Education – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Let me count the ways

How do we let young people down in 2025? Let me count the ways. Beyond our inexplicable willingness to allow them unfettered 24-hour access to the dark world of the internet, beyond our discomfort with and unwillingness to take the responsibility that lies with adults, to be in charge and to be the grown-ups in the room, beyond this lurks yet another way in which we can let them down. We can teach them an inflated sense of their own importance; we can let them believe that the world revolves around them and let them imagine that, when they reach adulthood, their employer will bend to their every whim. How do we do that? Let me give you an example.

It is not often that I read a post on LinkedIn, as it’s never an enriching experience. But imagine my horror when I happen upon someone who claims to be a fellow educationalist openly celebrating the news that a child is missing their lessons for no good reason other than the fact that it is their birthday. “Let’s normalise taking your birthday off without any further explanation or drama required,” she exclaimed. “Life’s too short not to!” She also celebrated “the beauty of flexi/online schooling,” showing at least some awareness of the fact that the average UK school would take a pretty dim view of any student – or their parents – citing a birthday as a reason to take a day off.

To be clear, it was apparent from her post that this person was talking about the kind of tutoring that is there to replace traditional schooling, not supplement it. As someone who works with students who attend mainstream school, I have had several occasions on which parents have cancelled their evening appointment with me due to birthday celebrations, and that is just as it should be: the child has already done a day’s schooling and it seems more than reasonable to reserve their evening time for birthday celebrations with family and/or friends. But this tutor was celebrating the fact that their student was missing an entire day’s worth of schooling, and even seemed to be implying that – in an ideal world – schools would be willing to accommodate such a decision. The responses were mainly positive, with several people – all of them no doubt making money out of the increasing trend of parents taking their children out of the traditional education system – applauding the sentiment. “Brilliant! Joy, wellbeing and belonging first, then education will flow and be valued” asserted one, a remarkable claim which I would love to see the data on. “All my students take their birthdays off, and I encourage it,” said another. “Absolutely brilliant,” said a third: “I too encourage my students to take their birthdays off!”

There were one or two of us speaking up for sanity, so all is not lost. One or two people commented that allowing students to take random days off is disruptive to both the teacher and the learner. I commented that allowing students to take time off in this way is surely setting them up for future disappointment in life. There are not many people in this world who are so blessed that they can pick and choose whether or not they go into work on a particular day. If at least part of education’s purpose is to prepare students for working life, then what kind of precedent are we setting by normalising the expectation of a day off on their birthday, rather than explaining to them that school is still there – birthday or not – and reassuring them that celebrations will be had when it is finished for the day?

There are innumerable jobs which do not allow for days off at your preferred time, including some quite noble careers. Teaching, for example, is well known as a profession in which you do get lots of time away from the chalkface, but the price you pay for the significant chunks of flexible free time undeniably allowed to you is that the times when you are tied to the chalkface are 100% dictated by your employer. It is quite remarkably difficult for classroom teachers to negotiate any time away from their classroom, for blindingly obvious reasons. I remember a wealthy friend once invited myself and my husband to Glyndebourne, in an ill-fated attempt to convert me to opera. “You’d have to take the afternoon off,” he said, airily. I snorted with mirth, for this was just one example of how someone in his wealth-bracket tends to presume that the world works for everybody else. It was almost worth me booking an appointment with the Headteacher, just to see the look on her face when I requested the afternoon off “to attend the opera.” Many of our young people will end up in jobs like mine, when time off at one’s own behest is simply not on the cards. Granted, many of them won’t. The point is: all jobs include “have-tos” (true even for my wealthy barrister friend), and young people need to learn this simple fact. Otherwise, we are letting them down.

Beyond the fact that school attendance teaches children about the “have-tos” in life, allowing time off at a child’s behest devalues education itself. Taking students out of school for random events should not be done lightly, for in doing so we are inevitably sending a message to a child that their schooling is not important to us. This then echoes down the line when it comes to their day-to-day studies, their preparation for examinations, their overall efforts to achieve academically. Why should it matter to them, if we are constantly undermining the message that it matters to us by taking them out of school?

My third and final objection to the idea of allowing and encouraging students to take time out of school for their birthday is perhaps a little controversial, so brace yourselves. Here goes. Quite simply, I think it is too self-indulgent. I am so depressed at how society seems to be shifting more and more towards an entirely individualistic mindset, one which prioritises the wants and needs of the individual over and above the needs of the community as a whole. While I would never object to the idea that one should be mindful of one’s own health and wellbeing, indeed I write often about my efforts to centre my own, the expectation of one’s right to do so has become so unquestionable that we are beginning to forget what binds us together as a community. In our relentless pursuit of independence and self-efficacy, I fear we may end up with a world full of egocentrics.

In the grand scheme of humanity, nobody’s birthday is actually that important, because nobody is the centre of the universe. We need to keep our special dates in perspective. They matter to us and – if we are lucky enough – to those who care about us. They do not – nor should they – impact upon the rest of the world. If that seems a little too nihilistic for your liking, then here’s another way of looking at it: if it’s their birthday, wouldn’t it be better for a child to go into school and celebrate by sharing the love with their classmates? Over the years, I have had several colleagues who liked to make a fuss on their birthday, so they brought in cakes and shared them with all of us. It was an absolutely lovely thing to do and everybody enjoyed it. And everyone wished them a happy birthday! So, if we believe that birthdays are so special and important, then why don’t we teach our children that their birthday is a chance to bring some joy to their usual routines and responsibilities, not an opportunity to evade them?

Hang in there, folks!

“Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.”

Peter Ustinov

This week, I have had a high volume of messages and phone calls from parents who are worried about their child’s progress. Witnessing your teenager navigate the pressures of impending exams can be a source of significant anxiety for parents and carers; balancing the desire to support them academically while managing your own concerns can be a delicate task, and never more so in this crucial period between Mock results and the final examinations, the proposed dates of which have just been announced. This year, both exam boards have elected to place all three of the Latin examinations prior to Half Term.

While all parents are anxious for their children to do well, the situation varies from client to client. Some have a child who is seemingly crippled by their own anxiety, struggling to study effectively because of the extreme pressure they put on themselves to succeed. Others report that their child is so laid back (or in denial) about the examination process that they’re doing little to nothing at all, blissfully convinced that the eleven weeks remaining between now and their first examination is an absolute eternity of time, during which they will – at some point – address what it is that they need to learn.

Parenting is like any relationship: it has a dynamic of its own and there are pressures from multiple angles. Every parent wants what’s best for their child and the anxiety stems from worrying whether we or they could be doing more. Yet parental anxiety can inadvertently influence a teenager’s stress levels and when parents exhibit high levels of concern, teens may internalise this stress, leading to increased pressure and potential performance issues. Recognising and managing our own anxiety is therefore crucial in fostering a calm and supportive atmosphere – but this is much easier said than done!

Children often mirror their parents’ emotional responses, so most psychologists advocate for modelling the kind of behaviour that you think your child would benefit from: demonstrating calmness and confidence can help your teen to adopt a similar mindset. This is not to say that you should not share your anxieties, indeed discussing your feelings openly, without projecting undue stress, can encourage your teen to share their concerns as well. Many parents I know find the car is a great place to encourage this kind of openness, because by necessity the discussion has to be had without eye contact; many people – especially teenagers – can find eye-contact really confronting when talking about difficult things, so opening up or encouraging your child to do so while your eyes are on the road can be useful. If you need to have a really difficult conversation, too difficult to be had while you’re driving, then doing so on a walk can have a similar effect: again, your gaze is facing forward and you’re walking side-by-side, which can dial down the intensity of what you’re saying and make it feel less threatening for both of you.

Many parents underestimate the amount of pressure that they are under while their child is preparing for exams, so it is important to focus on self-care when you can. Engaging in activities that reduce your own stress levels not only benefits you but also sets a positive example for your teen – remember, they learn from your role-modelling, so making time for yourself is not selfish: it is modelling for your child the best and healthiest way to handle their own stress, both now and in the future.

In terms of practical solutions when it comes to study, promoting efficient study techniques can reduce exam-related stress. Assist them in setting achievable goals for each study session to maintain motivation and a sense of accomplishment. Encourage evidence-informed methods such as summarising information, teaching you or someone else the material, or creating mind maps to enhance understanding and retention. Rather than reading and highlighting, encourage your child to read, set the book to one side and then try to summarise the information they have just read in their own words. This is by far the most effective aid to memory, as it forces the brain to reconstruct the information, which is essentially how memory works. Utilising past papers under timed conditions can build familiarity with exam formats and time management skills, so this is another essential tool in the process.

If you’re looking for detailed advice on how to go about studying effectively, I would highly recommend a book called The Psychology of Effective Studying by Dr. Paul Penn, who is a senior lecturer in Psychology at the University of East London. I interviewed him for Teachers Talk Radio a few years ago, and he is an absolute goldmine of evidence-based, practical advice. I would recommend the book for adults (it is aimed at undergraduates), but Paul also has a YouTube channel, which makes much of his advice really accessible for younger people. If you’re finding it difficult to persuade your teenager to try more effective methods of study, then Paul’s channel could be a great place to direct them towards.

Spurious pipelines

If you’re searching for a reason why so many of us have left the teaching profession in the last few years, then look no further than the ceaseless school-bashing that so many apparent professionals are willing to partake in.

I’d like to think that the situation is improving, but just this week we had a self-styled “training and strategy consultant” who claims to “help parents and professionals understand children with trauma” share the image below yet again and state as follows: “The power of this image is its simplicity. It makes us feel uncomfortable. And it should.” Yet another armchair philosopher, who has never taught in a UK school, willing to promote the lazy stereotype that schools are institutions of oppression. In response to the understandable pushback he received from some professional teachers, he commented “I am very happy for people to criticise this image and add to the discussion.” Ha! Yeah, right. People who promote this kind of facile commentary for clicks are not interested in discussion; they’re only interested in being patted on the back by the people who agree with them.

What’s most depressing is the number of people – many teachers included – that buy into this kind of nonsense. So many teaching professionals are so beleaguered by their circumstances, so ground down by the incessant white noise that tells us that the system is failing, they can’t even see when they’re being sold a self-defeating falsehood.

I have no intention of spending my time debunking the ludicrous premise here, that any school issuing basic level sanctions and – in extreme circumstances – exclusions, somehow sets a child on an inevitable path to crime. There have been plenty of well-informed challenges to this frankly mind-bogglingly stupid assumption, which fails to take into account the most obvious fact that correlation is not causation. How on earth can someone who claims to be an intelligent and empathetic professional fail to comprehend why it might indeed be the case that adults who commit crimes deemed worthy of imprisonment might have been children who found themselves in trouble at school? Can anyone honestly be that stupid? Are they so blind to the realities of human nature that they have to pretend that every teenager is a pure blank slate onto which The System somehow stamps an inescapably dark future? This is not to say that children who find themselves excluded from school are not troubled and should not be provided for. They are society’s responsibility and society’s problem. But so are the hundreds of other individuals in that school. Schools do not exclude lightly, indeed they go out of their way to avoid it. But if some recent, violent events have taught us anything, they surely have taught us the obvious fact that there are certain offences that warrant exclusion. Bringing a knife into school is just one of those offences.

I have written before about the fact that poor behaviour in schools was a significant part of what drove me out of the profession. In many ways, this is a simplistic way of looking at things. What truly drove me out was the presumption – in many schools and in much of society as a whole – that the poor behaviour was my responsibility and indeed my fault. Something I hear frequently from tutees are reports that their teacher “cannot control the class” and I never let it pass without challenge. “Why is it your teacher’s job to manage the way that you and your friends choose to behave?” I like to ask them. They tend to back-pedal vigorously, usually of course denying that they or their friends have anything to do with the poor behaviour being reported. But the truth is, this is what the kids genuinely think, this is what their parents think and this is what society thinks. Everyone believes that teachers should somehow, by dint of their vibrant personality and an indefatigable love for the traditional educational process, be able to manage and control the whims of the 30 individuals in front of them. If they can’t do that, it’s because they’re too uninspiring, too reticent, too reactive, not good enough at their job or they take their job too personally.

The truth is that the only way for schools to manage behaviour successfully is by setting their standards sky-high and expecting their staff, the students and their parents to be fully on board with the school’s ethos. That ethos must permeate every interaction and every conversation that takes place between every student and every member of staff. Such a culture is extremely hard work to create and there will be large numbers of people – professionals included – who will attempt to push back against it and defend a more individualised approach, in which each teacher is left to carve their own path. This individualised approach is how most schools are run and it doesn’t work. If you want to be sure of what behaviour is like in a school, find out how cover lessons go, most especially those supervised by a supply teacher. That’s the only way you’ll find out whether the school runs on a unified ethos or whether it runs on the force of personality and/or the years of brow-beaten experience chalked up by its staff. From the stories I hear from the classroom, we’ve got a long way to go.

Radical traditionalism

It is easy to forget, sometimes, how far we have come. In a social milieu that is changing so fast it makes your head spin, it can be tempting to hark back to simpler times, when teachers ruled the classroom and when students did as they were told. The trouble is, as a Professor of Greek once said to me, the good old days were never really that good. “In the good old days,” he mused, “with my background, I wouldn’t have been a Professor and a Head of Department. I’d have been ram-rodding the drains.”

One of the most frustrating things about politicians is they all seem to believe that they understand education. In fact, it’s not just politicians: it’s everyone. Everyone has been to school and so everyone can and does have a supposedly valid opinion on how schools should be run and how children should be taught. But as Katharine Birbalsingh observed this week, the “government team saying the Education Secretary doesn’t need lectures from successful school leaders because the Education Secretary went to school herself would be like the Health Secretary saying he doesn’t want to hear from doctors because he once went to hospital.”

Birbalsingh was frustrated by a recent (and extremely brief) audience that she and other extraordinary Headteachers had been given with the Education Secretary, who by all accounts was distinctly uninterested in finding out how a school with a socially disadvantaged intake such as Michaela’s can achieve results which rival those of Eton College. The Education Secretary was not in the least bit curious to explore how Michaela had reached such heights of attainment. I’d like to say that I find this extraordinary, unbelievable and shocking, but I don’t. Until people let go of their passionate political affiliations – and I find it highly unlikely that an elected Member of Parliament is capable of doing so – then education will continue to remain a bruised and punctured political football.

One of the most depressing things about modern times is how unwilling people seem to learn from the past. We have seen a plethora of radical experiments and we now have a wealth of evidence about which environments work best for the majority of students. With the opening up of academia and a terrific movement towards making the most useful discoveries in cognitive science accessible to the average classroom teacher, we also know a huge amount about how children learn and remember. Despite all of this, huge swathes of educationalists remain unshakably wedded to outmoded ideas. The infuriating thing is, they consider themselves to be the progressives, kicking against what they call “the traditional methods”. But surely, if you’re hanging on to so-called “progressive” ideas that were first mooted more than 50 years ago, then you’re anything but a radical. You’re a dyed-in-the-wool conservative.

I find it indescribably irksome that my stance on learning and education – which has changed radically over the years along with my own experience, with the reading I have done and with my willingness to change my mind – is labelled as “traditionalist”. If you want to know about “traditional” in its very worst sense then you could have sat through one of the Divinity lessons I was forced to attend at school. Oh yes. Divinity. Imagine that. The lessons were led by a Reverend and the man seemed determined to spread and perpetuate ignorance to the best of his deeply limited ability. He lived in a fantasy world, in which children were still drilled in their Bible studies at home, thoroughly steeped in an understanding of chapter and verse. Our so-called “lessons” consisted of him selecting a passage for one of us to read from the Bible, after which he would pontificate circuitously for the rest of the hour. The worst thing was, due to his unmitigated fantasy about our Bible knowledge, he offered no education as to the shape and structure of the Bible, he simply barked a reference followed by a name and waited for the girl to start reading. Any girl who found herself floundering to locate “Mark, chapter 15, verses 32-38” or whatever reference he had pronounced, was left to flounder. If she started reading from the wrong section he would simply shout “NOOOOOOO!” and wait for her to try again. On occasion, this happened multiple times until the girl managed to stumble upon the correct lines. I don’t think it even occurred to him that most children in the room wouldn’t even have understood what “chapter and verse” actually meant.

What indescribable apathy in the face of a golden opportunity. This man had no exam to prepare us for, no dull syllabus to force his hand. (The school, it may interest you to know, did not allow us to sit a GCSE in Religious Studies, because it objected to the fact that to do so would require studying “other religions”.) With such total freedom, the Reverend could have given us an immensely useful grounding in a text that has arguably shaped western values and western literature in more significant ways than any other written work in history. But no, he couldn’t be bothered. He was just waiting for retirement.

So, I smile to myself when I am reminded that I am supposedly in the “traditionalist” camp when it comes to education. Personally, I think that those of us in this camp should identify as something with a bit more of a rallying cry. How about “radical traditionalist”? A radical traditionalist believes that knowledge is not only important but the right of every child. A radical traditionalist takes on board the overwhelming body of evidence that direct instruction is more effective than discovery learning when working with novices. A radical traditionalist refuses to accept the soft bigotry of low expectations, the heinous and insulting prejudice that kids from ordinary backgrounds aren’t capable of academic rigour. I find it indescribably depressing how many people who consider themselves to be genuine liberals cheer on the pursuit of mediocrity for our most disadvantaged and vulnerable members of society, whilst patting themselves on the back for being progressive. Quite honestly, I don’t know how they sleep at night.

Revelations

One of the strangest things about humans is what they reveal about themselves. Never is this more apparent than at a school Consultation Evening, when the parents or guardians of a child sit opposite their child’s teachers to discuss their child’s progress or – at times – to reveal in glorious technicolour their warped sense of reality and chaotic lives to the person sitting opposite them.

Recently, The Huffington Post invited readers in the teaching profession to reveal the most remarkable things that parents have said to them over the years. “When teachers go into their profession, they do so with the expectation that they will have to deal with some student misbehaviour. … But when you speak with teachers about the behaviours that cause them the most distress, it’s not the students who are to blame, it’s their parents — some of whom seem to badly need a lesson in courtesy, respect and common sense.”

“I had a parent tell me that their child … was a genius and I just wasn’t smart enough to comprehend that” said one. “I had a parent tell me that they didn’t need to teach their child morals, as that is what school should be teaching them,” reported another. Over the years, I also experienced some quite remarkable condescension from some of the adults I had to deal with, although nothing quite this bad: “I once had a parent tell me, ‘I worked in daycare too, then I decided to get a career’,” reported one pre-school teacher with 17 years’ experience. This comment is particularly revealing of a fact that became apparent during the pandemic- how some people see schools as there to provide day care for their children, not an education.

Generally speaking, such people are so rare and so jaw-droppingly ridiculous that I have wiped the recollection of most such comments from my memory. The majority of parents are respectful and only too supportive of their child’s teachers. One memory I do maintain, however, is not of a child’s parents setting out to undermine me, but rather seeming to reveal such malfunction in their own lives that I have never forgotten it. This happened in my very first year of teaching, which is now 25 years ago, so I feel pretty safe telling the story. It was my very first Consultation Evening, one of hundreds that I would attend, and it remains the one I have never forgotten. It was also the time when I truly learnt the definition of passive-aggressive behaviour, or what in modern parlance is often referred to as gas-lighting.

The parents of this particular child were divorcing but were attending the Consultation Evening together with their child. There is nothing unusual about this and most manage to do so with only the faintest whiff of awkwardness in the air. I remain convinced that the overwhelming majority of parents want the best for their children and that includes protecting them from the worst of the fall-out when it comes to a separation. These parents, however, appeared to be going through a particularly acrimonious separation and there had been some confusion (possibly confounded by at least one of the people involved) about to whom communications regarding their child’s progress should be sent. This was made clear to me the moment that the family sat down – the child deposited like a military buffer zone between the individuals at war – and informed me that this was the case. Not a great start.

Neither parent would look at or speak to the other parent, so it was close to impossible to have a normal conversation that would include their child in the process without extreme awkwardness. Nevertheless, I pressed on as best I could, taking the opportunity to explain how well their child had been doing recently (remarkably well, given the family situation in which they found themselves). Just as I was beginning to round up my report, I was interrupted by the child’s mother, who appeared agitated and unable to contain herself any longer.

“I wish to make one thing absolutely crystal clear,” she barked, pointing her finger at me. “I wish to clarify the fact that I have not – nor have I ever – been suffering from any kind of mental illness. There is nothing wrong with me!”

There was a long, mortifying pause.

“Um. Okay,” I said, unsure where this was going but very sure that I didn’t like it or have any idea of how to handle it.

“So whatever has been said about me – and I mean by anyone – is not true. I want it wiped from your records!”

Personally, I was unaware of anything on anyone’s record about mental health issues, and I was genuinely at a loss as to what to say. Now, with more experience, I realise that I should have said something like “you clearly have some concerns, so can I suggest that you speak to …” and pass the buck onto someone considerably higher up the pay grade than I was (which, at that time, was pretty much everybody; I suspect the assistant caretaker earned significantly more than I did). From my recollection, however, I was incapable of anything other than opening and closing my mouth like a dying fish.

“I hope I’ve made myself clear,” snapped the mother, at which point her soon-to-be-very-ex-husband piped up.

“As I was saying,” he remarked, smoothly, “I’m keen to be kept informed of any ways in which I can help with vocabulary learning. Do you have any particular suggestions?”

There was another silence, while I stared at him, then at his trembling wife. It was as if she had not spoken. She did not exist. Her presence was not merely irrelevant, it was a non-fact. He had not heard her, for she was not there.

He continued.

“Just keep me in the loop with regards to anything I can do to help in that department.”

So, that was my stark introduction to the psychological concept of passive aggressive behaviour. I could immediately begin to see where this woman’s apparent neurosis was coming from. When you have someone who quite literally acts as if you have been expunged from the universe, where do you go other than the path of frustration, protestation and rage? What choice do you have other than to act out? I tried to imagine a lifetime of being ignored, of being talked over, of being erased and expunged. I’m not sure I would have handled it with any more dignity or diplomacy than she was managing.

To this day I will never know the full truth behind what was going on in that family, but I do know that the acrimonious divorce took them down a path of heart-breaking consequences for their child. Since they were unable to agree on custody and access and since the child was old enough for the courts to take their individual preferences into account, the child was forced to testify in open court about which parent they would prefer to live with and why. Quite how a couple who once made vows to each other and chose to bring a child into this world can end up so horribly broken I struggle to imagine, but the consequences for all concerned were devastating. So, more than any ignorant insults hurled at me and the profession I represent over the years – and there have been a few – it is this early experience that I recall with genuine regret.

Routines and comfort zones

As I write this, I’m in absolute agony. I can barely move without yelping. Rolling over in bed has been a challenge and I am getting up out of my chair like a 70-year-old. There’s me thinking that I normally make myself work hard on my twice-weekly visits to the gym. Turns out that – for quite some time – I’ve just been playing at it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been making progress. On several of the machines, I can now select a heavier option than I have been able to previously, and my strength has definitely continued to improve incrementally. But if I’m honest, that progress has been very, very slow and has quite possibly reached a plateau over the last few weeks.

This week, in place of the deep-tissue massage and advice-session I normally get from my physical therapist, we met at the gym and he coached me in my usual routines. Flipping heck. I truly had not realised just how much I was staying in my comfort zone and what a difference it would make to me, having someone to push me beyond it. While Greg is anything but a Sargeant Major type, it’s amazing what a great motivator it is to have someone beside you, telling you to add more weight, stretch a bit further, try a bit harder.

“What weights should we use for walking lunges?” he asked. “Um … 4s or 5s?” I said, hopefully, knowing full well that he would push me up to working with 6s. Off he jogged to the weight store and returned, brimming with mischief. “They didn’t have any 6s,” he said, nonchalantly. “Try with these 8s.”

Ignoring this transparent deceit and weighed down by an extra 16 kilos on top of my body weight of 47, I waggled my way through a series of walking lunges. Greg did the same beside me, holding more than double the weight and chatting all the time about his son and his daughter. I’ve taught both of them, of course, because, as an ex-teacher in the village comprehensive, it is a local by-law that I must have taught the children of every single community service-provider: the personal trainer, the Sainsbury’s delivery guy, the gardener, the builder, the roofer, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. While Greg chatted, I puffed and panted and my glutei maximi made it more than apparent to me that there would be trouble ahead. Yesterday and today, that trouble became manifest.

Over the last 48 hours I have felt almost as bad as I did on the very first occasion I tried this new-fangled business of resistance training. Ouch. It’s been a serious wake up call, the sudden realisation that – while habits and routines are essential and the stuff of a (healthy) life – they carry with them the risk of complacency and comfort. Things have been way too easy at the gym recently, because I have let them be so. I cannot remember the last time that I experienced serious delayed-onset muscle soreness after a visit, and that’s something to work on from here.

This week, I also met a new client, one who is struggling when it comes to committing her work to memory. Whether it be the set text, noun endings or vocabulary, there is a serious amount of rote-learning required in the subject of Latin, and many students struggle with the sheer volume of what they need to commit to long-term memory. Supposedly, she has been doing all the right things and has made regular use of flashcards, but the fact that the process is not working is most likely because it’s been too comfortable.

So, I encouraged her to work proactively on selecting the cards that she is struggling with and focus on those. Flashcards are for the words you don’t know, not the ones you do. I also warned against the well-known risk attached to using the flashcards alone, rather than getting somebody else to test you – the temptation to turn the card over too quickly and allow yourself to recognise the answer rather than to hold off until you retrieve it can be great; indeed it can be something that students do unconsciously, without even realising it. Putting somebody else in charge of the cards is a great way to mitigate against this risk. “It should feel uncomfortable,” I preached. “If you’re finding the flashcards too easy, you’re doing it wrong.” Huh. Physician, heal thyself, I thought ruefully this morning, as my muscles caterwauled their protest against Monday’s new and unusual routines.

What has this taught me? Well, it’s been a bit of a jolt. It has reminded me that we are all susceptible to the almost inevitable tendency to settle into a comfort zone, to keep patting ourselves on the back for a job well done when in reality we’ve done very little. It has also reminded me that going it alone is inherently flawed. I really understand why people hire personal trainers on a long-term basis – not because any of the exercises that they are doing are particularly complex or dangerous or requiring an expert, but because it’s just too easy not to push yourself. Paying someone to motivate you can be hugely valuable, and this has given me pause for thought. While I’m not sure it’s necessary for me to hire someone to train with twice a week every week, I can totally see the value in an occasional booster session to question my habits, to shake up my routine and to remind me to push myself harder. That’s something that I shall be investing in from this point forward.

Digital snake-oil

Picture the scene. You’re in a posh restaurant. The sort with linen napkins, thick carpets and snooty waiters. Everyone is dressed smartly and all the subliminal messaging is telling you that – whatever the food is like – you are expected to behave in a certain way.

The couple next to you are hunched over, staring at their smart phones. So are the couple behind them. Your partner is also staring at his phone. When your gaze returns to the table, your own phone awaits. No, this is not an indictment of society’s mass phone addiction, it is an unfortunate situation rendered necessary by the fact that your holiday-provider has decided that Going Digital is A Good Idea. As part of your eye-wateringly expensive holiday package you might be entitled to eat in this restaurant, but apparently you’re not entitled to a menu that you can actually hold in your hands. No, you must access the menu by “following the QR code” using the camera on your phone. Each table has a glass ornament displaying the code, so you whip your smartphone out and away you go.

It was not just the fact that seeing people scrolling on their phones in a restaurant was depressing – which it was. It was also the fact that accessing the menu in this way afforded no tangible gains whatsoever: it was, in fact, a substantially sub-optimal way of looking at a menu. The very need for scrolling was an irritation, when real menus are arranged in a way that allows you to scan the whole offering in one. A traditional menu would have been- quite simply – a hundred times better. Even my husband heartily agreed, a man who had a career in software engineering and is a natural lover of all things digital.

This spectacularly pointless switch to digital puzzled me for the rest of the holiday. With the best will in the world, why would somebody do this? Have we actually hit the point where some people believe that things are made definitively better purely for the reason that they are sprinkled with digital fairy dust? The quite extraordinary stupidity of the whole thing was rendered even more ludicrous by the fact that the holiday company did not even have the imagination to exploit the (albeit slim) advantages that “going digital” could bring to the party. For example, if they were so determined to go the digital route, then why not share the QR code with customers ahead of time and encourage them to start choosing their menu options in advance? This would at least have added a whiff of anticipation, although I still would argue that a traditional menu would have been infinitely preferable once we were sat in the restaurant itself. Easy advance-sharing was literally the only potential advantage I could imagine arising from the digital model, and they didn’t even bother to do that. So, the gormless march towards everything going digital advances, it seems, with no thought applied either to the potential consequences or to how to actually reap the potential advantages it might afford.

Increasingly, secondary school students are provided with “everything they need” online. While digital tools will have meant some investment on the school’s part, I am suspicious that a lot of what happens now is actually about reducing their photocopying budget, an undeniable thorn in the side of every HoD who has responsibility for their department’s costs. Honestly, what schools spend on technology generally pales into insignificance when compared to their yearly photocopying budget. While really successful schools who are getting fantastic results and impressive Progress 8 scores have broadly shifted towards the use of printed booklets for the students and moved away from digital presentations on the part of the teacher, vast swathes of schools (including in the private sector) have shifted towards a digital model, where everything is presented to the students electronically and nothing is printed out. Ker-ching.

I have worked with dozens of students in this position and have seen the disastrous fallout of what this digital model does for students’ learning and understanding. Inevitably, like anything inherently flawed, it is the already-disadvantaged that it leaves behind. People seem to assume that being “disadvantaged” means a lack of access to expensive technology and it is true that there can be glaring differences between what an affluent child has access to by comparison with one who is eligible for free school meals. But this is not the only way that students can be disadvantaged and it is vastly outweighed by other, more serious handicaps. Think prior attainment, think organisational skills, think access to an ever-increasing range of vocabulary, think time and space. Students who are already struggling in class for a myriad of reasons – some of which may or may not relate to poverty – are demonstrably left behind when adults demand that they manage both their time and their resources in such an abstract way, often without guidance.

There is so much nonsense talked about the younger generation being fully au fait with the full range of digital technology on offer, as if being born in the digital age bestows young people with an innate knowledge and understanding of the skills and mindset required to navigate towards progress in the modern age. The reality is that most kids are completely clueless when it comes to managing their learning remotely. Of course they are! Just because a child has been pressing icons on the screen of an iPad since they were a toddler, this does not imbue them with the organisational skills required to manage their learning online. To assume so would be like assuming that a toddler who has mastered the fun that can be had from a pop-up reading book is thus fortified with the skills and knowledge required to negotiate a library full of journals, encyclopaedias and reference manuals.

An increasing number of students that I work with are studying the WJEC/Eduqas GCSE syllabus, the creators of which produce a simply baffling array of resources that even I took a while to get my head around. Some of them are aimed at teachers, some of them in theory designed to be student-friendly. Most schools dump all of these resources into an area where students can access them, a collection of ponderous PDF files that are long and academically challenging. The one file which is explicitly aimed at students is designed as a student booklet, with space in which students can write their translation and notes. Most schools don’t even bother print this one out, instructing the students to work electronically. I have tutees who have not held a pen in class for years, so wedded is their school to the use of tablets or Chromebooks. I could honestly weep for their basic skills and feel outraged that so many schools are so blatantly ignoring the research that we have on the link between the use of a pen and memory. These students come to me with simply no idea what they have supposedly studied, what materials are in their possession and what they are supposed to do with them. They are completely overwhelmed and can’t even articulate the basic content that they have theoretically covered in class.

Technology is an absolute wonder. In the last few years, I have embraced online learning to the extent that I have made a career out of it, I have embraced the time-saving advantages of AI and I am always open to the advantages that technical advances can bring. As someone in possession of the world’s worst sense of direction, I find the smartphone genuinely liberating and life-changing, as it enables me to negotiate my way confidently. It even knows all the local pathways! As someone with poor eyesight, I love the fact that there has been an explosion in the availability of audiobooks, and that I can now access most books and articles in a format that allows me to manipulate the size and shape of the font as well as the colour of the background. This is all wonderful! Believe me, I love technology! But I am heartily sick of two things that the digital snake-oil salesmen seem to have successfully convinced society of: firstly, the blind assumption that digital is always better, when in fact people should be asking themselves whether it is better and if so why – what other advantages might the technology bring and what are the potential pitfalls? Secondly, I am tired of the assumption that children born in the current epoch are all miraculously imbued with innate digital skills and knowledge, a bizarre fantasy which seems thoroughly ingrained, despite the ever-increasing pile of evidence to the contrary.

Delayed gratification

This week I have found myself having a very stern conversation with one of my cats. Her name is Piglet. Piglet by name, piglet by nature. The animal simply cannot help herself when it comes to food. If she had her way, she’d be the size of a house, hauling her enormous belly around like a competitor in the World’s Strongest Man. Fortunately – or unfortunately, as far as she is concerned – she has mean old me controlling her food intake.

So, Piglet and I had to have a very serious conversation about her life choices. This is a cat that was in line to receive some small pieces of chicken as a treat. See, I’m not always mean: I had even taken the pieces out of the fridge, to bring them up to room temperature. Piglet, however, elected that evening to wolf down the remaining supper of our other cat, who is currently being rather delicate about her food intake. The second cat is in the early stages of renal failure and so is on a specialist prescription diet. When my back was turned for a nano-second, I failed to register that Dolly had walked away from her food and so I turned around to find Piglet urgently inhaling the last scraps of Dolly’s prescription dinner.

“You could have had some chicken pieces this evening!” I admonished her. “As it is, you’ve made the choice to eat the prescription cat food, so now you’re not getting anything else.” She stared at me, unmoved and unimpressed, still cleaning her whiskers after the extra feed she had claimed for herself.

In reality, of course, the cat’s brain is not capable of understanding the point. She’s a very smart cat, but she has not yet mastered English, nor has she worked out that stealing the prescription cat food means missing out on her chicken treats. She is also – being a cat – not capable of making the fundamental decision of delayed gratification, something which human psychologists and the world in general like to cite as a crucial indicator of our future success as adults. Or is it?

I am quite a fan of The Studies Show, a podcast hosted by two science writers called Stuart Richie and Tom Chivers. In each episode, they debunk various stubborn myths that persist either as a result of poor science or as a result of the science being poorly reported or interpreted (or both). They investigate how science is at the mercy of human bias like any other subject, and explain things such as confounding, publication bias and collider bias (I am still struggling to grasp the last one in full). In one particular episode, they explore the experiment nicknamed “the marshmallow test”, which was hailed as a groundbreaking study into impulse control in very young children, with some quite extraordinary claims made about how the findings were linked to future success in several walks of life – in education, in financial stability, in relationships and in health.

In various tests, performed on a group of 4-year-olds in Stanford University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, psychologists offered several hundred children a choice between either one or two sweet treats. The children were offered the choice of either taking one treat which they could have immediately, or if they waited for an unspecified amount of time, during which the psychologist left the room, they would then be allowed two treats. Times that the children were left to wait varied but could be up to 20 minutes. One point, made hilariously by Tom Chivers during the discussion, is to question whether some smart four-year-olds might already have a sound understanding of the value of their own time. “You know what, one marshmallow isn’t worth 20 minutes of my time, mate!” he imagines them saying. Stuart Richie then ponders whether marshmallows were a significantly bigger deal in the 1970s compared to now – what kid in the mid-2020s is going to wait 15 or 20 minutes just for one extra marshmallow?

The issues with the study are many, but the most dubious are the claims that were extrapolated from two follow-up questionnaires, which were responded to by only around 100 of the original 653 participants – meaning that more than 80% of the candidates were not included in the two follow-up studies, which looked at the children in later life. Chivers and Richie also raise the query that the original test was confounded by the fact that different children were given different coping strategies to assist with the waiting time – for example, some were encouraged to use distraction techniques, others to focus on the end reward. This is because the original purpose of the research at Stanford was to try to find out which of the coping strategies would help children most with delaying gratification – the idea of following them up to see which children became more successful in later life came some time afterwards, which may explain why Stanford lost touch with so many of the participants. However, it is the later follow-up studies that caused all the excitement, as they supposedly found a quite remarkably strong correlation between later success and the period of time that the younger children had managed to wait before receiving their reward. The claim – of course – turns out to be nonsense. The correlation only worked with children who had not been offered any coping strategies to help to delay the gratification, which somewhat begs the question why the primary author of the study believed so strongly in the teaching of delayed gratification as a life-strategy. Far more importantly, however, the correlation all but disappeared in replication studies, when controls were introduced for socio-economic background and previous academic success, both of which are far more obvious likely predictors of future academic attainment and overall success.

Chivers and Richie link the wild extrapolations taken from this particular study to similar attempts to introduce the concept of “growth mindset” in schools, another topic of academic research that they take a sledgehammer to in a previous episode. I remember this particular fad very well, as at the time in my school we had one particular Senior Manager who had read Carol Dweck’s book The Psychology of Success and was a shiny, happy acolyte for the concept that the tiniest shift in rhetoric – basically, praising kids for working hard rather than for their smarts – would somehow revolutionise their success in the classroom. It may not surprise you to know that it didn’t, and that the studies in this area have since been shown to prove nothing of the sort.

This is not to say that delaying gratification is not an important skill. It is, of course, an important part of growing up and becoming a successful adult that one learns to some extent to place tasks in an order of importance and/or urgency, rather than focusing entirely on what you would most like to do in the moment. Studying for an exam, preparing for a competition or an interview, exercising and eating the right things for the benefit of your longterm health are all simple goals shared by many which require this skill. In my experience, children acquire the ability to delay their gratification at different rates and while some teenagers have fully mastered the process others are still grappling with their motivation and find it really hard to set aside the things that they enjoy the most to focus on something important but less interesting. One of the greatest things that schools can do is thus to focus on assisting children in their ability to concentrate, as a lack of attention in class remains by far the biggest barrier to academic success for many of our most vulnerable students.

In the meantime, Piglet remains at the mercy of her desires and will no doubt continue to make a lunge for every tasty morsel she can find in her path. I have often said that one of the joys of keeping a cat is that they teach you how to live your life and speaking as someone who doesn’t always remember to reward myself just for the hell of it, Piglet serves as a feline reminder that sometimes making a dive for the thing you crave the most is to be recommended.