Classroom teaching – Page 3 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Invested in Education?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair

Full disclosure: I’d never heard of Upton Sinclair until I read this quotation. I first came across the remark when reading about the literacy crisis in America. I had already listened to the eye-opening podcast Sold a Story and was appalled at what I had heard. I then started looking at some of the debates happening online around how reading is taught in the US and how this has been dominated for so long by methods that don’t work effectively, but which make certain authors and publishers a great deal of money. The notion that anyone could push an idea in education purely for monetary gain seemed so appalling that I found myself wondering whether it could possibly be true.

Spolier alert: it is entirely possible. However, like most things in life, I think it’s a little more complicated than pure greed. Sinclair is absolutely right that people will continue to advocate for a bad idea to sustain their income, but I do cling to the notion that they probably have a personal investment in the idea that goes beyond the financial. Their self-worth, their self-belief and sometimes their very identity can be at stake. It’s jolly difficult to admit that you might have been mistaken about something that you’ve made your life’s work. Add to this the fact that – as Sinclair puts it – your “salary depends” on not being mistaken, then the process of enlightenment becomes close to impossible.

I have changed my mind about a range of things during my 21 years as a classroom teacher. What I believed to be the case when I started turned out to be wrong, and this is not because I became a cynic or “gave up on my principles” – quite the opposite. Changing your mind is challenging. The principles I have stuck to have been to follow the evidence of what is best for the majority of children. When I have been presented with overwhelming evidence that my approach towards doing something is less effective than someone else’s, then I have been willing to change my approach. I let go of my beliefs in the face of the evidence and I am a better teacher for it. Sadly, this seems to be an unusual attitude and I am constantly disappointed by how determindly people hold onto their beliefs against all the evidence. It seems to me that a lot of people care more about following their ideology than they do about genuinely doing what’s right; anything that seems to jar with their worldview frightens them so much that they’d genuinely rather avoid it, even when the evidence suggests that it helps learners more, or lifts a greater number of people out of poverty.

Even Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced and now struck-off consultant paediatrician, who first penned the now-discredited studies claiming a potential link between autism and the MMR vaccine, believed in what he was doing at the outset. Since then, having moved to America and been welcomed with open arms by the “anti-vax” lobbyists across the pond, doubling down on his beliefs rather than accepting the overwhelming scientific evidence that they were incorrect is by far the more attractive path for him to take. Why roll back on a position that’s making you a fortune? He will never change his mind – why would he?

It would probably shock most people to know just how much the education system has been at the mercy of snake-oil sellers and woo-merchants over the last 30 years. Some of it is still ongoing. In my time in schools I have sat through talks on such unscientific nonsense as Brain Gym, learning styles and the left-brain-right-brain “theory”. All of these sessions were run by “educational advisors” that the school had paid to train us. The waste of tax-payers’ money paying these people – whether they were well-meaning and deluded or outright fraudsters – makes me want to weep. Worse than this, however, is the thought that this money has not just been wasted, it has actively harmed the education of hundreds of thousands of children; teachers have been directly taught misinformation about how the brain works and about how children learn, at the expense of the wealth of genuine information that there is out there through cognitive science. If I think about it too much, it’s not good for my blood pressure.

I would love to think, with the advent of grassroots movements such as ResearchED giving ordinary teachers the confidence to push back against the tide of quackery, that the days of such cynical peddling are over. Sadly, we are not quite there yet. Just this week, with examination boards purportedly considering a shift to examinations being done on computers instead of by hand, there are the usual string of ed-tech salesmen rubbing their hands with glee. The amount of money that schools have wasted on tech over the years makes me feel quite ill. In the 21 years I spent in the classroom, I saw the arrival of the first interactive SmartBoard in one, lived through their proliferation in every classroom in every school, and lasted long enough to see the majority of them ripped out again, replaced by ordinary whiteboards. Each one of those SmartBoards originally cost a couple of thousand pounds and they all ended up in a skip – not because they were replaced by superior technology, but because most teachers realised that they were unncessary, unwieldy and impractical to use in the classroom.

There isn’t a week that goes by when I don’t think of Sinclair and his insightful observation. In terms of education, all we can do is continue to empower teachers to question everything that they are asked to do. My mantra in my last few years was “show me the evidence”. I know he’s a controversial figure for many, but Richard Dawkins writes so well and has a talent for wordsmithery that far exceeds mine. In his wonderful letter to his 10-year-old daughter, he concludes as follows: “What can we do about all this? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: ‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.“

Poking and fussing

Do you ever wonder whether we’ve somewhat lost our way when it comes to the purpose of education?

When I decided to become a teacher, it was made clear to me back in 1999 that my role would be complex. Given the trend back then for group work and making lessons fun, the role of the teacher had become somewhat synonymous with the purported aims of the BBC: to educate, inform and entertain, not necessarily in that order. Beyond that, it was also made clear to me in 1999 that I would have numerous responsibilities that blurred the line between education and social work, and none of them were unreasonable. Teachers – particularly primary school teachers – spend a huge amount of time with a large number of individual children every day; as a result, teachers are without question some of the best-placed adults to notice when there are concerns to be had, when a child’s demeanour changes or their health declines. I took my duty of care very seriously and regularly reported safeguarding concerns; the ability to raise such concerns anonymously, with more experienced experts who took me seriously and followed up on them, is something I miss greatly about being in a school.

The overwhelming majority of teachers take their safeguarding responsibilities extremely seriously. Nobody goes into teaching with the belief that they will be nothing but an academe, pouring knowledge into the minds of the young with no thought given to their health, their personality, their family situation or what might be going on inside their head. Teaching is a constant dialogue between adults and the young, and our empathy with and understanding of a wide variety of issues that may be holding a child back in their learning is crucial. But let us remind ourselves that what we are there to do is to impart learning. We are not there to solve all of society’s problems, from knife crime to nutrition.

In the last decade or so, and most particularly during and after the pandemic, schools have been expected to take up the slack for every single failing in society: for the failings of government, for the failings of under-funded health services, for the failings of over-stretched social services and sometimes – let’s not be afraid to say it – for the failings of parents. Parenthood is hard – incredibly hard – and not everybody is acing it; but teachers are not parents to the children in their care and they cannot – nor should they be asked to – replace that role.

I hesitate to make political predictions as I am notoriously bad at it and if the last few years have taught us anything it should be to prepare for surprise. That said, it seems likely that we will have a change of government at the next General Election, and it seems likely that the new ruling party will be Labour. This means that what the Labour party said about education at its recent conference becomes potentially more important and relevant than the Conversatives’ blustering about mobile phones (already banned in most decent schools) and maths up to the age of 18 (where they will find the teachers yet to be confirmed). But the Labour party’s pledge to bring in “supervised tooth brushing” for primary school children aged 3 to 5 caught my attention and got me wondering about what they think teachers are for. It also got me wondering whether any of them have ever set foot in a primary school, never mind stayed there for any length of time.

As one primary school teacher on the platform formerly known as Twitter pointed out, teachers have already experienced what it is like when they are asked to supervise hand-washing on a massive scale, when there was a big focus on this during the pandemic. “I remember getting the children to wash their hands at the sink during covid. It took an hour and they missed learning … My TA had to supervise them instead of support children. And that was a class of Y6 children. I can’t imagine how long it would take to shepherd 4 & 5 year olds through the process. This policy has not been suggested by anyone with experience of primary.” Her comments were in answer to someone who claimed that supervised tooth-brushing “would only take a few minutes”. Several primary school teachers responded, with comments like “30 very young children. Probably only one sink. Cleaning the cup after each child. Making sure each child has their toothbrush. At least 50% won’t like the toothpaste … I could go on and on.” My personal favourite was the one who pointed out the problems that would arise from all the spitting. Covid hygiene? Whatever. All in all, the discussion was (or should have been) an eye-opener for anyone who does not work with large groups of children on a daily basis, especially the little ones. You may (I hope) have supervised your own child’s toothbrushing at home. This is not the same as trying to do it with a class of 30.

The British Dental Association has stated that it is “encouraged” by Labour’s proposal, but I feel more than a little despair. As one teacher put it “it’s a sticking plaster for a gaping wound. Babies have teeth. We need NHS dentists, breastfeeding support groups at doctors surgeries, 0-4 family centres. Teachers have an educational role but they’re outsourcing it to us because they don’t want to fund the real support needed.” Absolutely. And it has to stop. Given the amount of time that every primary school teacher knows realistically that this tooth-brushing regime will take, what would people like those teachers to do less of to make it happen? Less supervised play? Fewer handwriting skills? Ditch basic numeracy? You choose.

For me, the suggestion sums up the tangible lack of respect that politicians have for the teaching profession. Teachers are treated as punching bags by all the major parties, belittled and taken for granted across the board. The profession is haemorraghing staff at an alarming rate and to this date not one single political party has taken any kind of frank look at this. Any pledge to “recruit more teachers” falls far short of what’s required, when we know that currently one third of teachers are quitting the profession within five years. It costs a lot of money to train a teacher, so a proper focus on how we retain them – not recruit them – would save the country a fortune.

Readers around my age may recognise the title of this post as a quotation from Pam Ayres’ I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth, a poem which pretty much every child my age was told to learn off by heart at some point during their time in primary school. “Poking and fussing” (or – more accurately – “pokin’ and fussin'”) is how tooth-brushing seemed to Ayres as a young child. For me, it’s a rather good description of the approach taken by politicians towards education.

The problem with homework

Self-directed study remains one of the most insurmountable barriers to success for most young people. For many of them, their first introduction to this process is homework. The very concept of homework in state schools is quite modern and seems to have been an expectation pushed in grammar schools rather than in secondary moderns. According to a survey of male pupils carried out by the Central Advisory Council for Education in 1947, 98% of boys in grammar schools received homework regularly, compared to a figure of just 29% of boys in a secondary modern setting. (The fact that this research was carried out into boys only tells you even more about the attitudes towards education at the time – liberals were starting to care about what happened to boys from lower-income backgrounds, but girls didn’t matter full stop). A fascinating booklet published in 1937 by the Board of Education reveals that the government were looking into the issue of homework and evidences firstly that it was on the increase in state schools and secondly that this was not popular; there is notable evidence that homework was used as a punishment rather than as something which was designed to support learning.

Homework remains a controversial issue in modern school settings and some teachers eschew its usage altogether; some educationalists believe that homework advantages those students with greater support at home and puts unnecessary pressure on those without the resources to facilitate it. Certainly, if a child is sharing a room with younger siblings or is in a multiple-occupancy household, and/or if that child has caring responsibilities, committing to any kind of study outside of their compulsory schooling can be a huge challenge. Interestingly, however, I have become increasingly aware of just how unsupported even the most affluent children can be when it comes to self-directed study. They may have all the facilities in the world, but they may not have any idea of how to go about their work. Unless the adults at home have a wealth of time and patience to offer their children, homework and self-directed study can become a real pinch point for families and can severely impair a child’s educational performance.

If I could convince parents of one thing that would make a difference to their child’s educational outcomes it would be this: most people drastically overestimate their child’s maturity when it comes to self-directed study. This includes their child’s ability to self-regulate, their capacity to self-motivate and their fundamental understanding of how to learn. None of this should be surprising given that most adults still have a very poor knowledge and understanding of how humans learn. Many people are still influenced by long-since debunked research on “learning styles” or similiar dangerous mutations and edu-myths that simply will not die; they remain wedded to the idea that the way their child learns is somehow unique, and that the child must discover the best ways of doing so for thesmelves. The reality is that we know more than we ever did about how humans learn things, and there is a wealth of advice out there about how to do so; most people simply don’t take it on board. With this in mind, what follows is a summative reminder of the advice that I give on a regular basis and provide for all parents who wish to support their child with learning.

1. Testing:

Even if your child thinks that they don’t know something, the first thing you should do is test them. I know that might seem strange, but the process of testing forces the brain to concentrate. Just staring at a word and its meaning won’t work; to succeed at memorisation, your child needs to engage with the process and the easiest way to make them do so is to start testing them. This is because memory is the residue of thought (Daniel T. Willingham): in other words, to remember something you have to think about it actively on muptiple occasions.

2. Small amounts, little and often:
This is absolutely crucial. If your child’s Latin teacher has set 30 words for them to learn over one week, they will need to tackle the task repeatedly. While for most homeworks they may be able to sit down and tick them off as done after an hour’s blitz, vocabulary learning should be done in short bursts: take 5-10 minutes once or twice a day and spend that time testing. Start with 10 words. Then later that day or on the next day, return to those 10, adding another 5 words on top. Then repeat those 15 words, adding another 5 and so on. By the end of the week they should be confident. Why so much repetition? There is a reason, and here it is …

3. Spaced learning:
When you rote-learn something quickly, you forget it pretty quickly too. But do not despair! The process of well-spaced repetition strengthens the links your brain has made with what it is learning and lengthens the retention. If a child does their vocabulary homework in one sitting, one week later they will have completely wasted their time. Instead, they should do it in short, spaced-out bursts, with “forgetting time” in between; this way they will spend around the same amount of time in total but their recall will be close to perfect. As a child gains confidence, you should extend the length of the spaces and ultimately you should revisit material that has not been covered for quite some time – days, weeks, months later.

4. Make intelligent use of flashcards:
Flashcards are an outstanding tool when it comes to vocabulary learning. You can use the traditional method of physical cards or an online version, which has the advantage of speed and efficiency. Personally, I am a huge fan of Quizlet, and your child already has access to my flashcards on there. What do I mean by intelligent use of them? Well …

Firstly, do not let your child spend hours making them look pretty, especially not drawing lovely pictures all over them. The use of images on flashcards actually has close to zero impact on students’ ability to learn vocabulary, which can turn into a ridiculous game of “say what you see.” For example, if I showed you the Latin word “femina” with a cartoon picture of a woman next to it, I’ll place a bet you’d be able to tell me that the word means “woman”. But what have you learned? Frankly, nothing. You’ve recognised a picture of a woman, which a two-year-old can do. Much better to discuss the meaning of the word “feminine” with your child and fix the Latin word in their head through the understanding of derivatives (of which more below).

Secondly, make sure that your child is definitely using the flashcards to test themselves (a process called retrieval), not to reassure themselves through recognition. Research shows that one of the most common mistakes students tend to make is to turn the cards over too swiftly; this way, students become convinced that they know the meanings of the words when in fact they are merely recognising the answers – and it can be surprisingly difficult for students to discipline themselves out of this habit, which is why you should help them. Make sure that you’re supporting them at least some of the time by controlling the turnover of the cards. Talk to them about flipping the cards too swiftly and make sure they’re aware of this tendency.

Thirdly, another temptation for students is to keep testing themselves on the familiar words (we all like to feel comfortable!) Remember, flashcards are a tool to help someone to learn the words they don’t know, so separate out the ones that your child has gained confidence with and spend longer on the ones they are struggling to recognise. This can be done on Quizlet by marking up cards with a yellow star (top right-hand corner of each card). That said, another mistake students make is to overestimate their level of confidence with words they have recently learned, so make sure you revisit the “no problem” pile a couple of times before you decide that the words have really stuck in your child’s longterm memory.

Finally, shuffle the deck. This is hugely important. The brain works by mapping links between the things that it is learning; as a result, it has a strong tendency to remember things in order, so the danger with learning several words at once is your child will remember them only in order. You should constantly shuffle the deck to ensure that this isn’t happening, or your child will never recognise the words out of context. On Quizlet this can be done by hitting the “shuffle” button in the bottom right-hand corner of the flashcard deck.

5. Focus on derivatives.
Not only does this help with vocabulary learning, it will develop your child’s knowledge and understanding of their own language and any other language(s) that they are learning. Furthermore, it will consolidate their learning because their brain will be linking its newfound knowledge to prior and future learning – and this all helps with its innate mapping skills.

All of the above requires time, energy and effort from a caring adult. I am acutely aware that this is a lot to ask and that for some people it will simply be too much for them. However, if you are able to dedicate yourself to the process, your child’s learning journey will be made infinitely easier and they will develop the habits and routines that will set them up for success in their studies later in life.

Why all teachers should tutor

Many trained teachers try their hand at tutoring: demand is high and the money is useful. I tutored consistently throughout my first few years in teaching, then returned to it when my husband gave up work to re-train. As time went on, however, I found myself bound to it by more than just financial necessity; I came to realise that private tutoring has was having a profoundly positive impact on my work as a classroom teacher.

It may sound absurd, but it’s easy to lose sight of what you’re paid to do in the frenetic world of mainstream education; marking and administrative tasks – not to mention the ever-shifting sands of expectations – can overwhelm you to the point where you lose perspective on what’s actually important. Tutoring reignited my passion for teaching on a fundamental level; not only did it take me back to some essential skills, it made me question the value of some other things that were taking up too much of my time. It made me better at saying “no” to things that impacted upon my ability to perform my teaching role to the best of my ability and – as a direct result – I stepped aside from roles and responsibilities that were in danger of doing so.

Tutoring exposed me to a wider range of specifications and teaching methodologies that were outside of my range of experience. Habits inevitably become entrenched when you teach the same subject in the same system to the same age-group for a number of years: tutoring forced me to think again. When I started tutoring face-to-face in my area, local demand was highest for Common Entrance coaching, so – despite the fact that I was a secondary school teacher – this became a specialism. Finding out what some 10-year-olds were being exposed to and could cope with made me question where I was setting the bar in secondary school; it also made me ask myself some fundamental questions about what, when and why I was teaching the core principles to older students. All of this came at would could not have been a more useful time: a few years prior to OfSted’s new framework and the huge shift towards a focus on curriculum coherence. When all other departments were running around in a panic, asking themselves why they were teaching what they were teaching and in what order they were teaching it, I had already been through that process and had totally refreshed my curriculum from bottom to top.

Perhaps the biggest impact that tutoring had on me while I was still teaching was a powerful shift in mind-set that is hard to quantify. When I started working with some local prep school students, I took several of them from the bottom of their class to the top. What this felt like is hard to convey, but suffice to say it was emphatically empowering. This positivity then filtered into my classroom practice and somehow made me feel as if anything were possible. This is not to say that I was naïve about the fundamental differences between what can be achieved through one-to-one tutoring and what can be realised in the mainstream classroom; but experiencing the irreplaceable value of one-to-one attention forced me to think of ways in which I could provide more of that magic in the classroom, particularly for the school’s Pupil Premium students (those who are defined by the government as coming from disadvantaged backgrounds). Blessed with an excellent trainee teacher most years, I began to take every opportunity to act as an expert Teaching Assistant to our Pupil Premium students in the trainee’s classes, coaching and guiding them to make more progress than they otherwise could.

Tutoring also opened my eyes to the phenomenal value of spaced learning and retrieval practice, as well as to the stark truth about just how much information children will forget once they have been taught it – a topic I have written on many times. That harsh reality fed through into my classroom teaching and fundamentally changed my approach to the basics of whole-class tuition. I introduced some of the exercises that I had created for the one-to-one setting and incorporated them into my classroom practice; I never took for granted that the students would have remembered what I had taught them the day, the week or the month before – I tested them repeatedly on basic knowledge. Once again, this all happened shortly before there was an explosion of this kind of practice in schools. I feel hugely grateful that tutoring gave me a bit of a heads-up.

As a full-time tutor now, with my own business, it seems obvious to say that tutoring has been a major influence in my life. But I would recommend it to any classroom teacher, not necessarily as a potential career shift but as a way of gaining access to new ideas, new experiences and new ways of informing your current classroom practice. If my experience is anything to go by, your performance in the classroom will benefit enormously.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Back to Basics

One of the best things about tutoring is the time and space to go back to basics. Many students come to me with a list of tricky constructions that they are struggling with, and without question I will address those things in the time I spend with them. More often than not, however, while the student may be requesting help with the ablative absolute or the indirect statement, what I discover is that they don’t even know their basic noun endings.

Over the years I have given a great deal of thought as to why this is so. The discovery – through tutoring – of just how many students this was true for certainly informed my own practice as a classroom teacher. I came to realise that the basics must revisited time and time again before students can claim full confidence and that this was true for all students, not just those that appeared to be struggling. So tutoring completely changed my approach in the classroom, for it gave the the realisation of just how much students naturally forget over time.

Given that Latin is a subject with which most people are unversed, I like to make analogies with subjects that are familiar to all of us. Imagine a child sitting their maths GCSE and trying to cope with the complexities of algebra and trigonometry. Then imagine that same child trying to sit their maths GCSE before they have fully grasped the meaning and process of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Maybe indeed you were that child. Maybe you were pushed through your GCSE or your O level with a shaky grasp of those basics. If you were that child, you will have been frankly terrified of maths as a subject and probably still believe that you’re “rubbish at maths”, all because nobody took the time to ensure that you understood the rudimentary basics. Remember how that felt? That’s what I’m talking about.

One of the first things I always check out when I meet a new student is whether they are confident with the order and meaning of the cases. You wouldn’t believe how many Year 10 or Year 11 students I have worked with who, when asked about this, have absolutely no idea. But what is the point of them learning their noun endings if they don’t know what those endings mean? So I start with a blank table and ask students whether they can tell me which case comes first and what the meaning of that case is. (Answer: nominative, and it’s the subject of the sentence). Most students who are taking GCSE are able to tell me this (although not all). Beyond that, many – not all, but the majority – start to fall apart from there. For example, they cannot remember whether the genitive comes before or after the dative and/or they cannot remember which one means “of” and which one means “to” or “for”. Immediately, therefore, we have a fundamental clue to what the underlying problem is with their approach to any Latin sentence: basically, in reality, they are guessing.

Delving into the gaps in a student’s knowledge like this is an enormous privilege and helping them start to plug those gaps is one of the best things about my job. All of these students have been taught these concepts before but all of them have forgotten that material. This is how memory works and this is why retrieval practice and revisiting past concepts in the classroom again and again is so crucial. Most classroom teachers, it seems to me, are still underestimating the importance of this and the extent to which even the highest of achievers need regular checks on their two times table interwoven with their introduction to the finer points of matrices. But the reality is that no matter how good the classroom teacher, no matter how solid and consistent their use of retrieval practice, there will still be some students who fall by the wayside; this may be due to illness causing absences or it may just be that they find it harder than the rest of the class. And that’s where tutoring comes in.

Sometimes people assume that repetition is boring and that working with lots of students on the same set of fundamentals would also be so. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every child is different and every child that is struggling in the classroom has their own personal and private worries; often a child has an instinct for the fact that they are missing some fundamental pieces of the puzzle but their situation has become so stressful that they feel unable to ask for help. Breaking down those barriers and helping them to grasp the core concepts and knowledge that they need in order to start succeeding is without a doubt the most rewarding thing that I could spend my time doing. Parents often tell me that their increased confidence and improving performance feels like a miracle.

So if your child is struggling with complex material, that is without doubt something which needs addressing. However, it may not be the case that the complex material is where we need to start. After many years of radio silence, I have recently taken up the piano again and am trying to re-learn some complex pieces that I could rattle off without hesitation at the age of 18. What I realised when I started at the music was that I have forgotten some of the most rudimentary bits of knowledge – when there are four sharps in the treble clef, what does that mean? I honestly can’t remember. So, before I can play with confidence, I will have to revisit some of those basics. I know that they will come flooding back, but the reality is that they need to be revised. So, back to basics I go. It will be worth it in the long-run.

Let us be clear: what teachers could learn from the aviation industry

We in education could learn a great deal from the aviation industry. In fact, most professions could learn a lot from the aviation industry. While so many other professions have a tendency towards a blame-culture and criticism, aviation is built on the principle of learning from its mistakes and implementing procedures to mitigate against them. It is also relentlessly focused on clarity of communcation: for lives literally depend on getting this right.

Last night, my husband and I watched one of a string of documentaries aired on the National Geographic channel, which follow accident investigations in aviation. The accident explored in this particular episode occured all the way back in 1989 and involved a Boeing 707 on an American charter flight from Italy to the Dominican Republic. The flight was making a scheduled stop on the Portugese island of Santa Maria, where it was due to be refuelled. As a result of a series of minor but significant oversights in procedure made both by the flight crew and by the Air Traffic Controller, Flight 1851 came in too low and struck a mountain range, killing everyone on board.

One of the most important things about the way in which investigations are conducted in aviation is that the culture focuses not on finger-pointing but on identifying the factors which led to an accident, so that the findings can be shared within the industry and lessons truly learned. The investigators may make recommendations which lead to a tightening of regulations around pilots’ working hours, a change in how pilots are trained, an adjustment to the design of an aircraft and/or its instruments, a tweak in recommended flight procedures, or all of the above. The approach is a model in how to react under extreme pressure: it does not seek to apportion blame, it aims rather to improve safety for the future, for the benefit of everyone. The pilots who do make errors (and who pay the ultimate price for them) are treated with infinite respect and the investigators do not simply stop at putting things down to “pilot error” and then washing their hands of the incident – they go on to explore why the pilots may have made a particular error, with the ultimate aim of reducing the risk of similar errors occuring again in the future. Were they overtired? Was the information they were receiving unclear or counter-intuitive? Was their training insufficient in this area? Above all, how could we have prevented them from making this mistake? I find this approach genuinely inspiring and I wish other fields would learn from it.

One of the key findings of this particular investigation was that there was a crucial miscommunication between the Air Traffic Controller and the flight crew. The ATC instructed the crew that they were “cleared to three thousand feet” (in other words, that their initial approach should not go below three thousand feet). For several reasons, the First Officer ended up mishearing the instruction as “cleared two thousand feet” and the aircraft was set to the incorrect height. My husband (a trained pilot, as it happens) informs me that this would be less likely to occur now because the advised vocalisations for this particular information have been revised, in an attempt to prevent such misunderstandings; the instruction would now be “you are cleared to altitude three thousand feet” – the word “altitude” must be used immediately before the given height in order to avoid any confusion between words and numbers, an error which in the case of Flight 1851 led to devastating consequences.

While the documentary explored numerous other reasons why the crash ultimately occured and indeed made it clear that the Captain of the flight crew undeniably missed several opportunities to prevent the disaster from happening, the underlying cause of the crash was quite simple – the aircraft came in too low. The miscommunication between the ATC and the flight crew, which was not corrected when it could and should have been, set the aircraft on a collision course with the mountainous terrain towards which it was headed.

Now I for one am jolly glad to be working in a field in which my mistakes are unlikely to cause multiple fatalities and even less likely to be the subject of a documentary on National Geographic some 35 years later. Yet this minor slip which led to such devastating consequences for the flight and its passengers did remind me of a misapprehension which I discovered in a tutee this year. On Flight 1851, the First Officer mistook a word for a number – quite simply, he heard “cleared to” as “cleared two”. Similarly, I realised this year that one of my tutees was convinced that the dative case had something to do with numbers. After a couple of minutes of discussing this with him and trying to explore what was going on, I suddenly realised what had happened: his teacher had (quite rightly) taught his class that the dative case was to be translated as “to” or “for”. My tutee, however, had heard “two” or “four”. He heard numbers instead of words. And he had been royally confused ever since.

Whilst teachers are not making minute-by-minute decisions on which hundreds of lives depend, instead they are laying the foundations for a child’s understanding in their subject. Whilst this is not life-threatening (happily, I can’t think of a single occasion on which a misunderstanding of the dative case has led to multiple fatalities), it is nevertheless important in our line of work, assuming we care about what we do. This particular child’s misunderstanding underlined for me the importance of dual coding, which means using a visual representation of what you are saying as well as a verbalisation: quite simply, if the teacher in question had merely written the words “to” and “for” on the board as they spoke, they would have avoided the misconception that was absorbed and internalised by this particular child.

On one sunny day, during which I took the photograph below, I was very privileged to join my husband on a flight during his training and listen to the impeccably high standard of teaching that he received from his instructor. My advice to all teachers if they want to observe a model in verbal clarity is to take every opportunity that they can to go and listen to people who teach a practical skill. Go and watch a PE teacher setting up a game; watch a science teacher preparing students for an experiment; take a refresher course from a driving instructor; tune in to your coach at the gym. Above all, in your own teaching, remember that every word you use must be carefully thought through and – in an ideal world – that you should take a note of every misconception which does occur and seek to mitigate against it next time by improving your verbal explanation. While I am happy and relieved to say that a child’s life will not depend on your words, their success in your subject absolutely does.

I took this photograph from inside the aircraft in which my husband did much of his training.

What’s wrong with GCSE Latin?

Sometimes you have to step off the treadmill to reflect on what is wrong with the system. After 21 years of preparing cohorts of students for Latin at GCSE level, it has taken me a year or so off the hamster wheel to reflect upon what is wrong with it and how the examination at GCSE level is fundamentally flawed.

To understand how the Latin GCSE fails our students, we first of all need to reflect upon what the purpose is of studying Latin – without this, the decisions made by the exam boards will seem even more incomprehensible than they actually are. First and foremost, forgetting any wild claims to promote excellence, increase vocabulary or whatever else we tell ourselves about our subject, the purpose of studying Latin is to train students to be able to read real Roman texts. This is the end goal and everything else is broadly irrelevant. This inescapable reality is – I believe – why both exam boards and QCA are so irrevocably wedded to the notion that students must study a substantial proportion of “real” Latin texts in order to gain a basic qualification in the subject.

Let us reflect for a moment on what this actually means. Unless a child has attended prep school and studied Latin from Year 5 or 6 onwards, students will have started Latin as a beginners’ subject in Year 7 and will be unlikely to have had more than one hour’s tuition per week in the subject. This may increase margially in Years 8-9, but not by much. Within that space of time, the exam boards are expecting a student entering Year 10 to be prepared to study real Latin texts, a frankly laughable notion. Imagine expecting a student of French to read and understand Voltaire or Maupassant during their GCSE course, when they are still wrestling with the fundamentals of the language.

The argument is often trotted out that modern language students have more to contend with, because they have to work on a wider variety of skills: Latin – being a dead language – does not require students to be tested on speaking or listening. Agreed, these skills take up a huge amount of teaching time for modern linguists that we do not have to dedicate when it comes to an ancient language. Believe me, however, this is more than made up for by the linguistic content required. My first Head of Department once quipped, when I mentioned to him that one of my Year 10 students had suddenly asked when we would learn to tell the time in Latin, that I should have replied “when you have learnt the pluperfect passive subjunctive.” He had a point. (He was right, by the way: the pluperfect passive subjunctive is required at GCSE). Rod, who had only ever taught French and German, had seen the list of grammatical constructions required for GCSE Latin and it never failed to astonish him.

Now that I am on the outside of the school system, working with a large number of GCSE candidates from a variety of schools, I am being exposed to a broad range of approaches from each school. Most of them do what I did and plough through as much of the GCSE language content as they can during the first two terms of Year 10, then start tackling the literature texts in the final term of Year 10 and throughout Year 11. This is the best we can do. I have come across one school that takes longer over the language then expects students to have gained enough linguistic knowledge to tackle the set texts very quickly due to their broader knowledge-base; this is frankly nonsense, given that the language required for the texts goes way, way beyond that required at GCSE for the language paper. Some schools start the texts immediately and encourage students to work on them from the very beginning, but this is rare.

For the unintiated, let us be clear: GCSE candidates do not have anything like the linguistic knowledge required to study the real Latin texts that are prescribed for the GCSE. The only way they can cope with and even borderline understand the texts is to learn the English translation off by heart, a simply mammoth rote-learning task. This is what I spend much of my time supporting students with as many are not given the tools and the skill-set to do this on their own.

This year I had something of an epiphany when working with a handful of independent students. Why do we do it? The requirements for Latin GCSE are so unrealistic that I would go so far as to say that the qualification is wildly inappropriate. My belief that this is the case means that I no longer encourage students to take the qualification as a supplementary subject: it simply is way too much to cope with on top of their regular studies. I do not say this lightly, not least because it will mean I miss out on a significant amount of potential tutoring work. But the truth must be told, and parents of students who have a desire to study Latin independently need to think very long and hard about the reality of what that means and whether they are prepared for the sheer slog that it will entail.

So long as the texts required for GCSE go far beyond the students’ linguistic skills, the only way to prepare for the examination will continue to be to learn the texts off by heart. I shudder to think the number of wasted hours that has been spent on this. One of my skills as a tutor is in helping students with this process, because there are indeed ways in which it can be made less arduous and more manageable. I shall continue to do this, to assist students in their quest to attain top marks in the qualification for which they have been entered. But really – what are we doing it for? Is it really the best way to prepare students for a future in the subject? I do wish QCA and the examination boards would take a long, hard and realisitc look at what they are demanding from 16-year-olds and face up to the reality that their examination in its current form is not really fit for purpose.

We’ve always done it this way

A few years ago I had something of an epiphany about why so many students struggle to translate the indirect command correctly. This is the kind of epiphany I am blessed with – nothing earth-shattering that will change the future of humanity as we know it; just a little tweak when it comes to how Latin might be best taught – we all need some kind of claim to fame.

Now I work solely as a private tutor I have the privilege of insight into how students are taught in a myriad of different schools. One consistent pattern is that the uses of the subjunctive are always taught in a particular order and most notably, the indirect command is consistently taught after the purpose clause. I think I know why this is and it’s for the same reason I did this myself for several years: it’s how it’s done in the Cambridge Latin Course. Even Taylor & Cullen introduce ut + subjunctive in this way: purpose clause first, followed immediately by the indirect command. But after my epiphany, I started to switch this around.

I have yet to come across 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 fascinating. Is it really the all-pervasive, insidious influence of the Cambridge Latin Course? Given that my focus for this piece is entirely on secondary schools and given that the majority of those still use (or have used) the Cambridge Latin Course over the years, I suspect it is. But I suddenly realised what a huge mistake it is to teach the purpose clause first: I realised that this is why students are so wedded to translating ut as “in order to” whenever they see it: because that is how they first see it and after that they can’t let it go.

So let me explain the alternative approach, which I started to use when I was still teaching in school and the approach I use to help my tuteees now with huge success. First of all, when I introduce the subjunctive, I do continue to teach the use of cum + subjunctive first, followed by the indirect question. This follows the pattern used by the Cambridge Latin Course and I think it is a good one: these two constructions both require no complexity when it comes to translating the tense of the subjunctive verb and are hence a good introduction to the uses of the subjunctive. I believe that at GCSE it is important to emphasise that there is nothing special about the way in which subjunctive verbs are translated in subordinate clauses; as soon as we get onto the indirect command and purpose clause the students have to learn to move beyond translating the tense of the verb in its literal sense, so they need to gain a little confidence first.

After I have taught the endings of the subjunctive and the first two uses as above, I then within one lesson (or tutoring session) introduce two uses of ut + subjunctive and explain that they are difficult to tell apart – I also explain that being able to differentiate between them is important for the grammar questions in the GCSE examination. I then explain that their default translation for ut should be “to” and explain the indirect command in detail: that the definition of a command-word is broad: begging, persuading or even asking counts as a command, as it basically includes any verb which is trying to get somebody to do something. I emphasise that the ut should always be translated as “to”. I show a few examples and reassure them that it is correct not to translate the tense of the imperfect subunctive – just translate the meaning of the verb after “to”, just as if it were an infinitive.

I then introduce the purpose clause and point out how similar it is as the ut can still be translated as “to”. I then exlain that the test to see whether or not it is in fact a purpose clause is to try out whether one can also translate ut as “in order to” or “so that he/they could”. If that’s possible, then it’s a purpose clause. I then spend the remainder of the session showing them a series of mixed examples and asking them to identify whether each sentence is an indirect command or a purpose clause. I stick almost exclusively to vocabulary required for GCSE and also provide vocabulary support to lighten their cognitive load – this is essential no matter what you are teaching.

Screenshot from one of my numerous presentations on this topic

One of the worst reasons for doing something is solely because we’ve always done it this way. In teaching it is always important to keep asking yourself why: why this topic? Why those things in that order? Why this? Why this now? If you don’t stop and ask yourself these questions on a regular basis, you end up doing things solely for the sake of it, solely because that’s what you’re used to and solely because it needs to be done at some point. Given how embedded the problem is that students regularly fail to recognise and translate the indirect command correctly, it is actually rather worrying that more teachers don’t seem to have asked themselves why this is. Pretty much every single student I meet, without fail, when presented with a simple sentence such as dux militibus imperavit ut oppugnarent will immediately say, “the leader commanded the soldiers in order to attack”. Perhaps more worrying, a large number of those students seem puzzled when it is pointed out to them that this translation doesn’t actually make a whole lot of sense. As a tutor, I have to break down their wedded belief that ut means “in order to” and explain why – most of the time = it actually doesn’t mean that at all.

Obviously there is third use of ut + subjunctive required at GCSE, which is the result clause. I teach this next but in a different session to emphsise that it works quite differently from the other two.

Animated slide which I use multiple times to remind students how to spot each clause

I then do lots of work on how to spot the difference between each of the three types of ut-clauses and I always word the question in the manner that they will face in the GCSE exam: why is oppugnarent in the subjunctive mood? The more they get used to the teacher or their tutor asking them this question, the easier the grammar questions will be for them. Some students have to be reminded that “because it’s used after ut” is not an answer to this question, as the examiner wants them to differentiate between the three clauses.