counter-intuitive, it would be that they should be testing themselves at every stage of their learning, including at the beginning. Students tend to resist this, for the process is challenging and uncomfortable (especially if they are not used to it in school) and the notion that they should be testing themselves on an area where they are aware that their knowledge-base is inadequate can feel rather daunting: perfectionists find it especially difficult to tolerate. Yet testing is essential to learning. When a student attempts to recall a piece of information from memory, they create the evidence base for what they do and do now know. Even more than this, not only does the process of retrieval make their knowledge (or lack of it) visible, it is also part of the learning process. For every time a student attempts to recall something and each time they manage to do so, they are working on the very thing that they will need to rely on in the examination; they are also strengthening the foundations of that knowledge base.

I cannot recommend Kate Jones’ blog highly enough for a simple, evidence-based explanation for how to go about the process of revision. Her ability to distil complex, research-informed ideas into a practical, workable guide is quite remarkable and as a result she is quite brilliant as a go-to advisory service for teachers. Her books on retrieval practice should be the benchmark for any classroom teacher. For advice directed at learners, regular readers of my blog will know that I am a huge fan of the psychologist Paul Penn’s advice on how to learn, which can be found both in his book on effective studying and on his YouTube channel.

Lord of the Flies: a very adult novel

Suddenly, everyone is talking about Lord of the Flies. It is one of my favourite novels, one which I taught for GCSE English literature for around a decade. I’m afraid that I have no urge to see what the BBC have done with it. I have also been somewhat irritated to see multiple hot takes on social media, critisising the story’s doom-laden attitude towards childhood and children’s psychology.

First of all, Golding was emphatically not being doom-laden about the nature of children, he was being doom-laden about the nature of humanity as a whole: let us not underestimate the extent of his doom-mongering, please. Secondly, Lord of the Flies is no more a novel about children and childhood than Animal Farm is a novel about livestock and animal husbandry. Like Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies is an extended allegory, and its message is a profoundly depressing one. So, buckle up.

Golding’s work of genius (one which he, incidentally, dismissed in later life as “boring and crude”) is a thoroughly disturbing exploration of what happens when the structures of civilisation fall away. It is emphatically not a novel about children. While the novel appears to contain the trappings of childhood: children’s games, their fears, their rivalries and their capacity for cruelty, it becomes clear as the narrative unfolds that Golding’s central concern extends way beyond childhood psychology. The island on which the children find themselves stranded is a microcosm of the world that the boys have left behind, a specimen society in which rival authorities, social hierarchies, violence and superstitious ideology rapidly emerge. Golding uses children in order to examine society stripped to its essentials, suggesting that what we call “civilisation” is a fundamentally fragile construct laid over a persistent human capacity for savagery. The novel is less an anthropological study of childhood than a parable about the nature of society itself.

From the outset of the novel, in which the boys find themselves stranded in the wilderness, the protagonists attempt to recreate the structures of the adult world from which they have come. They call assemblies, establish rules and elect a leader. Ralph’s authority rests on apparent legitimacy: he is chosen through a vote, and a conch shell is used as a tangible sign of democratic order. The conch regulates speech, embodies fairness and stands as a shared agreement among the boys to abide by rules. These early chapters might seem to suggest that humans, left to their own devices, instinctively lean towards mature governance; yet Golding makes it clear that the boys’ desire for adherence to a set of rules depends not on moral conviction but on a fear of consequences and a individual lust for dominance, for the boys speak immediately of the punishments that will face anyone who transgresses the rules they plan to lay down for themselves. Furthermore, as the hope of rescue fades, the rules lose all of their potency. As Ralph puts it, “things are breaking up. I don’t understand why.” The deterioration is not portrayed as uniquely childish; rather, it reflects how flimsy and insubstantial social contracts are when the institutions that sustain them collapse.

Jack’s transformation from choir leader to autocratic demagogue underscores this shift. His authority on the island grows not through reasoned persuasion but through his manipulation of fear and the promise of hunting and meat. He paints his face, embraces ritual and forms a tribe built on spectacle and intimidation. In doing so, he does not regress into childhood so much as adopt the tactics of a charismatic despot.

It is hinted from the outset that the boys have arrived from a society already engaged in a global conflict. The island society quickly begins to resemble the violent regimes and wartime mentalities of the adult world and the children’s play-acting of war quickly becomes indistinguishable from the very worst forms of human brutality. The murder of Simon is not an impulsive scuffle between children; it is a collective frenzy, a ritualised killing fuelled by hysteria and conformity. In that pivotal moment, Golding depicts the terrifying ease with which ordinary individuals can participate in atrocities when swept up by mass hysteria and mindless ideology. This is emphatically not a comment on the nature of children: it is a study in group dynamics and the power of suggestion.

Prior to his death, Simon’s role in the novel further supports the interpretation that Golding is examining society and group dynamics. His encounter with the pig’s head, the eponymous “Lord of the Flies,” reveals the central moral insight of the book: “the beast” that the boys fear is not an external creature but something within themselves. The pig’s head, swarming with flies, seems to speak to Simon, telling him that it (the beast) is part of them, is inside them: it is not an external force, rather it is innate to humanity. Golding aims to convince his readers that the impulse toward violence and domination is an inherent aspect of human nature, one that civilised society attempts, imperfectly, to restrain. Simon’s death, at the hands of boys who mistake him for “the beast” crawling out of the forest, symbolises the destruction of moral truth by collective fear and aggression. The tragedy lies not in the fact that the children are capable of evil, but in the implication that all humans are in the wrong circumstances.

Piggy represents rationality, scientific thought and the values of ordered civilisation. His glasses, which enable the boys to make fire, symbolise the power of technology and reason. Yet reason alone cannot withstand the tide of savagery once the social consensus collapses. Piggy is marginalised, mocked and finally killed when Roger deliberately dislodges the boulder that crushes him. This final act by Roger is particularly significant: earlier in the novel, he is depicted as throwing stones at the younger boys but he deliberately misses; the implication is that he is an inherently violent boy who is restrained in his urges by what Golding calls “the taboo of the old life.” As those restrictions erode with the breakdown of society, so too does his individual restraint. By the time he kills Piggy, Roger acts with deliberate intent. Golding’s emphasis on the gradual disappearance of internalised moderation points to his theme of the importance of societal structures in shaping and curbing antisocial behaviour. When those structures weaken, he believes, our latent cruelty surfaces.

Golding’s novel is emphatically not about childhood. The boys bring with them the hierarchies, prejudices and fears of their culture. The choirboys, accustomed to discipline and exclusion, quickly form an elite group under Jack. The “littluns” (as the youngest members of the group are collectively referred to) are marginalised and terrorised by the older boys and even Ralph, ostensibly the champion of order, participates in the violence against Simon. No character is exempt from moral compromise and this universality suggests that Golding is less interested in developmental psychology than in the broader human condition: his view of us is emphatically not a happy one.

The sudden arrival of the naval officer at the end of the novel crystallises the evidence that the island society is a mirror that Golding is holding up to the adult world. The officer is initially amused by the boys’ appearance, viewing their behaviour as a childish game. Yet he represents a world engaged in destructive warfare: his warship waits offshore, a reminder that organised violence is not confined to the island but is institutionalised in the adult society that lies beyond it. The boys’ painted faces and sharpened sticks are grotesque reflections of his uniform and the weapons he brings. The officer’s presence does not negate the horror that has occurred; rather, it frames it within a wider context. The island is not an aberration but a microcosm: Golding implies that the same forces driving the boys to chaos are operating on a global scale.

Published in 1954, in the aftermath of the Second World War and at the dawn of the nuclear age, Lord of the Flies reflects a period of unprecedented recent human destruction. The belief in steady moral and social progress had been shattered by the exposure of the Holocaust and the growing fear of atomic warfare. Golding, who had served in the Royal Navy, stated that he had witnessed firsthand man’s capacity for organised brutality and illustrating this was his purpose in writing the novel. His choice to use schoolboys as protagonists was an artistic decision: by stripping away adult institutions and placing children in isolation, Golding constructs a controlled experiment in which the island mirrors the essential dynamics of society in a concentrated form. The boys’ age if anything underscores the horrifying argument that the seeds of societal violence lie not in complex political systems alone but in the fundamental aspects of human nature. While the “beast” that the children fear can be seen as a childish nightmare, Golding does not treat their fears as trivial. “The beast” evolves into a powerful symbol of how societies create external enemies to embody internal anxieties and explain the darkness within them. The boys’ belief in the beast apparently justifies Jack’s desire for authoritarian rule and explains the abandonment of rational deliberation. In this way, childish superstition becomes analogous to the propaganda and scapegoating we find in adult societies.

It is undeniable that the novel challenged the mid-twentieth-century literary tradition, which portrayed children as naturally innocent and if anything morally superior to adults. In traditional adventure stories, still popular at the time, stranded boys tend to maintain British civility and cooperation. Golding deliberately inverts this literary convention. His boys do not build a utopia; they descend into barbarism. This inversion, however, is not a comment on children but a critique of the complacent belief that civilisation is secure and that moral behaviour is natural and instinctive. By showing that even well-educated English schoolboys can commit atrocities, Golding aimed to dismantle the myth of inherent cultural or moral superiority. Ralph’s uncontrolled grief at the end of the novel is portrayed as a source of embarassment to the naval officer. He weeps “for the end of innocence” and “the darkness of man’s heart,” a final summation of Golding’s bleak vision.

To read Lord of the Flies as a novel about the nature of children is to overlook its broader philosophical ambitions. Golding did not believe or aim to suggest that children are uniquely savage or that society alone corrupts them. Instead, he proposes that society is both a product of and a defence against the darker aspects of human nature. Civilisation provides structures — laws, social norms and institutions — that channel natural instincts such as aggression and desire into appropriate avenues. When those structures disintegrate, as they do on the island, the underlying impulses are revealed. The boys are not aberrations; they are average human beings.

Golding’s frankly brilliant work interrogates the very foundations upon which social order rests, yet it achieves this by focusing on children, whose assumed innocence sharpens the shock of moral collapse. Golding invites readers to question their comforting assumptions about progress, about culture and the nature of morality. The savagery on the island is not confined to childhood; it is an ever-present possibility within human communities. By the time the naval officer arrives, the reader understands that rescue from the island does not equate to rescue from the darkness within. Golding’s enduring message is that society’s stability depends upon our constant vigilance against forces that originate in the human heart. How’s that for a bedtime story?

Surprise, surprise?

No matter how long I have been working with young people, they never fail to surprise me. By the same token, no matter how long I have been teaching, I am still learning and adjusting my methods and assumptions. This is one of the many things that makes the process so rewarding and exciting.

There are a couple of students that have been working with me for a considerable period of time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they have both made outstanding progress. This is not to blow my own trumpet, it is simply to highlight the power of one-to-one tutoring and the genuinely spectacular impact that it has when utilised for the longterm. There is lots that one can do with a short-term emergency intervention, and I have indeed worked with students to boost their grade shortly before the examinations, but in such a situation there is only so far you can go. When a parent employs you well in advance of the examinations, it undoubtedly gives their child the best possible chance not only of a better grade but also of an improved understanding of the subject they are struggling in. This is the kind of work that is the most rewarding.

The two students I have in mind were both finding the subject very difficult but both highly ambitious and high-achievers in other subjects. They are now both working at a Grade 9 level and I have high hopes for their performance in the final examinations, all being well. Yet both of them still have their moments that surprise me: for example, they will both make significant blunders in a very simple grammar question, revealing what seems to be a fissure in their knowledge when I thought it was solid. These sorts of students are genuinely fascinating and benefit from tutoring the most, for in a one-to-one session you can pivot and adjust what you’re doing to isolate that unexpected sign of trouble and work on it.

Likewise, there are students that appear to have no solid knowledge base and approach the grammar as if it were an optional extra. These students can also surprise you, for they sometimes will smash a translation out of the park, leaving you open-mouthed and wondering what the hell just happened. The issue with such students is, of course, you never know what’s going to happen on the day of the exam: of course, this is true for all students, but it is especially true for them. They will oscillate from sheer brilliance to unmitigated disaster and you never quite know which version of events you will be presented with.

As for my own learning, I am still discovering what students do and don’t know and the sands are ever-shifting. Part of teaching and particularly tutoring is endless challenge to your own theory of mind: endless reminders that other people’s human brains, especially ones that have not been on this earth so long as your own brain, are not filled with the same knowledge, thoughts and ideas as yours. Teaching in secondary schools is particularly challenging from this point of view, as you rotate between classes of various ages: one hour you can be teaching a room full of 11-year-olds, the next you will be faced with a small group of near-adults. The frequent adjustments that secondary school teachers have to make during the day in terms of knowledge, expectations and vocabulary usage can be quite dizzying.

I have been pondering in particular this week the question of how much each of my individual students understand about sailing. This might seem bizarre, but the section of the Aeneid that most of them have been set for studying this year involves a storm that wrecks the ships that are carrying the hopeful Trojan refugees from their war-torn city to a new homeland. One of my students spends half the year at the family’s second home in Cornwall, sailing with her twin brother. As a result, she knows infinitely more about sailing than I will ever do and thus, when Virgil describes “the groaning of the rigging” (stridor rudentum) and uses phrases like “the prow swings off” (prora avertit) she knows exactly what is going on. For most of my students, this has to be explained: they don’t know that “rigging” refers to the system of ropes employed to support a ship’s mast and to control the sails, nor do they know that the prow is the front of the ship. My sailing student has a good grasp of Virgil’s more poetic descriptions of the power of the sea, for she has experience of it: she knows knows what it means when Virgil describes how the winds seem to lift the waves to the stars (fluctus ad sidera tollit) and how the sea momentarily appears to be like a sheer mountain in front of the sailors (praeruptus aquae mons). Hopefully she’s never been in a ship with this happening, but she will understand the concept well enough, and will have watched the sea and understood when is and is not a good time to sail. Most of my students none of this knowledge.

Given the obvious fact that most of my students are not sailors, this week it occurred to me that I needed to unpack what was going on in the Virgil text in much more detail for them, in case they were struggling to comprehend what was happening. Most kids (and indeed most adults) have never experienced what sailing is like, so will have limited capacity to imagine the extent of the damage and disaster that is being described. I suddenly realised that it was important to remind them that just moments before, the Trojans had been described as joyfully turning their sails for the open sea (in altum vela dabant laeti) and heading for the mainland, their new home of Italy within their sights. Crucially, they were in full sail when Aeolus, god of the winds, releases the squalls and tempests across the ocean. None of my students had considered this fact until I pointed it out to them. They were then able to comprehend, even from the most rudimentary grasp of forces, that being in full sail when a storm strikes is game over for a ship and its crew. This is why the storm is such a disaster for the men on board.

One of the things that every teacher and every tutor has to remind themselves of is to constantly test knowledge and understanding, and this goes for every assmuption that you might be making about vocabulary. It is crucial to consider the fact that the student(s) in front of you may not know the meaning of the words that you are using or they are reading. The word “rigging” was a good example for me — not one of my students, with the exception of the girl who sails, knew what the word meant. I had a similar reminder with the other verse text selections for 2026, in which one of the Catullus poems refers to his “purse”. I was brought up short by the fact that several of my students did not know what a purse was: in this modern day of digital money, in addition to the fact that we are flooded with Americanisms so many people now refer to a “purse” as a “wallet”, it is in fact not surprising at all that they did not know the word.

Vocabulary is an important foundation for learning and unfamiliar terminology can quickly become a barrier to understanding key concepts. When students hear and repeat terms without a solid grasp of their meaning, they may appear confident whilst holding misconceptions that affect their progress. Only by explicitly teaching vocabulary, checking for understanding and exploring students’ understanding of words without making assumptions can we ensure that the learners in front of us can access the curriculum and build deeper, more secure knowledge.

Another brick in the wall

This week, I upset a few people. That’s nothing new, for it is undeniable that I am the sort of person who sometimes opens her mouth merely to change feet. Often, this has landed me in trouble, especially when working for managers that like their staff nice and compliant; sometimes, it has earned me some respect, when I was fortunate enough to work for robust managers, those who are confident enough to respond well to challenge, even when that challenge could — in all honesty — have been better or more politely worded. When I think about some of the things I’ve said to and about management over the years, I consider myself jolly lucky to have been in a unionised workplace. Yet, in the school where I spent the second half of my teaching career, I am also grateful to have worked with managers who would listen, take note and respond thoughtfully when I said my piece, however clumsily: it demonstrates a confidence and an emotional resilience that is not to be underestimated.

These days, of course, I work for myself, so I have to go to social media to find people to upset. I can’t recall whether or not I have mentioned this on my blog before, but I have recently removed myself entirely from the platform formerly known as Twitter. It’s been something of a wrench, having been on there more or less since its inception, but needs must and it is true to say that the platform is not what it used to be. As a consequence, I have begun to spend a little bit more time on LinkedIn, which also seems to have changed, in my opinion for the better: it no longer seems to be solely dominated by corporate types humble-bragging about their mid-range sports car.

I’ve never been one for leaving platforms solely because of who owns them. Let’s face it, compared to my little world, every tech giant billionaire is probably, in relative terms, a pretty awful person. But when the owner of a platform has already proved their amorality in how they treat their staff and their customers, then goes on to double down in defending people’s “right” to manipulate, share and disseminate exploitative images of women and children, claiming that it is a “free speech” issue (something I care about passionately and do not appreciate being used as a smokescreen for abuse and exploitation), then that’s way over the line for me. So, farewell Elon, you moral cipher of a man: you won’t be getting my eyes on the advertisements that fund you any more. And hello, LinkedIn: let’s see what you have to offer. I have been pleased to find that there is an increasing amount of educational discussion on LinkedIn, and many of the brilliant go-to teacher-voices that I originally found on Twitter in its heyday are now actively posting on there. Furthermore, there is also plenty of talk about other relevant issues that interest me, some of them much more challenging than anything one would have found on there a few years ago, when LinkedIn was dedicated solely to corporate bragging and self-promotion.

The reality of being more active on such a platform seems inevitably (for me at least) to result in some low-level beef. Given that it is ultimately a business platform and thus a place where people showcase themselves and what they are bringing to market, it is inevitable that LinkedIn will include multiple voices who are crafting their image as someone who offers something to the education space that is not traditional classroom teaching (for which, given the well-documented recruitment and retention crisis, one generally does not have to advertise oneself). Such people include me these days and indeed I think and write a lot about what one-to-one tutoring enables me to do that was not possible in the mainstream classroom. The way I work now is truly liberating and I am grateful for it. What puzzles and concerns me, however, is the fact that so many people who are outside of the traditional classroom space seem remarkably keen on bashing the traditional system, and it was my objection to this that got me into trouble. I was assured that it is the system they are bashing, not the classroom teachers within it, and some people seemed to find it very insulting that I should think otherwise. But what they don’t seem to understand is that it can be pretty difficult to tell the difference. In bashing the system, they are actively contributing to the increasingly dismal situation in which classroom teachers find themselves. It is truly wretched to be a part of a system that is being relentlessly criticised on all sides, and this fact is undoubtedly contributing to the mass exodus of teachers from the profession. Harry Hudson has written very eloquently about this in his book, Must Do Better: how to improve the image of teaching.

For the avoidance of doubt, and in case anyone needs to hear this, it’s really tough out there in the modern classroom. I think more of us need to be saying this out loud. I am probably guilty of not being frank enough about it, so here is me saying that after 21 years at the chalkface, I’d had enough of being treated with contempt. In my final year, when I confessed to my husband that I wanted to resign from my job, I tried to explain to him what working in a modern school can feel like: I said, “you know that feeling when you’re walking down a towpath and you see a bunch of scary-looking lads hanging about that you have to walk through and your brain goes into high alert, wondering whether they’re going to shout something or surround you or just generally make you feel uncomfortable?” He nodded. Everyone knows that feeling. “Well,” I said, “it’s like that but all the time. Plus, those lads are your responsibility, and how you handle the situation on the towpath is at worst going to be called into question by your boss, at best will massively add to your already-horrendous workload if you decide to follow it up.”

There are very few jobs in which one can feel personally belittled and intimidated on a daily basis: teaching is one of them. Add to that the fact that in teaching, you are frequently asked what you could have done better or more empathetically in order for you to have avoided creating the situation in which you felt belittled and intimidated: I am genuinely not sure that this happens in many other spheres. Most places I go to, I see a sign up telling me that rude or threatening behaviour will not be tolerated. There’s one in our local vets, one at the GP’s surgery and I saw one in A&E when I had a surprisingly zestful response to some antibiotics a few weeks ago. Fantastic. I’m all for the signs and for the message that they convey. But schools don’t have those signs. Teachers just have to suck it up, apparently. Rude and contemptuous behaviour towards teaching staff has increasingly become par for the course in modern schools, and our teachers and TAs are expected to let it bounce off them like water off the proverbial duck’s back. We’re the adults in the room, we’re told: that may be so, but a notable number of the students didn’t get the memo.

One of the reasons I decided to move on from classroom teaching was not simply the unpleasant situations in which I increasingly found myself: it was the fact that I could feel my attitude towards young people starting to shift, and I didn’t want that to happen. I am glad to say that I hugely enjoy the time that I spend with the young people I now work with, but before I left the classroom I feared that my whole perspective on teenagers would be damaged forever, were I to spend much more time within a system that nobody is willing to support any more and everybody seems to think is part of the problem. See, this is the issue: many people — an alarming number of whom are calling themselves “educators” — seem somehow to have talked themselves into believing that the traditional education system is a net negative, that schools fail to prepare young people for “the modern world” (whatever that is: people have been talking about it since at least 1975), that the imparting of skills and knowledge in the conventional manner is deeply inadequate and should be condemned to history. We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control.

When belittlement is your daily reality, it can be pretty galling to scroll through social media and find yourself on a loop telling you how our Gradgrindian school system is failing young people, how every child exhibiting low-level defiance is simply dysregulated and misunderstood, how every uniform rule is an imposition on their individuality and an insult to their personal liberty, how every teacher who attempts to lay down some basic ground-rules is just another brick in the wall imprisoning them and preventing them from blossoming.

If we are to provide an education that is free to all at the point of contact (and I cling to the belief that this principle is non-negotiable), then traditional classroom teaching is here to stay. The alternative providers don’t want to hear it, but that’s the bottom line. And until we start believing that most of the youngsters in our care are able to rise to it, that the overwhelming majority of those young people are in fact infinitely capable of being both polite and attentive, if only such basic expectations were requested of them, then I fear we are set upon a path that will not end happily for any of those young people. To be clear, letting a student off is letting them down. When empathy with a student who is struggling to behave leads us down the path of least resistance, that is not kindness: far from it. It is sending them the message that we don’t care, that we don’t believe that they are capable of meeting the most basic of standards that we set for ourselves and for the rest of humanity. When we excuse challenging behaviour because of an individual’s difficult circumstances, we have to ask ourselves what we’re really communicating to that student about their potential. Just think about it: because once you see it that way, you can’t unsee it. I don’t know who coined the phrase, but it couldn’t be summed up more perfectly than this: the soft bigotry of low expectations. By adjusting our most basic standards, we make it clear to a certain kind of student that we’re writing them off as incapable of basic manners. Nothing — truly nothing — could be more inequitable or more damning for that child and their future.

This wonderful photo was taken by Maria Teneva on Unsplash

Cambridge hangovers

The Cambridge Latin Course: love it or hate it, you can’t ignore it. Longterm readers of my blog and listeners of my podcast will be aware that I have been quite critical of the CLC in the past, despite the fact that it did form the backdrop to my classroom teaching for most of my career. While I continued to use the stories (albeit adjusted) and the characters from the course, I moved further and further away from its approach to grammar during my time at the chalkface and rejected its underlying principles (show, don’t tell) pretty early on. Towards the end I had completely re-written the curriculum and had stopped using the text books altogether.

Now, as a full-time tutor, I am increasingly aware of the legacy that the CLC has left Latin teaching and I am genuinely curious to know how long this legacy will last. Whilst many schools have ostensibly stopped using the CLC, its influence on teachers’ approach remains apparent in ways that many of them are perhaps not even aware of. In this blog post I hope to reveal some of the habitual oversights that classroom teachers of Latin are making as a result of what I believe is a hangover from the CLC curriculum.

One key blind spot for classroom teachers aiming to prepare their students for the OCR examination is a failure to teach the verb malo at the same time as they teach volo and nolo. I cannot explain this, other than a legacy of the fact that malo is not taught in the CLC when volo and nolo are taught. Taylor & Cullen introduce malo at the same time (in chapter 7 of their text book), but the overwhelming majority of students that I teach are reasonably well-drilled on volo and nolo but have never been taught the verb malo. Students following the WJEC/Eduqas syllabus do not need to know malo, but those aiming at the OCR examination need to know it, so to miss this tricky verb out of one’s teaching is a major oversight. I believe that this is purely and simply because schools are following curricula that were originally built around the CLC, which makes a big deal out of volo and nolo in Book 2, but never mentions malo.

Another legacy from the CLC which I have written about before is the decision to teach the purpose clause before the indirect command. It was many years ago now when it suddenly hit me what a massive mistake this was. I asked myself why students were so wedded to the habit of translating ut as “in order to” whenever they see it and realised that it is because this is how they first see it and after that they can’t let it go. I have yet to meet a single student who has been taught the indirect command prior to the purpose clause unless they have been taught by me, and this is genuinely fascinating. Every single Latin teacher seems to assume that it is a good idea to teach the purpose clause first, and I believe that the all-pervasive influence of the Cambridge Latin Course is partly to blame. Even Taylor & Cullen do in Latin to GCSE: despite mixing up the approach taken by the CLC (they teach ut clauses first, leaving cum clauses and the indirect question until later), they still take the decision to teach purpose clauses first. In my experience, this is a massive error, and leaves students convinced that ut always means “in order to” when in fact it only means this when it’s used in a purpose clause.

My final grammar-based concern when it comes to school curricula being based around the legacy of the CLC is that teachers are still teaching the perfect active participle as if it is a broad grammar feature. This is done in the CLC, which for some extraordinary reason introduces PAPs towards the beginning of Book 3, long before deponent verbs are even mentioned in Book 4. Students really struggle as a result, since they form the understandable belief that the perfect active participle is a grammar feature that is common to all verbs. They thus struggle with the concept that most verbs have a perfect passive participle because they have not been taught that perfect active participles only exist because of deponent verbs. I have to spend a great deal of time unpicking students’ misapprehensions and misconceptions about this, teaching them in detail about deponent verbs and their features and then mapping this onto their participle. It takes so much time to dispel these misunderstandings, which would never be there in the first place were schools to adjust the curriculum to introduce the perfect active participle solely as a feature of deponent verbs.

It is genuinely fascinating to observe the fallout from text book use and to be able to identify where students’ misconceptions are coming from as a direct result of the curriculum that many schools are adhering to. I do find it worrying that so few schools are asking themselves why they are using text books that are not built around the examination that their students are aiming at, not least because the vocabulary in those text books is quite often a monumental waste of time. While the 5th edition of the CLC goes some way towards addressing this, it doesn’t solve the problem entirely and too much of its old stucture and principles remains for the problem to be solved in its entirety.

A general lack of guidance

I struggle to understand why so little guidance is given in many schools about how students should go about the process of learning. To be clear, I’m not talking about school assemblies on “study skills”, which I realise that most teenagers will zone out during. No, guidance needs to come directly from each individual classroom teacher, the subject expert; it also needs to be explicitly taught, modelled and demonstrated on a regular basis. Schools need to agree what methods they are going to recommend and this needs to be reflected right across the school in all subjects, tailored specifically to what works best in each academic discipline.

Startlingly often, students are still being told: here is your Latin set text, now off you go and learn the first section. I was guilty of this in my first few years of teaching — rote-learning comes relatively easy to me and I didn’t really comprehend the fact that most students need to be shown how to go about engaging with the process of committing something to memory. Furthermore, I was working in a very high-achieving grammar school, where we were not really encouraged to support students proactively with their learning; it was assumed that all the students in the school could cope well in academia without such support. This was a foolish assumption, but it was the one we were subliminally encouraged to make.

When it comes to the literature element of the Latin GCSE, whether or not a student knows the translation of the set text off by heart and whether they can relate that knowledge to the the Latin version in front of them is without doubt the single most important differentiator between a student’s success and failure in the exam. Despite this inescapable fact, few Latin teachers appear willing to dedicate classroom time to the learning process, so wedded are they to the conviction that students can manage the learning in their own time. Many of my tutees have been told time and again that they don’t know the text well enough, that they need to learn it, that they need to spend more time doing so. Yet when I ask them, “what methods have you practised in class?” they stare at me, blankly. I have come to realise that most students are not being taught how to learn things off by heart, beyond the most rudimentary of suggestions.

Now, I am not naive. Having taught in secondary schools for 21 years, 13 of those years in a comprehensive setting, I am more than well aware of students’ uncanny ability to claim that they have “never been taught” something that they have in fact been told on multiple occasions. However, the extreme cluelessness of so many of my clients when it comes to what to do and their apparent awe when they are taught some very basic methods such as colour-coding and the first-letter technique do leave me increasingly convinced that many classroom teachers are simply not dedicating enough (or in some extreme cases any) classroom time to learning methodologies. I’ll bet most of them are doing what I used to do in my first few years of teaching — giving students a few bullet points of advice on how to go about learning the texts, then assuming that those students will remember this going forward. But why do we believe such nonsense? We would not (I hope) present them with the endings of the 1st declension in one lesson then assume that they will remember those endings for the rest of time — so why on earth should that be the case when it comes to study skills?

One possible reason is teachers’ anxiety about time. One of the greatest strains that GCSE Latin teachers are under is time pressure. Very few schools offer enough space on the timetable for our subject and I am fully aware that making it through both set texts within the time available is a mammoth task. I rarely finished the second set text prior to the end of March; on the few occasions that I managed to do so, it was real cause for celebration. Yet despite this, as my career progressed, I allocated an ever-increasing amount of classroom time to teaching students how to go about the learning process and also to giving them short bursts of learning time to actually get on with it in silence. Any spare few minutes that I found myself in possession of at the end of a new section or a new concept, I would allow them to bow their heads and spend 10 minutes using the first-letter technique to get a few sentences of the text under their belts. I wonder whether classroom teachers are afraid of allowing students this time, as if it somehow undermines the important of our teaching role. I used to remind students that I was painfully aware how much pressure I was putting them under, asking them to rote-learn a new chunk of text almost every single week. So part of the deal I made with them was that — whenever I could — I would let them have a few minutes of classroom time to kick-start the process.

The benefits of allocating this time are twofold. Firstly, it literally does get the children started on the process and is an opportunity to remind them once again of the methods that have been recommended: I used to put them up on a summary slide, even when they could all recite the methods without hesitation. Secondly, while students are studying, a teacher can circulate the room and check whether they are actually using the recommended methods — there will always be a few determined recalcitants, who claim that the recommended methods “don’t work for them”. This is when a teacher needs to be strong. The evidence for what works and what doesn’t work in terms of how we learn is overwhelming, and unless that child can perform perfectly in every test you give them then they need to get on board with the methods.

As for what the methods should be, I recommend a variety but one is definitely stand-out brilliant and so far has worked for every student I have ever met. So if you haven’t read my old post on how to use the first-letter technique then do so straight away — you will never look back! For broader guidance on effective study I would recommend looking at the work of Dr. Paul Penn, Professor of Psychology and author of The Psychology of Effective Studying. His book is fantastic, as is his YouTube channel.

Going in stealth

One of the things I love most about what I do now is the stealth and anonymity. As a frontline classroom teacher in a modern educational setting, you are constantly exposed. Teaching means being quite literally on display at the front of the classroom putting on a show for multiple classes, multiple times per day. You’re also putting on a show for management, who in turn are putting on a show for each other, for parents, for OfSted or for the ISI. Everything, frankly, is performative. The whole world’s a stage.

Even more stressful than this is the fact that your results are under scrutiny. The pressure of this will vary from setting to setting, but there are vanishingly few schools now which do not now make individual teachers directly accountable for the academic results of the students in their classes. At the high-achieving grammar school I first worked in, the Headteacher would meet with every academic department every year and go through A level results with a fine-toothed comb. Every member of the department had to prepare for the meeting and bring along their justifications as to why some students may not have made the grade. It was a toe-curling and sometimes genuinely upsetting experience.

These days, with the work that I do, I am very much behind the scenes. I’m the person you’re not supposed to see. Black leggings and a balaclava have replaced the vibrant costumes I had to wear for my classroom performances. While there are some students or parents who inform the classroom teacher of my existence, most do not. I hear reports of teachers that are amazed, delighted and genuinely mystified as to how a student has made such a marked improvement in a short period of time. Some of them must (surely?!) hazard a guess as to how this might have happened, but many seem to remain in the dark, along with my services. In terms of the results that my tutees achieve, those results go on the books of their regular classroom teacher and they are welcome to them. I know the truth, as does the tutee and their parents who paid for my work. There is something strangely satisfying about it. I genuinely love being the secret silver bullet, the hidden reason why a child makes the shift from the bottom of their class to the middle or even to the top. I cannot tell you how exciting and rewarding it is.

One student brought me up short this week when she described the situation in her classroom. In a high-achieving school, in which many of the students studied Latin from an early age in prep schools, she has always felt slightly behind the curve and I knew this already. What I did not know was the extent to which the classroom teacher relies on the fact that students have prior knowledge and thus doesn’t feel the need to teach new concepts in anything like enough depth for a novice.

“You’ve actually taught me this stuff,” my tutee said, as we celebrated her improved understanding of the uses of the subjunctive. As I listened while she elaborated, I became more and more horrified. She explained that the classroom teacher pitches the work in a manner that works for those to whom the material is not new. The overall assumption seems to be that the students already know the basic grammatical structures and thus the teacher’s job is simply to give them a quick reminder plus some further practice. The problem is so bad for those in the class that do not have the prior knowledge that several other students have also acquired a tutor over the last few months, since they too are struggling to keep up. “What I find really funny,” my tutee said, who is wryly perceptive for a young person of her age, “is that everyone who needs one always gets a private tutor, and then the school congratulates itself every year on amazing results.”

While I have never taught in the private sector, I have some experience of this phenomenon in the grammar school I used to teach in. We had a couple of teachers who were basically ticking off the days until retirement and quite frankly they were diabolical. As an A level student, if you were put into Mr Dudley’s German class, you knew that you would never get through the exam without external help. As a result, every single member of Mr Dudley’s class was given the benefit of support from a private tutor by their families. (Parents who have got their kids into a grammar school are usually well on board with the idea of private tuition: it’s how most of them got their kids into the school in the first place). So, Mr Dudley’s class would crash its way through an untaught syllabus, with lesson after lesson being provably and audibly chaotic. But guess what? Mr Dudley’s results were better than all of ours put together. And he got the credit for it, despite his palpably dreadful teaching. To be honest, it used to drive the rest of us wild.

Private tutors’ work is incredibly difficult to track because its behind-the-scenes nature means that is not systematically recorded. Without centralised data collection or mandatory reporting, it is impossible to measure how widespread private tuition is or indeed how significantly it affects educational attainment and inequality. But when a high-achieving school boasts consistently outstanding results on their website, I must admit I do find myself wondering just how many tutors there are behind the scenes to make them possible.