Teaching & tutoring – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Reluctant Learners

One of the things I find most fascinating about teaching is how much better people are at giving advice about learning than they are at actually learning. We tell children to listen carefully, pay attention, practise, ask questions, accept correction, learn from their mistakes and not give up when something is difficult. All perfectly sensible advice. We then spend our adult lives doing almost exactly the opposite.

None of us like being corrected: we don’t enjoy discovering that we don’t understand something and we can become irritated when we can’t do something immediately. Given the opportunity, we will frequently find a way of blaming the person who is trying to teach us. I know this because I do it myself. We all do it. It is spectacularly difficult to avoid.

There is something peculiarly uncomfortable about being a beginner. You are, by definition, not very good at whatever you are attempting to learn and, worse still, you are having to demonstrate this incompetence in front of somebody who knows more than you do. It is not a comfortable position to be in. Most of us would much rather be the person who already knows what they are doing, which is presumably why so many of us find it easier to give advice than to receive it. There is a considerable difference between being interested in knowing something and being prepared to admit that you don’t know it.

Children, of course, have an advantage here, as they are beginners at almost everything. Nobody expects a five-year-old to be able to read fluently on their first attempt, or a six-year-old to produce a perfect drawing, or a child learning to ride a bicycle to glide elegantly down the road without falling off. Being bad at things is simply a part of childhood. As we get older, however, we become gradually less tolerant of our own incompetence. We also acquire identities: I am good at English; I am hopeless at maths; I am a languages person; I can’t draw; I’m not musical; I’m useless with technology. Such statements can sound like harmless descriptions of ability, but they can also become excuses that enable us to avoid the uncomfortable experience of being a beginner. If I have decided that I am simply “not a maths person”, then struggling with algebra is no longer an unpleasant stage in learning; it is confirmation of something I already believe about myself.

There is another problem, too, and that is that we don’t particularly like being corrected. Being told that you are wrong is not a particularly pleasurable experience, especially if you thought that you were right. Some children are remarkably sensitive to it, but adults aren’t necessarily much better. Watch somebody being taught to use a new piece of technology and you will see this in action. They press the wrong button, the person helping them says, “No, you need to do this,” and there is an almost irresistible temptation to reply, “Yes, that’s exactly what I was trying to do!” I have spent enough time teaching to recognise this phenomenon in myself as well as in my pupils. There is a difference between wanting to know something and being willing to learn it. The first is easy: the second is the bit that requires some effort.

Learning requires us to expose the gap between knowing and not knowing. A pupil who answers a question incorrectly has just demonstrated something useful: there is a gap in their understanding, and the teacher now knows where it is. A student who refuses to answer because they don’t want to get it wrong is protecting their fragile dignity at the expense of their learning. This is just one reason why a classroom where pupils are genuinely allowed and encouraged to make mistakes is so important. If getting something wrong is treated as a catastrophe (or mocked by others), children quite reasonably learn to avoid situations in which they might be wrong, which is disastrous for the learning process.

But there is an even more subtle problem. Sometimes we don’t want to be taught because we believe we already understand. This is one of the reasons students can be so attached to rereading their notes. The material looks familiar, the words make sense and everything feels reassuringly comprehensible. Then they are asked to explain it without looking and suddenly the knowledge has mysteriously disappeared. It hadn’t disappeared, of course. It had never been as securely learned as they thought. Recognition is seductive, whereas retrieval is considerably less comfortable, and yet that uncomfortable business of having to drag something out of your own memory is often precisely what strengthens the learning.

Good teaching can be something of a paradox. A good teacher is supposed to make things understandable, but making something understandable is not the same as making it effortless. Sometimes the most useful thing a teacher can do is to allow a student to struggle for a little while: not endlessly, and certainly not pointlessly, but long enough for them to have a chance to work something out for themselves. This is particularly powerful in one-to-one teaching, when a tutor can focus their attention entirely on one student, without the pressure to move on with the rest of the class. This is also one of the reasons why one-to-one tutoring can be so intensive (and thus why I work in shorter sessions): the student is put under the gentle pressure to figure things out, they cannot pass the baton on to the next learner in the room.

There is a particular moment when you can see a pupil wrestling with a problem and you have to resist the urge to rescue them. You can almost watch the thought process happening. A student who is struggling does not necessarily need rescuing, nor should they be left to flounder indefinitely. Sometimes they need a carefully constructed question or a small suggestion, and sometimes all they need is another minute to think. Getting that balance right is one of the more difficult and hence rewarding parts of teaching. There is a world of difference between a teacher who refuses to help and a teacher who knows that sometimes the most helpful thing they can do is wait; knowing when to step in and when to hold back is the one of the most nuanced parts of teaching, and it is surprisingly difficult to get right.

Good teaching is not simply about explaining things clearly. Of course, explanations matter enormously and a teacher who cannot explain something clearly is not doing their job. But explanation is only a part of teaching. At some point, the pupil has to do something with the explanation, and that usually means attempting something that they cannot yet do perfectly. There is a slightly uncomfortable gap between understanding an explanation when somebody else is talking and being able to apply that understanding when left to your own devices. Good teaching has to cross that gap rather than simply making the explanation increasingly thorough.

It is a peculiar modern tendency to interpret difficulty as evidence of failure. A child finds something hard and we immediately ask what went wrong. We ask whether the teacher is not engaging enough, when all the evidence shows that engagement is a poor proxy for learning. We ask ourselves whether the explanation was insufficiently clear, rather than considering the fact that the student may just need a little more time to wrestle with it. Worst of all, we ask whether the work needs to be simplified or brought down a notch. But learning something difficult is, by definition, difficult; it’s not a problem to be solved.

I suspect that adults find this particularly hard because we have forgotten what it feels like to learn from the beginning. We have become accustomed to competence. The accumulated knowledge and skills of adulthood make an enormous amount of life feel automatic. Then, when somebody asks us to learn something genuinely new, we discover that we are not nearly as clever as we had become accustomed to feeling. It is humbling, and perhaps this is why adults can sometimes be so remarkably defensive when somebody tries to teach them something new.

The best teachers should be enthusiastic learners, cheerleaders for the process of acquiring knowledge. They should remember what it feels like to be confused, particularly when something that ought to be easy suddenly isn’t. They ought to know that horrible moment when everyone else appears to understand and you are still trying to work out what on earth is going on. A teacher who has recently been a beginner at something can have a rather different attitude to a struggling student, because they understand that learning does not feel like a smooth progression from ignorance to mastery. It involves wrong turns, false starts, frustration and the occasional exhilarating moment when something that made no sense five minutes ago suddenly does.

Learning requires a certain amount of intellectual humility. You have to be prepared to admit that you don’t know something and to accept that being bad at something is an unavoidable part of eventually becoming good at it. None of this is comfortable, but it is crucially important. We want children to become confident, independent and capable of coping with difficulty, but the route to all three involves an unavoidable period in which you are none of those things. Before we can become good at something, we have to be prepared to be bad at it.

Perhaps the most important thing we can teach children, therefore, is not simply how to learn but how to be taught. Being teachable is not the same as being passive. It means being willing to look slightly foolish from time to time, to allow somebody else to point out what you have missed, and then to have another go. It is not particularly glamorous, but it is a remarkably useful skill, and one that doesn’t become less important simply because we have left school.

Under the Radar

There is a particular kind of pupil who is every teacher’s dream and, rather ironically, one of the easiest to overlook.

They arrive on time. They have their equipment. They get on with the work without being nagged. They don’t shout across the classroom, throw things, wander around or demand to know when the lesson is going to end. If they don’t understand something, they quietly struggle with it rather than interrupting the lesson to ask for help. When another pupil behaves badly, they wait patiently while the teacher deals with it. When the teacher asks a question, they may know the answer but keep their hand down. They are, in other words, absolutely no trouble whatsoever. And that is precisely the problem.

Every teacher knows that classroom attention is finite. There are only so many minutes in a lesson and only one teacher at the front of the room. If three pupils are arguing, somebody has forgotten their book, another is refusing to work and somebody else is calling out every thirty seconds, it is inevitable that those pupils will consume a disproportionate amount of the teacher’s attention. The conscientious pupil sitting quietly in the corner does not create an urgent problem to be solved. They can wait. The trouble is that “can wait” can gradually become “doesn’t need anything”.

Anyone who has spent any time standing in front of a mixed ability class will recognise the problem. When I was teaching in schools, I was acutely aware of the pupils who required my attention because they were noisy, disruptive, distressed or simply determined to make their presence known. The reality was that they were impossible to ignore: they would put their hands up repeatedly, call out, wander over to the teacher’s desk, complain about the work or announce that they had finished when they very obviously had not. Meanwhile, there might be another child sitting quietly a few desks away, doing exactly what I had asked them to do. The temptation is always to assume that such a child is fine.

One of the things I eventually learned as a classroom teacher was that I had to make a conscious effort to seek out the pupils who were not seeking me out. It sounds absurdly obvious when written down, but in the middle of a busy lesson it is remarkably easy to forget and good teachers are hyper-vigilant to this danger. I would walk around the classroom deliberately, stopping beside students who had not asked for help and looking at what they were doing. I would ask questions of children who rarely volunteered answers and towards the end of my career moved increasingly towards a “no hands” policy for questioning. I made a point of talking to students who had been quietly working while I dealt with somebody else’s vocal crisis. Sometimes the answer would be, “Yes, I’m fine.” Sometimes it would be, “Actually, I don’t understand this bit.” Occasionally, the response would be something that made me realise that I had been making assumptions about a child I thought I knew rather better than I actually did.

There is a wider problem here, because the quiet pupil is not necessarily the same thing as the high-achieving pupil. We sometimes conflate the two. A child can be conscientious and completely lost. They can be desperate not to draw attention to themselves because they are embarrassed about not understanding. They can be working incredibly hard while producing mediocre results because nobody has realised that there is a fundamental gap in their knowledge. Conversely, a child who appears quiet and self-sufficient may be capable of considerably more than the work in front of them is demanding.

The classroom is a social environment as well as an educational one, and children learn very quickly how to operate within it. Some discover that the easiest way to obtain adult attention is to demand it. Others learn that being quiet, compliant and self-sufficient is rewarded with trust and independence. There is nothing inherently wrong with either mode of behaviour, but the consequence can be that the children who need the teacher’s attention least urgently receive the least of it.

This is one reason why I became rather fond of what I used to think of as “quiet checking”. I didn’t need to make a grand intervention or announce to a pupil that I had noticed them. Sometimes I simply needed to stand beside them and look at their work. Sometimes I would ask them to explain what they were doing. Sometimes I would deliberately ask them a question that I knew they were capable of answering, simply because I wanted to hear their voice in a classroom in which the louder pupils had rather more presence.

It is important not to turn this into another job for the child. Telling a quiet pupil that they need to “put their hand up more” is not the answer and I am agog at how often a client’s parent will convey this to me as “feedback” from their child’s school; I had thought those days were over, but I’m afraid there are still thousands of teachers repeating this empty mantra as if it were gold dust. If a child has spent years learning that other people are louder, more confident or more demanding than they are, telling them to become louder is basically telling a timid person that the solution to their problem is to be more extroverted. In truth, it’s the adults that need to change their methodology.

Tutoring is particularly valuable for children of this kind. One-to-one tuition does something that is almost impossible to reproduce in a conventional classroom: it removes the competition for attention entirely. There is no disruptive pupil waiting to be dealt with. There is no classmate calling out the answer before another child has finished thinking. There is no embarrassment about asking a question in front of twenty-nine other people. There is no need to decide whether your problem is important enough to interrupt the teacher. The teacher is already there, and they are there for you. For some children, this is simply transformative.

I have had students who are perfectly capable academically but are extraordinarily reluctant to ask questions in school. They don’t want to be the person who holds everybody else up, or they don’t want to admit that they don’t understand something that their classmates appear to understand. They would rather go home confused than raise their hand and expose that confusion publicly. In a one-to-one lesson, that inhibition often disappears quickly and the child learns, with my encouragement, to interrupt me as often as they wish. There is nobody else to impress, nobody else to keep up with and nobody waiting impatiently while you work something out. You can say, “I don’t understand any of this,” and instead of feeling that you have just made a public declaration of inadequacy, you have simply given your tutor some useful information.

This brings us to the huge advantage that one-to-one tuition boasts over whole-class teaching. In a classroom, a teacher has to make decisions about what the entire class needs. Even the very best teacher cannot spend twenty minutes exploring one student’s misunderstanding while twenty-nine other pupils sit around waiting: but a tutor does not have that problem. If I discover that a student has misunderstood something fundamental, I can stop and deal with it. We can approach it from another direction, I can give them another example, I can ask them to explain it to me and, most importantly of all, I can discover precisely where the misunderstanding occurred and deal with that rather than simply repeating the explanation that didn’t work the first time. Equally, if a student understands something immediately, I don’t need to spend another fifteen minutes explaining it to the entire group. We can move on immediately: the lesson belongs entirely to that child.

I suspect that most teachers, if asked, would be able to name the pupils who have demanded the most of their attention. We remember the ones who made us laugh, the ones who drove us mad, the ones who needed pastoral support and the ones whose behaviour seemed to occupy an extraordinary proportion of our working lives. The quieter children are sometimes harder to remember. Tutoring can give them a voice.

Endgame

As I write, there is one more optional paper outstanding for the OCR Latin GCSE, albeit one that very few of my students will be sitting. By the time this piece is published, all of the examinations will be over.

For those of us who work in education, the end of the examination period marks not only the conclusion of a set of assessments, but also a kind of letting go. While we can explain, reassure, encourage and prepare, we cannot sit the papers for them. When the scripts are placed down on the desk and the clock begins its inexorable march forward, that student must go it alone. The weeks leading up to that moment are often characterised by a steady accumulation of worry. Students fear forgetting what they know. They fear difficult questions, poor sleep, unexpected illness and disappointing results. Even the most capable candidates are rarely immune. Indeed, some of the highest-achieving students often carry the heaviest burdens, acutely aware of the expectations they have placed upon themselves.

Alongside the students stand their parents. Public discussion of examinations often overlooks them, yet many experience the season as a prolonged period of helplessness and worry. They can provide revision resources, quiet spaces and encouragement, but they cannot sit the papers either. They must watch their children navigate stress, self-doubt and exhaustion and, quite naturally, absorb all of those emotions themselves.

Teenagers are notoriously good at emotional projection. Adults who work with teenagers often report walking into a room feeling calm and leaving feeling worried, pressured, angry or overwhelmed, all without immediately understanding why. In psychodynamic theory, it is purportedly possible for someone to unconsciously induce another person to experience feelings that they themselves cannot comfortably hold; rather than saying “I feel anxious”, the anxious person behaves in ways that leave everyone around them feeling anxious. Psychoanalysts have long reported experiencing sudden feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, irritation or helplessness that seem to originate in the patient’s emotional world rather than their own, and they are trained to reflect on their own feelings after a session and identify whether those feelings may reflect those of their clients.

In a similar way, tutors can become vessels into which the worries of students (and indeed their parents) are poured. A student arrives at a session convinced they have forgotten everything. A parent sends a message late in the evening asking whether their child is doing enough. Another student worries that a single mock result has predetermined their future. A parent fears that one poor performance will close doors forever. Perhaps most significantly at this point in the process, a parent accepts their child’s report of a disastrously poor performance in an examination as gospel: in fact, as I have written about before, research shows that students are generally very poor at assessing their own performance.

One of the less discussed realities of educational work is that emotional labour forms a substantial part of the job. We carry confidence when students temporarily lose theirs. We maintain perspective when parents struggle to see beyond an approaching exam date. We absorb fears that we know are disproportionate while simultaneously respecting the fact that, to the person experiencing them, they feel entirely real. During the examination season, this responsibility intensifies. Every session acquires a heightened significance and every practice paper feels loaded with meaning. A student’s disappointment over a dropped mark is rarely about the mark itself, it is about what they believe that mark represents, which is weakness and failure. The role of the educator becomes part teacher, part interpreter and part custodian of perspective.

When I worked in schools, this experience was concentrated within a single cohort. There was a collective rhythm to the year. One group of Year 11 students moved together through the same milestones, the same assemblies, the same revision sessions and eventually the same examination timetable. Their anxieties often echoed one another. For better or for worse, there was a shared atmosphere in the classroom and across the school. The pressure was intense, but it was unified.

Independent tutoring has altered that experience in unexpected ways. Rather than accompanying a single cohort through a common journey, I now work with numerous individual students, whose educational lives rarely intersect. I work across two examination boards and across all the myriad of choices that their teachers can make (hence the variety of end-dates I mentioned in my opening lines). Their examination timetables differ, their schools differ and (to be brutally frank) the quality of the teaching they have received also differs.

The cumulative effect can be surprisingly profound. While a classroom teacher may be carrying the concerns of thirty students in a single year group, an independent tutor may be carrying the concerns of dozens of individuals whose worries arrive separately and require separate attention. There is no collective narrative, rather there are multiple overlapping stories, each wildly significant to the person who is living it.

This is not a complaint. On the contrary, it is one of the privileges of the profession. Trust is not given lightly, particularly by adolescents navigating one of the most scrutinised periods of their education. To be entrusted with those concerns is an honour. Yet it would be dishonest to pretend that educators remain untouched by them. This year, it has been particularly challenging, for we have also been in the process of trying to move house. We accepted an offer on our property back in February and since then we have been playing the horrifically stressful game of strategy with agents, solicitors and some very anxious, very inexperienced first-time buyers. At last, as of this week, it looks like the deal is about to go through. Given the period of anxiety-inducing uncertainty that we’ve been through during the run-up, I’m almost looking forward to the stress of packing.

As examinations take place, many teachers and tutors find themselves carrying a quiet sense of responsibility that extends beyond any rational measure of their influence. We know that success or failure does not rest solely on our shoulders. We know that students ultimately achieve through their own effort and ability. Yet anyone who cares deeply about their work will recognise the feeling. We celebrate their successes personally and experience their disappointments personally too.

This is why the final examination of the season often brings relief not only for students but also for those who have supported them. The relief is different, of course. Students are relieved because the challenge is over. Teachers and tutors are relieved because the waiting can finally begin. There are no more last-minute questions, no more urgent revision plans, no more attempts to compress confidence-building into the final twenty-four hours before an exam. The work has been done. The papers have been written and nothing further can be added.

The weight that educators carry during examination season is rarely visible from the outside. It does not appear in timetables, performance measures or inspection reports. It is measured instead in conversations, emails, reassurances and moments of calm offered to students who need someone to remind them that an examination is important but not defining.

Results day remains ahead, of course. There will be celebrations, surprises and occasional disappointments. Yet results day belongs to a different emotional landscape. The uncertainty of preparation has ended. The long months of revision have passed. Whatever happens in August, the students have already done the hardest part: they have walked into the examination hall and faced the challenge.

Ghosts in the Machine

The last time I wrote about the professional use of generative AI was exactly a year ago. I had discovered that Chat GPT was surprisingly effective at constructing Latin sentences and was delighted that I could use it for such tasks as churning out examples of the ablative absolute. That’s about as far as I expected its capabilities to go and it already felt like a jolly useful gift.

Since then, I have made what I now realise is shamefully limited use of this quite remarkable tool. Only now am I just beginning to understand its full potential and the first epiphany has been that to experience those, one has to pay for it. Who knew? The fee is not huge, in fact I am currently working on the most affordable package which costs me £7 per month. With the work that it helped me to produce in just a couple of hours, it has already paid for itself one hundred times over.

Teachers, you must listen: if you have not already done so, make exploring the capacities of AI for resource-building a priority this summer. It will pay dividends. As this year’s GCSE Latin exams draw to a close and my attention is turned to the new set texts for the coming years, I promised myself that I would explore the possibility of using AI to generate materials. I have been blown away by what it can do.

Recently, I agreed with one of my lovely contacts that, during the summer holidays, he would give me some guidance on how to use AI to do this. Although I have started to have a go on my own, I still plan to meet with him, as the benefit of talking to someone who is much further down the road with something than you are is enormous. Simon Beasley, a fellow tutor and classroom teacher, has been using AI to generate resources, reduce workload and raise standards within his department for some time. I now understand how it is that the new generation of Classics teachers are pumping out such huge quantities of high-quality resources in their limited spare time. In my day (she says, waving her stick), I was doing so from scratch and I was pretty prolific in churning out stuff; these days, the sheer amount that my successors are able to produce is simply jaw-dropping. I had thought that they just had even less of a life than I did during my early years of teaching: I now appreciate that it is all thanks to AI.

So, what can it do and what are the pitfalls? Both questions are hugely important, because the use of AI is frankly dangerous unless you know what you’re doing. I don’t mean “know what you’re doing” when it comes to the AI itself — frankly, I haven’t got a clue what’s going on, how it does it and whether we are soon facing James Cameron’s rise of the machines. I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. What I mean is, you need to know what you’re doing in the subject you are asking it to help you with. Because, fellow humans, AI definitely can and does hallucinate. Ignore this at your peril.

Firstly, what it can do. I have been using Chat GPT to help me to prepare practice papers and revision questions for the new set texts. Rather wonderfully, it told me how to train it to do so. I asked it what to do and it told me that I need to give it as many examples as possible of past papers, which is no problem as I have them all: this in itself was the first revelation of being a paid user — you can upload a seemingly limitless number of files and it will read and analyse them in milliseconds. What then happens is you enter into an extended dialogue with it as you invite it to start generating what you want it to create for you. You critique its output and it learns as you do so. Even more wonderfully, it evidentially starts to develop its own instincts for what it is that you’re looking for and reflects this back to you. Furthermore, due to its capacity to “look” at multiple examples of past papers alongside each other in a way that the human brain struggles to do, it is able to point out patterns, quirks and minor changes in how the board have presented and structured the papers over the years, some of which I had never even noticed. The fact that it can do so in seconds is merely an added bonus. To be clear, it is actually generating the resources for you, right down to the fact that it can produce them as a Word document for you to download and edit. It’s unbelievable. I am still reeling from the excitement at what it can do.

Now, on to the pitfalls. There are three things that I think new users of AI need to be aware of in order to make safe and productive use of it. Firstly, Chat GPT is only as good as the instructions and the material that you provide it with. Computer scientists back in the 20th century had already developed the acronym GIGO, standing for “garbage in, garbage out”, summing up the principle that if flawed, incomplete or incorrect data is entered into a system, the resulting output will inevitably be just as flawed and useless, sometimes more so. If you’re not clear and explicit, and/or if you provide it with limited exemplars, you won’t get anything good out of your project. So far, so obvious.

Secondly, Chat GPT can and does hallucinate. I don’t know enough about how AI works to understand why, but it is the spookiest thing about it. In some ways, I guess it reflects how it is not merely a computer but a generative entity with the capacity to learn, one which mimics human thinking; humans go off at wild tangents and get things spectacularly wrong, and so does Chat GPT. Being of the capacity that it is, way beyond what a single human brain is capable of, it does so on a spectacular scale and you have to be aware of this.

For example, for my first project, I asked it to help me to develop some practice papers and questions for one of the new prose texts, which is an extract from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, the tale of Cupid and Psyche. I provided it with all the past papers from previous years on different texts, it analysed the board’s questioning style and created a style guide for how OCR formulates its exam papers. After a bit of back and forth with me pointing out what I felt it had got wrong, we were ready for it to start producing something for the new texts, so I provided it with the exact lines of the text that the board have prescribed. I anticipated no issue with this, having pasted the lines directly into the chat. Yet, when we were part way through the second paper, it told me that it thought “Juno’s speech” would be a good choice for the 8-mark style question. Now, I have prepared the new texts, but I do not yet know them well; despite this, I felt sure that to my memory there was no speech by Juno in the prescribed lines. I hunted through the published version of the prescribed text and then asked Chat GPT where it was getting what it called “Sections 14 and 15” from, since the board have divided the text into 13 sections only. It then cheerfully informed me that I was right: it had made up Sections 14 and 15.

This brings me to my third and final warning about my new best friend. It is remarkably charming and winsome. It is built to be agreeable and it rarely pushes back against you. It also presents its hallucinations as facts and, when you point out that it is talking out of its proverbial derrière, it cheerfully agrees with you. There is a danger here, perhaps in the same way that there is a danger when working with excessively amenable colleagues: you can end up in serious trouble, because there is nobody willing and able to tell you when you’re getting it wrong. To mitigate against this, I have learned is to poke it and challenge it robustly, to play devil’s advocate. Otherwise its capacity for people-pleasing could be quite catastrophic.

In my darker moments, I suspect that this is how it will take over the world. With a smile on its face.

Surprise, surprise?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another brick in the wall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This wonderful photo was taken by Maria Teneva on Unsplash

Cambridge hangovers

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

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

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

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

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

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

A general lack of guidance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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