Education – Page 2 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

See you in three weeks

This week, at a garden party, I chatted to a man in his 80s who reminisced about a school trip he went on in the 1950s. My neighbour’s father was given the opportunity to visit Dubrovnik in what was then Yugoslavia, when another local school had a few spare places for students to join the trip. Nothing seemed unusual or particularly surprising about his story until he reported their arrival in the city.

“So, the teacher pointed out some features at the train station and said that we should meet at the same spot for our return journey,” he explained. “After that, the teacher said, we’ll see you in three weeks.”

There was a pause, while my husband and I stared at Geoff in silence.

“I’ve got no idea what he and the other staff did from that point on,” he continued, “but we didn’t see them until it was time to go home.”

I then had to check in with him that I had heard him correctly.

“Wait … they just left you there to get on with it? For three whole weeks?”

“Absolutely,” he said.

Well. Needless to say, my flabber was gasted. Geoff went on to talk about his memories of the trip, which boiled down to basic survival. He and his friends bought some eggs from a local farm and discovered that every single one of them was bad. He expressed regret that some diaries he had kept at the time had gone missing during a recent move. Let’s hope they turn up at the bottom of an unpacked box somewhere, as they will surely make for fascinating reading when lined up next to the experiences of children today in a school trip setting.

Anyone who knows anything about school trips in a modern setting will be equally struck by the difference between Geoff’s experience and the ones had by students now. I have written before on the pressures of running school trips, most especially school trips abroad, and indeed that piece of writing remains my most-read blog by a considerable margin: it’s been read tens of thousands of times and clearly resonates with teachers who are still faced with the challenge of working in loco parentis. In summary, the original post was an exploration of a case where teachers on a school trip abroad were unjustly charged with “manslaughter as a result of gross negligence” in a French court, seven years after a child had died in an accident on a trip while in their care. Fortunately, the judge threw out the case, but the distress and suffering undergone by those three young professionals can only be imagined. The post also explained how I made the decision several years ago to stop running school trips abroad, purely because I could no longer cope with the stress and anxiety of doing so.

While I would never suggest that Geoff’s experience is one we should try to replicate in the modern world, as it displays a level of naivety and foolishness on the part of staff back in those days that I can only wonder at, it has got me thinking again about what was expected from teachers in the past compared to what is expected from us now. It has also caused me to think deeply about the vast chasm of difference between the day-to-day experiences that were once readily available to young people compared to what we assume is appropriate for them now.

One of the things that Jonathan Haidt explores in his recent book The Anxious Generation is the degree to which children now experience near-permanent adult supervision (to the extent that one might call it surveillance) and thus increasingly less real-world freedom and independence as they grow up; he contrasts this with the complete lack of supervision which most youngsters have when it comes to the online world, which is where – he argues – the worst dangers actually lie. He calls the effect on Generation Z – the generation who grew up with smart phones in their pockets – “the great rewiring” and urges society to roll back on the online freedoms we have grown used to and to replace them with more real-world freedom and risk. Haidt is a Professor at New York University and collaborates often with the American psychologist Jean Twenge, who was one of the first psychologists to argue that the rising rates of poor mental health among Generation Z can be attributed to smartphones. Sceptics of such research argue that young people simply have more things to feel anxious and depressed about, but in my opinion Haidt makes his case pretty persuasively. Earlier generations have also grown up in the shadow of war and global instability, he points out, yet such collective crises in the past did not manifest themselves in psychological distress; quite the opposite, they often engendered a sense of greater social solidarity and purpose, a net positive for mental health. By contrast, the evidence linking mental illness to smartphones and the inescapable and thus addictive access they bring to social media use is genuinely alarming.

Haidt’s argument builds upon a case he has made in his previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind, that overprotectiveness has contributed to the mental health crisis. He argues that Generation Z children are what he calls “antifragile”: they lack exposure to the varied experiences that are required in order to develop resilience. Haidt argues in both books that children ought to be given greater freedom to play unsupervised, free from adult surveillance.

In my last blog post I mentioned that in my last few years at the chalkface it was quite normal to walk down the school corridor and find a child outside every classroom – not necessarily because they had been thrown out of class, but because they were refusing to enter it in the first place due to the extreme level of their anxiety. I have no concrete answer as to why this is happening, but happening it is. There is an emerging school of thought that the well-meaning work that has increasingly been done in schools to address the issue of children’s mental health has in fact done more harm than good. I have recently read Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier and her research most definitely raises causes for concern. Shrier is a journalist and a controversial figure for some, but her concerns echo those raised by numerous psychologists, who talk of our modern tendency to pathologise normal feelings (who didn’t feel genuinely overwhelmed with fear and at times bone-crushingly miserable during their teenage years?) and push children down a path of sickness rather than allowing them to negotiate their way through their feelings and trust that the storms will pass. These concerns are summarised quite nicely here, in a piece from 2022 in the Telegraph.

So, Geoff’s brief and cheerful reminiscence has left me with much to think about. While none of us would dare to send our children out to a foreign country to fend for themselves for three weeks, perhaps we can learn from what was presumably the innocence of our forefathers. There was an enormous plus side to growing up and living without fear; if that kind of life and freedom produced the vibrant man that Geoff remains, then perhaps they weren’t getting it so wrong in the 1950s.

Covered in glory

It is difficult for anyone outside the profession to comprehend the full potential gamut of horror that is the secondary-school cover lesson. Not only does it mean losing what is potentially your only free slot of time during that day, the reality of that cover lesson can be genuinely terrifying.

I recall opening up the cover folder and reading instructions such as the following:

“Explain to students the fundamentals of the carbon cycle”. Um. Okay.

“Invite students to share their views on …” (insert anything here, frankly, for horrors to commence).

“Go through the answers” – when this was Key Stage 4 maths, my blood truly ran cold with terror.

Yesterday, on the platform formerly known as Twitter, Andrew Old (who is a figure that will be known to anyone who does EduTwitter) asked the following: what is the worst cover lesson you have ever had to do? He followed this up with his own entries for the competition, saying that he was torn between an MFL lesson where the work was a wordsearch that didn’t actually have any of the words in, a science lesson where the work was “write a rap about the rock cycle” and “any PE cover where they actually had to play a sport”. The latter brought back a flash memory of one Year 9 tennis cover during my first year, during which I learnt a valuable lesson and a principle that I stuck resolutely to for the rest of my 21-year career: do not – repeat not – go into work with a hangover. You will be punished.

Others on the platform added their own entries to the competition and I share some of these experiences purely so that readers may appreciate just what it is that your average teacher may go through on a typical day. One reported a double-booked room and having to find another room with a class he did not know. One reported the radiator bursting during the session. Too many to account for reported simply diabolical situations that would try the patience of anyone who values their sanity (most of them involving either PE or Music), but I think my personal favourite was the following: “I received a cover sheet. The first instruction was: collect inflatable sheep from sports hall. I replied and said that I would not be covering this lesson”. I think I laughed for 5 minutes about that one.

The only other response I found that involved someone simply refusing to go ahead with a cover lesson was this one: “during my PGCE (first day of my first placement no less) I had to perform CPR on my mentor teacher after he suffered a cardiac arrest. I was asked to cover his lessons for the day after he was taken to hospital. After a pregnant pause I simply said no. I wish this was made up.”

These days, I get to hear about cover lessons from the students’ point of view, and in many ways their accounts are no less gruelling. Students that I work with who attend school in the state sector report teacher absences at a record high and last year I worked with several Year 11 students who had no teacher at all for the majority of the school year; one student was affected in this way in multiple subjects. In the private sector, recruitment and retention seems to be marginally better, but the absence rate remains significant and the quality of cover work an issue. The problem is always particularly acute in minority subjects, when the absence of the subject expert can create an insurmountable vacuum that nobody has the expertise to fill. This was a pressure I felt acutely as the sole Latinist in the school I used to work in. The one and only time in my entire career when I was genuinely too sick to set work (indeed I could not get out of bed and considered the need for medical help), my HoD rang me up to ask me what he should do. I understand, I really do, and it certainly brought home the need for some kind of emergency provision.

One of the things that has struck me since leaving the profession is how little attention most schools give to the inescapable reality of cover and how damaging this is to the student body. I recall school leaders talking about this but in a manner that simply seemed to emphasise how important our presence was in the classroom, not a manner that brought any practical solutions to the unavoidable fact that sometimes we will be absent. School leaders really do need to face up to the reality that every child in their school will face a significant number of cover lessons during every month – at times, during every week. Schools should have a clear and workable policy when it comes to the expectations for a cover lesson, and these expectations should also be shared and repeated as a mantra to the students. For example, one school I worked in had the rule that cover work must be something that students could complete independently and in silence; this was a great rule, but it would have been considerably more powerful if that rule were shared as an expectation with the students!

I realise – now that I am outside the white heat of the situation – how much more I could have done to prepare students for what to do in a cover lesson. I absolutely could have done this myself, although I maintain that it would have been much more powerful to make it a school-wide expectation and something that is displayed for all students to see. All learners could be instructed on what they should do in the absence of specific cover work: for example, learning material from their Knowledge Organiser. With a bit of effort to do the groundwork, this would make life so much easier both for classroom teachers when they end up sick and for those who are providing the cover.

As a professional tutor now, I cannot influence what happens in the classroom, but I can help to make that experience more profitable and worthwhile for the individual students that I work with. I discuss with them what they can and should do when their teacher is absent and many of them take these suggestions on board. There are so many things that a student can use spare time for, but most of them lack the initiative to make use of that time without explicit instructions and guidance. The students I work with always have something that they know we are rote-learning and I talk to them about making efficient use of any spare classroom time to test themselves on whatever it is we are working on. In languages, the list of what students need to commit to memory is pretty relentless, so no student should ever be left twiddling their thumbs: but they really do need it spelled out to them that this is what they should be doing with the time.

Tough love?

Yesterday, I had a bit of an epiphany. It suddenly occurred to me why it is that tutoring can help anxious students so successfully.

Anxiety is not a professional specialism for me, and I’ve never experienced anxiety myself. Like all people, I’ve faced my challenges, but feeling overwhelmed by anxiety has never been one of them. Mind you, in the era I grew up in, such things were not named and certainly not medicalised. Whatever my views on the undeniable over-use of recognised psychiatric conditions to describe normal feelings (and believe you me, I have some), I think it is also undeniable that there is a genuine uptick in young people who experience what I would definitely call anxiety in some form.

When I first started teaching in 1999, I do not recall children’s anxiety even being mentioned as something I would have to deal with during my career. Fast forward to my final couple of years in the classroom, and you could not walk down a corridor without discovering a student outside virtually every classroom: not because they had been thrown out for poor behaviour, but because they were refusing to enter it in the first place. There was – without question – an explosion in students who were citing anxiety as the reason for their reticence. Some of them school-refused altogether and I had more than one student that I would see only once in a blue moon, so chronic was their conviction that school was a terrifying place. I have some hypotheses as to what has changed in society to spark this epidemic, but it is not my intention to explore them here. My intention is to examine the small part I can currently play in getting some kids back into the classroom.

As I have already stated, I would never claim working with school-refusers or children crippled by academic anxiety as a specialism. I have no significant training in this field and if anything I have endeavoured to avoid it. Bottom line, I believe children should be in school. There are exceptions to that rule in extremis, but the current and growing trend towards home-schooling as a viable option causes me genuine concern. Children are better off in school for a whole myriad of reasons, not least the fundamental and inescapable truth that school is the norm and thus integral to one’s experience as being a part of society. Saying this won’t win me any friends amongst my peers and competitors, but here goes: I am concerned that too many people in the tutoring industry find the upsurge in homeschooling professionally very convenient. Homeschooled students – unlike those attending school – open up the opportunity for daytime work, and lots of tutors want that. I worry, therefore, that professional tutors are not as motivated to get kids back into school as they should be. As a result of these concerns, I have increasingly steered clear of working in this field: I do not want to be a part of an industry that benefits financially from children being outside the school system.

Despite all my concerns and despite my lack of training in this field, countless parents have attributed to me their child’s increase in academic confidence and in some cases a return to the classroom. Much of this is in some ways unsurprising. I have written many times on the reasons why one-to-one tutoring is so remarkably powerful and effective, and this applies all the more so when a child has felt isolated, abandoned or forgotten in a classroom setting. But something more is going on with these most anxious of students, I suspect, and yesterday it hit me:

It’s because I can push them, and force them to take risks in a safe environment. Nothing is more effective when it comes to defeating anxiety.

In a classroom, a teacher has to pitch the class at one level for all. Inevitably, this carries the risk of some students becoming bored and disengaged by the lack of challenge, alongside the risk of others failing to understand what is happening. This is not just true of the lesson overall, it is true of every component part. Anxious students tend to fall at every hurdle, as their fight, flight or freeze response means that they spiral into panic and/or give up as soon as they sense danger – in their mind, that “danger” means as soon as things get tricky, as soon as they encounter something they don’t understand or as soon as they get something wrong. In any one lesson, that’s happening constantly, or at least it should be – learning cannot take place without challenge, micro-failure and frustration. In such a classroom setting, anxious students tend to take themselves out of the situation – either by physically leaving the classroom or by staying in their seat and disengaging; for example, answering “I don’t know” every time they’re asked a question, or even refusing to open their mouth at all. Classroom teachers even find themselves instructed by SLT, Heads of Year, SENDCos, parents and others not to ask certain students a question because – we are informed – they are too anxious to cope with it. Nothing could be more damaging to the educational process; if professional adults genuinely believe that a child literally cannot cope with being asked a question in class, then we have a major educational emergency on our hands. The solution is not to stop asking them questions. That simply isn’t good enough.

Happily, now out of the classroom, I can do what I like. When faced with an anxious student in a one-to-one scenario, I can afford to take risks. Firstly, before any risk-taking takes place, I can ensure that they really do understand something on a level that may not have happened for them before. Anxious students are so risk-averse that they are not good at taking a punt or going with the flow – they don’t trust that they understand anything well enough, so they need everything unpacked in detail. Once I have gained that student’s trust (and it doesn’t take long), they can ask all the anxious questions they’ve been storing up over the years and never felt able to ask. In this way, they can gain a command of the basics they’ve never had before, which empowers them to tackle more complex challenges.

At this point, the freedom I possess as a one-to-one tutor is immense and liberating. I can present my anxious tutee with something they never thought they could do and I can push them into doing it. In a one-to-one session, this is partly because the situation allows infinite freedom for row-back: if my instincts are wrong and the challenge is too great, I have the possibility of ditching the idea altogether before things get sticky, or of coaching the student through the process in incremental steps so that they cover the ground they could not have covered alone. Usually, my instinct is to do the latter – the need to abandon a task is vanishingly rare, but the option is always there. As the student’s trust in the process grows, so does their confidence.

Nothing is so wonderful as the look on a student’s face when they do something they did not believe themselves to be capable of. Nothing is more potent when it comes to smashing through the invisible barrier that anxiety weaves around these students. Nothing gives me greater joy than watching them fly past that barrier like it was never there in the first place.

On bugbears and juxtaposition

An old Head of Department from many years ago used to start his Year 7 German course in the same way every year. Every year he would ask students to name any famous Germans they could think of. Every year he hoped to hear names like Michael Schumacher or Boris Becker, or perhaps one of the countless famous German composers from over the centuries. Every year he was given Hitler. It never seemed to occur to this lovely man that perhaps there was a better way of starting off his first German lesson. Something made him do the same thing over and again and I think a bit of him somehow relished the inevitable disappointment. We all have our crosses to bear in our chosen subjects.

For anyone who teaches or touches upon Roman culture, for us it’s waiting for the inevitable moment when a child will inform us that the Romans used to eat so much at their dinner parties that they would go and make themselves sick so that they could eat more. I’ve even overheard the guides at Pompeii help to perpetuate this myth by mischievously telling tourists that any random passageway that they can’t account for is a “vomitorium”, where guests would relieve themselves to create space for more gluttony. They know that this is nonsense. The confusion seems to have come from the word vomitorium itself (which actually was used by the Romans to refer to any passageway leading crowds out of a public building) combined with satirical pieces such as Trimalchio’s Feast, sometimes called The Millionaire’s Dinner Party, which describes the imagined excesses of dinner parties held by the nouveaux riches. We also have the disapproving remarks of authors such as Seneca, who wrote of slaves cleaning up the vomit of drunks at banquets and criticised what he saw as the excesses of Rome. It’s a depressingly familiar picture for anyone who has worked in a hotel or similar establishment in modern Britain; wealthy Romans were no more or no less gluttonous than the comfortably-off in any society, especially those societies which have alcohol at the heart of their culture.

Eye-roll inducing as this was, my personal bugbear of misinformation I simply cannot wait to hear is different. I tell myself I have to go there to prevent students from getting it wrong in their exams, but in truth there’s a bit of me that cannot resist it for my own torture. When working on the literature, I always ask every GCSE candidate what they think the term juxtaposition means. Almost without exception, students will tell me that the word means “contrast”. On an exceptionally good day, they will tell me that it means “putting things next to each other in order to create a contrast”. In actual fact, it means “putting things next to each other” and this may be done in order to highlight a contrast.

While I hate to be a massive Latin bore, I’m afraid this is yet another case where a simple knowledge of the Latin roots of words can help. To juxtapose has its origins in the Latin words iuxta (which means “next to”) and iungo (“to join”, also notable in derivatives such as join, conjunction, conjugation, conjugal) alongside the Latin word positus (“place” or “position”). It quite literally means “a placing next to”: there is no mention of the notion of contrast in the original etymological meaning of the word. The frequency with which the technique is used to highlight a contrast means that it is arguably justifiable to include this in the definition, but the etymological roots of the word really must be prioritised. Fundamentally, juxtaposition is placing a word or phrase next to another word or phrase, often but not exclusively to highlight a contrast.

Unfortunately, students (and teachers) Googling the word will find an avalanche of quotations using the word to mean simply and exclusively “contrast”. Just this morning I spotted a horrendous meme quoting American guitarist Dean Ween of all people: “the juxtaposition of fishing and touring couldn’t be greater”. Sigh.

Another part of the problem with this misunderstanding is that English really isn’t very good at doing juxtaposition. Our language requires too many supplementary words to make sense, plus we cannot muck about with word order in the way that Latin can without a serious change in meaning. Word order is sense-critical in the English language: “man bites dog” means the opposite of “dog bites man”. Latin, being an inflected language (i.e. one where the endings of the words dictate their meaning and role) has the advantage in that an author can place words next to each other with ease – certainly to highlight a contrast or frankly to do whatever he wishes.

The good news is that once a student realised what juxtaposition means it becomes much easier to spot in Latin. Once a student understands that it simply means placing words next to each other, they can assume that an author as adept as Virgil has always done so for a reason – it does not have to be limited to the concept of highlighting a contrast. An author may juxtapose a string of sounds, for example, or indeed words with a similar rather than a contrasting meaning. It’s entirely up to him.

Photo taken in Athens by Alexandra on Unsplash

Subliminal messages

Well-behaved women seldom make history.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Professor of Early American history, Harvard

Imagine a world in which children received only good, positive and appropriate messaging about girls and women. Would it be dramatically different from the world we inhabit right now? I like to think that the world within my lifetime has changed for women, but sometimes I wonder.

While I love and agree wholeheartedly with the quotation above, when it comes to Roman history it seems to me that two types of women are preserved by the male elite who wrote about them: the badly behaved indeed, but also the idealised male fantasy – the Roman Stepford wife, if you will. In a culture in which history-writing truly was the sole preserve of men, the only women considered worth talking about were those who stood out in extremis: either those who made a right royal nuisance of themselves, or those who fulfilled the Roman male fantasy of the ideal wife. This meant that examples of the “perfect” Roman woman were recorded (think Lucretia and Arria Paeta) as well as the ones whom history condemned as beyond the pale (think Messalina and Clodia). Hence we are left with a cartoonesque surreality, in which real women’s voices are almost entirely absent.

This week I’ve been thinking about the subliminal messages we send to women and girls. As a child of the late 1970s and the 1980s, I grew up alongside all sorts of messaging that would now be considered unacceptable and problematic for boys and girls alike. I remember cigars advertised on the television and cigarettes in magazines. I remember buying candy sticks that were sold in small packets designed to look exactly like cigarettes, which my friend and I would pretend to “smoke” on a wintry day, enjoying the way our clouds of breath resembled the unquestionably cool clouds exhaled by smokers. I remember Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson. I remember Benny Hill and his entourage of large-breasted, scantily-clad women. I remember the standard comic trope of male Boss chasing younger female employee around the desk. She would try to avoid his wandering hands but the messaging clearly implied that she invited it really and enjoyed the whole process immensely; it also implied that the man was utterly helpless and incapable of controlling himself in the face of his desires for the younger women paraded before him. Poor chap.

As a child, I liked playing with Sindy dolls and was distinctly less than impressed by Barbie, mainly because the design of her legs made it impossible to force her onto the back of a horse, which was my dominant obsession at the time. If a girl can’t ride a horse, what is exactly is the point of her, I thought? This was particularly disappointing given that the Barbie horse, although a somewhat stylised palomino with a ridiculous flowing mane, had the benefit of articulated legs, which one could adjust into galloping and jumping positions. What a missed opportunity for Barbie to shine as an athlete! My mother supported my apparent lack of enthusiasm for Barbie’s appearance and carriage, helpfully pointing out her risibly manipulated figure as well as the fact that her arms were fixed at right angles. “Probably caused by years of carrying a tray,” she remarked.

Behind the bar in our local family pub there were large cardboard cutouts of topless women, attached to which were overpriced packets of peanuts, which punters were encouraged to purchase by the apparent lure of revealing a little bit more of the nubile lady’s naked form. In that very same pub, my sister was told by one punter that she should be careful to alternate the hand she used to pull the pint-pump, to make sure she didn’t end up with “one bigger than the other”. This was the world I grew up in. None of it was anything I registered as either traumatic or indeed problematic at the time. It was simply the way the world worked. Chin up, love.

Fast-forward to the beginning of the 1990s and when I hit the 6th form my all-girls school seemed to expect us to flip from a world in which sex had been barely acknowledged inside its four walls to a world in which teaching us how to win over the opposite sex was pretty much the endgame. We were invited to host dinner parties for handfuls of lads from private boys’ schools and our group scored a real win as we got Harrow: “we’re all snobs at heart, aren’t we girls?” said the teacher who gave us the simply terrific news, about which we were all expected to be suitably delighted. An evening dinner dance at Wellington College followed swiftly, at which one girl was dragged out of the bushes, covered in scratches and bleeding. As a punishment for her behaviour, the girl was locked in the coach with the male coach driver for the remainder of the evening. It was never established what had happened in the bushes.

Sometimes, the past comes back to you in flashes and at times like these I try to remind myself just how much the world has changed. I hope that it is no longer even imaginable that a girl would be treated in this way in a modern school, although occasionally a story emerges that makes me wonder. At least, though, I cling to the fact that the world has surely changed enough that plenty of people would be shocked by such an event and prepared to take action. That’s the difference. Still, the fact that such action might remain necessary is both depressing and exhausting. I’m not sure I believed we’d still be fighting for the rights of women and girls in 2024, but for a myriad of complex and unpredictable reasons it’s where we seem to find ourselves.

This week, I was invited to comment on a resource, excellent in many ways, but which contained stylised cartoons of an apparently flirtatious slave-girl. When I queried the inclusion of an image that seemed to me to be straight out of the 1970s in a course aimed at modern schoolchildren, the author said he would take on board my comments but also that the girls he’d taught “seem to be happy” with them. So what’s the problem? Well, here’s the thing: girls are used to it. Girls are socialised to accept their lot, to remain docile while they are conditioned to believe that the female form is public property. In my foolishness, I honestly thought we’d have got past all this by now, but when I catch the smallest glimpse of the ghastly diet that our girls are being fed on Instagram and similar platforms, when I see the tiniest of tots mimicking the hyper-sexualised poses and pouts of their chosen online influencers, it makes me want to weep. I don’t know what we can do in the face of such an overwhelming tide of subliminal messaging online, but can we at least keep it out of our educational resources?

One of the most depressing conversations I have ever had with a student was one with a member of my Year 10 Form, who showed up for school on a Monday morning with ridiculously long acrylic nails. She knew that the school did not allow them and was clearly trying it on, so the usual negotiations ensued as I attempted to apply the school’s policy and she kicked against it. While we awaited the member of Patrol whom (of course) I ended up summoning due to her refusal to attend the expected acrylic removal session voluntarily, I foolishly attempted to appeal to her, woman to woman. I pointed out the extreme impracticality of the false nails, which rendered her frankly disabled when it came to even the most basic of tasks and certainly at real risk when playing any kind of sport. “You know, women before you have fought incredibly hard so that you don’t have to do this kind of thing any more,” I told her. “You don’t have to polish and preen; you don’t have to enhance your body or make it into a cartoon version of itself in order to please others.” Unfortunately, my words appeared to have had zero impact. She just looked at me like I was insane.

As so often with my weekly musings, I’m not even sure I know where I’m going with this or indeed who needs to hear it. Maybe I’m just howling at the moon. I remain concerned that there is still work to be done before our daughters and granddaughters can truly be themselves, not a caricature of what society says they should be. We can pat ourselves on the back as much as we like about how far we’ve come since Benny Hill was making us laugh on prime-time television; but until we stop the subliminal message being pumped into our children’s brains that women’s bodies are a commodity, then how can we expect them to rise above the mundane and realise their full potential, unencumbered by the expectations of others?

Snacking

This week I resolved to do more snacking. Not of the doughnut kind (tempting as that is) but a thing I have read about called exercise snacking. It’s rather fun. Instead of resolving that anything other than a full-scale workout is a waste of time, the philosophy of snacking advises working small bursts of activity into your daily routine, whatever that is. I decided to experiment with it. So far this week I have done some calf exercises on the bottom stair while my coffee was brewing, some balancing exercises in the kitchen while cooking (there are probably some health and safety issues with this but I’m a grown adult and doing it at my own risk), plus some squats while finishing a drama on Netflix (far less risky, although the cat was pretty weirded out). None of this snacking is replacing my twice-weekly visits to the gymnasium from hell, but they form a picnic hamper of exercise snacks that I can work into my day without making any effortful changes to my everyday lifestyle.

This got me thinking about how the principles of snacking can be applied to studying. As clients will know, I work in half-hour slots and spend a great deal of my time persuading students that short bursts of focused work are far superior to longer periods of dwindling focus. So many students remain convinced that they need huge swathes of time in order to be able to study effectively, when in fact the reverse is true. No matter how much we learn from cognitive science about the limited capacity of our working memory and the shortness of our attention span, most students (and often their parents) remain wedded to the idea that they need a lengthy stretch of time for studying to be worthwhile.

Much of this attitude, of course, stems from good old-fashioned work avoidance. We’ve all done it: pretended to ourselves that we simply don’t have time for something when in fact what we’re doing is manufacturing an excuse to procrastinate whatever it is that we don’t want to do until the mythical day when we will have plenty of time to dedicate to it. You wouldn’t believe how much time I can convince myself is required to clean the bathroom. Part of overcoming this tendency is to call it out: point out to students when they are using their lack of time available simply as an excuse. But there is, I think, also a genuine anxiety amongst many students that they need long stretches of time in order to be able to achieve something. It often surprises them greatly when I inform them not only that much can be achieved in 10, 15 or 20 minutes but that in fact this kind of approach is optimal. It is not a necessary compromise in a busy lifestyle to fit your work into short, focused bursts: it is actually the ideal. The same is true for exercise snacks, for which there is a growing body of evidence that suggests the benefits of these short bursts of exercise can actually outweigh those of longer stretches.

One of the most counter-intuitive findings from cognitive science in recent years has been that regularly switching focus from one area of study to another is actually more effective for learning than spending extended periods of time on one thing. At first, I really struggled with this in the classroom, as all my training had taught me to pick one learning objective and hammer this home throughout the lesson. But up-to-date research-informed teaching advocates for mixing it up, especially in a setting like the school I used to work in where lessons were an hour long. A whole hour on one learning focus is not effective; far better to have one main learning focus plus another completely separate one one to reinvigorate the students’ focus and challenge them to recall prior learning on a completely different topic. I frequently do this whenever possible in my half-hour tutoring sessions, which may have one core learning purpose but with a secondary curve-ball which I throw in to challenge students to recall something we covered the previous week or even some time ago. This kind of switching keeps the mind alert and allows for regular retrieval and recall.

Retrieval snacking is also something that friends and family can help with and that students can and should be encouraged to do habitually. If you’re supporting your child with learning their noun endings, why not ask them randomly during the day to reel off the endings of the 1st declension? This kind of random questioning will pay dividends in the long-run, as it forces a child’s brain to recall their learning on a regular basis and out of context. Nothing could be more effective at cementing something into their longterm memory, which is the greatest gift any student can give themselves in order to succeed. My grandfather (a trained teacher himself) used to do this with me when I was small and was struggling to learn my times tables. “What are nine sevens?” he would yell out at random points during the day and I had to answer. It worked.

So, let’s hear it for study snacks. Short, random moments when a student challenges themselves to remember something. Adults can help and support them in this process as well as encourage them to develop it as a habit for themselves. Share with them the fact that this works and will help them with longterm recall. Apart from anything, it sends the message that study – like exercise – should be a part of daily life and woven into the fabric of your routine and habits. You don’t even need a desk to do it.

Why isn’t this taught in schools?

This was the cry of Susanna Reid on Good Morning Britain yesterday. In a discussion on the worthy quest by Martin Lewis to improve the teaching of financial literacy in schools (a move for which I am broadly in support), the well-paid presenter explained that one of her own children was surprised, shocked and no doubt disappointed by the news that they would have to pay tax on their own earnings. Reid was incredulous. Yet instead of reflecting on her own parenting and wondering how she had managed to raise someone with such a poor grasp of how the world works, she wailed “why isn’t this taught in schools?!” The entire panel agreed with her, with nobody raising the fact that basic financial literacy is, in fact, currently taught in schools.

To quote a nauseating political turn of phrase, let me be clear: I support the teaching of financial literacy in schools and I agree with Martin Lewis that it could do with some improvement. I support it because there are a small handful of vulnerable children who will not experience any discussion at home when it comes to financial matters. They may have parents who struggle to understand such things for themselves, who lack the skills and the vocabulary to enlighten their own children in complex matters. All of that said, I cling to the fact that all parents have a responsibility to teach their children about the world and how they fit into it and to the fact that the overwhelming majority of parents are perfectly capable of doing so. It is parents who have a duty to give children a sense that money doesn’t grow on trees and has to be earned, as well as the basic principle that most of the things they see around them have to be paid for and that this money comes from all of us. These are the kinds of things that must be discussed constantly in order for a child to grasp them, not ticked off on a curriculum list.

When we’re talking about a parent as privileged as Reid (you can look up the latest best guess on her salary), I am pretty unimpressed by the apparent fact that she does not consider it her responsibility to discuss such matters with her own children. To give her the benefit of the doubt, some people find talking about money with their own children difficult. Some want to cushion their children against the harsh reality that things have to be bought and paid for. I’ll be honest and say that I have never understood this. I consider myself hugely fortunate to have had parents who laid their cards on the table. Who told me what we could and could not afford. Who pointed to schoolmates with more luxurious lifestyles and punctured the image by deliberating where that money might have come from, what sacrifices may have been made in order to get hold of it. I was told that I was lucky to have a father who came home in the evenings and at weekends, who turned down more lucrative opportunities because he had different values and preferred to be at home with his family. By the same turn, my parents got lucky that I happened to observe one or two things that supported their rhetoric. Perhaps the most poignant moment was during a pool party at the house of a particularly wealthy classmate. They had an amazing house and an incredible lifestyle, one which could easily have impressed a child of my age. But the birthday girl’s mother spent the entire proceedings lying on a sun-lounger while we were supervised by the au pair, which I found really weird. (I was too young to work out that the mother was drunk, but realised this in later years). What I did understand at the time was that the child’s father made a brief appearance at around 4.00pm and she burst into tears: he was wearing a suit, carrying a briefcase and was leaving his daughter on her birthday to go to work. I remember thinking there and then, “if this is what buys you a private pool, you can keep it.”

Of course, the debate about where the responsibility lies for financial literacy forms part of a wider discussion on what schools are and should be used for and to what extent we are now asking them to take on things which really should not be their responsibility. I have written before on Labour’s mind-boggling suggestion that schools should take on teaching children how to brush their teeth, and barely a day goes by when there isn’t a story of a child sent in to primary school incapable of buttoning up their own coat, doing up their own shoelaces or even the basics of toilet training. Schools are now the receptacle for every failure in social care and – let us not be afraid to say it – every failure in parenting. It simply is not sustainable.

When I mentioned Reid’s comment on Twitter I received a lot of replies, with plenty of people telling me whether they did or did not recall receiving any teaching about financial literacy when they were in school. As always, everyone thinks their own recollections of school reflect the reality then and now, and everyone labours under the illusion that their own recollections are 100% accurate. If I believed every tutee who claimed they’d “never been taught” something I’d be declaring a state of emergency in Latin teaching across some of the most prestigious schools in the country. The reality? Well, they have been taught it, they just didn’t take it in at the time and it’s my job to fix that. The teaching of financial literacy in schools does take place and Reid’s children will in all likelihood have been given some basic teaching on taxes. Could the teaching of financial literacy improved? Certainly. As Lewis pointed out in the discussion on GMB, it is a topic currently divided between Maths and Citizenship in state secondary schools, so it might be a good idea to have someone with overall responsibility for coordinating the curriculum on finances across the whole school. Great idea. I’m all in favour. However, there will still be kids who simply don’t take it on board and I come back again and again to the reality that nothing is so powerful as the messaging a child receives at home.

So, Susanna: if you truly wanted your children to understand about paying taxes, then maybe you should have talked to them about such things on a regular basis to prepare them for the world they will be inhabiting. Your children have grown up in a household with a fair bit more money than the average person, so I hope very much that this was discussed. I hope you told them when times were tight, or explained to them how lucky they were that this was never the case, since mummy does a job that is considered worthy of a salary that most people in equally worthy professions could only dream about. I hope you talked to them about how much prices have gone up in the last couple of years. Do they know why most supermarkets now have a donation point for local food banks? Do they know the answer to the classic question that MPs are so frequently challenged with: do they know the price of a pint of milk these days? Do you? You see, your children’s teachers were not responsible for explaining the basics of how the world works. That job, I’m afraid, was yours.

How did it go?

With the first Latin GCSE done and dusted, “how did it go?” is probably a question that every candidate has been asked and answered multiple times. This week, I have found myself wondering to what extent their self-evaluations are accurate.

Curious to discover an answer, I turned to the internet without much hope of finding one, yet came across a psychology study reported by The Learning Scientists, a group of cognitive scientists who focus on research in education. What’s particularly interesting about the study is that it attempts to evaluate students’ success at making what they call “predictions”, which the psychologists define as a student’s projection of their likely performance prior to a test, as well as their “postdictions”, by which they mean a student’s evaluation of their performance afterwards. The study attempted to make an intervention in that process, in other words they tried to improve students’ ability to make both “predictions” and “postdictions” about their own performance. The results are interesting.

The study was performed with a group of undergraduates, and the psychologists made several interventions in an attempt to improve their students’ ability to self-evaluate. They taught them specific techniques for making the most of feedback and they ensured that they took a practice test one week before each of the three exams that they sat, inviting students to self-score the practice test and reflect on any errors. The undergraduates were then encouraged to examine reasons why their “predictions” and their “postdictions” may have been inaccurate on the first two exams, and make adjustments. All of this was with the aim of improving their ability to self-evaluate.

The study found that while the undergraduates’ “postdictions” (i.e. their report on their own performance after the test) remained slightly more accurate than their own “predictions” (their projection of their likely performance), the above interventions resulted in no improvement in the accuracy of students’ “postdictions” over time. While the accuracy of some students’ “predictions” did improve somewhat, none of the undergraduates showed any significant improvement in their ability to make “postdictions”. The students’ ability to evaluate their own performance after each test remained as varied as they had been prior to the interventions.

As the authors conclude, “this study demonstrates … that improving the accuracy of students’ self-evaluations is very difficult.” This is genuinely interesting and certainly fits with my own anecdotal experience of my own ability to assess how I have performed after an examination, as well as the huge number of students that I have worked with over the years. A student’s own feelings after a test may be affected by a myriad of compounding factors and if I had a £1 for every student who felt that an examination had gone dismally who then turned out a perfectly respectable grade, I’d be a wealthy woman. In my experience, some students may over-estimate their “predictions” but most students underestimate their “postdictions”. It is interesting that those “postdictions” appear to be elusive when it comes to intervention and that the cognitive scientists have not – as yet – found a method of helping students to assess their own performance more accurately. I suspect that is because it is too emotive.

It is not obvious from the study how high-stakes the tests were – the psychologists do not make clear, for example, whether the test results contributed significantly (or indeed at all) to the assessment of the undergraduates’ own degree. This to me is something of an oversight, as an obvious compounding factor in any student’s ability to assess their own performance has to be their emotional response to it. Low-stakes testing as part of an experiment is a very different ball-game to the high-stakes testing of an examination that counts towards a GCSE, an A level or a degree class.

My conclusion for now, especially for my highest-achieving students, is to remain unconvinced that they know how well they have done. I could name countless students who have been deeply distressed after an examination, only to discover that they achieved a mark well above 90%. Even in the most seemingly disastrous of circumstances this can be the case. I know of students who missed out a whole question or indeed even a whole page of questions and still achieved an excellent grade overall, so solid was their performance on the rest of the paper and the other papers which counted towards their grade.

Much as it remains an important emotional connection to engage with every student about how they feel their exam went, they’re not a good barometer for what will be on the slip of paper when they open their envelope in August.