Teaching & tutoring – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Unknown Unknowns

“I am wiser than this man: for while neither of us appears to know anything … I do not assume that I know what I do not know.”

Plato’s Socrates, Apologia, 399 BCE

As they commence their tutoring, most students who come to me report that they are struggling in Latin. This, of course, is no surprise. Yet, when asked to explain why they are struggling, their answers are frequently vague. Some students may attribute their failure to what they believe is a lack of innate ability (“I’m just no good at this”), while others have simply no idea. Very few are able to reflect upon the likely causes or to pinpoint when things started to fall apart.

Research in cognitive psychology has consistently shown that students’ own perceptions of their learning are not accurate. This is true even among high-performing learners. My own anecdotal experience informs me that students rarely have any real idea of why they are struggling. As a general rule, most students cannot identify the areas in which they lack knowledge, and some overestimate their grasp of the basics. It may surprise people to know that the easiest students to help tend to be those who come to me in a state of despair: those are, in fact, the students who really know that there is a deep-seated problem and they are only too keen for any solutions that might be offered to them.

Students who come to me convinced that they have a reasonably good grasp of the basics are sometimes reluctant to engage with initial investigations into their knowledge of the fundamentals. This is because they tend to come to me with the fixed idea that, since they started to struggle only as the subject became more difficult, it is therefore the difficult topics that are the problem. In almost every single case (there are — of course — rare exceptions), what they do not realise is that they started to struggle when things got difficult precisely because their grasp of certain fundamentals was hazy in the first place. With students like this, the first thing I have to do, unfortunately, is to rock their world a little: the only way to help them is for them to realise that their basic grasp of the subject is not as secure as they assumed it was. Once they understand this, everything can be resolved.

As human beings, we generally assume that we have privileged access to our own mental processes. However, cognitive science has repeatedly demonstrated that self-knowledge — particularly knowledge about one’s own cognitive performance — is limited and often inaccurate. This insight is foundational for understanding why students misjudge their learning difficulties. Learners experience their cognitive effort subjectively, but subjective feelings of fluency or difficulty are poor indicators of genuine understanding or mastery. For instance, when studying a text, a student may feel that they “know” the material because re-reading it feels smooth and familiar; in reality, their fluency results from familiarity rather than durable comprehension or a solid knowledge base. While learning requires active self-monitoring and regulation, our introspective access to the mechanisms of learning is highly fallible, and a student’s subjective experience of learning is not necessarily a reliable guide to their actual competence.

A further barrier to students’ insight into their own struggles is the prevalence of misconceptions about how learning and memory work. Studies consistently show that learners hold naïve beliefs about the process of learning — for instance, that re-reading and highlighting are effective strategies, or that one can “multitask” while studying without cost to comprehension; if your son or daughter insists that they can listen to music while studying, this regretably false conviction will be familiar to you. Such beliefs can then shape a student’s behaviour and self-assessment. For example, when students fail after employing such strategies, they may conclude that they are “bad at the subject,” as this feels safer than questioning the strategies themselves. Cognitive research has shown that effective learning requires active engagement (such as retrieval, elaboration and connection-making) rather than passive exposure (such as re-reading and highlighting). However, because active engagement is much more cognitively taxing, students tend to avoid it. This failure to recognise the cognitive mechanisms which underpin successful learning can lead students to misinterpret their failures. For example, a GCSE Latin student who does nothing but re-read the vocabulary list multiple times and then cannot recall the meaning of the words in a translation test may conclude that they have a poor memory; in reality, the issue is inadequate and ineffective retrieval practice.

Students do not necessarily know why they are struggling in the subjects they study, not because they lack intelligence or motivation, but because the human mind is poorly equipped to reflect on its own cognitive processes. Research proves this. Learners often rely on misleading cues such as fluency and effort and may exhibit systematic overconfidence with the basics due to familiarity. Emotional and motivational factors can further distort self-assessment, compounding the inevitable fact that the novice status of most students deprives them of the structured knowledge needed for accurate self-diagnosis. A student anxious about mathematics may perceive problems as more complex than they are, reinforcing the belief that they are “not a maths person.” This self-perception can become self-fulfilling, as avoidance prevents improvement and reinforces failure. When students fear failure, they may prefer to attribute difficulties to uncontrollable causes (e.g. “the exam was impossible”) rather than to confront any deficiencies in their methodology. Conversely, overconfidence and fixed mindsets about ability can lead students to dismiss feedback and persist with ineffective strategies. Ever tried to convince your teen to try a different method of study and been knocked back? You are not alone. Convincing learners to try different strategies is notoriously difficult.

Cognitive research thus reveals a fundamental irony of education: those who most need insight into their learning difficulties are sometimes the least able to confront it. This means that teachers and tutors must never assume that students understand the reasons behind their struggles. Instead, support for all students should include explicit instruction in metacognitive skills (the methods of study) — we must assume that they don’t know how to go about it. Only by learning how learning works can students begin to see why they struggle and, ultimately, how to overcome those struggles. Despite all of this research, it is simply mind-boggling how little of this is still going on in most schools.

All of these thoughts have been triggered by a frankly bizarre discussion I had online with a couple of tutors this week. One remained absolutely convinced that the best way to tutor was to ask the student what they are struggling with and to start there. I must say I find this phenomenally foolish. While I do always ask students what it is that they are struggling with, this is largely with the purpose of gaining an insight into how they are feeling about the subject. Their response to the question gives me enormous insight into their emotional relationship with Latin and with their studies in general. To take their self-reporting at face value, on the other hand, would be monumentally daft and would betray my experience as a professional. Students rarely comprehend what it is that they need help with, and why should they? They are not the expert! That is what they have come to me for. I listen, I take note of their anxieties and fears and then I go back to basics. Every. Single. Time. If (as does happen in vanishingly rare cases) their grasp of the basics is cast-iron and Teflon-coated, then we can move onto the complex stuff at pace. More often than not, however, a student who claims to be struggling only with the more complex grammatical niceties of the subject, will in fact lack a few blocks in the foundations of their core subject knowledge. Finding these holes and fixing them is what I specialise in.

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

GCSE Latin set texts – why students struggle

Few things risk being so damning as the insight of a one-to-one tutor. As an ex-classroom teacher myself, I am painfully aware just what a difficult job teaching is, and how it is entirely possible to leave some students behind, despite your best efforts. It is from this perspective that I come to this topic.

It is obvious and undeniable that many of the students I work with have been well-taught: they have simply lost their way or misunderstood for a variety of complex reasons. Others, I must confess, I do wonder what’s been happening in their classroom. Whatever the truth of the situation, once a student has indeed lost their way with their studies, it can be a Sisyphean endeavour for them to rejoin the road to success without support. As I write these reflections on what the students I am paid to help have missed and misunderstood about set text work, it is in the full consciousness that there will have been some members of my own classes over the years that became lost by the wayside. A classroom teacher who can claim otherwise is a rare creature indeed.

Set text work remains one of the biggest challenges that students face when they reach GCSE level in their Latin studies. Suddenly, there’s a whole new world of real, unedited Latin in front of you, some of it in verse. The expectation we place upon students to cope with this is frankly mind-boggling. Imagine asking a student of French to study Molière, Maupassant or Descartes at GCSE level: this is what we are asking students to do in Latin. The whole thing is frankly ridiculous, and I have written before about what a pointless exercise the whole business is, but given that the exam boards resolutely refuse to change their approach, we’re stuck with it. What follows are some observations about students who struggle with this element of the exam.

Perhaps the most striking thing I notice about some students’ understanding of the literature is the fact that those who are struggling with the set texts cannot articulate the very basics of what they are about. Teachers are often under enormous time pressure when it comes to the huge swathes of literature they must plough through, and – as a result – they often dive straight in to working through the text line by line, and do not find the time to ensure that their students understand the basic meaning and purpose of the text.

Currently, this is manifesting itself most strikingly with the Virgil text prescribed last year and this year for OCR (selections from the opening of Aeneid 1) and the Love & Marriage texts for Eduqas. For one student studying the latter, it took me more than one session with her to establish which texts she was studying, so non-existent was her grasp of what had been covered. With the Virgil, teachers have a particularly difficult task: how much to tell students who may have little to no knowledge of epic and/or mythological stories in general? Aside from this, however, is notable that not one single student that I have worked with during the last 18 months has had even the slightest inkling of an idea that Carthage had significance for a Roman audience. I find this genuinely sad. I cannot think of anything more important than explaining to them that the Carthaginian empire was a rival superpower that the Romans had overturned some 150 years before Virgil was writing. In a series of three conflicts between Rome and Carthage, Rome was ultimately victorious and utterly destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE. While the wars themselves were history to someone writing in Virgil’s time (the 1^st century AD), the experience and trauma of these conflicts, especially the long and harrowing campaigns of Hannibal, were a central and formative part of Roman collective memory and crucial to their self-definition. The Carthaginian Wars quite literally defined them as indefatigable warriors and the global superpower of their age.

Beyond this surely fundamental understanding of why Virgil is banging on about Carthage at the start of his epic work, no student that I have worked with understands or can define what an epic work is. I cling to the notion that they must have been taught this, but I can only assume that they are given this information in lesson one and that their teachers then assume that it has stuck. Such things are crying out to be used as a regular Do Now or similar quick retrieval task: what is an epic? Who was Homer? How is Virgil imitating him? A student should be able to tell us that an epic is a lengthy poem, written to be publicly performed, and focusing traditionally on tales of battle and self-definition; they should also understand that the gods and destiny play an important role in epic and that epic is a genre that evolved through the Greek oral tradition and that Virgil is doing something rather special by canonising this into a definitive Roman origin story in Latin. These basic notions really need to be revisited regularly to ensure that students remember them.

Beyond the fundamentals, the biggest mistake made by classroom teachers in my experience is their excessive focus on style, over and above teaching students how to learn the text. At this point, we come to the crushing reality and the reason why I believe that set text work is such a monumentally pointless waste of students’ time: the Latin is too hard for GCSE-level students to grasp in full, meaning that their only option is to rote-learn the text in English. Few classroom teachers labour under the illusion that this is not the case, but few also realise just how much guidance students need in order to do this necessary and time-consuming task successfully. When I was teaching, I learned to drill students on the best methodology for rote-learning, modelled it for them and then gave them short bursts of classroom time to start doing so, while I monitored them. It was essential, in my view, for me to see it demonstrated that students had understood the methods I had shown them and were trying them out. Students can be remarkably stubborn when it comes to study skills, and unless it is literally demonstrated to them that a method works, they will ignore your advice and go it alone. As a result, they will fail. Students who have been shown how to learn the text successfully come to realise that the demonstrated methods work and will stick with them.

The final issue with classroom set-text teaching arises out of a combination of two issues I have already raised: teachers being under time pressure to push ahead with the text line by line, combined with an excessive focus on stylistic features. What this means is that teachers generally introduce a new bit of text and talk about its stylistic features at the same time. The reality for novices is that this will be impossible to follow. My advice to students is always to attempt to get ahead of the class with the rote-learning, so that they are looking at a section of the text that they understand when their teacher starts talking about style. This gives them a better chance of following what the teacher is saying. When I was in the classroom, I would take the students through the meaning of the text and set them to learn it before I said anything about its stylistic features. It worked infinitely better than expecting them to follow what I was saying when working through a new bit of text.

Fundamentally, classroom teachers must remind themselves that students can achieve around 80% in the exam with only the haziest of grasps when it comes to the stylistic features of the text. The vast majority of their marks come from knowing the text, and yet this aspect of their studies is given the least amount of focus in the classroom. In their anxiety to help students with the most difficult aspects of the examination, many classroom teachers overlook the low-hanging fruit: how to help them to achieve the bulk of their marks.

A time and a place for questions

The importance of questions in the mainstream classroom has, in my opinion, been rather over-emphasised in schools. This might seem a somewhat old-school, even Gradgrindian approach to my old vocation, but bear with me while I explain.

Questions are indeed important, but classroom teachers have at times been told to encourage them to excess. As so often, this move was driven by specialists in the Humanities, whose own peculiar experiences in the classroom seemed to shape every INSET I have ever sat though as a teacher. Notions such as “there are no foolish questions” and “everyone’s opinion is equally valid” might work to a degree in an RE lesson, but such an approach is frankly disingenuous in many other subjects. I’m not convinced it’s even the right approach in the Humanities, if I’m honest; in an age in which most people seem much better at speaking than they are at listening, it seems to me that excessive encouragement of questions from a point of ignorance more encourages a desire for a question to be aired and the questioner’s voice heard, rather than any real desire to hear the answer.

Excessive questions from the floor can truly derail a lesson and this is never more true with Year 7, many of whom have been encouraged (or at least not discouraged) in the primary setting to ask questions all the time. In some of the Year 7 lessons I recall there were some children so bursting with excitement and desperation to ask questions and share their ideas that their arms would be waving like windmills. As Ben Newmark argued in his excellent post on this topic, students like this can dominate a lesson to the detriment of the majority. In a class of 32, it is a teacher’s role to divide their attention and focus as evenly as and fairly as they can; allowing one or two students to dominate with questions and anecdotes is unfair to the others. Moreover, as Ben also argues, children who are obsessively thinking about their next contribution are not actually focusing on the lesson, nor are they listening to anyone else. He makes the case that teachers should not encourage an environment in which students can ask questions whenever they want do, rather one should encourage them to save their questions for the appropriate time.

There is no escaping the fact that asking questions is one of the most powerful tools a student can use to deepen their understanding. When a student poses a question (especially a good one), they are actively engaging with the material rather than passively receiving information. Ideally, this process forces them to think critically about what they know, identify gaps in their knowledge, and seek clarification. In doing so, students can begin to develop a stronger conceptual grasp of the subject. This approach to study is explored by Dr. Paul Penn in his guide for university students on how to study independently; he makes the point that you cannot gain a great deal from a text if you don’t interrogate it. In an ideal world, asking questions helps students to take ownership of their learning. This sense of agency not only boosts confidence but also makes learning more meaningful. Ultimately, the practice of questioning transforms a student’s learning; students can develop the skills to think critically and independently.

So here’s the joy of what I do. Tutoring, unlike the mainstream classroom, can be based entirely around a student’s desire to ask questions. Tutees who come with a barrage of questions gain a lot from the process and it can be a wonderful outlet for children who feel frustrated by having to wait their turn in the classroom. By the same turn, it can also provide the opportunity for those less confident students to ask the questions that they might not feel able to ask in class (including the ones they worry are foolish). One of my key aims as a tutor is to encourage these questions right from the start, providing a safe environment for a child to start this process – for those who are significantly behind in their subject and who have spent months or even years trying to hide at the back of the classroom, it can take some time to break down these barriers.

The tutoring environment is one in which students can be encouraged to interrupt, something which cannot be managed successfully in the mainstream classroom. Once a child is confident with a private tutor, the opportunities are endless, but both student and tutor must remember that these opportunities are peculiar to the one-to-one relationship and cannot be mirrored or encouraged in a school. As someone who tried to do their best in both worlds, I am constantly reminded of this fact now I am privileged to work solely one-to-one.

Make No Assumptions

“Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in while, or the light won’t come in.”

Alan Alda, American actor

One of the biggest luxuries of one-to-one tutoring compared to classroom teaching is the opportunity it gives you to make no assumptions. In the classroom, hauling large cohorts of students through a curriculum means that you have to make assumptions sometimes: you can explore responsive teaching and effective questioning all you like, but fundamentally the class has to move on. Without (or even with) some quite remarkably skilled classroom practice, a few may still be left behind. In an ideal world they wouldn’t be, but we don’t live in an ideal world.

In its best and most effective form, one-to-one tutoring is an opportunity for the tutor to make no assumptions and — as a result — for the student to gain understanding at a level that they may never have experienced before. This applies no matter what level they are working at. Those who appear to be thriving can be challenged and have their understanding tested. Such examination can really shore up their mastery by picking holes in any misconceptions that they may be harbouring, misapprehensions which may trip them up at a later date. Whenever I have a student who is performing at a high-grade level, I remind myself of the number of students I have worked with who are working at a low grade and who report high performance in their first two years of the subject. Never. Make. Assumptions. Just because someone appears to be thriving does not mean that their understanding is perfect or complete, nor does it mean that they will not struggle at a later date.

Here’s another assumption for you. When working with high-performing students, many teachers and tutors assume that “stretch and challenge” must mean new material, going beyond the curriculum. This absolutely has its place and may well be warranted in some cases. But in my experience, those cases are phenomenally rare in Latin. In this highly-inflected language, a subject in which the greatest gift you can offer a student to guarantee future excellence is a cast-iron grasp of the basics, I have yet to meet a student that does not benefit from being challenged to justify and unpick their understanding of the work that’s already in front of them; this applies especially to students who claim to find such work “too easy”. There are times when a high-performing student can translate a GCSE-level passage with relative ease and it would be tempting to nod along and congratulate them. But making assumptions based upon their apparently confident performance is letting them down. Asking them a range of pertinent, incisive questions and challenging them to explain and justify their translation usually reveals a myriad of tiny holes in their presumed comprehension. This is by no means a disaster, it is rather something to be celebrated. Through this process, a student working at a high level can improve the quality and depth of their understanding and that can make all the difference to their ability to thrive at the next level in the future.

Many students come to me with their own assumptions. A common belief that some students hold is that it is only the difficult material that they are struggling with. They base this supposition on the fact that they started to experience problems as the material became more challenging. But with rare exceptions, it is seldom the case that the so-called “difficult” material is the problem. I could take a student’s assessment of their problem at face value, and start tackling their knowledge of the indirect statement, the ablative absolute or the uses of the subjunctive. But I have learnt that this is a false assumption. Instead, I start by showing them a basic table of noun endings and ask them how familiar they are with that material. I then ask them whether they can name all the noun cases in the correct order and tell me exactly how those cases are used and translated. In all my years of tutoring, it has been an extremely rare occurrence that a student can do so without mistakes or hesitation: it’s happened maybe once or twice. This is because such students will have been taught the basics a very long time ago and then their teacher has assumed that these basics have been retained ad infinitum. If I could advise classroom teachers of one crucial tweak to their classroom practice, it would be this: get properly informed about memory and retrieval practice and use it proactively to revisit the basics. It will be a better use of classroom time than anything else you are doing at the higher level. For example, as a starter task, ask your Year 11 (or even Year 12 or Year 13) students to write down the cases in order and also give a rough summary of how each case is used. You will be amazed at how many of them cannot do it.

Students also have assumptions about themselves or their own abilities, all of which require challenge. Presumptions such as “I’m no good at this” or “I can’t do it” are obviously damaging, but perhaps even more so are postulations such as “I know the basics”, indeed these blithe suppositions can actually be more difficult to overcome. Students who are convinced of their own weaknesses can be easy to work with, as all you need to do is use the power of one-to-one support to show them that they absolutely can do it: the revelation is so exciting and inspiring for most of them that they tend to be an easy convert to the tutoring process. A harder sell can be persuading those who are convinced that their early progress in the subject is not to be questioned and who thus request a focus on the most complicated constructions. It can be something of an unpleasant shock for them when small fissures are revealed in what they were convinced were solid foundations and it is these students who actually require the most reassurance. Students who have found the subject difficult from Day 1 are used to the struggle; it is those who hit problems later down the line that can falter at the very suggestion that they might need to revisit the subject at a rudimentary level.

Photo by Kyle Gregory Devaras on Unsplash

The importance of safeguarding

This week I attended an online training session on safeguarding, something which is included as part of my membership of The Tutors’ Association. The session is by no means the only way in which I keep my knowledge and awareness of safeguarding and child protection up to date, but it is one of the many things I choose to do to stay informed. I say “choose,” because tutoring remains an unregulated industry and — contrary to what many parents may assume — there are currently no legal protections in place to safeguard minors or their families when it comes to private tuition.

Last year, the BBC reported that more than 90 private tutors working in the UK have been previously convicted of sexual offences involving children within the past 20 years. This is frankly horrifying. The children’s commissioner for England called for reform in light of the findings, but currently there is still no legal requirement for people offering private lessons to undergo any kind of criminal record check before working with children and young people; there are also no guidelines about training for tutors when it comes to safeguarding (or indeed anything else).

While I labour under no illusions that teacher training is the be-all and end-all when it comes to education, indeed I would rate my own PGCE from St John’s College, Cambridge as one of the most woefully inadequate and borderline useless qualifications I have to my name, at least that process required some formal training in safeguarding. Beyond that, if a tutor is a qualified teacher with experience in schools (and by the way, those two things are not the same thing at all!) then they will have been put through mandatory safeguarding training on a regular basis, in accordance with the law. For this reason more than any other, I would personally be rigorously frisking any tutor who has no longterm experience in classroom teaching as part of their background for evidence that they are alert to and aware of the meaning and importance of safeguarding. People should be particularly aware that there are plenty of tutors who advertise the fact that they have a teaching qualification, but in fact they spent no time in the classroom beyond their training year. From a safeguarding perspective, this will mean that they are very inexperienced and will not have done much training in this area.

The current lack of regulation means not only that many tutors do not bother to secure a DBS check for themselves (the process is actually not as easy as you might think, and requires you to be attached to a recognised organisation who will process it for you), but perhaps even more concerningly many of them do not have experience of any training in safeguarding. A simple browse through online discussions between tutors reveals a plethora of would-be professionals claiming that membership of a professional organisation is “not worth it” and that securing a DBS is “not necessary, because parents don’t ask.” As for training, it doesn’t seem to occur to any of them that it might be important or useful for them.

My own role in schools was broadly that of a classroom teacher with the occasional bit of further responsibility thrown in, and I climbed no further up the pastoral ladder than the role of form tutor. Despite this, I always took the safeguarding aspects of my job extremely seriously. Not only did I follow and absorb all training to the letter, I used to (and still do) read the relevant serious case reviews published by the government; they are now archived by the NSPCC. Such reviews are, in my opinion, important for ordinary members of any workforce who come into contact with children, as they often highlight individual and institutional failings that everyone should be aware of. Despite this, I have never met anyone else in my profession who reads them, except people who have to do so as a part of their job description (Designated Safeguarding Leads).

The training I attended this week was good and I said so. Let’s be honest, I am notoriously difficult to please, being one of those teachers that has sat through so many shockingly poor in-service training sessions that I have become what I am more than prepared to admit is hyper-cynical. I’m deeply intolerant of any kind of flannel and even less tolerant of what I like to call institutional back-patting, when everyone sits around and tells each other what a terrific job they’re doing. I see this a lot in tutoring: it’s usually dressed up as “this is a positive/safe space” but really it amounts to nothing more than ridiculous complacency arising from a lack of challenge, which is not good for any professional in my humble opinion. But The Tutors’ Association have done a good thing in appointing Holly Goodwin as their Designated Safeguarding Lead and indeed it is testament to the vastly improved professional approach of the new regime in the Association that it has appointed a DSL in the first place. Holly has experience as a DSL in schools in both the state and the independent sector. She now works as a consultant and trainer in schools, universities, children’s homes, hospices and charities, helping organisations to build safer environments for children and vulnerable adults. So, she’s a great appointment, and it is really good to know that I can contact her for advice.

One of the things I miss most about being in a school is being able share my low-level hunches in an appropriate way. People without experience in this area often imagine that safeguarding is high-drama revelations and interventions, and of course, sometimes such things happen. Most of the time, however, the process is all about the little tiny things, the things that seem like nothing in isolation. As a tutor, if I notice something small like a child being consistently tired, or I note that the father seems somewhat domineering, I cannot do anything with such an observation. As a classroom teacher, I would have shared my thoughts on the confidential system. My school, like many, used CPOMs, a software system designed to streamline safeguarding concerns within institutions. We were actively encouraged to log even the most insignificant of observations, because they might form part of a wider picture. In an ideal world, when safeguarding training is really effective, every teacher is proactively using the system on a regular basis; as a result, for some children, a picture starts to form from all the little tiny raised flags, something which might start to indicate a bigger cause for concern. Thus, while an individual observation such as “Dad seems a bit domineering” would never warrant any kind of intervention on its own (it is not illegal to be an unpleasant man), it might one day be relevant to a bigger picture that does indeed lead to further investigation. I don’t have access to anything like this now, and I really miss it.

UK schools are among the most important places for children’s safeguarding because they serve as a central, consistent and regulated environment where children spend a significant portion of their time. Teachers and other school staff see children daily, allowing them to observe patterns of behaviour, appearance, and emotional wellbeing. Because of this routine contact, schools are often the first place where signs of concern are noticed. I really do miss being part of this schema and am alert to the fact that private tutoring puts individuals like me in a rather different position from a regular teacher, who is a part of something bigger.

What GCSE students don’t know about the Aeneid

Since last week, when I wrote again about the power of one-to-one tutoring, I have had even further cause to reflect on its essential benefits.

It would come as shock, I suspect, to most classroom teachers, the extent to which students forget, misinterpret or loftily ignore what they have no doubt been taught in school. I say “no doubt” because I refuse to believe that students have never been taught the basic background to the texts that they are studying, despite their protestations.

What does happen, I believe, is that teachers over-estimate students’ ability to absorb and remember complex material. It certainly came as a shock to me when I started to read more about how memory works (a criminally overlooked field of study in my training) and came to realise just how much repetition is required for students to grasp the basics. In this blog post, I plan to outline the opening few lines of one of the current OCR set texts and explore the things that have puzzled, baffled and troubled the students I have worked with this year. I hope that this will enlighten readers as to the extent that some students struggle with complex material.

One of this year’s texts is taken from Virgil’s Aeneid Book 1. It starts at line 13, so as close to the beginning of the text as one could wish for. This potentially makes for a much easier life than the times when a set text has been taken from Book 10 or Book 12. One would have thought that it would be an easy task to get students to comprehend the basic facts of what the text is about and its core purpose. Well, one would have thought wrongly. With only one exception, the students requesting my help with the Virgil text this year have not been able to define what an epic is, nor were they able to say what Virgil’s purpose was in writing the Aeneid. Most of them swore blind that they’d never been taught the definition of an epic. Beyond this, they have all been baffled to the point of total and utter confusion as to who the Trojans were and what on earth they had to do with the Romans and their self-definition. So, let’s look at some extracts from the opening lines of the text and see in more detail what’s been troubling my charges.

urbs antiqua fuit, Tyrii tenuere coloni,
There was an ancient city, [which] Tyrian settlers inhabited,

Karthago, Italiam contra Tiberinaque longe
Carthage, opposite Italy and the far-distant mouth of the Tiber,

ostia, dives opum studiisque asperrima belli;
rich in resources and most formidable in the practices of war;

Out of those who have requested help with the Virgil, most of them were unable to tell me where Carthage was and why it’s described as a formidable stronghold. None of them – genuinely no exceptions – understood the historical fact that the Romans had destroyed Carthage over 100 years before Virgil was writing. While I would not for one moment expect any of them to have detailed knowledge of the three Punic Wars, I was a little surprised that none of them seemed to be conscious of the fact that Virgil was writing in a world in which this rival superpower had been razed to the ground decades earlier, and that this was a crucially important part of how the Romans defined themselves. Does it seem likely that this was never mentioned by any of their teachers? I think probably not. Is it likely, however, that this was perhaps mentioned once in the first lesson and then rarely – if ever – reiterated? That, I’m afraid, seems plausible. I think teachers need to think very hard about what’s happening in the first couple of lessons of set text work. When you present the students with the text, their minds are completely preoccupied with the length of it and how on earth they are going to cope with learning it; they are thus even less likely to absorb any background information you’re giving them.

Very few students were able to tell me what the Tiber is (a river in Rome, as iconic to the Romans as the Thames is to Londoners) and none of them seemed to understand how Carthage is “opposite” Italy. Carthage lay on the other side of the Mediterranean sea, located on the coast of north Africa, in what we now call Tunisia – indeed, it kind of bulges out into the sea and looks to be the bit of land mass in Africa that is closest to Italy. Perhaps it is because my own sense of direction and general geography is so embarrassingly poor that I always look all of these places and features up on a map and contextualise them for myself in detail. Do teachers assume that their students’ knowledge of geography is as sound as their own? Maybe so, and if so, I guess my advantage is that my own geography is so awful that I assume absolutely nothing! Anyway, the text and the description of Carthage continues:

quam Iuno fertur terris magis omnibus unam
[one] which Juno is said to have cherished more [than] all [other] lands,

posthabita coluisse Samo; hic illius arma,
valuing [even] Samos the less;

Now we’re getting on to the meat of the text and what Virgil is building up to in this opening section. He sets out to explain why Juno, the queen of the gods (most students didn’t know that, by the way), has a massive beef with the Trojans. Here, he highlights the fact that Juno values Carthage even more than Samos. What’s he on about? My students didn’t know. Samos, an island off the coast of modern-day Turkey, was the birthplace of Juno and a centre of her worship. The fact that she values it less than Carthage highlights the importance of Carthage to her and hence her overwhelming desire to protect it. This is why Virgil mentions Samos.

progeniem sed enim Troiano a sanguine duci
But indeed she had heard [that] a breed [would] arise from Trojan blood,

audierat, Tyrias olim quae verteret arces;
which would one day overturn the Tyrian stronghold;

hinc populum late regem belloque superbum
from this would come a nation, wide-ruling and superior in war,

venturum excidio Libyae: sic volvere Parcas.
for the destruction of Libya: thus were the Fates unrolling.

I have asked all of my students to tell me who “the breed that would arise from Trojan blood” are, which could absolutely come up as a one-mark question in the exam. Until I explained, very few of them understood that it was the Romans. They seemed genuinely unsure about the point of the Aeneid‘s opening, which is to highlight how difficult the goddess Juno made it for the Trojans to make it to Italy, which was their destiny. Why were they headed to Italy? Again, when asked, students had not grasped the fact that Aeneas and the rest of the Trojans were refugees, survivors of the Trojan War and in search of a new city now that theirs had been destroyed. It seems remarkable given current events in both Europe and beyond that students seem to find this resonant fact so easy to forget. Has the analogy with modern refugees setting sail across dangerous waters ever been drawn for them? I do hope that is has, but again, maybe that’s happened only once. Students had failed to grasp that the Trojans are trying to get to Italy and that Juno is trying to prevent this because she is trying to prevent the Roman empire from existing and thus to prevent the destruction of Carthage by the Romans. Now, here’s what’s really interesting: I have explained this multiple times and in multiple ways to several different students individually, and most of them have really struggled to grasp it. I suspect it’s partly because they are having to think about multiple timelines and this is difficult for younger people; I also think it might have something to do with the fact that some of what they are being told is historical fact and some of it is legend – they genuinely find it difficult to get a handle on what it all means and how it fits together. I am still thinking about how it could be better explained in the future, since it’s clearly a lot more difficult to understand than those of us who are subject experts realise.

necdum etiam causae irarum saevique dolores
not even now had the causes of [her] resentment and bitter griefs

exciderant animo: manet alta mente repostum
left [her] heart: deep in her mind remained the far-off

iudicium Paridis spretaeque iniuria formae,
judgement of Paris and the insult of her beauty scorned,

et genus invisum, et rapti Ganymedis honores.
and her enmity towards the tribe and the honours paid to the stolen Ganymede.

Here, Virgil lists the reasons that Juno has for hating the Trojans. It seems that students find this really difficult, too. This is perhaps because they must grasp two separate things: firstly, they must understand that Juno’s over-arching reason for hating the Trojans is that they are destined to give rise to the Romans, who will eventually destroy her beloved Carthage. They find this really difficult to grasp, as I explained above. In addition, they must also understand that Juno has some other more petty reasons for hating the Trojans, mentioned here by Virgil. She has a general enmity towards the tribe because it is descended from someone called Dardanus, who was the son of her husband Jupiter as a result of one of his numerous extra-marital affairs. Thus, the existence of the entire Trojan race was an insult to Juno. In addition (and this is the only story that most of the students seemed familiar with) there was the beauty contest between three goddesses that Paris, a Trojan prince, was given the dubious task of judging. His choice was ultimately the cause of the Trojan War, since the bribe he was offered by the winner (Venus) was the most beautiful woman in the world, which was Helen, who happened to be married to a Greek. Hence, when Paris claimed his prize, the Greek tribes waged war upon the Trojans. More importantly for our purposes, the fact that Juno was not selected as the winner of the contest was yet another slight against her by a Trojan. The third petty reason mentioned, the “honours paid to the stolen Ganymede” is all about Jupiter’s promiscuity again. Ganymede was a handsome Trojan that Jupiter took a fancy to and abducted, yet another insult to his wife. (Note: Ganymede was not, as one of my students was absolutely convinced of, a horse. Not that taking a fancy to a horse was beyond Jupiter, miind you, but that isn’t what happened in the story).

his accensa super, iactatos aequore toto
Inflamed further by these [things], she kept the Trojans [who were] left by the Danaans

Troas, reliquias Danaum atque immitis Achilli,
and by ruthless Achilles far-distant from Latium, storm-tossed in every corner of the sea;

arcebat longe Latio, multosque per annos
and for many years

errabant, acti fatis, maria omnia circum.
they wandered around all the oceans by an act of fate.

tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem!
Such a great undertaking it was to found the Roman race!

Here, Virgil sums up his overall point: that it is Juno’s hatred of the Trojans and her fear of their impending destiny, which causes her to work against their journey and to thus postpone their fulfilment of fate. One of the final things that I have noticed students really struggle to grasp is that fact that Juno knows full well that she won’t succeed: as a goddess, she can see the past, the present and the future, and she knows that the destruction of Carthage by the Romans is fated and inevitable. Still, she’s going to do everything in her power to prevent, or at least delay, the inevitable. I find it interesting that young people should struggle to understand this very human kind of motivation – that we might still strive for something that we already know is doomed to failure in the longterm. I guess they haven’t had experience of it yet.

Before teachers feel too dismal, I should point out that I do tend to specialise in working with students who really struggle with the subject. That said, what has been interesting this year is that almost all of my students have struggled with this text, even the high-fliers. I hope that this post has given some food for thought. It is so easy to assume that students have understood what we have told them, so easy to imagine they are following what we say. Until we delve a little deeper – one of the immense joys of working one-to-one as I do now – we can delude ourselves that they have understood the point of a text and are following its meaning.

Aeneas flees from Troy, attributed to Lucca Batoni Pompeo, 1754-57, Galleria Sabauda, Turin

The unbeatable value of one-to-one tutoring

Last week I wrote about how class size doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to outcomes for students. While it can have a notable effect on a teacher’s workload (and I believe that this is important), the evidence that smaller class sizes improve student performance simply isn’t there, certainly at secondary level.

You’d think, given both this and my commitment to being evidence-informed, that I would thus be in support of the idea that tutoring in small groups can be as effective as tutoring one-to-one. Quite the opposite. The very fact that research and my own experience tells me that the size of the group seems not to impact upon the outcomes for students only serves to reinforce my belief that there is something uniquely special about working in the one-to-one model. David Cameron once said that his support for equal marriage was not in spite of the fact that he was a conservative but because he was a conservative. By the same token, I don’t support the view that one-to-one tutoring has a greater impact than working with small groups in spite of the fact that there is no evidence that reducing class sizes improves outcomes; I support the view precisely because of this fact. It is my view that groups – however small – will never provide a child with the same level of intervention as working with an expert one-to-one.

During my last few years of teaching, I had the opportunity to teach a group of five students. The official line was that the small group was due to a timetabling glitch, but the full story was that the Headteacher had unwittingly made a promise to a small handful of parents, a promise which turned out to be impossible on the timetable. Because the mistake had been made by the Headteacher, she had the power to say “make it happen.” Thus, after a considerable amount of shuffling, the staff responsible for timetabling came up with a solution: we would create an extra group to accommodate the subject combination promise that had been made to those students and their parents. This left me – the only Latin teacher in the school – with three Year 9 groups instead of my usual two: one was the usual size of around 28 students, one was somewhat smaller at around 23, the third was the group of 5.

Initially, I was quite excited by the idea. As someone who had tutored one-to-one in my spare time, I felt quite certain that working with such a tiny number of students would feel more like tutoring than teaching. I would be able to offer them close supervision and thus, I presumed, their progress would be exponentially greater than that made by students in the other groups.

Certainly, I was able to pay those students more attention than I otherwise might have been able to do and certainly they all did well. Yet, so did the students in the other two groups. Over the two years I was not able to identify any measurably different outcomes for those students and the experience of teaching them was nothing like the experience of tutoring. Small class size or not, all the other variables were the same. They had the same teacher – me, like it or not – and they had to be marched through the same curriculum. Five students is still enough for there to be considerable diversity among the group, so the pace was still on the slow side for some, rather too pacey for others. While I was – of course – able to offer more individual support than in a larger classroom, it was genuinely surprising how limited the impact of this was overall. Had any of them chosen to engage a private tutor, they would have benefitted as much as any of the students in my group of 28.

As a result of the high expectations that are placed upon teachers, it is easy for them to feel threatened by the very existence of private tuition. I experienced this myself, when I watched a boy who was struggling in my subject transform his performance as a direct result of working with a local private tutor. It was a truly humbling process to witness, and I don’t deny that for a short while I felt rather dismal about my own apparent failure as his classroom teacher. But as a private tutor, I have seen the game from the other side of the fence. I know that what I can do with a child in a regular series of bespoke one-to-one sessions bears little or no resemblance to what I can achieve in the mainstream classroom. It is because I work one-to-one that I am able to do this.

As a private tutor, everything I do is in direct response to one individual’s needs. The key to outstanding private tuition is developing the ability to read each person closely; in a one-to-one session, I can watch for every tiny non-verbal cue that a child is giving: every shift in the chair, every bite of the lip, every furrow of the brow. Of course, I often noticed these signs in the classroom too, and I endeavoured to pay close attention to those individuals who were expressing some puzzlement. But how often must I have missed such nuances, due to the sheer number of faces in front of me? Every missed moment is another tiny chink in that student’s progress, another fissure in the delicate and ever-evolving construction of knowledge and understanding.

In a classroom, children must wait – an individual query may not be relevant to the whole class, and some students, especially in the younger years, seek to reassure themselves by querying what a teacher has said before the sentence is barely out of their mouth; this desire to ask questions at every stage of an explanation can ruin the flow of a lesson for the majority, and students must learn to save their questions for later, when a teacher is circulating the room. Teachers try then to address each individual query and pay personal attention to every child, indeed the importance of this is one of the things that makes teaching both challenging and rewarding. But the rules are reversed in private tutoring, when a tutor can actively encourage a child to interrupt as many times as they wish; as a result, the lesson is truly tailored to the individual and every potential misunderstanding is addressed – simply impossible in the mainstream classroom.

I am not unsympathetic to those educationalists who have concerns about private tutoring. In stark contrast to the case of my student whose progress was transformed as a result of tuition, I have also come across cases when a child has been thoroughly let down by a tutor with no professional experience. Many of those advertising at the more affordable end of the scale are university students – I would willingly have tutored for £10 an hour as an undergraduate – and some of them do an excellent job. However, such tutors have no experience of the ever-changing expectations that children are working towards; if you are simply looking for someone to de-mystify a subject then this kind of tutor can work very well, but if you are looking for your child to make progress towards a specific educational goal or to excel in a particular set of examinations, you’re taking quite a risk in paying someone who is not an expert in this process.

Yet the main objection against private tuition often raised is not a lack of professionalism on the part of some tutors; rather, it seems to touch on the wider issue of so-called “helicopter parenting” and a tendency to problem-solve on behalf of our children. In truth, no matter how much a parent might wish it to be so, private tutoring is not a magic solution; it is merely an opportunity, with which the student has to engage in order to progress. A few will rock up confidently with a myriad of questions, but the vast majority have spent so long hiding at the back or trying to bluff their way in a subject they are struggling to understand that it takes some time to strip away their defences and encourage them to participate without fear.

The tutees that come to me are often in a state of despair. More than one parent has described the dreadful bouts of gut-wrenching anxiety and floods of tears as a child finds themselves getting further and further behind their peers. My subject is obscure, and few parents are blessed with the knowledge to help their child through the quagmire of this difficult and unforgiving discipline; so, they can watch in despair while their child suffers, or they can find a compassionate and competent professional to provide the right kind of support for them. As one parent put it to me, “you have turned dislike and dismay into enjoyment and enthusiasm.” Sounds like something worth paying for.

Why is translation so difficult?

I recall being puzzled a few years ago, when the languages department I was attached to invited me to present to them on how I go about teaching the skill of translation. I had assumed that the process of translation was almost synonymous with language work, and would be embedded into the teaching of all languages. It was news to me that a change in syllabus meant that translation from the target language into English was a new and hitherto under-explored field for modern linguists, and this belies my background as someone who has specialised in Latin.

When it comes to ancient languages, translation is what we do. Without delving into the thorny issue of justifying the value of studying Latin per se (!), it is a simple truth that the ultimate goal of this kind of study remains to be able to read and decipher a text that was written down in Latin and to translate it into English. Despite this obvious truth, a huge number of children who study the subject struggle with the process of translation, and it is worth reflecting upon why that might be.

Broadly speaking, the clients who get in touch with me asking for help for their child fall into two camps, and those camps tend to be based on age-group. Most of the people who want help for a younger child (say in Years 7-8) will say that their child is “okay with translating” but “struggles with the grammar”. This is always a massive red flag for impending disaster, for it means that their child’s translations are based entirely on instinct and guesswork; the child may have appeared to manage okay so far, but as things get harder they will fall apart and the child will soon find that they can comprehend very little of what’s in front of them. It is a drastic misconception, in my opinion, that “grammar” is something separate from “translation”. This really gets to the heart of Latin as a subject and belies why so many children need help with it. Grammar is not an optional luxury for those most deeply versed in the language: it is the beating heart of how the language works.

Parents of older children (broadly speaking in Years 9-11) tend to be the ones who are already experiencing the fall-out of translation without the systematic application of grammar rules. Students by this time find that their previously-successful methodologies of translating on instinct have all but collapsed. Parents of students who have reached this stage will usually tell me that their child struggles with absolutely everything and is on the verge of giving up. A few will say that their child is “okay with the grammar” (which means they have rote-learned their endings) but cannot make it work in the context of a translation. This less common scenario is what tends to happen with a highly-motivated student, generally successful in their studies, who has been told to “learn their endings” and has dutifully done so, but has not had the opportunity to sit down with somebody in one-to-one sessions and have the process of translation – actually making use of those endings – modelled and unpicked for them. This is not to say that their classroom teacher has not used the method of modelling, nor that they have not tried to dedicate some one-to-one attention to such a child. But the reality remains that such processes are remarkably difficult to embed and often require repeated, intensive one-to-one work to make a tangible difference to outcomes. This is especially true for a child that has developed the habit of translating on instinct and has not been drilled from the beginning to analyse Latin sentences rigorously. I’m afraid to say that the most popular text books used in secondary schools (the Cambridge Latin Course and Suburani) tend to encourage and compound such an approach. These courses are nicknamed “reading courses” and aim to encourage fluid and instinctive reading from the outset, eschewing the process of analysis. My personal experience with such an approach is that it is disastrous for a child’s long-term grasp of the subject and results in an inability to translate when things get even remotely complicated. Lots of people disagree with me on this, and if you’d like to hear me interview one or two of them, then listen to my podcast; in Season 2 Episode 1, I interview Caroline Bristow (Director of the Cambridge Schools Classics Project) and in Episode 6 I talk to David Carter, who is an advocate for a methodology called comprehensible input. If you’d like to hear me interview someone who shares my views, listen to Season 2 Episode 2 with Ed Clarke.

Much of my time in one-to-one sessions is spent asking students to justify their translation. When they tell me that rex deorum means “the king of the gods” … was that an easy guess based on the fact that they know the vocabulary? Or can they identify the fact that deorum is genitive plural, which is why it translates as “of the gods”? If they can’t unpick their reasoning behind very simple sentences, then in my experience they will never be able to translate more complex ones. My focus is therefore to present students with a variety of sentences, using vocabulary that is familiar to them, then challenge them to identify and articulate the morphology and syntax which justifies and explains their translation.

It is also important from the very beginning to present students with sentences which cannot be translated successfully without some kind of analysis. Even at the most rudimentary level, this is easy to do. While reading courses such as Suburani tend to encourage students to follow their natural instinct to read from left to right by using pronouns at the start of a sentences like English does, I prefer to present students with sentences that lack a noun or a pronoun as the subject, so they are forced to look at the verb ending in order to find out who is doing the action. During lockdown, I basically re-wrote the Cambridge Latin Course for my students and one of the main things I did was to remove all those subject pronouns. This change made an immediate and tangible difference to outcomes with the beginners in my classroom. From very early on, students were forced to cope with sentences such as ad tabernas festinas (you are hurrying to the shops) when previously they had been shown tu ad tabernas festinas, which means exactly the same thing but provides them with the subject (you) as vocabulary at the front of the sentence and hence removes the need to look at the verb ending; take away the subject pronoun, and the learner is forced to develop the correct habit of parsing the verb ending (festina-s, as opposed to festin-o or festina-t). Initially, of course, this slows the learner down, but the ultimate gain is the right kind of rigour, which will pay dividends in the long-term. While it will initially appear to take students longer to be able to translate basic sentences with fluidity and skill, their translations when they come will be based upon real understanding, not the false appearance of success. It is this false early success – in my opinion – that makes the reading courses so popular; students feel brilliantly successful in the early stages, but they are living in a house of cards.

By far the most common scenario presented to me as a tutor who specialises in supporting struggling students is a child who has enjoyed and appeared to thrive in Latin in Years 7-8, who then experienced an enormous crisis in Year 9 or at the start of their GCSE studies. These students feel cheated and let down, and understandably so. A lot of them come to me saying that they regret selecting the subject for GCSE and are convinced that they cannot do it. Happily, I am usually able to convince them that they can do it, but this involves unpicking the habits they have formed in the early years and retraining them from scratch. While reading courses such as Suburani and the CLC continue to dominate the market in secondary schools, I don’t see this situation changing in a hurry.