Musings – Page 6 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

You’ve had enough

“You’ve had enough” he said, as he pushed her glass away. “You’ve had enough” he said, with a tone so dismissive and disapproving that I looked up from my book and glared across the room, judging this man I had never met in a marriage I had no knowledge of in a room full of strangers.

“You’ve had enough.” She’d had one glass of champagne.

Every week, I try to make my blog posts an honest representation of what’s on my mind at the time. Mostly that means something which has been sparked during a tutoring session, an observation I have made during several similar sessions or some work that a client seems to have found particularly helpful. This week, following a weekend away in North Yorkshire, a passing encounter with another couple has been playing on my mind ever since.

Maybe his wife had a history of truly outrageous behaviour in public. Maybe she had a history of drinking too much. Maybe she had a health condition that meant more than one tiny glass of champagne was a seriously bad idea, and he was just looking out for her. Maybe. Maybe. But I doubt it.

How many times have I heard a man asserting his control over a woman’s behaviour, done with such decisiveness, such easy self-confidence, such surety that they have the right to impose their will upon a woman? I’m afraid it’s one gigantic trigger for me and makes me want to grab the bottle and drain it before marching to the bar to order a second: ordered, I might add, on my own account, bought with my own money and poured recklessly down my own neck. I might end up with the hangover from hell, but at least it would be on my own terms and be my own stupid choice.

Mary Beard has written and spoken with brilliant clarity about how the voice of women has been controlled, manipulated and erased by men throughout western culture and traces its origins right back to the earliest works we have. As she points out, it is in the very first book of Homer’s Odyssey, one of the two oldest works of western literature in our possession, that we are treated to the first ever recorded example of a man telling a woman to shut up. Telemachus, the teenaged son of the absent Odysseus, speaks to his mother (who is ruler in her husband’s absence and managing rather magnificently – for a woman) and he tells her: “go back upstairs and resume your own work – the spinning and weaving; speech is the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.” Okay. Right you are, son.

Professor Beard cites various texts to illustrate her point that the silencing and dismissing of women’s voices was par for the course in the ancient world (and indeed is par for the course with depressing frequency in the modern one). She points out that in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the satirical joke behind the entire play was that the men of Athens were doing such a God-awful job of running the state that even the women could manage it better. She also examines how women are silenced in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, through transformation into dumb animals incapable of diction. She explores in some depth how oracy was not only considered a man’s domain but indeed defined masculinity itself at its most sophisticated; fine rhetoric was the demonstration, the exercise and the definition of power.

Yet it is not just the oratorical and political silencing of women that has been playing on my mind since I overheard the disapproving Yorkshireman policing his wife’s alcohol intake. Disapproval of this kind so often has its origins in fear – fear of “making a scene” or “a show of oneself” and I find myself reminded of how frightened men in the ancient world were of their women losing control. Witness the moral panic documented in Roman sources at the supposed rise in popularity of cults in which women allegedly lost control and gave in to their baser desires. The Romans in particular seemed to find excessive emotions or hedonism genuinely horrifying when it was expressed by women or, indeed, in a manner which they simply considered to be “feminine”. So the Roman state clamped down hard on these cults.

Addressing the manner in which women are portrayed in the ancient world is of crucial importance and something I have never shied away from. I cannot without comment take students through a passage of Latin which mentions the handing over of women as part of a peace deal, the assignation of female prisoners to men as a reward, or the supposed magnanimity of the general who lets a particular woman off the expectation of becoming his personal slave because she is betrothed to somebody important. Students are usually interested to talk about the content of such passages and it is an important opportunity to remind them of the differences between ancient society and our modern expectations.

Yet in that little bar in North Yorkshire, just for a little while, I could not help but find myself wondering just how far we have come after all, when a man can so clearly and so publicly disapprove of his wife maybe enjoying herself just a little bit more than usual.

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.

Smart phones and the myth of multi-tasking

Has your teenager ever assured you that they are great at multi-tasking? Or have you heard it said that the younger generation, because they have grown up in a multi-media world, are great at multitasking? Well, I’ve got news for you and for your teenager: I’m afraid it isn’t true.

First of all, whatever people may tell you, research tells us that multi-tasking is a myth. What humans are doing when they multi-task is – in fact – constantly switching their attention between two things. It is undeniable that some people seem to find this easier (or perhaps one should say that they find it less stressful or irritating) than others; but the idea that anyone can pay full attention to two different things at the same time is a fallacy – and yes, I’m afraid that goes for girls as well as boys! A study by the University of London found that participants who “multi-tasked” during cognitive tests underwent a decline in performance similar to participants who has stayed up all night; some of the adults participating in the test saw their IQ drop by 15 points, leaving them with the average IQ of an 8-year-old child.

The fact that multi-tasking is a myth has been known by cognitive scientists for some time, and is one of the main reasons why working in silence when concentrating on a difficult task is so important, both in school and in private study. Peripheral noise, including both chatter and music, is distracting to the brain and will impair cognitive performance. If our concentration is interrupted by noise the brain starts to become overloaded, with more senses being alerted and more thought patterns therefore fighting for our focus. For people working in busy environments, noise can put a real stress on the brain, affecting people’s ability to work at anything like their full capacity. While many people may feel they have adapted to working in noisy environments, the research indicates that this is far from ideal when it comes to congitive performance, and therefore far from ideal when studying. A study published in Psychological Science found that children exposed to excessive noise in their school environment are more likely to suffer from stress than children who are educated in quieter areas; the study indicated that students who attended schools located near airports had significantly higher levels of the stress hormones (adrenaline and cortisol) as well as markedly higher blood-pressure.

But it’s not just unpleasant or unwanted noise that can cause a problem. Has your teenager ever told you that they need to listen to music while they work? Well, Nick Perham, a senior lecturer at the department of applied psychology at Cardiff Metropolitan University, has done a meta-analysis on the effect that music can have on children’s concentration. His findings show that while some studies in the past may seem to indicate that certain people perform tasks better while listening to classical music, reading comprehension is definitely impaired by music that contains lyrics and/or speech; while he found that listening to instrumental music instead of music which contains lyrics reduces this impairment, his conclusion having looked at all the evidence is that a silent environment is best for concentration and academic performance.

I’ll be honest, I knew all of this and have known it for several years. But perhaps the most striking bit of research I have only heard of recently. This research is about smart phones and the ways in which they can distract us. Now, we all know that these little devices are weapons of mass distraction – I’m not sure even a teeanger would try to pretend otherwise with a straight face. But research carried out in the US came up with some fascinating findings about the extent to which this is the case. Did you know that just the very physical presence of your smart phone – even if face down and switched to silent – impairs your cognitive performance?

The study from America looked at the effect of smart phones on individuals’ cognitive performance. A large number of adults were asked to perform a series of cognitive tests. One group was instructed to leave their phone out in front of them on the desk while they did the tasks, but to place it face down and on silent. Another group was instructed to put their phone away in their bag. A third group was told to leave their phones in another room. And guess what? That’s right. Out of sight is out of mind, leaving your mind free to do the tasks without distraction – those whose phones were nowhere to be seen performed best in the tasks; by contrast, the very physical presence of the phone, even switched off, switched to silent and/or left face down on the desk, was enough to impair the cognitive performance of the candidates whose phones were visible in front of them.

On my regular canal walk the other day I listened to one of the co-authors of this study, Dr. Adrian Ward from the University of Texas, interviewed by Dr. Michael Mosley on his podcast called “Just One Thing”. Ward hypothesised that the smart phone is such a powerful draw – with its lure of games, easy entertainment and social connection – that its very physical presence (even if switched off or on silent) is enough to be an unconscious distraction for the brain. So the physical presence of your phone, even though it is switched off and you have no intention of looking at it, is communicating to your brain that you could be doing something potentially rather more entertaining than what you’re currently meant to be focusing on.

So what can we take from all of this? Well, to me, it’s important that young people understand just what a powerful distraction their smart phone can be, and that they are on board with the idea that they should therefore be putting their devices away (ideally in another room) while they are studying. I am not suggesting that you race into your teeanger’s room right now and wrestle it from them; but if you can persaude them that handing it over for short bursts of time while they are studying is a good idea, then they will thank you in the long-run. Ideally, this conversation should take place and the principle established when children are first allowed access to these devices.

The puzzle of Latin word-order

Twice this week, working with two very different courses, I have been struck by an author’s decision to challenge students at a very early stage in their Latin with complex word-order.

“Traditional” Latin word order will have you believe that the subject (should there be one) will come at the beginning of the sentence and the verb at the end. Everything else, with a variety of rules within that, will come in the middle. Yet when it comes to studying real Latin literature, a student has to face up to the fact that this so-called tradition is – at best – a very simplified version of reality; if one were to be truly critical, one might say that the whole concept is a nonsense. Real Latin authors break away from the formalised shape of a Latin sentence – sometimes for effect, sometimes just because they felt like it.

With one small group of tutees I have just started the second booklet of Clarke’s Latin, an ab initio course aimed ostensibly at Common Entrance candidates, although you’d be hard-pushed to find a better introduction to Latin whatever your ultimate goal and indeed I am using it with an adult learner also. Students have been taught all of the cases and their meanings, but only in the 1st declension. Students have also been taught the endings of the present indicative active in the 1st conjugation, and we have just reached the point where the author has introduced the imperfect tense for the first time. Not surprisingly, things are starting to get a little trickier, but my students are rising magnificently to the task – a testament to the robustness of the course so far.

The author has challenged the students from the beginning when it comes to word order, forcing them to engage with both their verb endings and their case endings. But I was struck in particular by this sentence, in exercise 47:

poetas, ubi appropinquant, feminae agricolarum salutant.

Wow. Even the students were impressed.

After some discussion with my fearless group of three, they deciphered that poetas was accusative and therefore not the place to start. I then encouraged them to look at verb endings and to consider whether they could find a subject. With this relatively light-touch coaching, they were excited to deduce that the subject of the main clause was feminae and that the subordiate clause contained the subject in the verb ending but referred back to the poets. The genitive case gave them no trouble at all. With careful thought but relative ease, they came up with the perfect translation: the farmers’ wives greet the poets when they approach.

So far so unremarkable you might say – although personally, having taught Latin for 21 years, I think it is indeed remarkable the extent to which a robust course such as this one enables students to think like a true Latinist at this early stage. But what happened next was perhaps even more exciting. One of the group said, “why would an author put poetas at the beginning like that, instead of the subject?”

It then occurred to me that Clarke’s course is not only producing better results when it comes to the children’s understanding of the underlying grammatical principles; it is also preparing them for much more complex skills later down the line. Firstly, it is preparing them for literary criticism: why an author chooses to place a word in a particular place is exactly the kind of question that GCSE and A level candidates need to be able to answer in their study of literature. Furthermore, when Clarke uses challenging sentences such as these, he is opening children’s eyes to the challenge of translation at a higher level; as a result of this child’s question, we were able to discuss how a translator might attempt to render the sentence into a format that mimics the emphasis that is expressed in the Latin. I suggested something like “it is the poets that the farners’ wives are greeting, when they approach” and invited the children to critique my suggestion: does it stray too far from the original, or is it in fact more faithful to the text?

Clarke’s course offers some extraordinary opportunities for high-level thinking and dicusssion, even when students are at a very rudimentary level. These students have only met the 1st declension and the 1st conjugation in the present and the imperfect indicative active; beyond that, they’ve met a few adverbs and basic subordinate clauses using words such as ubi and antequam. Yet already they are asking questions that would not be out of place in an A level class. Already they are considering that word placement might be important or significant to a Latin author. Already they are pondering a variety of ways that the spirit of the Latin might rendered in translation, and beginning to realise that translation is not a simple or straightforward task in which you only follow a set of rules. This is, quite frankly, extraordinary.

On the very same day I had a session with a child whose school uses Suburani, a course which has gained popularity in many state schools. This course could not be more different from Clarke’s Latin and its authors are no doubt very happy about that – their philosophy is wildly different. The sentence that got me thinking was in chapter 8. By this point, students have met the present, imperfect and perfect indicative active. They have met only the nominative, accusative and ablative cases but they have seen them in three declensions, including neuter versions. Like with the Cambridge Latin Course, all three declensions and all five conjugations are used from the very beginning of the course due to the desire to create an interesting and varied storyline. Laudable as this might be, in my experience students who struggle with Latin have literally no idea what is going on by this stage.

My tutee was presented with the following sentence:

gentes Britannicas opprimunt Romani

It is not the only and not the first sentence where Suburani has used varied word order, and I like to think that this is a deliberate attempt on the part of the authors to encourage students to look at their verb and noun endings – just the same as Clarke’s course aims to do. However, this process is undermined in so many other ways by the course that my tutee was not able to parse the sentence above (which although it contains nouns and verbs from a wider variety of declensions and conjugations, is actually a good deal more simple than my example from Clarke’s Latin).

The translation that my tutee suggested came as no surprise: “the British tribes oppress the Romans”. This is due to a phenomenon I have written about before, the tendency for students to read from left to right, just as they have been trained to do in their own language. The trouble with Suburani is that it does nothing to break this habit. It might teach students their verb endings, but its constant and excessive use of pronouns in the nominative case encourages them to continue to read from left to right and guess the meaning of the sentence. It was this issue that I wrote about in my previous blog post criticising the course.

Now don’t get me wrong, the mistake made by my tutee is what I would expect any child to do; even my tutees using Clarke’s Latin have to be reminded on occasion not to read in this way – it’s a habit so deeply ingrained that it is nigh-on impossible to break. But students who have been taught using Suburani – when prompted to explain which noun is in the nominative or accusative case – usually find this really difficult. They have been shown too many declensions at once and as a result have found it bordering on impossible to memorise how the noun endings change as they decline. And they’ve only met three cases!

My issues with Suburani go beyond its grammatical faults – criticisms which could just as easily be aimed at the Cambridge Latin Course, for which I retain an undeniable fondness and used (albeit heavily adapted) throughout my career in classroom teaching. Suburani contains material presented in a manner that I consider to be quite frankly inappropriate for younger children, another thing I have written about before. Having reached chapter 8 and encountered a simplified version of Caesar’s account of the Druids’ wicker man, reproduced without critique and in graphic detail (with a nice firey background graphic to boot), I have to ask myself what on earth they thought they were doing. While the Cambridge Latin Course is currently undergoing a re-write and the team has agonised about how to present certain aspects of the ancient world faithfully yet sensitively, the authors at Suburani seem out to create shock and awe. I am disliking it more and more the further I get through it.

In Praise of Cruciverbalism

A recent holiday freed up a great deal of my time to spend on some of my hobbies: reading, most particularly listening to audiobooks, and doing the cryptic crossword.

I do not come from a family of cruciverbalists, although my maternal grandather pretended to do the one in the Guardian on most days. My husband was taught the skill at school, believe it or not, by his Latin teacher. This man, who has assumed an almost legendary status among my husband’s old friends, claimed to teach “sailing, golf, bridge and Classics – in that order.” Like many Classicists, he clearly had a magpie brain, and this lends itself to the kind of thinking required to solve crossword puzzles. This particular teacher would usually begin most of his lessons with a crossword clue for students to solve and one of them even went on to become a professional crossword-setter. Not that it pays well, mind you, so don’t quit the day job for it just yet.

I always believed that there was some kind of special intelligence required to do cryptic crosswords and this meant that I avoided them entirely, flapping my hands and saying “oh, my brain just doesn’t work like that”. Like most things, this was learnt behaviour and also stemmed from a basic fear: fear of the unknown and fear of looking stupid. It was only when my husband decided to teach me the rules of the process that I realised that not only was I perfectly capable of tackling cryptic crosswords, I was actually rather good at them.

Some people, I think, do have a natural flair for them and do not require the level of direct instruction that I had to have in order to gain mastery. In a tribute to my husband’s old Classics master, I decided to use his idea of presenting students with the odd cryptic clue during form time. I gradually taught my students some of the rules, but it was striking how a couple of them took to it instinctively from the start. It was also striking how others were convinced they were incapable of it.

Cryptic crosswords require you not take things at face value and some people are indeed naturally good at this type of thinking. Most importantly, crosswords demand that you think deeply about all the possible different meanings of individual words. There are also regular tricks to watch out for that play on either the alternative meaning or an alternative pronunication of a word. Examples would be that “flower” often means “river” (i.e. something that flows) and “in the main” often refers to the sea. “Late” usually means “dead” and “retired” usually connotes a reference to bed, bedtime or sleep rather than turning 65.

On occasion, specialist knowledge of a particular field is required, but there is Google for that: heaven knows how people managed them in the past! Sometimes crossword clues reference Classical themes and I have developed a habit of sharing some of these on my Twitter feed. I have one infuriatingly clever Twitter friend who gets every single clue within 0.8 seconds – this can be particularly disheartening when it’s one that took me 24 hours to solve! But no matter, he is a genius and I am not.

If you’ve ever wondered just how crosswords work, here are a few Classically-themed examples explained below.

The Anglo-French concoction causes amnesia. (5)

For this clue you need to know that whenever a crossword setter says “the French” he usually means le or occasionally la – in other words, “the” in French. In this case, our setter hints that you need the definite article in both English and French. So, you have to combine “the” and “le”. The word “concoction” is a hint that you need to play around with the letters – crossword-setters use a frankly terrifying range of anagram hints which range from the obvious (like this one) to the downright obscure: anything that hints at something being varied, wrong or frankly anything the setter fancies can be an anagram hint. In this case, the anagram only requires you to swap around the words the and le to give you lethe: the name of the river that deceased souls drank from in the Underworld which caused them to forget their past lives. This fits with the definition, which is “amnesia” (forgetfulness).

Some verses provided by exiled poet. (4)

This kind of clue often catches me out. It’s a hidden word, and I have highlighted the answer in bold. Hidden words are most commonly hinted at by the word “some” (as here) but it can also be “in” or “part” or anything similar. Here the setter is hinting that you will find the word hidden somewhere within the words that follow. Ovid was famously exiled by the emperor Augustus for “a poem and a mistake” (we’re not sure what the mistake was!), so the definition is “exiled poet”.

What tourists see in Athens – a harvest on poor soil. (9)

This clue combines three important crossword hacks. Firstly, it’s important not to ignore the little words, especially the indefinite article “a” – in this case, it provides the first letter of the answer. Secondly, you often have to think of an alternative word or synonym for a word that’s given to you. In this case, the synonym for harvest is crop. So far, therefore, we have a-crop– and we’re assuming that the definition is “What tourists see in Athens.” To complete the construction, we have another anagram hint word, which is “poor” – mix up the letters of the word “soil” and you can complete the answer: a-crop-olis: what tourists see in Athens.

“Deploy more reps!” ruled the Romans (8)

My final example indicates just how broad the range of anagram hints can be. In this case, the anagram hint word is “deploy” – it’s telling you to mix up the letters of “more reps” to give you something which can be defined as “ruled the Romans”. Got it yet? E_P_R_R_

Clues in isolation (which is how my husband started to teach me) are actually much more difficult than working on a whole puzzle – once you break into a crossword, that gives you some letters to play with, as I did for you at the end of the previous paragraph. When I first started I would look up some key long answers to give me some letters so I could get going. Three years on, I still continue to look up every answer I can’t deduce to see if I can explain it. If I can’t work out why the answer is what it is, I ask my husband; if he can’t work it out I ask his friends! It is rare for me to find a clue that nobody in our circle can explain, although it does sometimes happen!

Romanes eunt domus

Love it or loathe it, you’ve no doubt suffered for your Latin.

This suffering is parodied superbly in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, when the eponymous hero is caught trying to write “Romans, go home” on the walls of the governor’s palace. His encounter with the centurion, like so many of Python’s sketches, satirises the traditional English education system, which its writers and performers were privileged (or perhaps unfortunate) enough to have experienced.

Those of us that have been through the process of robustly traditional Latin teaching can recognise not only the threats and the pressure imposed by the “teacher” in this scene, but also the inescapable fact that traditional Gradgrindian Latin teaching involved the repetitive translation of numerous and apparently nonsensical sentences, with little to no acknowledgement of their actual meaning or indeed their cultural milieu; this is brilliantly parodied by the centurion’s apparent obliviousness to Brian’s purpose, his blind focus on the grammatical corrections and his final insistence that Brian re-write his insult a thousand times. The result, of course, is that the walls of Pontius Pilate’s palace end up covered in Brian’s challenge to Roman authority. At dawn, the centurion seems to realise this and Brian is chased from the scene.

So, to the Latin.

Brian writes Romanes eunt domus, by which he means “Romans, go home!” The centurion points out to him that it does not mean this, but rather something which equates to “people called ‘Romanes’, they go, the house.” So let’s examine the centurion’s corrections.

The Latin for Roman, Romanus, is a 2nd declension masculine noun. When the centurion demands to know what it “goes like” Brian comes up with annus, but you are more likely to have used the paradigm dominus or servus. This is Brian’s first correction, when he remembers that the nominative plural of Romanus is Romani, not Romanes (which would make it a 3rd declension noun). This is why the centurion translates Romanes as “people called ‘Romanes’” – it is a nonsense word in Latin, so is assumed to be an unfamiliar name of an unfamiliar group – something the Romans were quite used to, in fact, and they usually placed foreign words into the 3rd declension, a group in which nouns can end in anything at all in the nominative singular.

The centurion next challenges Brian on the verb eunt, from the horribly irregular ire. Brian is able to conjugate the verb correctly in the present tense and able to identify that eunt is therefore 3rd person plural present indicative. As the centurion points out, however, “Romans, go home!” is an order, so the imperative is required. Brian struggles but eventually comes up with the imperative (i) to which the centurion replies with my favourite line, “HOW MANY ROMANS?” Brian is thus forced to realise that the plural imperative is required: ite. Singular imperatives end with a vowel, plural imperatives with the suffix -te.

At last, we come to the noun domus, where the centurion actually makes a mistake. Brian is challenged to name the case that is used for “motion towards”, as in his statement the Romans are being instructed to go towards their home. He at first comes up with the dative, a common mistake made by students who understandably confuse the indirect object (I give water to the girl) with motion towards (I go to the shops). As so often, it is the English that is confusing, for we use the same word (“to”) for expressing these two very different concepts.

Threatened by the centurion’s sword at this point, Brian comes up with ad domum, which is more or less correct. However, domus is a noun which tends not to follow the preposition ad and is usually placed into the accusative case on its own to express motion towards. Some nouns just work like that. The mistake that the centurion then makes is to insist that Brian identify this case as the locative. While domus does indeed have a locative, this is actually domi and would mean “at home” – it would not be used to express the notion of heading towards home. So the Latin that Brian ends up with (Romani, ite domum) is correct, but the final piece of grammatical reasoning is wrong – domum is accusative, not locative.

I bet you wish you hadn’t asked now.

I have pondered many times whether the Pythons realised their mistake after filming or whether they remained in blissful ignorance. Some particularly ardent fans believe that the mistake was deliberate, as a final joke on the centurion, but I find this a little implausible. Whatever the reason for the error, it does not detract from a highly entertaining and unforgettable scene.

Facing down your Fears

What’s my logo? I don’t have one. Snappy name for my business? Don’t have that either. My business is me: my knowledge, my skills and my experience. I am my business. That might sound potentially arrogant. Actually, it’s a little terrifying.

A few weeks ago, as I always do, I woke up at the beginning of a new week and listened to two excellent podcasts aimed at tutors and education businesses, both of which release on a Monday. If you haven’t come across them, I do recommend. One is called the “Upgrade Your Education Business” podcast by Sumantha McMahon. The other is the “Love Mondays Club” by Helen Dickman. While both of them spend a good deal of time talking about things on a scale not only beyond my reach but frankly beyond my desires, I have continued to enjoy listening to them and have gained a huge amount from doing so. Both podcasts have encouraged me to think about and to question what I’m doing; both have solidified some of my thinking about what direction I want to go in and what I do and don’t want for my business. Perhaps most importantly, they have helped me to crystalise in my mind what is unique about what I offer, and this has helped me with how I present myself on my website and on social media. I am enormously grateful to both of them for the sheer number of tips, ideas and questions they have put out there for free.

It was on the Love Mondays podcast that I heard Helen – a very successful tutor and business coach – talk about her own fears of being in front of the camera. This was something of a shock given how much she places herself front and centre of her promotion campaigns! Helen acknowledged that people who have met her online as she presents herself now will probably have assumed that she is fine being in front of the camera, and has no qualms about placing herself at the centre of her promotional material. But she revealed how she used to hide her face on social media, using her pet dog instead of herself as a muse and generally avoiding showing herself on screen. Everything she said rang true with me, and I started to wonder just how many other apparently confident and successful business owners feel the same.

On this particular podcast, Helen had a guest: the photographer that she had commissionaed to take the professional images that she is currently using on her website and on social media. Kika Mitchell, who specialises in family shoots and personal branding, had me laughing within minutes. She came across as the funniest, most self-effacing and genuine character one could hope to meet. I felt the same when I got in touch with her; I felt the same when I spoke to her on the phone; I felt the same when she came to my house and made me front and centre of my very own photo shoot: something I never could have imagined myself agreeing to.

If you’d asked me a few years ago whether I’d consider myself a person who needed to employ a photographer to improve my personal branding, I’d have hooted with laughter. But the more I listened to Helen’s podcast and listened to Kika talk about what she does, the more I came to realise that’s exactly what I needed. It had been on my mind for months that my website was looking a little tired. Beyond that, the reality was that I had one photo – one! – that I was comfortable sharing on social media. As they said in Roman times, vincit qui se vincit: the one who conquers themselves conquers overall. I knew I had to face my fears and conquer them.

In a business like mine, when I am fundamentally selling myself, I understand that people want to see the person that they’re investing in. Of course they do – I feel the same! There is no way I would feel so comfortable picking up the phone and talking to someone about something as person-centred as tutoring unless I had seen an image of them looking warm, open and humane. So my personal loathing of being in front of the camera was a huge problem. Not just that, I do genuinely look awful in photographs: not because of my appearance per se – I understand that my hang-ups about that are personal – but because whenever a camera is pointed in my direction I immediately tense up and look tense and awkward. On our wedding day, my instructions to the photographer were: I don’t want to know you’re there. I knew that this was the only way we stood any chance of capturing an image of me looking happy and relaxed. Point a lens in my face and – as a rule – I look like a complete weirdo. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Fortunately, he took me at my word, and did a great job in capturing both me and my husband without my knowledge.

Having convinced myself that a professional photo shoot was something I should do, I decided that choosing someone I felt comfortable and relaxed with was going to be essential. This is what’s so great about Kika. She seems particularly adept at working with people who feel as I do – people who find the idea of having a camera pointed in their face genuinely awful. Kika’s skill lies in forcing you to be yourself. She was mercilessly insistent that I should be smiling and laughing and achieved this by … making me smile and laugh! I laugh a lot in real life. On camera, not so much; but Kika managed to capture me laughing and smiling, and those images have turned out to be some of my favourites.

I’ll be honest and say that I do hope these images last a fair while; I am not sure that I am miraculously converted to the thought of being a model in the longterm! But if Kika can take a series of images of me that I am comfortable with, I’d say she can do it for anyone.

Sick bugs and toxic policies

This week, I’ve been thinking about illness and absence. As someone who has entered the post-pandemic trend of working from home, I feel remarkably cushioned from the winter bugs currently circulating. By this time of the year, as a full-time teacher, I would have been hit by at least one virus, maybe two. I worked in a building filled with over a thousand teenagers and around one hundred adults. The results were inevitable.

The news is currently filled with the tangible threat of being in such close proximity with others. It seems unsurprising that cohorts of children, who have spent a significant part of their formative years in lockdown, are now experiencing a surge in both viral and bacterial infections, a spike in cases which might otherwise have been spread out over the last two years. I have around 30 online clients who are under 18 and every single one of them has been suffering with something over the last few weeks – even those who are home-schooled, since they live with siblings who attend school and bring the bugs home. It’s simply unavoidable.

One of the few positives that I hoped would arise out of the recent pandemic was a shift in attitude away from dogged presenteeism and towards a more pragmatic approach towards what it means to keep your colleagues and your schoolmates safe and healthy. The schools I have worked in were as guilty as most when it came to dolling out awards for 100% attendance, something which has always made me acutely uncomfortable.

My own attendance record as a colleague was excellent, but something which colleagues will not have known about me was that my school attendance as a child was absolutely dire. Percentages weren’t recorded in the 1980s with the same zeal as with which they are now, but I would guess that my attendance hovered at 70-80% – well into the “danger zone” by modern standards. I have no desire to bore you with the reasons in detail, but suffice to say I was in and out of hospitals a lot plus I was – to be frank – just a sickly child. If I got something, I got it with bells on, and I usually lost several kilos in weight during the process. All in all it was not a happy time – for me, or for my family.

Thankfully, in recent years there has been some pushback from professionals against the use of attendance awards, with several high-profile voices in education raising the obvious point that they are discriminatory. This is especially true of awards which pool the results of a group or a cohort, thereby harnessing the toxic influence of peer pressure. A student such as I was, with complex medical issues leading to unavoidable absences from school combined with what amounted to a string of bad luck, would have been hammered mercilessly by the modern system. Not only that, but the students who are the real targets – you know, the ones who could definitely do with getting their tails into school a little more often – remain markedly unmoved by the whole system.

It never ceases to amaze me just how much schools somehow convince themselves that their rhetoric and pressure-systems will have any effect whatsoever on the miscreants they are supposedly aimed at. As it happens, my oldest friend was one of those miscreants. She was perfectly fit and healthy but managed to attend school rather less frequently than I did. She just didn’t like school (or at least, she didn’t that particular school, a sentiment with which I have some sympathy). And yet, when our maths teacher lost her cool with my friend, and let it slip one day in front of the entire class that she was nicknamed “the part-timer” in the staff room, she embraced the title like a badge of honour. I still throw the so-called insult at her occasionally, and it still makes us both laugh nearly 40 years later. The very notion that she would buck her ideas up and attend school more often as a result of this gibe is utterly laughable to anyone who remembers what it was like to be a teenager. Why on earth would she have cared? Get real, Mrs Rutherford. Yes, I remember you.

Of course, attendance is important. But it is unrealistic to think that our pathetic attempts to maniupulate the teenage mind is having any effect on the Ferris Buellers of this world. More than this, our heavy-handed systems are indeed having an effect: they are pressurising the most anxious of students to attend school when they shouldn’t. I can name countless students over the years who dragged themselves into school when they should have been at home in bed. Not only was this detrimental to their own health, it was detrimental to the rest of us who were exposed to their viruses. Even worse than this, I have known students distressed that their attendance record might be affected by their presence at a family funeral or arising from otherwise distressing circumstances. This is madness. And it’s our fault. Presenteeism is a horrible curse upon the dutiful, the well-behaved, the sensitive and the anxious child – and that’s before we even return to the issue of students who suffer from underlying medical conditions or disabilities which require regular medical attention and/or intervention. By contrast, it has no impact whatsoever on young Ferris.

As if these systems being used on children were not bad enough, many of us on EduTwitter were made aware this week of a school which has been marking its staff’s identity badges according to whether that member of staff had achieved 100% attendance at work. The justification for this was that it would “raise a great opportunity for staff to start conversations with students about the importance of attendance.” Not only was I blown away by what a spectacularly toxic thing this is to do to your staff, I once again found myself thinking of the vanishingly small handful of staff that this policy is (presumably) aimed at.

Come on, admit it. We’ve all worked with at least one or two of them in our time; the one whose name appears on the cover sheet with such glorious regularity that it becomes a kind of performance art. But will they be shamed by a policy like this? I guarantee you that they will not – they certainly weren’t shamed by me covering their lesson for the umpteenth time in a term, so I fail to see why anything so prosaic would make a difference to their attitude. Once again, we have a system which punishes the dutiful and fails to address the actual problem. Poor attendance by individuals (a rarity in schools in my experience, but something which does occur on occasion) is something which needs tackling directly, frankly and robustly by SLT; manufacturing a shaming system for every staff member that falls foul of this year’s worst winter virus is heartless in the extreme.

When it comes to both staff and students in schools, we need to stop idolising the notion of “in at all costs” for the costs are too great – costs to the sick individual and costs to the community. If your child is ill, they should be at home. They should also make a conscious and proactive effort to catch up on their return. Schools should have an effective and workable cover policy, one which leans towards usage of set work and does not pressurise the sick individual to be sitting at their laptop at 4.30am writing cover sheets (which I have done in my time). Schools also need to face up to the fact that policies need to focus on making life less comfortable for the individuals that do make a habit of their absence – not introduce shaming systems which will harm members of the team who are trying their hardest.