Teaching & tutoring – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Another brick in the wall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This wonderful photo was taken by Maria Teneva on Unsplash

Cambridge hangovers

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

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

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

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

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

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

A general lack of guidance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going in stealth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When practice makes too perfect?

Every teacher wants their students to succeed. All teachers put in hours of effort to build the competence and confidence of their students. Yet across most schools in most subjects, there is a subtle but pervasive problem: teachers giving students tasks that directly contradict the conditions under which students will ultimately be assessed. Perhaps the most common way I see this manifested is when teachers set an exam question for homework but do not set a time limit. Students are encouraged to produce their best answer, without the contraints of timed conditions. On the surface, such a task may seem not only harmless but supportive: but what are the risks involved?

Teachers rarely encourage harmful practice out of sheer carelessness: quite the opposite. Such practice arises from good intentions. Teachers often want their students to slow down, to think carefully and to produce their best work. Removing time pressure feels like a way of fostering both their learning and their skills. Teachers are also conscious that timed tasks can cause stress and many, understandably, fear overwhelming their students; ironically, it is most often the already-anxious student that is most damaged by the practice of no time-limits, since the temptation to spend an excessive amount of time on a task in order to produce a perfect answer may be overwhelming for them. Likewise, such students are usually the most deeply affected by the looming prospect of time pressure in an exam. Thus, in their desire to reduce pressure on their students, teachers may unwittingly create more pain for the most anxious of students in both the short-term and the long-term.

Another reason why teachers may set a task without time parameters is that when students are given more time, they often produce more complete work. Completed work gives the teacher more to comment on and the student more to reflect on. Students are more likely to manage to write something at length if they are not under strict exam conditions and thus teachers have more to work with when it comes to marking and feedback. Again, however, we are faced with a painful irony as a result: not only are students practising the wrong skills, their teachers’ time is being wasted as it is being spent giving detailed feedback on irrelevant skills. To be frank, everybody loses.

What is thus most surprising about some teachers’ reluctance to impose time-limits on their students is that they fail to see how setting time-limits is a win-win situation for everyone. Not only will the student benefit from the fact that they are practising precisely what they will need to do in the examination, that student will benefit in the short-term from a homework task that is time-bound and manageable. Far too often, students are set open-ended tasks which can expand to fill the time they have available: for anxious and/or high-achieving students, this can be almost infinite. Likewise, the time that teachers have to spend on marking and feedback is minimal and needs to be tightly-managed, for the sake of their own workload and to ensure that the time they do spend on that task is valuable and effective. I will never forget Professor Paul Black (50% of the brains behind the now-ubiquitous educational concept of Assessment for Learning) stating to a roomful of teachers that we were all marking too much, too often, for too long and (here’s the really devastating bit) that we were all wasting our time. That was 25 years ago. And we’re still doing it.

Outside of workload, a further risk that arises from setting students exam-style questions with no time limit is the illusion of competence. Cognitive psychology has repeatedly demonstrated that students — and indeed their teachers — can be misled by what feels effective in the moment. When a student has unlimited time on a practice essay, their cognitive load is relatively low. There is no pressure to recall information quickly, organise ideas under time constraints or make strategic trade-offs between detail and speed. As a result, tasks feel more manageable and the final product looks polished. Students and teachers might both reasonably conclude that they are exam-ready on that topic, but this belief is built on a false foundation. What are they actually ready for? In real exams, time limits force rapid decision-making. Perhaps what is most important is that students must develop an understanding that examinations do not demand perfect, polished answers: to expect this under time pressure would be grossly unreasonable. Students must learn the importance of producing a sensible, structured response that is as well-crafted as can reasonably be expected in the time allowed. This is not the same thing as what one might produce given infinite preparation and review time, for example when drafting a manuscript for publication. When exam practice is performed without time constraints, students may master individual components of the task (knowledge, technique, structure) but they will fail to integrate them at speed during the exam. Students who have never practised in timed conditions may also experience extreme panic when they first encounter them, at a time when it is too late to build that resilience.

Research tells us that learning sticks when students are forced to retrieve information under conditions that mimic the challenge they will face. Slow, open-book, or time-unlimited tasks do not recreate the retrieval demands of an examination. They allow students to look things up, pause, think in a leisurely fashion or redraft their answers. Yet again, they are practising the wrong skills, as these behaviours are impossible in an exam room. For a skill to transfer from practice to final performance, the practice must include the key features of the performance context. Practising sections of a piano piece slowly can help with accuracy, but to perform at performance tempo, you must ultimately practise at performance tempo: you must also avoid repeating mistakes in your practice, lest they be embedded. The same principle applies to writing essays, solving equations and analysing sources.

Musical practice is not the only example of a process that academic teachers could learn from. The older and more experienced I get, the more I realise what an oversight it is that academic teachers do not listen to and learn from our sporting peers. Athletes understand the training process: they understand how to break challenges down into achievable goals and what is needed in order to practise for a final performance. More and more, I talk to my students about their studies in a way that draws on the processes used by competitive sports men and women.

With many students facing their Mock examinations at around this time, the extent to which they are prepared for those is very much on everyone’s mind. Without a doubt, most teachers understand all too well that students need to be familiar with the look and feel of assessment questions, and try to produce questions which mimic the phrasing and typical format of the questions that they will face. They also know that students need to practise retrieving their knowledge without notes, prompts, or textbook guidance. Yet the thing that is most commonly overlooked with exam-matched practice are realistic time constraints. I would argue that to encourage students to practise answering these without the additional parameter of time constraints is a dangerous and counter-productive waste of everyone’s time.

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.