Education – Page 5 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Is it really too easy?

One of the many joys of tutoring is the time and space it affords you to check out whether a student understands basic concepts. This does not only mean basic academic concepts, such as the differnce between the subject and the object; it also means looking at some of the ostensibly simplest sorts of questions on the exam papers and making sure that they know how to go about them.

Teachers of Latin GCSE are under enormous pressure to get through the syllabus content in the time they have available. Latin classes – certainly in state schools – often start from a position of disadvantage, having already had a limited number of teaching hours at Key Stage 3; some GCSE classes even start ab initio. The exam board then demands that a huge amount of complex material is covered, including a ludicrous amount of real Latin literature. The reality of this means that class minutes are at a premium, and teachers will move rapidly over basic concepts and may even assume that simple questions are understood and do not require practice. Often, as a direct result of this, key marks are lost due to small misconceptions or a lack of clarity in a student’s mind when it comes to how to approach such questions.

This week I finally got around to reading the Examiners’ Report from 2023 and their comment on the derivatives question really leapt out at me. It said, “this question is designed to be accessible to candidates of all abilities, and most scored at least 2 marks.” Personally, I find this utterly delusional on the part of the examiners. How, pray tell, is a question accessible to all candidates when it relies on a breadth of literacy and general knowledge not covered in the syllabus itself? And how is a score by many of 50% on this question indicative that it was indeed accessible? The comment is simply astonishing and I’m afraid it betrays yet again how out of touch the world of Classics is with reality. I have worked with a variety of students who have been scuppered by the derivatives question and their struggle is due to one or more of the following reasons:

Students do not know their Latin vocabulary well enough to be able to access the question. You can’t come up with a viable derivative if you don’t know what the Latin word means. This is more complex than it perhaps sounds, as the word is often presented in a form that is different from the one they have learnt e.g. dabat from the verb do), meaning that candidates who find the subject challenging will probably struggle to recognise it.
Students are EAL (English as an Acquired Language) and lack the breadth of English necessary to succeed in this question. They may be performing outstandingly well in the subject, but they have not yet come across the word regal or sedentary.
Students do have English as their first language but are not widely read, meaning that they struggle to come up with derivatives; they might recognise one when it’s pointed out to them, but they find it difficult to reach for one. This means that students for whom reading is modelled and encouraged at home are at a huge advantage, which is one of the main reasons why the examiners’ assertion that this question is “accessible” really grinds my gears.
Students have simply not been taught how to approach this question, or if they have been shown how they have not practised it at length. Teachers rarely spend a significant amount of time doing so because they assume (like the examiners do) that the question is easy. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, it may be time they do not have. In my experience to date, the best schools practise deivations from the very beginning of Key Stage 3, and this is certainly the best way to embed the knowledge for GCSE.

Some students really do have no problem with the derivatives question, and when that’s the case I leave them to it. These students are always highly literate and usually well-read. Unlike them, many students need to be shown multiple examples of derivatives and time needs to be invested in guiding them through the vocabulary list looking for such derivatives – the examiners even recommend this in their notes, yet still cling to the delusion that this question is highly accessible. Believe me, any question that cannot be done without detailed, explicit, one-to-one guidance from an expert is not accessible; teachers do not have time on the curriculum to prep for this question adequately.

Another question that many teachers lack the time to focus on and tend to assume the students will cope with just fine is the 10-marker in the literature papers. Because the question is open-ended and requires no knowledge of the Latin, this question really is accessible in the sense that even students who have struggled with the material should be able to do it; I say “should” because once again there is some guidance required. Students tend to apply what they have been taught about answering other types of questions (even in other subjects) to the 10-marker and this can lead them down the wrong path; answers need to be full of quotations/references but not to the Latin, to the text in translation. There is also no requirement for detailed analysis. I have written about this in more detail here. The 10-mark question makes up 20% of each literature exam: that means it makes up 10% of a student’s entire result – way more than the difference between two grades. It’s definitely worth spending some time on!

It’s a real joy as a tutor to be able to dive into the basics and make sure that students are well-prepared for what they face when it comes to exam time. Questions that the examiners and teachers assume are easy usually are so once you know how to approach them, but it’s that assumed knowledge that I’m interested in. Once a student has been gifted with said knowledge, that’s when they can start to fly.

Invested in Education?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair

Full disclosure: I’d never heard of Upton Sinclair until I read this quotation. I first came across the remark when reading about the literacy crisis in America. I had already listened to the eye-opening podcast Sold a Story and was appalled at what I had heard. I then started looking at some of the debates happening online around how reading is taught in the US and how this has been dominated for so long by methods that don’t work effectively, but which make certain authors and publishers a great deal of money. The notion that anyone could push an idea in education purely for monetary gain seemed so appalling that I found myself wondering whether it could possibly be true.

Spolier alert: it is entirely possible. However, like most things in life, I think it’s a little more complicated than pure greed. Sinclair is absolutely right that people will continue to advocate for a bad idea to sustain their income, but I do cling to the notion that they probably have a personal investment in the idea that goes beyond the financial. Their self-worth, their self-belief and sometimes their very identity can be at stake. It’s jolly difficult to admit that you might have been mistaken about something that you’ve made your life’s work. Add to this the fact that – as Sinclair puts it – your “salary depends” on not being mistaken, then the process of enlightenment becomes close to impossible.

I have changed my mind about a range of things during my 21 years as a classroom teacher. What I believed to be the case when I started turned out to be wrong, and this is not because I became a cynic or “gave up on my principles” – quite the opposite. Changing your mind is challenging. The principles I have stuck to have been to follow the evidence of what is best for the majority of children. When I have been presented with overwhelming evidence that my approach towards doing something is less effective than someone else’s, then I have been willing to change my approach. I let go of my beliefs in the face of the evidence and I am a better teacher for it. Sadly, this seems to be an unusual attitude and I am constantly disappointed by how determindly people hold onto their beliefs against all the evidence. It seems to me that a lot of people care more about following their ideology than they do about genuinely doing what’s right; anything that seems to jar with their worldview frightens them so much that they’d genuinely rather avoid it, even when the evidence suggests that it helps learners more, or lifts a greater number of people out of poverty.

Even Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced and now struck-off consultant paediatrician, who first penned the now-discredited studies claiming a potential link between autism and the MMR vaccine, believed in what he was doing at the outset. Since then, having moved to America and been welcomed with open arms by the “anti-vax” lobbyists across the pond, doubling down on his beliefs rather than accepting the overwhelming scientific evidence that they were incorrect is by far the more attractive path for him to take. Why roll back on a position that’s making you a fortune? He will never change his mind – why would he?

It would probably shock most people to know just how much the education system has been at the mercy of snake-oil sellers and woo-merchants over the last 30 years. Some of it is still ongoing. In my time in schools I have sat through talks on such unscientific nonsense as Brain Gym, learning styles and the left-brain-right-brain “theory”. All of these sessions were run by “educational advisors” that the school had paid to train us. The waste of tax-payers’ money paying these people – whether they were well-meaning and deluded or outright fraudsters – makes me want to weep. Worse than this, however, is the thought that this money has not just been wasted, it has actively harmed the education of hundreds of thousands of children; teachers have been directly taught misinformation about how the brain works and about how children learn, at the expense of the wealth of genuine information that there is out there through cognitive science. If I think about it too much, it’s not good for my blood pressure.

I would love to think, with the advent of grassroots movements such as ResearchED giving ordinary teachers the confidence to push back against the tide of quackery, that the days of such cynical peddling are over. Sadly, we are not quite there yet. Just this week, with examination boards purportedly considering a shift to examinations being done on computers instead of by hand, there are the usual string of ed-tech salesmen rubbing their hands with glee. The amount of money that schools have wasted on tech over the years makes me feel quite ill. In the 21 years I spent in the classroom, I saw the arrival of the first interactive SmartBoard in one, lived through their proliferation in every classroom in every school, and lasted long enough to see the majority of them ripped out again, replaced by ordinary whiteboards. Each one of those SmartBoards originally cost a couple of thousand pounds and they all ended up in a skip – not because they were replaced by superior technology, but because most teachers realised that they were unncessary, unwieldy and impractical to use in the classroom.

There isn’t a week that goes by when I don’t think of Sinclair and his insightful observation. In terms of education, all we can do is continue to empower teachers to question everything that they are asked to do. My mantra in my last few years was “show me the evidence”. I know he’s a controversial figure for many, but Richard Dawkins writes so well and has a talent for wordsmithery that far exceeds mine. In his wonderful letter to his 10-year-old daughter, he concludes as follows: “What can we do about all this? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: ‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.“

Why all teachers should tutor

Many trained teachers try their hand at tutoring: demand is high and the money is useful. I tutored consistently throughout my first few years in teaching, then returned to it when my husband gave up work to re-train. As time went on, however, I found myself bound to it by more than just financial necessity; I came to realise that private tutoring has was having a profoundly positive impact on my work as a classroom teacher.

It may sound absurd, but it’s easy to lose sight of what you’re paid to do in the frenetic world of mainstream education; marking and administrative tasks – not to mention the ever-shifting sands of expectations – can overwhelm you to the point where you lose perspective on what’s actually important. Tutoring reignited my passion for teaching on a fundamental level; not only did it take me back to some essential skills, it made me question the value of some other things that were taking up too much of my time. It made me better at saying “no” to things that impacted upon my ability to perform my teaching role to the best of my ability and – as a direct result – I stepped aside from roles and responsibilities that were in danger of doing so.

Tutoring exposed me to a wider range of specifications and teaching methodologies that were outside of my range of experience. Habits inevitably become entrenched when you teach the same subject in the same system to the same age-group for a number of years: tutoring forced me to think again. When I started tutoring face-to-face in my area, local demand was highest for Common Entrance coaching, so – despite the fact that I was a secondary school teacher – this became a specialism. Finding out what some 10-year-olds were being exposed to and could cope with made me question where I was setting the bar in secondary school; it also made me ask myself some fundamental questions about what, when and why I was teaching the core principles to older students. All of this came at would could not have been a more useful time: a few years prior to OfSted’s new framework and the huge shift towards a focus on curriculum coherence. When all other departments were running around in a panic, asking themselves why they were teaching what they were teaching and in what order they were teaching it, I had already been through that process and had totally refreshed my curriculum from bottom to top.

Perhaps the biggest impact that tutoring had on me while I was still teaching was a powerful shift in mind-set that is hard to quantify. When I started working with some local prep school students, I took several of them from the bottom of their class to the top. What this felt like is hard to convey, but suffice to say it was emphatically empowering. This positivity then filtered into my classroom practice and somehow made me feel as if anything were possible. This is not to say that I was naïve about the fundamental differences between what can be achieved through one-to-one tutoring and what can be realised in the mainstream classroom; but experiencing the irreplaceable value of one-to-one attention forced me to think of ways in which I could provide more of that magic in the classroom, particularly for the school’s Pupil Premium students (those who are defined by the government as coming from disadvantaged backgrounds). Blessed with an excellent trainee teacher most years, I began to take every opportunity to act as an expert Teaching Assistant to our Pupil Premium students in the trainee’s classes, coaching and guiding them to make more progress than they otherwise could.

Tutoring also opened my eyes to the phenomenal value of spaced learning and retrieval practice, as well as to the stark truth about just how much information children will forget once they have been taught it – a topic I have written on many times. That harsh reality fed through into my classroom teaching and fundamentally changed my approach to the basics of whole-class tuition. I introduced some of the exercises that I had created for the one-to-one setting and incorporated them into my classroom practice; I never took for granted that the students would have remembered what I had taught them the day, the week or the month before – I tested them repeatedly on basic knowledge. Once again, this all happened shortly before there was an explosion of this kind of practice in schools. I feel hugely grateful that tutoring gave me a bit of a heads-up.

As a full-time tutor now, with my own business, it seems obvious to say that tutoring has been a major influence in my life. But I would recommend it to any classroom teacher, not necessarily as a potential career shift but as a way of gaining access to new ideas, new experiences and new ways of informing your current classroom practice. If my experience is anything to go by, your performance in the classroom will benefit enormously.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Back to Basics

One of the best things about tutoring is the time and space to go back to basics. Many students come to me with a list of tricky constructions that they are struggling with, and without question I will address those things in the time I spend with them. More often than not, however, while the student may be requesting help with the ablative absolute or the indirect statement, what I discover is that they don’t even know their basic noun endings.

Over the years I have given a great deal of thought as to why this is so. The discovery – through tutoring – of just how many students this was true for certainly informed my own practice as a classroom teacher. I came to realise that the basics must revisited time and time again before students can claim full confidence and that this was true for all students, not just those that appeared to be struggling. So tutoring completely changed my approach in the classroom, for it gave the the realisation of just how much students naturally forget over time.

Given that Latin is a subject with which most people are unversed, I like to make analogies with subjects that are familiar to all of us. Imagine a child sitting their maths GCSE and trying to cope with the complexities of algebra and trigonometry. Then imagine that same child trying to sit their maths GCSE before they have fully grasped the meaning and process of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Maybe indeed you were that child. Maybe you were pushed through your GCSE or your O level with a shaky grasp of those basics. If you were that child, you will have been frankly terrified of maths as a subject and probably still believe that you’re “rubbish at maths”, all because nobody took the time to ensure that you understood the rudimentary basics. Remember how that felt? That’s what I’m talking about.

One of the first things I always check out when I meet a new student is whether they are confident with the order and meaning of the cases. You wouldn’t believe how many Year 10 or Year 11 students I have worked with who, when asked about this, have absolutely no idea. But what is the point of them learning their noun endings if they don’t know what those endings mean? So I start with a blank table and ask students whether they can tell me which case comes first and what the meaning of that case is. (Answer: nominative, and it’s the subject of the sentence). Most students who are taking GCSE are able to tell me this (although not all). Beyond that, many – not all, but the majority – start to fall apart from there. For example, they cannot remember whether the genitive comes before or after the dative and/or they cannot remember which one means “of” and which one means “to” or “for”. Immediately, therefore, we have a fundamental clue to what the underlying problem is with their approach to any Latin sentence: basically, in reality, they are guessing.

Delving into the gaps in a student’s knowledge like this is an enormous privilege and helping them start to plug those gaps is one of the best things about my job. All of these students have been taught these concepts before but all of them have forgotten that material. This is how memory works and this is why retrieval practice and revisiting past concepts in the classroom again and again is so crucial. Most classroom teachers, it seems to me, are still underestimating the importance of this and the extent to which even the highest of achievers need regular checks on their two times table interwoven with their introduction to the finer points of matrices. But the reality is that no matter how good the classroom teacher, no matter how solid and consistent their use of retrieval practice, there will still be some students who fall by the wayside; this may be due to illness causing absences or it may just be that they find it harder than the rest of the class. And that’s where tutoring comes in.

Sometimes people assume that repetition is boring and that working with lots of students on the same set of fundamentals would also be so. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every child is different and every child that is struggling in the classroom has their own personal and private worries; often a child has an instinct for the fact that they are missing some fundamental pieces of the puzzle but their situation has become so stressful that they feel unable to ask for help. Breaking down those barriers and helping them to grasp the core concepts and knowledge that they need in order to start succeeding is without a doubt the most rewarding thing that I could spend my time doing. Parents often tell me that their increased confidence and improving performance feels like a miracle.

So if your child is struggling with complex material, that is without doubt something which needs addressing. However, it may not be the case that the complex material is where we need to start. After many years of radio silence, I have recently taken up the piano again and am trying to re-learn some complex pieces that I could rattle off without hesitation at the age of 18. What I realised when I started at the music was that I have forgotten some of the most rudimentary bits of knowledge – when there are four sharps in the treble clef, what does that mean? I honestly can’t remember. So, before I can play with confidence, I will have to revisit some of those basics. I know that they will come flooding back, but the reality is that they need to be revised. So, back to basics I go. It will be worth it in the long-run.

Mistakes were made: the use of the passive voice

Students are often surprised and puzzled when I point out to them that English is not very comfortable with the passive voice. It’s not our most natural way of speaking, which may go some way towards explaining why students find the passive voice difficult to translate. For example, while Latin slides into the passive voice in the imperfect and future tenses quite simply with its alternative set of endings, English makes one heck of a meal out of this: who on earth really wants to say “he was being carried” or “he will be carried”?

Despite this, and this is another thing I like to point out to my tutees, the passive voice is used for very distinct purposes in the English language. First of all, it is used in scientific writing. When writing up an experiment, students are taught to write that “the powder was placed into the test tube” rather than “I put the powder in the test tube”. In scientific writing, this tradition stems from the principle that we should take the individual out of the process and focus on the process itself, removing any other distractions or influences. This then carries forward as a tradition in all academic writing in all fields, although I note with some dismay that this appears to be changing. O tempora! O mores!

The passive voice in scientific writing is a tradition because the person conducting the experiment is not (or should not be) the focus of the experiment. Likewise, another purpose for which the passive voice can therefore be used is in order to separate an event from its cause. Consider the difference between saying “Emma broke the vase” and “the vase was broken (by Emma)”. Not only is the person who broke the vase separated from the action, they don’t even need to be named for the action to make some kind of sense: the accident just happened.

This kind of passive speaking is used to great effect is by public figures – in particular, politicians. The phrase “mistakes were made” even has its own Wikipedia entry, so synonymous is it with political double-speak. The phrase, described by the New York Times as a “classic Washington linguistic construct” allows a politician to sound as if they or their party are taking responsibility for something without actually doing so and without even articulating what they are taking responsibility for. Despite the fact that journalists have poked fun at this phrase since it was first used as early as the 19th century, politicians continue to roll it out on a regular basis. Listen out for it – you’ll be amazed how often it or something very like it pops up.

There are yet more creative ways in which the passive voice can be used other than merely distancing yourself from responsiblity. If you want to create a straw man argument and so ridicule a view that nobody actually holds, how about saying “what we are being asked to believe”? “What we are being asked to believe here is that young people are incapable of making any kind of decision.” Who is actually asking us to believe this? Erm, nobody; we’re just “being asked” to believe it by persons unspecified – straw men, if you will. The passive voice makes this rhetorical trick viable, effective and convincing. (Nice tricolon, I know). Similarly, if you wish to give more credibility to a position than it truly deserves, then make it sound like the consensus view by using the perfect passive participle — drop in that a position is “long held” or “long agreed-upon”. Long held or long agreed-upon by whom, exactly? Well, nobody knows or seems to care.

One of my hobbies is listening out for ancient rhetorical techniques as employed by modern politicians (or rather their speech writers, as since the Age of Spin I am somewhat cynical about the degree to which any of our modern leaders write their own material). Many of the techniques learned, employed and taught by the greatest speech-writers of the Roman era can still be heard in the House of Commons today. A very basic version of the same skills are indeed taught in schools, as students are still expected to learn how to write persuasively in their English language GCSE. The passive voice is an often-overlooked and thus dangerously insidious technique. Do not let the speakers fool you with it. Or, I should say, do not be fooled (by them).

Cicero Against Catiline by Hans W. Schmidt, 1912. Meibohm Fine Arts.

Let us be clear: what teachers could learn from the aviation industry

We in education could learn a great deal from the aviation industry. In fact, most professions could learn a lot from the aviation industry. While so many other professions have a tendency towards a blame-culture and criticism, aviation is built on the principle of learning from its mistakes and implementing procedures to mitigate against them. It is also relentlessly focused on clarity of communcation: for lives literally depend on getting this right.

Last night, my husband and I watched one of a string of documentaries aired on the National Geographic channel, which follow accident investigations in aviation. The accident explored in this particular episode occured all the way back in 1989 and involved a Boeing 707 on an American charter flight from Italy to the Dominican Republic. The flight was making a scheduled stop on the Portugese island of Santa Maria, where it was due to be refuelled. As a result of a series of minor but significant oversights in procedure made both by the flight crew and by the Air Traffic Controller, Flight 1851 came in too low and struck a mountain range, killing everyone on board.

One of the most important things about the way in which investigations are conducted in aviation is that the culture focuses not on finger-pointing but on identifying the factors which led to an accident, so that the findings can be shared within the industry and lessons truly learned. The investigators may make recommendations which lead to a tightening of regulations around pilots’ working hours, a change in how pilots are trained, an adjustment to the design of an aircraft and/or its instruments, a tweak in recommended flight procedures, or all of the above. The approach is a model in how to react under extreme pressure: it does not seek to apportion blame, it aims rather to improve safety for the future, for the benefit of everyone. The pilots who do make errors (and who pay the ultimate price for them) are treated with infinite respect and the investigators do not simply stop at putting things down to “pilot error” and then washing their hands of the incident – they go on to explore why the pilots may have made a particular error, with the ultimate aim of reducing the risk of similar errors occuring again in the future. Were they overtired? Was the information they were receiving unclear or counter-intuitive? Was their training insufficient in this area? Above all, how could we have prevented them from making this mistake? I find this approach genuinely inspiring and I wish other fields would learn from it.

One of the key findings of this particular investigation was that there was a crucial miscommunication between the Air Traffic Controller and the flight crew. The ATC instructed the crew that they were “cleared to three thousand feet” (in other words, that their initial approach should not go below three thousand feet). For several reasons, the First Officer ended up mishearing the instruction as “cleared two thousand feet” and the aircraft was set to the incorrect height. My husband (a trained pilot, as it happens) informs me that this would be less likely to occur now because the advised vocalisations for this particular information have been revised, in an attempt to prevent such misunderstandings; the instruction would now be “you are cleared to altitude three thousand feet” – the word “altitude” must be used immediately before the given height in order to avoid any confusion between words and numbers, an error which in the case of Flight 1851 led to devastating consequences.

While the documentary explored numerous other reasons why the crash ultimately occured and indeed made it clear that the Captain of the flight crew undeniably missed several opportunities to prevent the disaster from happening, the underlying cause of the crash was quite simple – the aircraft came in too low. The miscommunication between the ATC and the flight crew, which was not corrected when it could and should have been, set the aircraft on a collision course with the mountainous terrain towards which it was headed.

Now I for one am jolly glad to be working in a field in which my mistakes are unlikely to cause multiple fatalities and even less likely to be the subject of a documentary on National Geographic some 35 years later. Yet this minor slip which led to such devastating consequences for the flight and its passengers did remind me of a misapprehension which I discovered in a tutee this year. On Flight 1851, the First Officer mistook a word for a number – quite simply, he heard “cleared to” as “cleared two”. Similarly, I realised this year that one of my tutees was convinced that the dative case had something to do with numbers. After a couple of minutes of discussing this with him and trying to explore what was going on, I suddenly realised what had happened: his teacher had (quite rightly) taught his class that the dative case was to be translated as “to” or “for”. My tutee, however, had heard “two” or “four”. He heard numbers instead of words. And he had been royally confused ever since.

Whilst teachers are not making minute-by-minute decisions on which hundreds of lives depend, instead they are laying the foundations for a child’s understanding in their subject. Whilst this is not life-threatening (happily, I can’t think of a single occasion on which a misunderstanding of the dative case has led to multiple fatalities), it is nevertheless important in our line of work, assuming we care about what we do. This particular child’s misunderstanding underlined for me the importance of dual coding, which means using a visual representation of what you are saying as well as a verbalisation: quite simply, if the teacher in question had merely written the words “to” and “for” on the board as they spoke, they would have avoided the misconception that was absorbed and internalised by this particular child.

On one sunny day, during which I took the photograph below, I was very privileged to join my husband on a flight during his training and listen to the impeccably high standard of teaching that he received from his instructor. My advice to all teachers if they want to observe a model in verbal clarity is to take every opportunity that they can to go and listen to people who teach a practical skill. Go and watch a PE teacher setting up a game; watch a science teacher preparing students for an experiment; take a refresher course from a driving instructor; tune in to your coach at the gym. Above all, in your own teaching, remember that every word you use must be carefully thought through and – in an ideal world – that you should take a note of every misconception which does occur and seek to mitigate against it next time by improving your verbal explanation. While I am happy and relieved to say that a child’s life will not depend on your words, their success in your subject absolutely does.

I took this photograph from inside the aircraft in which my husband did much of his training.

We’ve always done it this way

A few years ago I had something of an epiphany about why so many students struggle to translate the indirect command correctly. This is the kind of epiphany I am blessed with – nothing earth-shattering that will change the future of humanity as we know it; just a little tweak when it comes to how Latin might be best taught – we all need some kind of claim to fame.

Now I work solely as a private tutor I have the privilege of insight into how students are taught in a myriad of different schools. One consistent pattern is that the uses of the subjunctive are always taught in a particular order and most notably, the indirect command is consistently taught after the purpose clause. I think I know why this is and it’s for the same reason I did this myself for several years: it’s how it’s done in the Cambridge Latin Course. Even Taylor & Cullen introduce ut + subjunctive in this way: purpose clause first, followed immediately by the indirect command. But after my epiphany, I started to switch this around.

I have yet to come across a single student who has been taught the indirect command prior to the purpose clause unless they have been taught by me, and this is fascinating. Is it really the all-pervasive, insidious influence of the Cambridge Latin Course? Given that my focus for this piece is entirely on secondary schools and given that the majority of those still use (or have used) the Cambridge Latin Course over the years, I suspect it is. But I suddenly realised what a huge mistake it is to teach the purpose clause first: I realised that this is why students are so wedded to translating ut as “in order to” whenever they see it: because that is how they first see it and after that they can’t let it go.

So let me explain the alternative approach, which I started to use when I was still teaching in school and the approach I use to help my tuteees now with huge success. First of all, when I introduce the subjunctive, I do continue to teach the use of cum + subjunctive first, followed by the indirect question. This follows the pattern used by the Cambridge Latin Course and I think it is a good one: these two constructions both require no complexity when it comes to translating the tense of the subjunctive verb and are hence a good introduction to the uses of the subjunctive. I believe that at GCSE it is important to emphasise that there is nothing special about the way in which subjunctive verbs are translated in subordinate clauses; as soon as we get onto the indirect command and purpose clause the students have to learn to move beyond translating the tense of the verb in its literal sense, so they need to gain a little confidence first.

After I have taught the endings of the subjunctive and the first two uses as above, I then within one lesson (or tutoring session) introduce two uses of ut + subjunctive and explain that they are difficult to tell apart – I also explain that being able to differentiate between them is important for the grammar questions in the GCSE examination. I then explain that their default translation for ut should be “to” and explain the indirect command in detail: that the definition of a command-word is broad: begging, persuading or even asking counts as a command, as it basically includes any verb which is trying to get somebody to do something. I emphasise that the ut should always be translated as “to”. I show a few examples and reassure them that it is correct not to translate the tense of the imperfect subunctive – just translate the meaning of the verb after “to”, just as if it were an infinitive.

I then introduce the purpose clause and point out how similar it is as the ut can still be translated as “to”. I then exlain that the test to see whether or not it is in fact a purpose clause is to try out whether one can also translate ut as “in order to” or “so that he/they could”. If that’s possible, then it’s a purpose clause. I then spend the remainder of the session showing them a series of mixed examples and asking them to identify whether each sentence is an indirect command or a purpose clause. I stick almost exclusively to vocabulary required for GCSE and also provide vocabulary support to lighten their cognitive load – this is essential no matter what you are teaching.

Screenshot from one of my numerous presentations on this topic

One of the worst reasons for doing something is solely because we’ve always done it this way. In teaching it is always important to keep asking yourself why: why this topic? Why those things in that order? Why this? Why this now? If you don’t stop and ask yourself these questions on a regular basis, you end up doing things solely for the sake of it, solely because that’s what you’re used to and solely because it needs to be done at some point. Given how embedded the problem is that students regularly fail to recognise and translate the indirect command correctly, it is actually rather worrying that more teachers don’t seem to have asked themselves why this is. Pretty much every single student I meet, without fail, when presented with a simple sentence such as dux militibus imperavit ut oppugnarent will immediately say, “the leader commanded the soldiers in order to attack”. Perhaps more worrying, a large number of those students seem puzzled when it is pointed out to them that this translation doesn’t actually make a whole lot of sense. As a tutor, I have to break down their wedded belief that ut means “in order to” and explain why – most of the time = it actually doesn’t mean that at all.

Obviously there is third use of ut + subjunctive required at GCSE, which is the result clause. I teach this next but in a different session to emphsise that it works quite differently from the other two.

Animated slide which I use multiple times to remind students how to spot each clause

I then do lots of work on how to spot the difference between each of the three types of ut-clauses and I always word the question in the manner that they will face in the GCSE exam: why is oppugnarent in the subjunctive mood? The more they get used to the teacher or their tutor asking them this question, the easier the grammar questions will be for them. Some students have to be reminded that “because it’s used after ut” is not an answer to this question, as the examiner wants them to differentiate between the three clauses.

Pink spots, pink lines and seeing red

This week’s “controversy” on EduTwitter seems to be the very suggestion that crowd control might be necessary in our schools. The mental gymnastics that some people will perform in order to persuade themselves that children do not behave in the proven, well-documented ways that we know all human beings behave is quite extraordinary.

Perhaps well aware of the reaction his post would get, David Scales, Principal of Astrea Academy, Woodfields, tweeted a couple of pictures from his school: “Introducing pink spots and pink lines. Pink spots – a duty point that staff must occupy if empty. Pink lines – one foot either side and queue if at a T, otherwise a corridor divider, walk on left.” Let us be clear, this is the use of visible guidelines for where large numbers of youngsters should assemble and/or where those managing them should ideally stand. How on earth this is controversial I will never truly understand, but the reaction it sparked would be hilarious if it weren’t so depressing.

“Professional adults expected to occupy spots; no wonder politicians treat us with contempt. It starts within” said one. Others seemed to feel that the staff at Scales’ school must be suffering from some kind of Stockholm syndrome: “It’s astonishing and worrying no staff have pointed out how ridiculous this is.” Numerous responses suggested that Scales does not trust his staff and that they are being treated with contempt, while others seemed to find the very need for visible markers beneath their contempt. “Utterly ridiculous. 37 years of teaching in primary schools and I have never wanted or needed anything like this.”

I am speechless. Stunned. Do these people occupy a different planet from the one on which I have spent my years to date? I spent 21 years in two secondary schools – neither of which could be considered “tough” schools by any stretch of the imagination – and I can well see the need for the spots and lines.

One of the things that I find particularly puzzling about people’s hysterical reaction to painted guidelines is their inability to see that a forward planning prevents poor behaviour from occuring, keeps everybody safe and shows children how to conduct themselves in the right way; the very people who claim to value students the most seem hell-bent on not showing them what good looks like, on not showing them how to behave, on setting them up for failure. Presumably the plan is that the kids should just line up however they fancy leaving staff to shout at them when they get it wrong. How incredibly stressful for all concerned.

One of the most important things to understand about schools – particularly large secondary schools – is that they work like a hivemind, like a well-oiled machine. Everything relies on staff being where they’re expected to be and on students knowing where to stand, how to move around, when to be quiet and what kind of conduct is expected of them. As soon as this is allowed to unravel, people are at best confused – the kind of situation that causes untold stress to many vulnerable students and their staff; at worst, people can find themselves at serious risk of harm.

Many critics of crowd control seem to possess a quite stunning inability to grasp that large numbers of people – any people, not just children – is a potentially risky situation in and of itself. I find myself wondering whether they are wilfully ignorant of human behaviour as well as remarkably blind to the architecture around them. Have they not noticed how many buildings are designed specifically with subliminal crowd control in mind? This is not because town-planners and architects believe that we are all savages, who will instantly descend into a re-enactment of Lord of the Flies as soon as we’re let out of our cages; it is because they know that people move around most comfortably, more conveniently and more safely if the flow of movement is managed in an orderly way. Quite simply, guidelines make things better and less stressful for everyone.

The Romans were concerned about crowd control. With their visceral distaste for civil unrest (perhaps a result of the regularity with which it occurred), Roman architects designed their public spaces with considerable thought to the fact that large numbers of people would be involved. Over a decade ago, archaeologist Alexis McBride wrote a fantastic blog post exploring the apocryphal skill with which the Colosseum – a structure that could hold up to 80,000 people – was designed to empty of its crowds as rapidly and efficiently as possible. By modern standards, the process would have been uncomfortable and dangerous but, as McBride puts it, it would have been fast! Likewise, this post from 2007 draws on the knowledge of Keith Still, an expert on modern crowd control, who has consulted on the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca and the Beijing Olympics; he found the amphitheatre at Pompeii to be a striking example of good design when it comes to crowd control.

So let’s hear it for painted spots and lines and for crowd control in general. If you’ve never felt unsafe in a crowd, lucky you. I have been terrified in crowds before, perhaps never more so than in an unsupervised crush at the very small, very expensive private school I was sent to as a child. You see, it doesn’t matter what kind of people are involved; if there is no order and no clarity, and you add in a little hysteria, a little noise, a little excitement, real danger can occur – even if the members of the crowd are all female, most of them bearing names such as Philippa and Felicity. Since that day I have always been alert to the risks of crowds, and have of course been at the centre of much larger and potentially more dangerous ones since – on the London Underground, on protest marches, after a concert. In all of those scenarios I have been viscerally aware of and hugely grateful for the time, the effort and the planning that other people have put into the process of keeping the members of that crowd safe. I would highly recommend that we show the same level of care and respect towards our children and the staff who are paid to look after them.