Musings – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

School Daze

Before reading any further, try a simple experiment. Think of a teacher from your school days. Not necessarily the best teacher you ever had. Not necessarily your favourite. Just the first one who comes into your mind.

I have no doubt that somebody came to you almost immediately. You may be able to picture the classroom. You may remember the sound of their voice, the clothes they wore or a particular phrase they repeated endlessly. You might even recall a specific lesson, despite the fact that years or even decades have passed since you last sat in front of them.

Now, try remembering what you ate for lunch three days ago. Chances are, you’re finding that rather more difficult. This curious imbalance lies at the heart of one of the most fascinating questions in psychology. Why do so many of us retain vivid memories from our school days while forgetting vast stretches of our adult lives?

As a tutor, I am frequently reminded of just how powerful these memories can be. Mention Latin and people often respond not with a discussion about language but with stories about school. Sometimes they remember an inspirational teacher. More often, they recall a terrifying one. They may remember little about the subject (most usually Caecilius est in horto) but they do remember the smell of the classroom and the location of the windows. Such memories remain remarkably persistent.

The human brain is not a recording device. Most of us intuitively imagine memory as something like a video archive, faithfully storing the events of our lives for later retrieval. In reality, memory is selective, reconstructive and deeply influenced by emotion. Not only is the brain constantly making decisions about what information is worth keeping and what can safely be discarded, it reconstructs those memories each time it brings them to mind. From an evolutionary perspective, the process makes perfect sense. A memory system that preserved every detail of every day would quickly become overwhelmed. Forgetting is not a flaw in the system, it is one of its most important features. The interesting question, therefore, is not why we forget so much but why we remember certain things so clearly.

One answer lies in emotion. Psychologists have long known that emotionally significant experiences are more likely to be remembered. This does not necessarily mean dramatic or traumatic events (although those are often disturbingly persistent). Embarrassment, excitement, pride, anxiety, surprise and even mild humiliation can all strengthen memory formation. School provides a quite remarkable number of opportunities for such emotions. The first time a child answers a difficult question correctly or incorrectly in front of their peers. The panic of forgetting a line in a school play. The pride and embarrassment of winning a prize. The horror of realising that homework has been left at home. The embarrassment of calling your teacher “Mum” in front of a class (actually, I’ve even been called “Dad”, which was interesting). Such experiences may seem trivial to an outside observer, yet they provoke heightened emotions at the time and hence become deeply embedded in our memory.

Teachers frequently become part of this process. The teachers we remember are not always the most effective educators. More often, for better or for worse, they are the ones who made us feel something: who inspired us, frightened us, encouraged us, challenged us or infuriated us. Emotion acts like a preservative, signalling to the brain that a particular experience may be worth keeping long-term. Even now, my oldest friend and I can remember how terrified we were of our needlework teacher when we were 13. Her favourite method of crowd control was ritual humiliation. “Everyone gather round to see how badly Ros is doing this,” is a classroom memory we will both take to the grave. To this day, I genuinely wish I had found the courage to defend my friend and told that teacher exactly where she could shove it. Exclusion would have been 100% worth it.

School provides us with a series of novel firsts. Much of adult life is surprisingly repetitive and the very predictability that makes adult life manageable can make it difficult to remember. One Tuesday begins to resemble another. Childhood is different, since everything is happening for the first time. Our first day at secondary school. Our first examination. Our first close friendship, the loss of which can be our first taste of heartbreak. Our first major disappointment. Such experiences define our narrative. All of this helps to explain why our memories of school often feel so vivid. It was not necessarily that school itself was more memorable than adult life. Rather, our experiences in school were a plethora of firsts, which our growing brains identified as key events in our evolving self-definition.

In addition to the inescapable fact that our school days introduce us to a series of first-time experiences, it is also important to remember the profound effect that experiences have on us when they happen during our younger years. Psychologists have identified a phenomenon known as the “reminiscence bump”, one of the most intriguing findings in memory research. When older adults are asked to recall events from their lives, they tend to remember a disproportionate number from childhood, adolescence and very early adulthood. Memories from these years appear unusually durable. I have witnessed this first-hand as I have watched my parents age: both of them, now in their 80s, talk more about their childhood and their youth than they have ever done before. Researchers continue to debate exactly why this occurs, but it is a recognised side-effect of ageing and several explanations have been proposed. Our younger years are often characterised by major life transitions and significant personal development; we form identities, establish relationships, make important decisions and experience many of life’s defining moments. That period also coincides with a time when the brain is laying down new neural pathways and thus appears to be particularly sensitive to memory formation. I find this the most interesting part of current theory: many neurologists believe that the changes that the brain is going through during adolescence and our early 20s are as significant as those that happen during our first two to three years of our lives.

For all of us, education is not simply something we experience, it is the environment within which much of our identity is formed. For some people, the experience is something they never quite recover from, and a significant challenge faced by schools is managing the feelings and prejudices projected by some parents for whom school was a thoroughly traumatic experience. For some, school was such a place of struggle and of negative comparison of oneself to others that it becomes associated with entirely negative experiences. School is where many people first encounter challenge and failure and it can be difficult for some adults to let go of the powerfully negative associations they may have towards education as a result.

All adults inevitably revisit their own experiences of school when their own children join the classroom. This sparks memories and every time a memory is reconstructed, it is updated and made more vivid. The past remains alive because we keep returning to it. This process can sometimes create the illusion that we remember school more accurately than we actually do. Every act of remembering involves a degree of reconstruction and we do not retrieve memories so much as rebuild them. This helps to explain why siblings who attended the same school often remember it so differently. They are not recalling a shared objective reality: they are reconstructing experiences through the lens of their own emotions, personalities and subsequent lives.

As somebody who has spent much of my professional life working in schools, I find all of this both fascinating and sobering. Teachers rarely know which moments students will remember. The lesson that took hours to prepare may vanish entirely from memory, whereas a careless throwaway comment may still be remembered forty years later. I am painfully aware of this. Our school experiences occur at precisely the moment when our identities are taking shape, when all of our experiences are new and our emotions feel most intense. The result is a collection of memories that can remain astonishingly vivid for the rest of our lives.

Ghosts in the Machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On legends and identity

Legends occupy an uncertain territory between lived experience and imagination. Across the ancient world, people explained their origins through stories that blended fragments of history with self-conscious invention. Sometimes these traditions preserve genuine echoes of the past: archaeological discoveries at sites once dismissed as mythical, such as ancient Troy itself, have shown that beneath the layers of poetry there can indeed lie traces of historical reality. Yet legends can also reveal more about the societies that tell them than about the events they supposedly describe. They express the aspirations, fears, ambitions and identity of the people who weaved those tales. Few examples illustrate this more clearly than the Roman claim to Trojan ancestry — the belief that the people who built the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire were descended from refugees who escaped the destruction of Troy after the legendary Trojan War. It is something my students ask frequently: is it true?

For centuries, educated Romans accepted, celebrated and elaborated this tradition. According to the received version of the story, the Trojan prince Aeneas fled the burning city carrying his aged father Anchises on his shoulders and leading his young son Ascanius by the hand. A few survivors, the handful of Trojan citizens who had not been killed by the Greeks, went with him. After years of wandering across the Mediterranean sea, the travel-weary and traumatised survivors arrived in Italy, where Aeneas’s descendants would eventually establish the line leading to Romulus, the founder of Rome. The myth became one of the foundational narratives of Roman civilisation, immortalised most famously in the Aeneid, composed by Virgil during the reign of Augustus in the late 1st century BC.

The question that many of my students ask is whether there was any truth behind the story. Were the Romans genuinely descended from refugees from Asia Minor (modern Turkey), or was the claim merely a literary invention that helped the Romans to ally themselves with the ancient Greek heroic tradition that they so admired? Modern historians overwhelmingly regard the Trojan ancestry of Rome as mythical, yet the myth itself remains historically significant precisely because it reveals so much about Roman identity and about the ways that civilisations construct their own past and define their own identity.

The roots of the story stretch back into the complex cultural world of the early Mediterranean. The city of Troy, located in north-western Anatolia near the Dardanelles in modern Turkey, was long thought by many scholars to be entirely fictional, the invention of Greek epic poetry. That changed dramatically in the 19th century, when excavations led by Heinrich Schliemann uncovered the remains of a substantial ancient settlement at Hisarlik, now widely identified as the site of Troy and a UNSECO world heritage site. Archaeology has demonstrated that several cities occupied the site over many centuries, and one layer appears to have suffered destruction during the Late Bronze Age, roughly corresponding to the traditional period assigned to the Trojan War. Although historians remain cautious about treating Homeric poetry as literal history, there is now broad agreement that the legend of Troy’s destruction probably contained at least the distant memories of a real conflict in the eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age.

Yet even if Troy itself was real, that does not mean that the Romans were descended from Trojans. The earliest inhabitants of Latium, the region around Rome, were Italic peoples who spoke Latin, an Indo-European language closely related to other regional dialects. Archaeological evidence indicates a continuity of settlement and gradual social development in central Italy rather than the arrival of a conquering or colonising population from Anatolia. Early Roman culture seems to have emerged from interactions among Latins, Sabines, Etruscans and other Italian peoples over several centuries. There is no concrete evidence for a mass migration of Anatolians to Italy.

The Trojan story appears instead to have developed gradually through contact with Greek culture. From the 8th century BC, Greek colonies spread across southern Italy and Sicily, bringing Greek language, religion and literature into close contact with the peoples of the Italian peninsula. As Rome grew in power, Roman elites became increasingly fascinated by Greek civilisation. Greek mythology provided a rich reservoir of heroic narratives through which emerging states could interpret their origins and ambitions. As I like to point out to my students, every educated Roman would have been steeped in the language and the stories of Homer, in a similar fashion to how the educated elite were steeped in the bible during the Renaissance. The heoric stories were central to the identity of every well-informed Roman.

Aeneas appeared as a relatively minor figure in Greek epic tradition, long before the Romans adopted him. In Homer’s Iliad, he is presented as a Trojan noble favoured by the gods and destined to survive the war. Greek writers later elaborated stories about his wanderings after the fall of Troy, and by the 6th century BC some traditions had linked him with settlements in Italy. The Romans eventually embraced and transformed these stories into a national identity.

This transformation reached its most influential form under Augustus. Emerging victorious from decades of civil war, Augustus sought not only political authority but ideological legitimacy. Rome needed a story to explain both its greatness and its suffering. Virgil’s Aeneid supplied that story with extraordinary literary power. Written between approximately 29 and 19 BC and (we think, at least) at the behest of Augustus, the poem deliberately echoed Homer while presenting Rome under Augustus as the culmination of a divine historical destiny.

In Virgil’s telling, Aeneas embodies virtues that the Romans admired deeply: duty, endurance, piety and self-sacrifice. He is not merely a wandering exile but the chosen instrument of fate. The sufferings of Troy become the prelude to Rome’s future empire. Jupiter himself promises that from Aeneas’s descendants will arise a people destined to rule the world, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos: to show mercy to those that submit and to grind down the resistors in war. The poem thus transformed a refugee narrative into a self-conscious justification of imperial rule.

The political usefulness of this mythology was immense. Augustus claimed descent through his adoptive family, the Julii, from Aeneas’s son Ascanius, also somewhat handily known, we are told, as Iulus, a monumentally twisted fudge by Virgil, which has always amised me. Since Aeneas was said to be the son of the goddess Venus, the Julian line acquired divine ancestry, which Augustus referenced in his statuary and architecture. It elevated him above ordinary politics and linked the new imperial regime with a sacred and thus unquestionable destiny. In this sense, the Trojan myth functioned less as objective history than as ideological theatre, something which Augustus and those around him turned out to be phenomenally good at. Yet it would be mistaken to dismiss the myth simply as cynical propaganda. The Romans genuinely cared about ancestry and tradition, and many educated Romans seem to have accepted the Trojan story sincerely, or at least treated it as culturally meaningful.

Ancient attitudes toward myth differed considerably from modern expectations of historical accuracy. Myth and history were not always sharply separated categories. A story could be morally, spiritually or politically “true” even if its factual basis was uncertain. Roman authors occasionally displayed scepticism about legendary traditions, but they rarely rejected them outright. The historian Livy, writing during Augustus’s reign, admitted the uncertainty surrounding Rome’s earliest past while still recounting the traditional narratives. In the preface to his history of Rome, he observed that accounts of the remote past are “more fitted to adorn the creations of the poet than the genuine records of the historian.” Yet he proceeded to include them because they formed part of Rome’s cultural inheritance.

The appeal of Trojan ancestry also reflected Rome’s complicated relationship with Greece. Roman elites admired Greek art, philosophy, literature and education profoundly. At the same time, Rome was busy conquering the Greek world and often sought to define itself as distinct from and superior to Greek culture and its values. Claiming Trojan descent offered an elegant solution to this cultural cognitive dissonance. The Trojans belonged to the heroic universe of Greek epic, granting Rome prestigious ancient connections, but they were not themselves Greek: in fact, within Homeric tradition, they were indeed the enemies of the Greeks. Rome could therefore position itself as both heir to and rival of Greek civilisation. There may also even have been diplomatic advantages to the myth. Throughout antiquity, claims of shared ancestry could shape alliances and political relationships. Roman leaders sometimes invoked Trojan connections when dealing with eastern Mediterranean cities that traced their own histories back to the Trojan world. Mythology could function as a form of soft power long before the modern term existed.

Modern scholarship has approached the Trojan question from several directions, including archaeology, linguistics, comparative mythology and most recently genetics. None has produced convincing evidence that supports a literal Trojan origin for the Romans. Linguistic evidence is particularly important. The language associated with Bronze Age Troy remains uncertain, although scholars often connect the region with Anatolian languages such as Luwian, which belonged to a separate branch of the Indo-European language family. Latin, by contrast, evolved firmly within the Italic branch of languages. This strongly suggests that the ancestors of the Romans developed within the Italian peninsula rather than migrating from Anatolia in historical times.

Modern genetic studies likewise indicate that the population of ancient Italy was shaped by complex patterns of migration and interaction extending over millennia. Like most Mediterranean peoples, the Romans emerged from multiple layers of ancestry. While it is entirely possible that individuals from Anatolia reached Italy through trade, warfare, slavery or selective migration, there is no evidence for a distinct founding population. The Mediterranean was interconnected long before Rome’s rise and human mobility was common. But this broad interconnectedness differs greatly from the dramatic national migration imagined by Rome’s foundational myth.

Myths are not rendered meaningless simply because they are not literally true. In many respects, the Roman belief in their Trojan ancestry accomplished precisely what successful national myths are meant to accomplish: it gave people a shared story about who they were and why their civilisation mattered. The myth linked suffering with destiny, exile with triumph and destruction with renewal. Troy’s fall became the necessary precondition for Rome’s greatness and gave people the hope that greatness can come from indescribable suffering. This theme resonated powerfully with Roman political culture, especially during periods of upheaval, of which there were many. The late Republic had witnessed civil wars, assassinations and social collapse. Virgil’s description of survivors who carried the memory of a ruined homeland toward a future empire possessed enormous emotional force: it allowed the Romans to imagine their hardships as part of a larger, providential narrative.

The endurance of the Trojan myth also reflects the extraordinary influence of Virgil’s poetry. The Aeneid became one of the foundational texts of European civilisation and has been studied continuously for two thousand years. Medieval and Renaissance writers treated Aeneas not merely as a fictional character but as a symbolic ancestor of European political order. Even in modern times, the image of Aeneas fleeing Troy remains one of antiquity’s most recognisable scenes.

Legends rarely survive for millennia unless they speak to something deeper than mere fact. The Roman Trojan myth endured not because it accurately described population movements in the Bronze Age, but because it expressed how the Romans understood themselves. Like many origin stories, it blurred memory, imagination, politics and poetry into a narrative powerful enough to outlive the empire that created it.

On Resilience

Today, many of my students are finishing their Latin exams. For some, the battle continues until just after half term.

Every year I have a range of clients, from those who quite enjoy the challenge of examinations all the way up to those for whom the fear is utterly crippling. Whichever way we look at the data, it does seem undeniable that anxiety among adolescents has risen sharply over the past decade across the developed world. Certainly in the 21 years that I spent in the classroom I witnessed an unquestionable spike in children presenting with anxiety; by the time I left, it was not unusual to walk down a corridor and find a child hovering outside almost every single classroom, all refusing to enter due to what they said was a fear of what would happen inside. Many parents are watching their capable, intelligent children unravel under the pressure of perfectionism, comparison and relentless digital scrutiny. In that environment, emotional resilience has become more than a fashionable phrase. Increasingly, it is an essential survival skill.

Recent research suggests that exam anxiety is now embedded in a wider crisis affecting adolescents. A 2025 study published in BMC Psychology described test anxiety as a “common form of situational anxiety” capable of seriously affecting both academic performance and mental health. The researchers found strong correlations between anxiety levels and a lack of emotional regulation in adolescents. At the same time, researchers are warning that the digital world surrounding teenagers may be amplifying these pressures. A systematic review published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2025 examined evidence that connected adolescent social media use and anxiety, concluding that significant associations exist between the two, even if the relationship is nuanced rather than universally causal. Heavy or compulsive use of social media appears to be closely associated with poorer mental wellbeing, disrupted sleep, diminished concentration and heightened emotional distress. A 2025 study in Computers in Human Behavior found that adolescents engaging in more than two hours of weekday screen time showed significantly greater mental-health risks, while passive scrolling in particular was linked to higher anxiety. For pupils sitting exams, those pressures can become combustible.

The old anxieties of adolescence were at least partly escapable. School ended in the mid-afternoon. Peer judgment, so essential to teenage development, did not continue relentlessly through the evening in the form of Snapchat conversations, TikTok videos or Instagram stories displaying apparently perfect (and often misguided) revision routines. Today’s students inhabit an always-on culture, in which achievement itself has become performative. Some teenagers are filming themselves revising under aesthetically pleasing lighting with motivational music and uploading it for public consumption. This is hugely concerning: young people are not merely under pressure to succeed, they are under pressure to appear successful. This phenomenon creates a loop of continuous social comparison, the feeling that one’s worth is measured constantly against curated versions of other people’s lives. During exam season, that comparison intensifies. Small wonder, then, that resilience is becoming central to our discussions about exam success.

Resilience is frequently misunderstood. It is not emotional coldness. It is not “toughening up”. Nor does it mean suppressing fear. Emotional resilience is the capacity to experience stress, disappointment and uncertainty without collapsing under them: it involves recovery rather than invulnerability. Most especially during GCSEs, when students are expected to sit multiple examinations in multiple subjects, it is inevitable that some of those examinations will go better than others. Resilience is essential, if students are to progress successfully through this testing marathon.

Many high-achieving pupils appear outwardly successful while inwardly fragile. Teachers increasingly describe students who attain excellent grades yet struggle to cope with setbacks that previous generations might have regarded as routine: a poor mock result, criticism from a teacher, rejection from a university course. Part of the problem lies in how success is framed. Young people absorb adult anxieties with remarkable efficiency. Politicians describe education as an economic battlefield, schools have to compete in league tables and universities are necessarily selective. Employers want experience and proof of concept.

The message heard by many teenagers is stark: fail now, fail forever. In reality, life trajectories are rarely so linear. Careers zigzag and ambitions evolve, so setbacks often prove formative rather than fatal. Certainly, I look back upon most of my failures with a sense that they came good in the end. Adolescents, lacking the long perspective of adulthood, experience examinations with an immediacy that can feel existential. Failure is something to be feared, not endured.

Resilience cannot simply be taught through assembly slogans or laminated posters reminding pupils to “believe in themselves”. (Dear Lord, I wish everyone would learn to accept this). Resilience must be cultivated. While schools, of course, have an important role to play here, they have nothing compared to the power of family.

If I could give one piece of advice to anyone who is worried about their children’s resilience, it would be to normalise struggle and discomfort. It’s important to let children see our failures as well as our successes: let them observe the struggle and the setbacks, let them see you come through them. Adolescents (and indeed anyone who suffers with anxiety in the longterm) often assume that everyone else is coping better than they are. High-performing families and indeed school cultures can unintentionally reinforce this illusion by celebrating outcomes while concealing vulnerabilities. But when students hear successful people speak honestly about setbacks and uncertainty, anxious feelings can become less dominating. Resilience develops when young people understand that disappointment can and must be endured. It’s a normal part of life.

Another factor is sleep, perhaps the most neglected component of adolescent wellbeing and one I have written about recently. Recent research reported by The Guardian found that teenagers are now sleeping less than ever, with screen use and social pressures among the key drivers of worsening sleep deprivation. The consequences include poorer mental health, academic difficulties and burnout. Exhaustion erodes resilience rapidly. A teenager revising until 1am while simultaneously doom-scrolling through social media is not building academic advantage; they are often dismantling their emotional capacity to cope.

There is also a wider societal question about what precisely we are preparing children for. Education policy tends to focus overwhelmingly on measurable attainment because attainment is easier to quantify than emotional stability. League tables cannot easily capture self-awareness, perspective or adaptability. Yet employers routinely identify resilience, communication skills and emotional intelligence as critical to career success. Universities also report undergraduates struggling with independence, stress management and perfectionism. One way of seeing examinations, therefore, is as a test of those skills as well as of one’s academic performance.

A resilient teenager is not one who never panics before an exam. It is one who can panic, recover and continue. Young people need opportunities to develop what psychologists sometimes call “distress tolerance”: the ability to sit with uncomfortable emotions without catastrophising them. That capacity should emerge gradually through ordinary experiences such as coping with setbacks, navigating disappointment and recovering from embarrassment, all things which every young person can and should experience. I know it is desperately tempting to try to protec them from it, but once we understand that these knocks that life brings are an essential part of our children’s learning, they can become a little easier to bear. The alternative is that adults become so desperate to protect their children from failure that they inadvertently make failure feel intolerable: when the failure comes, as it inevitably will, they will have no resources to deal with it.

Exam results matter. Of course they do. Educational achievement opens doors, expands opportunities and transforms lives. Pretending otherwise serves nobody. But the ability to withstand setbacks, regulate emotions and maintain perspective may matter even more in the long term. A young person who learns resilience acquires something more durable than a high grade: the confidence that difficult experiences can be survived. And that may well prove to be the most important lesson that their education can offer them.

Cropped version of a photo by Zohre Nemati on Unsplash

et tu, Brute?

“Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up
To such a sudden flood of mutiny.
They that have done this deed are honourable:
What private griefs they have, alas, I know not,
That made them do it: they are wise and honourable.”

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony’s speech in Act 3 Scene 2.

This week, although it is difficult to know why, I’ve been thinking about imperial assassinations. Goodness knows what has sparked these musings on rebellion, mutiny and the forcible removal of a leader, but something tells me that we have been here before and we will be here again.

Julius Caesar was famously assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 BC because many Roman senators feared that he threatened the Roman Republic. After winning a civil war and famously crossing the Rubicon, Caesar looked rather too comfortable at the top and a group of senators, including some of his closest allies, formed a conspiracy to murder him. They believed that killing Caesar would protect Rome from tyranny and restore the power of the Senate. In reality, instead of saving the Republic, the assassination led to further and prolonged civil wars and ultimately helped to bring about Rome’s future under imperial rule.

Given that the Roman empire was one of the most powerful political systems in history, it is easy to forget just how tenuous an emperor’s grip on power truly was. Roman emperors supposedly held absolute authority, but their position depended upon the support of the senate, the army and the praetorian guard. If any one of those groups withdrew their loyalty, even the strongest ruler could be swiftly removed from office. These days, a man in such a position is forced to resign; in those days, you simply got murdered.

During the height of the empire, particularly from the first to third centuries AD, emperors were commonly assassinated. It’s one of the things that I find students are most puzzled by, perhaps because they have fallen for Roman (particularly Augustan) propaganda and see Rome as exemplary of stable governance. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. One of the most dramatic examples of an emperor being forcibly removed from office was the assassination of the emperor Caligula in AD 41.

Caligula began his reign with enormous public support. The Roman people celebrated his ascension because he followed Tiberius, who was viscerally disliked, and he was also the son of the wildly popular general, Germanicus, who died very young. At first, Caligula appeared to be generous and charismatic, but his true colours soon became more than apparent and his behaviour towards members of the governing classes became cruel, erratic and humiliating. While ancient accounts may possibly exaggerate his faults (and the stories really are wild), nevertheless his relationship with powerful political groups certainly deteriorated rapidly and beyond repair. His popularity with the Roman people may have maintained his position for a while, but it was the praetorian guard who decided his fate when they assassinated him in his own palace.

The praetorian guard were an elite military unit stationed in Rome, whose purpose was to protect the emperor. By the same token, precisely because they had direct access to the ruler and were always armed, they also had the ability to dispatch them most efficiently. Following the murder of Caligula, many members of the senate wanted to restore the Republic again and abolish the office of emperor altogether, but their power by this time was weakened by the fact that they had already proved themselves impotent in the face of imperial power: most crucially, they lacked control over the army, but they also lacked popular support: the senators’ power had originally been brought down by populist leaders, who had exposed the undeniably self-serving systems set up by the ruling elite to perpetuate their own wealth and power. The decisive factor that ensured the senators were finished in all but name was the praetorian guard, who required an emperor to sign their pay cheques and indeed to justify their position. After Caligula was killed, the praetorians found Caligula’s disabled uncle, Claudius, hiding in the palace and proclaimed him as emperor. Once the military had backed Claudius, following the lead of the praetorian guard, the senate had no leverage to object. The removal of Caligula therefore demonstrates that, although the senate could support or justify the overthrow of an emperor, the men who carried the swords were the ones who decided things.

Another good example of an emperor being decisively removed from office is the fall of Nero. By AD 68, Nero had ruled for fourteen years. Initially he had been guided by capable advisers such as the philosopher Seneca. Early in his reign, he was relatively popular with the people because he sponsored games, artistic performances and public entertainments. His relationship with the senate, however, steadily worsened. Nero executed or forced the suicide of several senators whom he suspected of conspiracy, creating an atmosphere of fear among the traditional ruling aristocracy. His extravagant spending and controversial behaviour also damaged his reputation. But the decisive factor in Nero’s removal was his loss of military support. In AD 68, the governor of Gaul turned against him and shortly afterwards the Spanish governor, Galba, declared himself emperor. The praetorian guard abandoned Nero after being promised rewards by his Spanish rival: as a result, Nero had no protection in Rome, so the senate took the opportunity to declare him a public enemy and authorised his execution. Facing arrest, Nero was forced to take his own life, which was the traditional way for a condemned Roman aristocrat to make a hasty exit: these days, it’s called resigning for the good of the party.

Nero’s downfall once again highlights the importance of the army and the praetorian guard. The senate formally condemned him, but this action was only possible because he had lost the loyalty of the army in the provinces, who were demonstrating their growing political importance by supporting rival claimants such as Galba to the imperial throne. At the same time, the praetorian guard acted once again as chess-masters by switching allegiance when it suited their interests. Nero’s popularity amongst ordinary Romans may have delayed his downfall to some extent: ancient sources suggest that sections of the plebeians remained loyal to him because of his public entertainments and indeed because of his visible clashes with senatorial elite. But public support could not save an emperor once the military and political elite turned against him.

The emperor Commodus provides our final example of how imperial power could collapse. Commodus ruled from AD 180 to 192 and was the son of the respected emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Quite unlike his stoic father, Commodus became associated with corruption, extravagance and self-indulgence. He preferred gladiatorial games and personal luxury to responsible government and he increasingly alienated the senate by treating their traditional authority and governing experience with contempt. Commodus was quite the character and even participated personally in gladiatorial contests, something that aristocratic Romans found grotesque and degrading for a man of standing.

As Commodus became more paranoid and unstable, leading officials even feared for their lives and eventually members of his inner circle organised a conspiracy against him. An attempt to poison him failed, but ultimately the wrestler Narcissus was hired to strangle him in his bath. The senate immediately triggered the process known as damnatio memoriae, in which official images and references to a ruler were destroyed. This decisive removal of Commodus from public office again illustrates the weakness of emperors who had lost the support of the ruling elite. Although Commodus had attempted to maintain popularity with the masses through games and spectacles, this could not compensate for the hostility he faced among the senators and imperial officials. His death also demonstrates that conspiracies often emerged from within the imperial household itself. Following Commodus’s death, the empire descended into civil war, indicating that no ruler could govern successfully without military backing.

Throughout the height of the Roman Empire, the senate retained political importance but its power was limited compared to that of the army. Senators could legitimise or condemn emperors, as seen with Nero and Commodus, yet they rarely controlled events independently. The Roman army was ultimately the most significant force in removing emperors and the provincial legions frequently proclaimed their own generals emperor, especially during periods of instability. Military loyalty depended heavily on personal leadership and the promise of material rewards as a result of successful campaigns. Soldiers expected their leaders to provide financial bonuses as well as military victories: the two went hand in hand. If an emperor appeared weak, unpopular or incapable of expanding the empire, ambitious generals could and would challenge him. This military influence became even more obvious during the third century, when emperors rose and fell rapidly and the eventual collapse of the empire as we would recognise it became inevitable.

Within this monumental military might, the praetorian guard occupied a unique position due to their physical proximity to the emperor. Unlike distant legions, the guard was stationed in Rome and could intervene directly in palace politics. As seen in the case of Caligula, the guard was more than capable of assassinating the man with whose protection they were supposedly charged. Any passing similarities to UK cabinet members are, of course, entirely coincidental.

Together Forever?

soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.

Suns can set and rise again:
but once the brief light has set for us
there is just one everlasting night for us to sleep through.

Catullus, Poem 5

It has surprised me how many students have found these lines difficult to comprehend, a reminder that metaphors are not always obvious to students. One student recently hazarded a guess that Catullus was talking about the idea that he and his lover will be together forever in death. This not really what Catullus is saying at all: the poem focuses on the brevity of life compared with the yawning enormity of death, and uses this as an exhortation to make the most of the short time that he and his lover will have together. Furthermore, my student’s assumption that Catullus is talking about himself and his lover being united forever in the afterlife is an inherently post-Christian sentiment.

My student’s misinterpretation of Catullus’s musings on life and death came not long after I had finished another novel by RF Kuang, an author whom I have blogged about before. Her novel Katabasis is both grim and entertaining, following the travails of two research students who make a trip down to hell in an attempt to retrieve the soul of their academic supervisor. In the same way that Kuang’s previous novel Yellowface was a side-swipe at the publishing industry, Katabasis takes a highly critical look at the competitive world of academia. It also takes a spectacular tour of the ancient underworld, as seen through a variety of cultural lenses.

The way a culture imagines the afterlife reveals much of what it believes about life itself. For the ancient Romans, death was not a doorway into a joyful reunion with loved ones, nor a promise of restored relationships and perfected bonds. Instead, it was a shadowy continuation of our current existence, stripped of vitality, and warmth. The afterlife, even at its best, was a lonely and inadequate shadow of life.. The later Christian vision of the afterlife, especially the idea that death reunites individuals with those they love, rests on a fundamentally different emotional and philosophical foundation. Where Christianity tends to offer hope, restoration and intimacy beyond death, Roman thought leans toward distance, melancholy and an almost unsettling persistence of separation.

To understand this difference, it helps to look at how Romans conceived of the underworld. Deeply influenced by earlier Greek traditions, the Roman afterlife was typically imagined as a vast, dim realm beneath the earth, populated by shades, which were faint, insubstantial echoes of their living predecessors. These shades were not vibrant souls enjoying a new form of life, but diminished versions of their former selves. They retained memory (forgetting comes before reincarnation and a return to the upper world), but not vitality. Existence in this realm was often described as monotonous and emotionally flat, a place where the dead lingered rather than lived.

In this context, the idea of joyful reunion with loved ones has no place. Even when the dead encounter one another, their interactions are rarely depicted as comforting or restorative. Instead, such meetings often emphasise loss and regret, or the impossibility of truly reconnecting. The emotional tone is strikingly different from the Christian expectation that relationships will be healed and perfected after death. For the Romans, death did not mend what was broken in life; if anything, it froze those fractures in place.

Stories set in the underworld illustrate this vividly. When heroes descend into the realm of the dead, they often seek out lost loved ones, but what they find is not solace. Encounters are fleeting, strained and painful. The dead may recognise the living, but there is an unbridgeable gap between them. Attempts at physical contact fail, as the shades cannot be grasped. Words may be exchanged, but they carry a weight of finality rather than hope. The living leave with a deeper sense of loss rather than reassurance.

One of the most telling patterns in these stories is how often reunions are marked by emotional distance. A deceased loved one may turn away and refuse to engage or speak, displaying a kind of weary resignation that underscores the permanence of separation. Even when affection remains, it cannot be acted upon in any meaningful way. The relationship exists only as memory, not as a living bond. This is a far cry from the Christian idea that love transcends death and is fulfilled in eternity.

The Roman view is rooted in a different understanding of the self and its continuity. The soul, in Roman thought, does not necessarily retain the full personality or emotional richness of the living individual. It becomes something quieter, dimmer and more detached. Without the body, the soul’s capacity for connection is limited. Relationships, which in life depend on physical presence, shared experiences and emotional exchange, cannot fully survive in this diminished state. What remains is a kind of echo, not a continuation.

This helps explain why Roman literature often portrays the dead as solitary figures, even when surrounded by countless others. The underworld is crowded yet profoundly lonely. Each shade exists in its own muted sphere of awareness, unable to truly engage with others. Even when groups of the dead are described, they do not form communities in the way the living do. There is no sense of shared joy, no collective celebration, no renewal of bonds. The crowd does not alleviate loneliness; it deepens it.

The Christian concept of the afterlife places relationships at the centre of its promise. A stroll through my local graveyard reveals a multitude of 19th century graves that celebrate a family being reuited: their bodies are laid to rest together and the assumption is that their souls have reunited. Heaven is imagined not just as a place of individual salvation, but as a community of the redeemed, where love is perfected and reunion is assured. The idea that one will see loved ones again, recognise them and be reunited in a meaningful, joyful way is a powerful source of comfort to many (although as a child I often used to ponder how it would work for someone who remarried after their partner’s death: would they all hang out together in the afterlife?) Death, in the Christian framework, is not the end of a relationship but its transformation into something more complete.

Roman culture, for all its emphasis on family, duty and social bonds in life, did not project those values into the afterlife in the same way. Instead, the Romans believed that death severs the active dimension of those bonds. Memory may persist, but the relationship itself does not continue in a fulfilling sense. The finality of death is not softened by promises of reunion.

Even the rare exceptions in Roman thought, such as the idea that particularly virtuous individuals might enjoy a more pleasant afterlife, do not fundamentally alter the overall gloomy picture. These individuals may dwell in more favourable regions of the underworld, but the emphasis is still on individual reward rather than relational restoration. The joy, if it exists, is not primarily about being reunited with loved ones, but about relief from suffering or recognition of virtue. Relationships remain secondary, if they are present at all.

Another important aspect is how the Romans viewed grief. In a culture where the afterlife did not promise reunion, mourning had a different character. The dead were honoured, remembered and ritually maintained through practices that acknowledged their continued existence in some form. Yet these practices did not imply that the dead were waiting to embrace the living again in a future life. Instead, they reflected a desire to maintain a connection across a boundary that was understood to be fundamentally unbridgeable. This creates a poignant tension. On the one hand, Romans cared deeply about their loved ones and sought to preserve their memory. On the other hand, their worldview offered little hope that these relationships would be restored after death. The result is a kind of restrained sorrow, an acceptance that loss is permanent in a very real sense. The dead are not gone entirely, but neither are they truly present.

In stories of the underworld, this tension often reaches its most dramatic expression. A living visitor may be filled with longing, eager to see someone they have lost, only to discover that the person they remember is no longer fully there. The encounter becomes a confrontation with the limits of memory and the reality of change. The loved one is both present and absent, recognisable yet unreachable. The emotional impact is not comfort but a deepened awareness of loss. Death remains a boundary that cannot be undone. The afterlife is not a continuation of life’s relationships but a separate, diminished mode of existence. Encounters between the living and the dead, when they occur, serve to reinforce this boundary rather than dissolve it. They remind us that what has been lost cannot be recovered.

For the Romans, the afterlife was not a place where you would run into the arms of those you missed. It was a place where you might see them again, but only as shadows, only at a distance, and often only to feel more acutely the separation that death had created. Reunion, when it occurred, was not a resolution but a reminder of what once was. It attests to a fundamental difference in mindset and attitudes to death that I find endlessly fascinating.

Finding your Way

I have always thought of myself as someone who is fundamentally miswired when it comes to getting myself about. My internal compass is completely absent. Not just slightly out of kilter, you understand, but fundamentally and dramatically wrong — enough to turn a ten-minute walk into a humiliating loop past the same shop three times. My sense of direction isn’t just bad, it is non-existent, as if I have been born without whatever quiet internal certainty tells other people, “this way makes sense.” I’ve always envied those who have that innate sense of the right way: my father navigates the world like an indigenous man on walkabout. Sadly, I did not inherit a single iota of his instincts, to the extent that I’m surprised that I know the difference between left and right.

For most of my life, my appalling sense of direction has been a significant handicap and I suspect it had an impact on my confidence in other spheres. If I can’t reliably find my way across a town or even within the building in which I work, how on earth was I supposed to navigate anything larger: major life decisions, life ambitions, the invisible map of life? Other people seem to stride forward with invisible coordinates guiding them, while I would hover at crossroads, second-guessing, recalculating, almost always choosing a path with the distinct feeling that I might soon regret it.

Then, almost overnight, the world changed. Or rather, the tools in my pocket did. What used to require a well-thumbed but mysterious (to me, at any rate) A to Z, guesswork and a regular prostrating of my dignity onto the mercy of strangers, all of this has now been superceded by the reassuring warm glow of technology. Even more wondrously, it doesn’t sigh or say “I told you so” when I end up getting lost. It simply recalculates, endlessly patient, as if wrong turns are not failures but part of the process.

At first, I used it defensively. I would check directions obsessively, zooming in on routes, memorising landmarks as if preparing for an exam. But slowly, something unexpected happened. I stopped treating navigation as a test I had to pass and started treating it as a conversation. I could walk, drift even, knowing that if I wandered too far off course, I wouldn’t be lost — I would just be somewhere new, with a way back always available thanks to the super-duper magic pocket-wizard.

When you no longer fear being lost, the world opens up in subtle ways. Streets become less like corridors you must follow correctly and more like possibilities you can explore. A wrong turn isn’t a mistake: it’s a detour with an exit strategy. The pressure to always “get it right” dissolves, replaced by a quiet confidence that you can recover, adjust and continue. Even more pleasingly, I no longer find myself late for an appointment, lost and crying. (Yes, humiliatingly, that has happened: at one low point in 1993 I spent an hour and a half trying to find the location of a lecture I was supposed to attend in London for my degree: in despair, I sat down on some steps and blubbed, only to realise after a couple of minutes that I was actually sitting on the steps of the building in which I was meant to be attending the lecture).

Life in the 1990s felt like one long navigation problem for me. Choosing the wrong path early onmeant ending up miles away from where I was meant to be, with no simple way back that didn’t involve an expensive taxi ride. Now, I wonder if direction isn’t about always knowing where you’re going, but about trusting that you can keep moving, even when you don’t. That’s the freedom that technology has afforded me. The tiny blue dot on my iPhone’s digital map — steady, present and always updating — feels like a metaphor for something I never realised I needed: reassurance that my current position has a way out and a way forward.

I still have a terrible sense of direction and I am at peace with that. If you took away my iPhone, I would probably end up circling that same corner shop, wondering how I got there again. But I no longer see that as a personal flaw so much as a different way of moving through the world. I am someone who wanders, who doubles back, who explores by accident. And now, with my talisman in my pocket, I am reminded that no step is irreversible; wandering feels less like failure and more like a way of discovering paths I never would have chosen on purpose. Maybe that’s what direction really is: not a straight line, not a fixed bearing, but the ability to keep going, to adapt: to trust that, even if you don’t know exactly where you are, you are never lost forever.

The Trouble with Sleep

As someone who works almost exclusively with young people between the ages of 14 and 16, I am well-versed in the problem of teenagers and sleep. Any teacher who has been scheduled a challenging class on a Monday morning will understand the issue, but since working online I regularly have the pleasure of being presented with a youngster who has quite obviously been peeled unceremoniously from their bedsheets less than a minute prior our session. I have often advised parents to book a later session, on the grounds that their child is simply not in a fit state to absorb anything prior to mid-morning. There are some that can cope, but for others it becomes apparent that their parents will be wasting the money that they pay me, so groggy and unengaged is their child when the session begins. But just why do teenagers find mornings so palpably difficult?

At the centre of everything is our circadian rhythm, the internal clock which governs when we feel sleepy and when we feel alert. In younger children, as every parent knows, the clock tends to run on the early shift; but somewhere around puberty, the clock shifts — enough to have a pretty big impact. In adolescents, the hormone melatonin, which is central to what drives our urge to sleep, is released later in the evening compared to both children and older adults. This shift in their natural sleep phase means that teenagers genuinely feel more alert late into the evening and do not feel ready to sleep until much later than they used to. I remember this with visceral clarity. Staying up to watch Moonlighting, followed by Indelible Evidence, felt effortless, while waking the next morning felt simply agonising. Teenaged bodies, still growing and developing rapidly, require a substantial amount of rest — typically around eight to ten hours. But if a teenager is wired to fall asleep at midnight, yet still needs to wake up at 7.00 a.m. for school, then we’re faced with a problem.

I always like to ponder why these evidential facts about our biological nature and development might have evolved. It is undeniable that most teeangers experience a change in their body clock as they develop, and it is also undeniable that adults vary in terms of their own body clock: some are natural night owls, some are larks. (You probably have a good idea which one you are, but it’s quite fun to do the test: some people are very strongly one or the other, some people are flexible. I am as much of a lark as it is possible to be). So, why might it be that we vary in this way? As humans evolved, it would have been useful for a tribe to have a variety of members within it, to ensure that there is always someone that is capable of being hyper-vigilant at any time. When life was lived on a knife-edge, an endless battle for survival, it was crucial for the safety of everyone that at least some members of the tribe were capable of functioning at any one time. Thus, these subtle differences in how alert we feel at different times of the day may have been an essential advantage and thus these differences were perpetuated through natural selection.

Of course, biology is only part of the story. If teenagers were tucked away in candlelit rooms with nothing but a paperback novel and their thoughts, they might still stay up slightly later than the adults in the household, but probably not quite as late as they do now. Modern life has introduced a dazzling array of sleep-delaying tactics, most notably in the glowing rectangle of the smartphone. Social media, messaging apps, streaming platforms — all of these operate on the principle that there is always one more thing to see, one more conversation to have, one more video that might be even funnier than the last. If you can establish one rule in the home, it should be that these devices do not take the journey to bed with you. Teenagers are particularly sensitive to reward and novelty, meaning that the little bursts of satisfaction provided by notifications, likes and new content are especially compelling. The result can be a perfect storm: a brain wired to seek stimulation, a body that doesn’t feel sleepy yet, plus a device that delivers endless entertainment on demand. Bedtime, under these conditions, becomes achingly oppressive.

Waking up early for school is difficult not because teenagers are being dramatic (although, to be fair, some drama may be involved in some cases), but because the teenaged internal clock is still firmly set to “night mode.” When an alarm goes off at 6.30 a.m., it is essentially interrupting the biological equivalent of midnight. Imagine being forced to wake up at 2.00 a.m. and then expected to perform algebra, write essays and engage in meaningful discussion. That is not far off what most teenagers are experiencing every day.

The misalignment between biological rhythms and social expectations is sometimes referred to as “social jet lag”. It’s the same groggy, disoriented feeling one might have after flying across time zones, except instead of being a temporary inconvenience, it is a daily occurrence. The result is chronic sleep deprivation, which has a range of effects that extend far beyond simply feeling tired. In the classroom, this can manifest as difficulty concentrating, slower cognitive processing, and a general sense of mental fog. Teachers may notice students staring into space, struggling to retain information, or reacting with the enthusiasm of someone who has been asked to solve a puzzle while underwater. It’s not (always) that teenagers don’t care about their education; it’s that their brains are not operating at full capacity during the hours when learning is expected to happen.

Sleep deprivation is also closely linked to irritability, emotional volatility and increased stress. Sound familiar? Parents, who may already be operating under the assumption that their teenager simply needs to go to bed earlier, are so often met with morning grumpiness that can escalate into full-blown conflict. The state that a young person is in can reinforce the adults’ belief that the child should retire to bed earlier. The teenager, meanwhile, feels misunderstood and unfairly judged, leading to a cycle of frustration on all sides. What makes this situation especially tricky is that both perspectives contain elements of truth. Teenagers do, in many cases, make choices that exacerbate the problem — staying up later than necessary, using devices late into the night and underestimating the importance of sleep. I did this myself on an infinite loop and looking back it seems ridiculous. Yet at the same time, I remember vividly how alert I felt in the late evening and how utterly unattractive it seemed to take myself off to bed. The fact remains that the underlying biology of teenagers genuinely does make early sleep and early waking more difficult for them. It is not a simple matter of willpower, nor is it entirely in their control.

Some schools have tried to take the peculiar biology of teeangers into account by experimenting with later start times. Research suggests that even a modest delay in the beginning of the school day can lead to improvements in attendance, academic performance and overall well-being. Teenagers who are allowed to wake up in closer alignment with their natural rhythms tend to be more alert and more engaged. I have always wondered, however, what these schools are like for the adults. Speaking as someone whose energy is now heavily weighted towards the morning (I spring awake, starving hungry, at around 5.30am most days), I would hate to work in a place where the day was shifted later. This is the problem: the teenagers are not the only ones with skin in the education game.

Given that all schools still start significantly earlier than most teenagers would like, there are nevertheless small changes that can help. Exposure to natural light in the morning can nudge the circadian rhythm slightly earlier, making it easier to wake up over time. Limiting screen use in the hour before bed can reduce the stimulating effects of both blue light and stimulating content, giving melatonin a better chance to do its job. Consistent sleep schedules, even on weekends, can also make a difference, although this is perhaps the most challenging suggestion of all, given the powerful allure of a Saturday lie-in. It all seems rather easier said than done, and my parents certainly gave up even trying. Ultimately, understanding is key. If families can recognise that their teenager’s sleep patterns are not entirely a matter of choice, and if teenagers can be persuaded to acknowledge that their habits can influence their well-being, the conversation can at least be had.

It is, in the end, a delicate dance between what our bodies want and what our schedules demand. Teenagers, caught in the middle of this dance, are not failing at mornings so much as they are beginning to negotiate with them. If they’re lucky, they will become a lark like I did, and the world will become an infinitely easier place to negotiate (unless they want to work in the nightclub industry, I suppose). So, if your teen occasionally hits the snooze button one too many times, it might be worth remembering that they are not resisting the day — they are just trying to catch up with a night that ended a little too soon for them.