Education – Page 7 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Can Chat GPT write in Latin?

I’m always a little bit behind the curve when it comes to technology. If you’re looking for future predictions, I am definitely not the person to come to. You’re looking at the woman who said that texting would never take off and who confidently remarked in 1998 that the internet “didn’t sound particularly useful.”

Fast-forward to the end of 1999 and I was surfing like a Californian, thanks to a fellow student on my PGCE course. He sat down next to me one day and issued a statement which – on honest reflection – may have had more impact on my life than anything I read in my 8 years at university. “I’ve discovered a great new Search Engine,” he said. “It’s called Google.”

Now I didn’t know what a Search Engine was and my knowledge of computers to date had extended to word-processing (remember WordPerfect?) and the use of a CD Rom. I had been given an email address, which one accessed by logging into Telnet and navigating a series of processes so tedious and clunky that I really couldn’t imagine why anyone would wish to make use of it. Then Matthew introduced me to Google and the rest, as they say, is history.

So this week – around 6 months after it was launched, I took a look at Chat GPT for the first time. For the uninitiated, Chat GPT is a free chatbot which utilises artificial intelligence. It was developed by a company called Open AI and launched into the world at the end of November 2022. In summary, you can ask it questions and it will answer them for you, drawing on the internet for information. So what’s different for the user from using a super-clever search engine such as Google, you may ask? (I certainly did). Well, Chat GPT will generate a lengthy response to your question, written in whatever style-register you ask it to mimic.

Chat GPT’s ability to produce complex and extended verbal responses in a particular vocal register has caused a great deal of consternation in education, with teachers realising just how easy it now is for students to ask their computer to produce an alarmingly convincing response to an essay question. A student can simply type their essay question into the system (“what were the causes of the First World War?”) and Chat GPT will generate an essay-style response. The more information you give the system, the better and more useful it will be to you. For example, you can give it a word limit and you can ask it to pitch its response at a particular kind of audience. The system has also caused some wry consternation and a bit of self-reflection amongst journalists, following the news that The Irish Post was forced to withdraw an Op Ed arguing that fake tan is racist; the article turned out to be AI-generated and was submitted as genuine by someone in an undeniably successful bid to make the editors at the publication look foolish. The article was titled Irish women’s obsession with fake tan is problematic and its opening line read “Dear Irish women, we need to talk about fake tan.” Well played, chatbot. Well played.

As so often, I do find myself being thankful that this kind of technology was not available to me when I was younger and learning how to construct an argument or write persuasively “the hard way” – by actually doing it myself. Where Chat GPT will take us in terms of the future of essay, speech and Op Ed writing as a skill and as a means of testing knowledge I have no idea. I’m jolly glad it’s not my problem. It’s all a little overwhelming and makes me want to lie down in a darkened room for a while. Perhaps I shall do so, and Chat GPT can finish the rest of this blog post for me.

Given the inescapable fact that Chat GPT and its ilk are here to stay, I dived in with some consternation but with also a little glimmer of excitement that I might be at the point of reliving my Google moment in 1999. Could Chat GPT be as life-changing as that discovery was? Well, I am here to tell you that the answer is potentially yes.

Given the truly abysmal state of Google Translate, I was highly dubious at the notion that Chat GPT could generate accurate Latin. Well, it can and it does. Moreover, you can give it perameters, which makes it fantastically useful as a teacher-tool. You can ask it to write you a passage of Latin based on a particular story and instruct it to make the passage suitable for GCSE candidates: for example, “I need a passage of Latin, around 100 words, suitable for GCSE students, based on the story of Claudius Pulcher”. It can do that! You can ask it to generate a series of sentences to practise a particular grammatical construction: for example, “write me 20 Latin sentences using the ablative absolute, suitable for GCSE students”. It can do that too!

One thing that I have not yet fully established is how to force it to use only the GCSE vocabulary, and this brings me to the biggest complaint that I (and others) have about Chat GPT in its current form: it presents incomplete, dubious or frankly false information with the confident swagger of a scruffy blond Etonian. It doesn’t tell you what it doesn’t know, and this – given the open availability of the system – is somewhat alarming. For example, when I asked it to create a passage suitable for GCSE candidates using only the OCR GCSE vocabulary list, it claimed to have done so. I pointed out that a particular word was not on the GCSE list. “Apologies!” it said. “Here is the passage again, with that corrected.” It then produced the passage again, with that word replaced by another one that was not on the GCSE list. I pointed this out also, and again the system responded in a manner that suggested it was fixing the error. I then pointed out several other words that were not on the list and eventually it admitted that it was not able to consult “outside sources” such as the OCR GCSE list. Hmmmm. By the way, before anyway thinks that I’ve lost it, I am fully aware that yes, I was having a conversation with a computer-generated entity: the weirdness of that does not escape me.

I discovered through colleagues on the Twitter hivemind that it was possible to put links into Chat GPT, so I gave it a link to the OCR GCSE list. I also tried experimenting with pasting the whole list into the the chat box and asking it to use only that vocabulary. The latter seems to generate the best results and – in terms of creating a series of practice sentences – pretty much solves the problem if you work within tight perameters; for example, ask it to generate some GCSE-level sentences practising adjectival agreement, and give it the adjectives on the GCSE vocabulary list. It still utlises a wide range of vocabulary when creating an extended passage, so a teacher would still require a knowledge of (or the patience to check) all of the words listed by OCR, or whatever other examination body you are working to.

As for the accuracy of the Latin? It is extraordinarily good. Given that I work with beginning students and candidates up to GCSE level, I grant you that I am not asking it to do anything overly complex, but this is still a giant leap from anything else we have seen in my lifetime. Some sentences I felt were a little unnatural and would wish to tweak, but grammatical errors are minimal. This is borderline miraculous given that up until now the best we have had has been Google Translate. Nothing prior to Chat GPT has been even bordering on accurate and therefore useful in any way.

So, can Chat GPT write in Latin? The answer is that it can. In the hands of an expert teacher it is going to be a genuinely brilliant tool that will save infinite amounts of time and will assist in the production of high-quality resources. Chat GPT will produce the bare bones of a worksheet in seconds, leaving the expert teacher free to develop, tweak, personalise and perfect their new resource. This is a genuine godsend. It has the potential to mean that every new resource a teacher writes will be better, for it will already have been through much of the fine-tuning process which normally relies on students acting as guinea pigs. In terms of the hours it will save us, I am still slightly in shock.

Defining your terms

This week I had a request from a client that made me reflect on how differently terms are used in different subjects, and how confusing this can be for all of us. At best it may mean that we are talking at cross purposes; at worst, it can mean focusing on areas that aren’t important, to the detriment of progress overall.

For much of my career I taught English language and English literature as subjects, as well as Latin. My first job indeed was advertised as “English with Latin” and for much of my career in schools around 50% of my timetable was filled with teaching English. It’s how one survives and earns one’s keep as a classroom teacher in a niche subject, especially in the state sector. English departments are always very large and always have a high turnover: consequently, there is always a little bit of room for you if you can offer it as a subject. This was how I was able to ring up a school which was advertising a very part-time Latin job and tell them that I needed a full-time job and could teach English up to GCSE. Did they have room for me in their school? Of course they did! Suddenly a role which was advertised as 0.4 became a full-time post overnight.

But back to defining our terms. Comprehension is an important skill in the subject English. Reading comprehension is used (for better or for worse) to test students’ ability to read and understand a lengthy passage of writing, extract key bits of information from it and assess its tone; they may also be asked to identify areas of bias or nuances which indicate the author’s viewpoint or opinion. Many students find comprehension remarkably difficult and as a strong reader myself I’ll be honest and say that I found this tricky to address; in my opinion, I was never a particularly brilliant English teacher because the material came so easily to me that I wasn’t very good at identifying the ways in which I could help those students for whom it was more of a struggle; Latin I had to work at, which makes me a better practitioner when it comes to teaching. But whatever my personal failings, there is no question that comprehension is a challenging and complex area in the teaching of English and it’s certainly a skill which students need to practise.

This, no doubt, is what led my client to request a focus on comprehension skills. But “comprehension” in Latin – by contrast to how this term is used in English – is an entirely different beast, certainly in the language paper at GCSE level. Students are not asked to sift a long passage for information, nor are they asked to identify connotations or empathise with the writer’s viewpoint. In Latin, the examiners direct the students to the information by quoting it, then basically ask them to translate what’s there. For example, the first sentence of a passage might be as follows:

Tarquinius erat rex Romanorum.
(Tarquinius was the king of the Romans).

The first “comprehension” question would then be:
Q1. Tarquinius erat rex Romanorum (line 1): who was Tarquinius? [2]

Not only does the examiner direct students to the relevant bit of the Latin by quoting it, they demand merely the ability to translate what’s in front of them. Comprehension is therefore not a complex skill which requires a great deal of repeated practice. Sometimes students need to be encouraged to take their time and ensure that they have written down everything that the mark scheme requires, but that is generalised exam technique – look at the number of marks and consider whether you have answered all aspects of the question. It’s not a unique skill in itself, like the process of comprehension is for students and teachers of English. Comprehension questions in the literature examination are also largely “say what you see” with the exception of those questions which ask about style – these, children do need repeated practice with. These areas I have addressed in more than one post in the past.

Another misconception which many people have is that “grammar” is something separate from “translation”. This really gets to the heart of Latin as a subject and belies why so many children need help with it. Grammar is not an optional bolt-on, it is the beating heart of how the language works. An extraordinary number of people will say when they get in touch with me that their child is “okay with translating” but “struggles with the grammar”. Sadly, this means that their translation will be based on guess work and indeed they may have got lucky to date – but as things get harder they will fall apart and find that they can comprehend very little of what’s in front of them.

Much of my sessions are spent asking students to justify their translation – when they tell me that rex Romanorum means “the king of the Romans” … was that a guess based on the fact that they know the vocabulary? Or can they identify the fact that Romanorum is genitive plural, which is why it translates as “of the Romans”? If they can’t do that, they will never be able to translate more complex sentences. My focus is therefore to present students with a variety of sentences using vocabulary that is familiar but to challenge them to identify and articulate the morphology and syntax that makes the translation work.

It is important to be able to explain to clients how our particular subject may differ from areas in which they may be quite an expert, so that they can make more informed decisions about how and why their child needs support and the best ways to provide this at home. Pretty much everyone I meet wants to support their children in their studies, and giving them concrete guidance on how they can do so is one of the many pleasures of tutoring.

OCR Latin GCSE language – exam technique

GCSE candidates for 2023 are facing their first exam on Tueday May 16th. I have written recently on specific aspects of the paper, in particular the grammar questions and the derivatives question, but this is a generalised post about how to approach the examinantion as a whole.

The Latin language paper is one of the few examinations in which most students will not be under time pressure. Obviously there are always exceptions, and I have had some students who are exceptionally cautious or methodical in their approach find themselves run out of time – but this is very rare. Most students finish the paper early and many finish it within around half the time that is allocated to them. This can lull students into a false sense of security, and there have been few experiences more frustrating in my time than watching students close their paper and choose to spend their remaining time sparing into space. Examiners are not stupid, and the time allocated to candidates is done so for a reason. There is a great deal of time allocated to the language paper because a high degree of accuracy is demanded in order for students to perform exceptionally well.

So what should candidates be doing with all of the spare time that they will – as a general rule – have on their hands? Here are my key bits of advice.

First priority is to go back to the start of the examination and check the bits of the paper that you found easy and did quickly, which is most likely to be the simple comprehension questions in Section A. This is where you are most likely to spot minor errors. Use the time to check your work and look for minor slips such as translating a singular as a plural or vice versa – these kids of errors will lose you marks that you are perfectly capable of scoring.
Return to the derivatives question. This question asks you to define the derivative as well as to give one. Check whether you have chosen the best possible example of a derivative, by which I mean whether have selected one that you can define. For example, in the specimen paper the examiner asks for a derivative from the word credo (I trust or believe) and almost all students immediately plump for credit, which is actually really tough to define in relation to the meaning of the original Latin word; much better to select credible, which defines as believable, or incredible, which you can define as unbelievable. Using the spare time that you have to think of a better derivative could win you an extra 2-4%.
Check your grammar questions. Some of them have more than one possible answer, so check that you have chosen the most solid answer that you are definitely sure of. Check and double check that you have answered all parts of each question as accurately as you can.
Check your answers to the comprehension in Section B and return to the parts of the translation in Section B that you got stuck on and give it a little more thought. Staring at a sentence you find difficult and don’t understand may be a waste of time and may cause you stress, so don’t stare at it for longer than a couple of minutes. If you’re really stuck that’s okay – the exam is designed to really test you and you can still score a top grade without understanding every line.
Finally, if you have checked and double checked everything in the examination and are 100% sure that you have done your most accurate best, now is the time to consider answering the alternative optional question. Most students choose (or have been trained) to do the grammar questions and miss out the English into Latin. If you have spare time following all your checks there is no reason why you cannot answer the English to Latin questions as well: the examiner will mark both options and you will be awarded with whichever gains the highest mark. Remember, however, that this is the very last thing that you should do when you literally have nothing else to check, as it is always a potential waste of your time – you can’t be credited with marks for both options!

Always remember that a few marks here or there can make the ultimate difference between one grade and another. It’s a myth that examiners pool together the papers and re-examine those that are very close to the boundary – teachers do this during the mocks and did this during the pandemic. Examiners do not. It is a purely mathematical game of number-crunching and if you come out just one mark below the grade boundary then that’s how it is. So trawl through you answers and celebrate any mistakes that you find – it could just make the difference in the end.

It’s never too late when it comes to the grammar questions

Have I mentioned that this month is busy? For a few days it seemed like every time I picked up my smartphone there was a new message from an anxious parent seeking last-minute support for their child. GCSE Latin may be somewhat niche, but it is still sat by thousands of students across the UK every year, and many of them are feeling uprepared.

Last week I wrote about how many of the students that have approached me are woefully ill-informed about how to go about the process of learning their set text. We are rapidly hurtling towards a time when fixing this within the available time-frame will be a real challenge. Despite this, some students who have approached me for help only recently are rising to it; but their lives could have been made so much less stressful had they been taught these techniques in the first place and tested on the text regularly.

In the last week, however, I have been approached by students presenting with concerns across the whole specification. While at this stage it is not realistic to promise a dramatic turnaround, there are things that can be done to improve a student’s grade at this late stage. Many students present with concerns about the language paper, quoting a grade 3/4 in this element and a grade 7 in the literature. They express surprise when I tell them that more work on the literature might actually help them the most. At this stage, improving a child’s grade is little more than a numbers game. For example, if I can teach them some techniques which will help them to gain full marks in the 10-mark question (which is worth 20% of their literature grade and therefore 10% of their mark overall) I can make a difference. Students who know the text well should be able to achieve a grade 8/9 in the literature papers, which will pull up their overall result, even without any improvement in their language grade.

So is there anything that can be done at this late stage to improve a child’s performance in the language paper? Well, with five weeks to go, there is little to be gained by delving in and analysing how much basic grammar is missing from a student’s knowledge bank – that can’t be fixed in five weeks, especially given the plethora of other subjects that students are studying at GCSE: it’s not like they can dedicate the majority of time to their Latin. More realitically I can focus on one element of the examination and improve their performance in that. The easiest win is the grammar questions, worth 10% and gloriously predicatable.

I teach students a series of rules and show them dozens of past and practice papers one after the other, focusing entirely on this question; as a result, students are able to identify how predicatable the examiner tends to be and at this stage that can really help. It also empowers them by enabling them to understand the language used in the questions and to identify what it is that the examiner is looking for.

Most students, in my experience, have not been prepared well for this question and there’s a reason for that. Grammar questions are a relatively new thing at GCSE level. They were introduced to the syllabus in 2018 and most teachers saw them as an entirely new phenomenon. But grammar questions have been a feature of the Common Entrance syllabus for decades and guess what? Some of the same people involved in setting those are also involved at GCSE. If anything, the GCSE questions are easier – I would place them at between Level 1 and Level 2 at Common Entrance – Level 3 grammar questions go way beyond the expectations at GCSE. As someone who has tutored the Common Entrance for years, the “new” grammar questions introduced in 2018 looked entirely familiar to me and I was immediately able to predict how they would work. In addition, Taylor & Cullen have published a series of practice papers in their books that accompany the OCR GCSE, as well as further practice with the grammar questions. Teachers now have a minimum of 10 practice, specimen and past papers to model for them how the questions work – and they are consistently repetitive.

The best way to prepare students for this element of the examination is to show them as many examples as you can in quick succession – select just this part of each paper and do one after the other. That way, students are able to spot how certain words, phrases and expectations are repeated time and time again. I usually find that within two half-hour sessions I can take a child from one who was previously mystified as to what to do and guessing wildly to one who is able to score 8, 9 or – on a good day with the wind behind them – 10 out of 10 consistently on the grammar questions.

Off you go and learn it

Time and again I am struck by how little guidance some students are given about how to go about the process of learning. I’m not talking about school assemblies on “study skills”, which I guarantee you most teenagers will switch off from; the guidance needs to come directly from each individual classroom teacher, the subject expert, and it needs to be explicitly taught, modelled and demonstrated on a regular basis. Schools need to agree what methods they are going to recommend and this needs to be reflected right across the school in all subjects, tailored specifically to what works best in each academic discipline.

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

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

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

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

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

As for what the methods should be, I recommend a variety but one is definitely stand-out brilliant and so far has worked for every student I have ever met. So if you haven’t read my previous post on how to use the first-letter technique then do so straight away – you will never look back!

errare humanum est

How children respond to making a mistake is very telling. Working closely in a one-to-one situation with lots of different young people has really started to make me think about the psychology of erring and how an individual’s response to it can be a powerful indicator of their resilience and their potential for success – both academically and in terms of their emotional welfare.

I should stress at the outset that none of my personal observations are truly evidence-based; I work with lots of youngsters, but my reflections are no more than a series of anecdotes. However, my thoughts have sent me off on a bit of a whistlestop tour of what the research does say. For example, a child’s age radically affects their ability to cope with making mistakes and receiving feedback on them; younger children are much less able to cope with negative feedback and require more overt positivity and reassurance. However, recent research supports the notion that making mistakes is crucial to the learning process, and that setting the bar high is more productive in terms of learning outcomes. Yet children will not benefit from this if their response to making mistakes is riddled with anxiety or other negative emotions, and it is this insecapable fact which led to the popularity of the concept of growth mindset in schools; unfortunately, the longterm results show either no benefits or only very small incremental benefits for all the money and time that has been hurled into the concept.

Like many proven concepts in psychology, the truth about growth mindset is not greatly surprising: children with what could be described as a growth mindset – in other words, with the resilience that enables them not only to cope with making mistakes but to learn from them – these children do better in school overall. Well, duh. I’m not sure this is news to anybody. However, what happened in response to this proven research, inevitably, was a rush to develop and advocate for strategies through which schools could encourage a growth mindset in all children. Now, let’s be realitic. Of course, schools can model and encourage a growth mindset in students, but they’re never going to radically adjust the psychology of every individual sat in front of them; pretending that this is possible is part of the pressure that is driving teachers out of their jobs. Let us be clear: the model that children see at home is, always has been and always will be more powerful than what is modelled for them in school.

The observations I have been making about how children react to mistakes are something I am still pondering about. I have yet to meet a child with a truly mature response to the process and I don’t expect to – that maturity comes (if you’re lucky) during adulthood. But I think I can spot the ones that are already on their way there and the ones that I am concerned may struggle along the way.

The clients that worry me the most are the ones that immediately apologise for every error they make. If a child’s response to an academic mistake or misjudgement or mis-recollection is that it is something they need to apologise for, I can only imagine the psychological strain that this places upon them on a daily basis. The feedback loop is essential to study and the process of learning, and I have yet to find a way that reassures such children that this is the case, to the extent that they stop apologising. No matter how much reassurance they are given, no matter how well they are doing, such children will – in my experience to date – continue to apologise for errors. It concerns me greatly for their wellbeing, never mind the limitations that it may place on their longterm ability to learn.

At the other end of the scale are the children who won’t accept they have made a mistake. This too, I suspect, may stem from anxiety. The child will go to endless lengths to tell you why what they said is not wrong, or is the same thing as what you said, or is what they meant in the first place. For some children, granted, this can just be a bit of fun – I have one very high-achieving client who likes to be flippant and retort “same thing” when I tweak his translation; he knows and I know that he’s having a joke with me and will in fact file the correct answer for future reference. But I have met a handful of children who will tie themselves up in knots before they will admit that something is wrong, so desperate are they to avoid the suggestion. One problem with this is that so much learning time is wasted; a more serious concern is that their reaction to the situation belies a level of anxiety about making mistakes that will hold them back in the longterm.

A reaction I have noticed among some high-achievers is what I call self-policing. These students will wail “why on earth did I say that?!” when they make a small slip – they are hyper-aware when their mistake is a minor slip of the tongue, perhaps due to rushing, and they flagillate themselves for it mercilessly. Interestingly, such children are very concerned by minor errors, but deal much better with the process of puzzling out more challenging tasks, in which they expect to make mistakes and learn from them. I find this fascinating. Of course, we all have the urge to tick ourselves off when we do something that we perceive to be foolish, but I have found myself pondering recently whether something more complex is going on. Many of these sorts of children are in very high-achieving schools and/or come from families with high expectations. Are they used to being pounced on when they say something foolish? I remember a colleague who had worked in one of the most academically high-octane boys’ schools in the country telling me that the boys had a particular word that they would all shout in a chorus when another boy “said something stupid”. I absolutely cringed. What an awful learning environment for children, and what a dreadful place that must have been to teach. To what extent, I wonder, do such places contribute to an inability to face up to one’s own mistakes, when blustering and denial seems an infinitely safer option?

But here is the good news. A genuinely surprising number of students deal with mistakes superbly and every time I observe this I want to grab their parents and hug them. Do they realise, I wonder, what a great job they must have done in those formative years? Do they know just what a difference it will make to their child’s longterm wellbeing and their ability to learn? When a child is able to say “aha! Yes, I see that.” Or “ooh, so why is that wrong?” Or even “hang on, didn’t you say x earlier?” which will then help us to uncover a misconception or confusion or exception or false friend or other glitch in the matrix of learning. Such children feel the advantages of tutoring the most, for they are able to access its benefits face-on and without fear.

As a passionate tutor, I try to guide all my students towards this approach by helping them to develop this mindset and attitude towards their studies. But for some it comes naturally, for others I will always be fighting the tide of their previous experiences, their anxieties, their beliefs about themselves and their ability to learn, the way that they have been spoken to or had situations modelled for them by a myriad of family members, friends and teachers throughout all the challenges that they have faced so far. But the more I think about it, the more I come to believe that a child’s attitude towards mistakes is central to their potential for progress (and indeed central to their happiness and wellbeing), so it is something I shall continue to give a great deal of thoughtful energy to.

Taking the wonder out of science

British science week: 10-19 March

A few years ago, the London Science Museum produced its own travelling act for children called “The Energy Show”. It was reported enthusiastically on the BBC, with loud film-clips of zany, steampunk characters shrieking and leaping about the stage, conjuring up the mandatory balls of flame and obligatory explosions that – we’re endlessly told – will encourage our children to get into science. The madcap performers and their virtual lab assistant i-nstein (sigh) took an audience of excited young theatre-goers through a range of whacky demonstrations. The hope was that they would be inspired enough to take their study of chemical reactions further, even after they returned to the classroom and were reminded that they didn’t know or even care what a mole was.

One voice (I’ll confess to having several) in my head told me that I should be happy about this sort of stuff; that anything aimed at “Getting Kids Into Science” has unquestionably got to be A Good Thing. But as I watched the pyrotechnics, I had a familiar sinking feeling.

When I was fifteen, the film Dead Poets Society was released, in which an inspirational professor exposed a group of smart and cynical boys to the rapture of poetry. As the protagonist says of the eponymous club, “Spirits soared, women swooned and gods were created – not a bad way to spend an evening.” The film unashamedly presented poetry and the arts as the pinnacle of human endeavour; science came out as one of several undesirable poor relations. Here’s a section from a speech made by the character John Keating, the inspiring teacher in question:

“Medicine, law, business, engineering … these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love … these are what we stay alive for! To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless … of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer? That you are here. That life exists, and identity. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. … What will your verse be?”

The painful irony for me now when I read those lines is that the questions trembling behind them are inescapably scientific. But to my young mind it was utterly convincing that science was nothing more than a tedious necessity, and this was confirmed to me again and again in the classroom. The very phrase “practical experiment” made me crave fresh air and illumination.

Happily, there are writers who understand. In Unweaving the Rainbow, a homage to science, Richard Dawkins raised concerns about the dominance of practical science in schools, and mused on how impoverished the world would be if only those who had practised and mastered the skill of playing an instrument were interested in and exposed to classical music. As a musician myself, the analogy speaks to me; the endless tedium of scales and arpeggios is enough to put anyone off, and their repetitive practice, whilst entirely necessary for success in the mastering of an instrument, is not for everyone; yet no-one would dream of suggesting that this should preclude a knowledge of, an interest in and even a passion for music itself.

Back in the 1980s I did many practicals, and I suppose that my teachers tried their best to pique my scientific interest. There were ping-pong balls and life-sized models; there were even bottles of acid kicking around on the laboratory bench right next to the gas taps, which some students never tired of lighting behind the teacher’s back. But I’m afraid I simply wasn’t thrilled when a powder changed colour at the bottom of a test tube, or when my lit splint made a squeaky pop, indicating the presence of hydrogen. My teachers saw this as nothing but a failing on my part, and yet when they unanimously agreed that I was “not a scientist” I was overjoyed – triumphant, even. And why? Because none of those practical lessons had convinced me that science was anything other than the pursuit of the mundane.

Most children are natural philosophers. In addition, and contrary to popular belief, not all of them are better engaged by hands-on activities over abstract ideas. In my case, somewhat romantic and thrilled by artistic ideals as I was, the seemingly humdrum realities of the science lab were a positive turn off. My head was bursting with the biggest questions imaginable, and much of the time I was going through the all-consuming existential crisis common to young people, an experience that should be celebrated and nurtured. As my interest in philosophy grew, it was nurtured and guided exclusively by teachers of the arts: numerous English teachers, a couple of historians and most of all my Classics teacher, who would eventually inspire my subject of choice at university. It’s ironic that the closest I came to doubting my convictions as to the unworthiness of science came to me through literature; in being exposed to the metaphysical poets, I couldn’t escape the fact that these exciting, romantic and raunchy philosophers were fascinated by science. But the real scientists had long since abandoned me as a dreamer and left me to discover — too late, as it happens — that my disregard for mathematics and the sciences would eventually limit my academic career; suffice to say, my first postgraduate seminar in the philosophy of logic was one hell of a shock.

Most of the students I have taught during my lifetime have already decided whether or not they consider themselves to be “a scientist.” Too often, it seems to me, the deep and soulful thinkers are the ones that are turned off by science. Why does this bother me? Well, there are lots of reasons. Firstly, I fear that we may be driving some of our best potential thinkers away from science — not a happy propsect for the future. Secondly, I believe that an emphasis on the practical over and above the philosophical may well be a part of what puts many girls off science. Thirdly, and to my mind by far the most pressing worry, is the increasing chasm that we seem to be creating between scientific thinking and “the big questions.” Science should now be at the centre of philosophical reasoning and debate, and yet it tends to get pushed to the side because so few teachers have the knowledge and the skills to apply it.

In the school I used to work in, if you walk down the corridor from the science labs to the Religious Education rooms, you are faced with a plethora of exciting philosophical challenges plastered across the walls. Are some people just evil? When does life begin? Why are we here? Is there such a thing as the soul? What happens when we die? These questions are terrific, but a brief glance through an RE text book will show you that “What scientists think” is generally presented in a colourful bubble alongside other colourful bubbles of equal size summarising “what Christians/Jews/Muslims think.” For any child reading this material, the implication is that scientific thinking is just one option of many; sure, you can choose to look at the world from a scientific angle, but hey, it’s okay not to, especially if it doesn’t sit comfortably with your beliefs! Glance back at those inspiring walls and you’ll find a poster of Rudolph Zallinger’s March of Progress pinned up next to Michaelangelo’s Creation of Adam: it’s all up for debate, it seems, and everyone’s opinion is equally valid — a mindset in schools which I have found increasingly irksome, not to mention worrying.

A Head of Science once confessed to me that he sometimes exploited the popular misunderstanding of the scientific term “theory” in order to avoid causing offence to religious students when talking about evolution — in other words, he allowed the students to think that it’s “only a theory”. I don’t mind admitting that I blew something of a gasket at him and he seemed puzzled by my reaction — perhaps he had thought himself to be on safe ground by admitting his betrayal of his science to one of those ‘arty’ types. But I think that my rage was legitimate — “righteous anger” to quote Aristotle, the forefather of the scientific method. But perhaps some of my antagonism stemmed from my own sense of betrayal. I was frankly let down by my science teachers; they failed systematically to provoke a desire in my young mind to understand the world around me, and I regret those lost years bitterly. The young people that we teach deserve a whole lot better.

This piece is republished in celebration of Science Week 2023. It has been published previously in various forms, most recently in Quillette Magazine in February 2016; I first wrote it under the title “On Being Impractical” for the Richard Dawkins Association for Reason and Science.

Missing the mark

This week I’ve been pondering the fact that we teachers don’t always make the best markers. I mentioned this in passing to a Year 11 tutee a couple of days ago and he expressed such incredulity that I decided to unpick my thoughts a little. Why do teachers struggle to mark accurately and disapassionately?

First of all, marking is incredibly difficult. Even shorter-answer questions take an enormous amount of concentration and classroom teachers are under intolerable time-pressure most of the time. Marking is rarely something that teachers enjoy and prioritise (I’ve met the odd bizarre teacher who claims to “love” marking but if I’m honest I always assumed they were pretending). Longer-answer questions require even greater concentration (English teachers, I feel your pain) and they also require training; if a teacher has not acted as a professional marker and/or attended a training course run by the examining body which addresses those questions and the mark scheme in detail, they may be making false assumptions about how those question will be assessed.

Secondly, teachers develop their marking as a professional tool to aid the teaching process, not as an end goal in itself. When I was training “assessment for learning” – something which its pioneers, Black and Wiliam, now say they wished they had called “responsive teaching” – was the new focus in education, and to a large extent it still dominates. Responsive teaching (I shall call it by its preferred name) requires teachers to mark in a manner that informs their planning – in other words, teachers should base their next lesson on the information that has arisen out of the last time they looked at their students’ work. From the outset, both Black and Wiliam campaigned for teachers to mark in a manner that reduced their workload – I heard Professor Black deliver a session at The Latymer School where I used to work, and he was without a doubt the first educationalist to stand up and tell me to spend less time marking. Black and Wiliam’s vision was that teachers should mark in a smarter way that genuinely informed their teaching – all outstanding advice.

What it means, however, is that teachers are trained to use marking as a diagnostic tool. Every time we mark, we are acquiring and encoding information about how that student is doing and – let’s be frank – whether they are following instructions and/or approaching their learning as we have taught them to. This all feeds into our overall impression of how a student is performing and will shape our next approaches. This is of course jolly difficult in the mainstream classroom, where a class of 30 may present a myriad of responses to what they have been taught so far. Happily, schools are learning to adapt more effectively to this, with leading proponents of whole-class feedback such as Daisy Christodoulou, the brains behind the “no more marking” campaign, driving schools towards a more effective way to share feedback to larger groups. Schools who have not fully adapted in this direction (mine was one of them) are overloading teachers with unnecessary work, since all the research points towards whole-class feedback as by far the most effective use of teachers’ time. Asking teachers to write individual, personalised feedback to every student in a large class is insane and remains one of the things that drives people out of the profession.

So let us come back to the original comment which so surprised my tutee, which was the suggestion that teachers don’t always make the best markers. I told him that I worked as part of a group of 6 professional markers who were assigned the A level literature components a few years ago. Most of us were working classroom teachers, but one member of the group was a subject expert but not a teacher. If I’m honest I was surprised she was there and expected her to struggle with the process. How wrong I was. In fact, she rapidly became the best out of all of us. You see, she was arriving without all the baggage. We teachers look at a script and immediately start thinking about the individual that wrote it. How if only they had done this or that then their answer would have been better. I found it hard not to feel frustrated by the ones who had clearly not learnt the text – again, a symptom of years at the chalkface. I rejoiced for the ones who had excelled. I ached for the ones who had misunderstood the question. But the non-teaching subject expert had no emotional baggage to bring to the table, no classroom-weary experience of working with a myriad of teenagers, who can be frustrating at the best of times; she approached the process entirely disapassionately. Teachers tend to pick up a script and think “how can I help this student to improve?”, or sometimes – let’s be honest – “what on earth are they doing?!”. Examiners must pick up a script and think nothing other than “where precisely does this response fit in the mark scheme?” That’s actually incredibly difficult to do if your brain is used to marking for the classroom – marking for the purpose of helping students to develop and improve.

One of the things we had to develop as part of the examining process was the ability to judge when an answer had hit the threshold for full marks. The teachers in the group took far longer to understand this than the non-teacher. This – I believe – is because we were so used to looking for reasons and ideas to help the students in front of us. The schools I have worked in were all obsessed with “even better if” comments – what tweaks could even the most outstanding of students make to their answer in order to make it better? Much as I applaud the notion that there is always room for improvement, this was sometimes exhausting and at times felt cruel. Sometimes I blatantly ignored school policy and said “you know what? This was perfect. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. Keep up the brilliant work.” Sometimes students need to hear that. But marking for the exam board isn’t about perfection – marking for the exam board will require you to give full marks to an answer that is decidely less than perfect. The exam board does not require perfection – it requires students to show their knowledge in a way that fits the mark scheme (and yes, it is a somewhat mechanical and artificial process). Giving full marks to an answer that could be improved was something that the teachers in the group – myself included – had to be trained into doing; it still felt weird every time we did it.

Exam boards are struggling more and more to recruit markers, a symptom of the fact that teachers are already under intolerable strain much of the time as well as an indicator of just how appalling the rates of pay are. I have always advocated that working as a professional marker is excellent CPD and that teachers should mark for the board they teach to if they can; however, I completely understand why so many of them simply cannot find the time or the energy to do so.