Learning – Page 2 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Time Phrases

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”

Andy Warhol.

If you regularly peruse my blog for the vague philosophical musings and/or feminist rants, this one may not be for you. For on my mind this week is a spreadsheet I’ve been creating, which logs the frequency and regularity with which individual grammatical constructions come up on the GCSE Latin language paper, both for OCR and WJEC.

Yes, I’ve had quite the rollercoaster of a week so far.

For some time, I’ve had the feeling that time phrases are under-taught in most schools. It’s an easy fix, so it’s something I have always addressed with all of my students unless they show immediate and obvious evidence of confidence with them (which is rare). Imagine the validation I felt, therefore, when my analysis of all the exam papers available to us so far (a total of eight years) revealed that time phrases are one of the constructions which occur with the highest frequency in both examination boards.

There are a grand total of 23 time phrases in OCR language papers to date, a number equalled only by the ablative absolute, which also occurs 23 times, and exceeded only by the indirect statement, which comes up a whopping 28 times in the OCR papers; the indirect statement is universally acknowledged to be a tricky construction, so most schools spend a great deal of time on it (often, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, to the detriment of student understanding, but that’s another issue). The indirect statement occurs far less frequently in the WJEC examination (only 12 times) and its complexity is limited by the fact that students are not expected to know the range of infinitives that are required by OCR. Compare this to the fact that time phrases occur on the WJEC papers with a greater frequency than any other construction – a total of 18 appearances, with the next highest being the indirect command and the purpose clause, which both occur 13 times across the eight years.

Time phrases are not complex but they are – in my experience – something which students grasp with less ease than most teachers assume. In this blog post, I plan to explore why this is and to make the case that they should be addressed more frequently and with more care than is currently occurring in most classroom settings.

Time phrases are used in Latin to express either how long something went on for, or to specify when an event occurred; sometimes they are also used to indicate the period of time within which an event occurred, but the latter is infrequent at GCSE level. The reason that students find the construction more puzzling than their teachers perhaps assume is the nature of how these constructions translate into English.

The accusative case in Latin is used to express how long something went on for. Here are some examples:

milites duos dies pugnabant
The soldiers fought for two days

in taberna tres horas manebamus
We stayed in the pub for three hours

The use of the accusative to express length of time is perfectly logical to a subject specialist. We understand fully that the accusative is used to express passage of time and motion towards and we therefore find the translation into “for two days” or “for three hours” perfectly natural. For a novice, however, who is still wrestling with the very concept of noun cases and how to express them, the use of the word “for” in our English translation is deeply confusing. Isn’t the word “for” how the dative case is expressed? It is essential therefore to explore and unpick this potential confusion and explain to the novice that the English language is using the word “for” to express an entirely different concept here. The dative case means “for” as in “the slave prepared the meal for the master” – in other words, for the master’s benefit. This is quite different from the use of the word “for” to express how long something went on for, which is expressed by the accusative case in Latin. The use of the word “for” in our translation has to be tackled head on and explained carefully until the novice fully grasps the difference between the concept of the dative (“the slave prepared the meal for the master – i.e. for his benefit”) and the accusative (“the slave prepared the meal for three hours – i.e. that’s how long it took the slave to prepare it”). This cannot be skimmed over, otherwise a novice’s understanding is likely to be shaky – the knowledge will not stick, because it is built on shaky ground. Virtually every single student I have worked with have furnished me with evidence for this – only those carefully drilled in one or two schools with a reputation for extremely rigorous grammar teaching have not fallen prey to this misunderstanding.

The ablative case is used in Latin to express when something happened. Below are some examples:

milites prima luce oppugnaverunt
The soldiers attacked at first light

amici illa nocte advenerunt
The friends arrived on that night

milites nocte fugerunt
The soldiers fled by night

Here, students can experience some confusion due to the myriad of possibilities when it comes to rendering the ablative case in a translation. The variety with which English expresses the concept of when something happened depending on the vocabulary used can be really confusing, so once again the novice must be taught carefully. It must be thoroughly explained that “at”, “on”, “in” or “by” are all possibilities and the students must be given lots of practice in selecting the most appropriate choice. Only when students have seen multiple occurrences of these time phrases and thus practised all the different possible ways that they might be translated can they be said to have gained full confidence in this concept.

Having worked in a state comprehensive I understand better than most that classroom time is a precious and finite resource. Yet having performed my analysis of exam papers I feel I have a strong case that teachers should be devoting more of their chalkface time to this concept. All students can grasp it and they all stand to make tangible gains in the examination with the full understanding that more thorough teaching will afford them.

This beautiful photo is by Aron Visuals on Unsplash. I have used it before and I absolutely love it.

The best use of curriculum time

“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.”

Theophrastus.

On Wednesday, I had my regular fortnightly meeting with the new teacher who has taken over the teaching of Latin in the school where I used to work. This teacher is an ECT (in her first year of teaching) and while she will of course have a professional, in-house mentor to oversee her development within the school, the Head was conscious of and rightly concerned about the fact that she will have no subject expert in the building to offer her support. That’s where I come in. This week, I found my young protégé in a bit of a flap about one particular part of the language curriculum and since reflecting on our time together I realise that I was less helpful than I could have been. Rather than letting our conversation continue when it comes to the grammar at a granular level, what I needed to do was to get her to reflect on which aspects of the curriculum actually require the most time spent on them. Next time I see her, I shall do so.

One of the most frustrating things about leaving teaching is at last having the time to see and understand how one could completely re-write the curriculum to reflect more accurately the way that the exam papers are written. What those outside the profession will find difficult to understand is that it is left in the hands of often new and experienced teachers to design an entire curriculum to prepare for an exam they did not write. No real guidance is shared by the exam boards (and on the odd occasion when some guidance is offered, it is usually either unrealistic or unworkable in some or most settings). What we really need is for exam-setters to work alongside schools to build an appropriate curriculum, but that’s never going to happen.

As we talked, my instincts were telling me that this teacher was becoming unnecessarily bogged down by her worries about a particular construction and was planning to spend a huge amount of time on it. I need to make sure that she does not do this. The reason? Well, I have just reviewed the 8 separate past and specimen papers that we have from the exam she is entering her students for, and this particular construction appears either once or twice in each language paper. Around half of the time, its appearance is supported by comprehension questions, which guide the candidate towards the correct interpretation. The rest of the time, the examples used are almost exclusively ones which most students would be able to translate on instinct, even if they had never been taught the existence of this particular construction. Compare that to another kind of construction, which most teachers skim over very briefly, but which in fact appears multiple times in every single exam paper. Which would you focus on? Sounds obvious now, doesn’t it? But you wouldn’t believe how few teachers go through this thought-process when designing their curriculum and planning their lesson time.

Having made the switch from the classroom to private tutoring, I am in contact with dozens of students from multiple different types of schools. Something I have come to realise is that almost all teachers over-teach the aspects of the curriculum that they believe to be difficult. It is not that their beliefs are incorrect, but what they get wrong is the amount of curriculum time that they dedicate to these concepts as a result of their relative complexity. It’s a common assumption in education that one must spend more time on something because it is difficult. In fact, this must be weighed up against three crucial realities: firstly, the nature, knowledge and curriculum history of the students that we have in front of us; secondly, the amount of time that we actually have with them; thirdly – and perhaps most crucially – the relative weighting that this difficult concept carries when it comes to final outcomes. This requires an understanding of how much, how often and with how much depth that difficult concept is tested, as well as how many marks that testing carries. Once you start trying to balance this equation, it can lead to some surprising conclusions, which might not seem obvious to anyone but the most experienced in curriculum design.

If a concept or construction is so difficult that its full understanding will require multiple hours of curriculum time, yet that very construction is only likely to add up to three marks on one paper, which converts to 1.5% of the student’s overall score … is that concept actually worth teaching at all? It’s something to think about, at least. Perhaps one could teach it in a very condensed form, teach some broad strategies that work in the majority of cases and leave it at that. Certainly, what one should not do, is spend hours and hours of precious curriculum time trying to bring students to the point of full understanding whilst neglecting other concepts which we might consider simpler but appear multiple times on the paper and are thus integral to success. It simply isn’t the sensible approach, given the huge constraints that all schools face when it comes to curriculum time.

The tendency for teachers to labour what’s difficult is something which I share openly with my tutees. I am very careful not to criticise or undermine the school’s curriculum, but I simply explain that it is natural for teachers to spend lots of time on the things that they know are difficult as they are setting the bar high for their students. Children of the age that I work with are perfectly capable of understanding that this might be a noble and understandable approach, but is perhaps not the best strategy to help them if they are struggling with the basics. Even the most able students, who are aiming at the highest grades, can still be reassured by the knowledge that the most challenging aspects of the curriculum are of less importance than perhaps they thought they were; it actually frees them up to grapple with them, once they have been released from the anxiety that their full understanding of this concept is absolutely essential for success. Knowing that you’re working on something that might gain you an extra mark or two is very freeing, and it enables the students who are aiming high to make sensible decisions about how to spend their own time, which is often very stretched.

In Latin, it is not only the language paper that requires this frankness of approach and a realistic analysis of where one’s time should be directed. I have written before about the extent to which teachers over-teach the stylistic analysis of literature texts, when the overwhelming majority of marks are gained in the exam through students simply knowing the text off by heart. I emphasise this over and again to the students I am working with, many of whom come to me because they are scoring very low marks in this aspect of the examination. Students can score at least 80% by simply knowing the text like the back of their hand, so this should be the overwhelming focus of the lesson: despite this, I have so far come across only one school where I would say this is happening – where the focus is on drilling and making it clear to students that they must be learning the text in detail. I shall not name the school, but one thing I will say is that it is a very high-achieving school, where the Latin department produces results of almost exclusively 8s and 9s in the GCSE every single year: this goes to show that the school is not avoiding the trickiest concepts – there is no way a student could score a Grade 9 without getting a decent score in the style questions – but it shows that they understand how to balance their curriculum and focus their efforts on what gains students the biggest advantage. The emphasis must be on knowledge, with the complex skills being supplementary to that. The final clincher, which again I share with my students, is that the high-level questions become infinitely easier and more doable once you know the text. Thus, a student who has already gained a solid knowledge of the text that is in front of them has a much better chance of being able to understand and apply the ideas he/she is being taught to gain those elusive extra marks.

Shooting the Moon

During the period when I was writing my PhD, my main source of temptation and distraction was an electronic card game called Hearts. This was before the turn of the 21st century and while there were indeed some strange men in some of the science departments talking about a mysterious and abstract notion called “The Internet”, most of us had not discovered it yet. So, in 1998, I had neither cat videos nor social media to distract me, but I did have Hearts. Traditional card games such as Hearts and Solitaire (which I have always called Patience) were included along with the Microsoft software on my laptop, and it turned out to be a genuinely powerful temptation when the alternative was doing some work.

Hearts is a simple game for four players (or you plus three players driven by the computer). It is an evasion-game, in which you must try to avoid collecting any cards in the suit of hearts, plus particularly avoid collecting the Queen of Spades, which carries a heavy penalty and is essential to avoid. Generally speaking, the more hearts you end up stuck with at the end of the game, the worse your score, plus if you end up with the Queen of Spades you are particularly in trouble. I discovered all of this gradually: the motto in my family has always been, “as a last resort, read the instructions”, so in the style to which I had become accustomed, I plunged into the game and learnt the rules through trial and error.

One day, I was having such a bad round that it became clear that I was going to lose every single hand. Amused, I continued on my losing streak, keen in fact to make sure that I did indeed lose every single hand, purely for entertainment. (Please remember – the alternative was neoplatonic metaphysics). It was through this throwing in of the towel that I discovered the phenomenon of “shooting the moon” – it turns out that that in Hearts, if you lose every single hand and thus collect every single card in the suit of hearts and you collect the Queen of Spades, you actually win that round. It’s a slam-dunk, all-in move, like placing all your chips on one roll of the dice. I never managed to replicate the phenomenon and so only ever managed to win through shooting the moon on that one, accidental occasion.

In the last couple of years, I have become of aware of an increasing number of people who are keen for their children to “complete the syllabus early”. Some parents have expressed their wish that the entire specification be covered by the end of Year 10 (good luck with that!) and others adamant that they want the most complex concepts taught early or taught from the beginning. I have no idea where this notion has come from, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it found its origins on some online parent forum somewhere. Some high-achieving schools used to push this kind of rhetoric but with the shift in 2018 to specifications which are far more content-heavy, most schools find themselves struggling to complete the entire syllabus on time in some subjects, never mind early. The desire to push ahead also fails to take into account the rapid development that children are undergoing in their mid-teens. What a child is capable of towards the end of Year 11 may be poles apart from what they were capable of at the start of Year 10. On the other hand, it may not. It’s impossible to predict and – lest we forget – children are not machines.

One or two parents I have spoken to are so utterly wedded to the idea that the syllabus must be completed months ahead of the exam that they simply cannot be persuaded otherwise. Sometimes they claim that their child is vastly ahead in another subject – often mathematics – and express frustration that this is not the case in all. In the past, I might have accepted their take that their child was indeed in this position and argued that languages are different. Now I am married to a man with a mathematics degree, who rues the fact that he feels – on reflection – that he did not have the intellectual maturity to cope with the more nebulous fields of study that he was exposed to during his degree, it gives me pause. Is there honestly any subject in which a child or a young adult, however intelligent, can advance so rapidly without paying a price further down the line? Do they really understand what they are doing, or will it all come crashing down like the proverbial house of cards when they get a little further down the road? My feeling is that unless your child is some kind of savant (and to date I have never met one of those, so I’m telling you your child isn’t one of them) then you’re taking quite a risk with this approach.

Many parents who want their children to do well are concerned about the trickiest concepts in the syllabus. Sometimes they have feedback from their child’s schoolteacher that they have struggled with one or more of these more complex concepts. What some people find difficult to accept is that much of the time, it is not the tricky concept that is the problem – the problem lies deeper, in the foundational studies that their child may have been whisked through at high speed and left with tiny, often imperceptible gaps in their knowledge. Like the invisible holes in the enamel of a tooth, these gaps store up trouble for the future and before you know it you’ve got a gaping cavity in front of you. It is the rarest of occasions when this is not the case and indeed it is often the children who have historically done well in a subject that are most at risk. The better a child appears to be doing in a subject, the harder and faster they are pushed and the greater the number of tiny, undetectable cracks are formed which will make their presence known in the future. It’s the nature of the beast and nobody’s fault, but parents do need to trust a tutor who tells them that it’s time to go back to basics.

The overwhelming joy of what I do now is having the one-to-one time in which to genuinely test and shore up a child’s fundamental understanding. Asking them the same question in multiple different ways to ensure that they possess a genuine grasp of the topic, not a superficial ability to provide a text-book answer to an anticipated question worded in a style that they recognise. Asking them to define a grammatical term and give an example. Most of all, asking them to explain why a phrase or a sentence translates the way it does – does their translation stem from the ability to skate on thin ice or from a genuine grasp of the underlying principles?

You see, shooting the moon is exciting. But risking it all on one turn of pitch and toss is – as any recovered gambler will tell you – a seriously bad idea. Success comes from baby steps, strong foundations and a genuine grasp of how things are put together. Success in study is a marathon, not a sprint, and if a marathon runner started the race with the speed of a 100-metre sprinter, they would never make it to the end, never mind win. Early and fast does not mean better – quite the opposite. It can mean failure. So be patient and trust in the process. Shooting the moon is both elusive and risky and there are infinitely safer ways to win a round of cards.

Snacking

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did it go?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making a habit of it

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
Will Durrant, American historian, paraphrasing Aristotle

On the internet, where dodgy misattributions abound, this quotation is invariably ascribed to Aristotle himself. In fact, it is taken from historian and prolific author Will Durrant’s early 20th century work, The Story of Philosophy. In chapter 2 he examines Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and summarises his interpretation as above.

Despite undoubtedly being a genius, Aristotle was a master of the practical over and above the theoretical, which is perhaps the reason why his ideas have endured so successfully. He was one of the few thinkers of his time to acknowledge that philosophy is a luxury: that certain physiological and indeed psychological needs must be met before one can dedicate one’s time to it. He argued that there was never a simple way to define anything, that even the most fundamental moral definitions can vary with circumstances. He also argued, as Durrant summarised so pithily, that living well comes to a large extent through the repeated automation of good habits, and that being theoretically good was not much use in isolation without action.

This week, I finished James Clear’s Atomic Habits, a spectacularly popular book I have been in the queue for at my local library for several months. Conscious of the even longer queue that came after me (it is next available in December!) I finished the book within a couple of days. This was not a difficult task. I can see why there has been so much fuss about it and why for some it has been genuinely revelatory. As a reasonably well-organised and self-motivated person, I would not go so far as to say that I found the book life-changing, but I certainly found it helpful and agreed whole-heartedly with his refreshingly pragmatic approach. To take just one example, he makes the point that people who appear to be good at resisting temptation (a characteristic that many of my friends claim I possess) are in fact merely better at avoiding it – ingraining the habit, for example, that you do not buy certain foodstuffs is always more successful than buying them and telling yourself that you will consume them in moderation: the latter is simply too difficult to achieve.

Above all else, Clear’s point is that successful people (and you can define “success” in whatever way you choose) develop good habits while others do not. This might seem obvious, but it is precisely his unerring focus on habits that is so radical. While other self-help manuals exhort people to find their motivation and attempt to inspire us to make dramatic changes in our lives, Clear focuses on advising us to develop better habits incrementally: to take advantage of our brain’s ability to assimilate and automate regular and repeated behaviours. For example, I have said to myself: “I will go to the gym at x time on a Monday and a Thursday every week.” How do I make sure that this happens? Well, Clear advises going when I can, whatever the circumstances. If I miss a session due to illness or emergency, it becomes even more important to ensure that I make it the next time. If I can only go for 10 minutes, I should go for 10 minutes. This is because the habit of going is what’s most important. To quote another oft-used saying, perfectionism is the enemy of progress: if I let my abstract desire to achieve the perfect full work-out every time I go to the gym dominate over the priority of simply going habitually, I put my long-term gains at risk. It is easy to use the fact that on any one particular day I simply don’t have time for the perfect workout as an excuse not to go at all. Instead, I should focus on developing the habit of attending come what may, even if my peformance is sub-optimal: the enduring habit is the path to life-long fitness.

One of the things Clear expresses beautifully is the limited power of motivation, something I have written about less skilfully here. I am a firm believer that motivation is difficult to come by and has limited value when it comes to the reality of the daily grind – for example, the regular gym visits necessary to attain fitness or the repeated vocabulary learning required to sit a Latin exam. Humans need to experience some practical gains before they can achieve any kind of motivation and even then motivation can fail. Clear mentions a discussion he had with a coach who trains successful weight-lifters. The coach attributed the difference between those who make it and those who don’t not to some bottomless pit of inspiration or self-motivation but quite simply to their tolerance for boredom: their capacity to stick with the programme of repeated lifts, day after day, without quitting. Fundamentally, that’s all that makes the difference.

One of my tutees, with less than a fortnight to go before their exam, suddenly interrupted our session to ask me about “the best way to learn vocabulary.” Now, I’m not saying there aren’t ways that are better than others, indeed I have written extensively about it and shared a practical guide to exactly that with him and his family months ago. But I know this particular student very well and he’s the sort that is always looking for a silver bullet. He’s the sort that wants a quick fix. The reality is this: there isn’t one. You. Just. Have. To. Do. It. A few words a day, every day, day in day out, over and again, until you’ve learnt them. This is what he has never been willing to hear and he wasn’t particularly thrilled when I said it again.

On my way to my first ever solo gym visit (yes, I made it!) I was stopped by a guy who was getting out of his car and wanted directions to the station. Rising above the urge to moan about London commuters who use our road as a free car park, I beamed at him and said I was going in that direction and would show him the way. “I’m heading there,” I said, pointing to the glowering gymnasium squatting next to Jewsons. “Although I’m not particularly thrilled about it.” What he said next precisely summed up Clear’s case in Atomic Habits. “I haven’t been to the gym for months,” he admitted. I told him that it was my first time going alone having lost my work-out buddy and that I wasn’t looking forward to it for that reason. “Ah!” he shouted, confidently, as we parted ways. “You just need to find your motivation!”

Coming from a man who had literally just admitted that he had failed to attend his own gym for months, I found this fascinating. He was probably looking at me and thinking that with my attitude I would never keep going. I lacked the motivation to be a proper gym-goer. As for himself, I suspect in his own mind he was just having a blip. Okay, a blip that had lasted for several months, but a blip nonetheless. He was motivated to go, he simply hadn’t had the time, recently. Work had been manic. But do you see the problem? I think I do. In all honesty, I do not feel motivated to go to the gym. I don’t want to go. But I’m going. That’s the point. It’s the same thing that got me through my PhD, which I hated every minute of; while others claimed to love their research and yet gradually fell by the wayside and quit, I dragged myself up every day, wrote a few paragraphs, cried a lot, and eventually finished it. The practical grind beats the theoretical, the habit beats the concept. Sometimes, the hamster on the wheel is the ultimate winner.

Last-minute help?

This is the first of two remarkably busy weeks working with a very large number of Year 11s during their school holidays, preparing for the forthcoming GCSE examinations. Many of these students have approached me in just the last few weeks seeking help, and it is remarkable how much can be achieved in a short time prior to the final exams.

Many clients are surprised by the assurance that help can be worthwhile at this late stage. Many contact me in a state of panic or near despair, convinced that the situation is unsalvageable and unsure why they’re even asking for my advice. Yet within a few weeks it is possible to have an impact on a student’s confidence and their attainment, so long as you know what to focus on.

First and foremost, it is essential to assess the particular areas with which a student is struggling. This in itself can be a challenge, since many students (and certainly their parents) can struggle to identify where the problems lie. Students often present with nothing more than the fact that they need help with “the grammar”, so I rely largely on my own detective work to get to the bottom of what can be done to improve the situation. At a late stage of intervention this may well not mean delving into complex material, nor indeed trying to ask them to learn basic fundamentals. At this stage, it’s about identifying and selecting some concrete things to address that will gain them a win.

One thing that can be tackled head-on is their performance in the grammar questions, which make up 10% of their language mark. The examiner is remarkably repetitive and we are now in possession of enough past papers to prove this concept. Showing students every single past paper in quick succession, focusing entirely on the grammar questions and demystifying what it is that the examiner is looking for in their answer can be a real game-changer. In just one session it is usually possible to help get most students to the point where they can achieve 8 or 9 out of 10 in that section. To achieve full marks, students require a whistlestop tour of the uses of the subjunctive, which is a question the examiner has asked every single year, and that can take up another session or two. The uses of the subjunctive are another relatively easy win because most exam papers contain at least 5-10 sentences containing one of these constructions, so an understanding of how to translate those clauses gains them a significant margin.

There are further gains to be had if we have time to look at several practice papers as they can be coached on the types of phrasing that come up on a regular basis. I have identified a collection of common phrases that appear on exam papers with striking regularity, and a student who is perhaps overwhelmed with vocabulary learning can benefit from focusing their revision on these phrases. In addition, I have a list of high-frequency words that come up time and again on exam papers. Focusing on the high-frequency words will not gain a student a top grade in the exam (you need all the vocabulary for that!) but it can be a real game-changer for students who are struggling at the pass-mark.

Some students come to me for help with the literature and the majority of the time it is because they are completely overwhelmed by how to go about committing the texts to memory. I have written before on the fact that too many teachers tend to assume that students have the knowledge, experience and skills to rote-learn vast quantities of material without support, but in my experience, this really is not the case. My grades went up significantly when I started to assume that students did not have this knowledge and I taught them explicitly how to go about the process. Likewise, my grades went up when I took the risk of allowing them short bursts of class time to make a start on the process – this afforded me the opportunity to model the process and then monitor them using it. Many students are resistant to advice when it comes to study skills, so it’s important to ensure that they do give effective methodologies a chance so that they can be converted to the process. If left to their own devices, many students will ignore the suggestions made by their teachers, attempt to do it their own way and fail.

I am finding the work that I am doing immensely rewarding. Just this week I had a particularly heartening message from a client saying that her son is really seeing a difference. “He’s just said to me “ a few weeks ago I wouldn’t have had a clue and now I am getting them all right”. So grateful.” This particular student has been through exactly the process I have outlined above – I took him on a whistlestop tour of the uses of the subjunctive, we reviewed all the grammar questions on past papers and now we’re onto as many practice papers as we have time for, tackling some further easy wins such as time phrases along the way. Once the student is on board with the notion that it is never too late to turn their performance around, it’s quite remarkable what can be achieved.

They didn’t (always) behave for me

A conversation with one of my younger tutees this week reminded me just how toxic classroom disruption can be. While rueing his poor performance in a recent test, the boy expressed real frustration about the situation in his Latin class. “Some kids just see it as their job to mess around” he said. He even reported that the situation had brought his teacher to tears in the past.

At even its most minor level, any form of classroom disruption is an issue for all learners. Children who may be struggling with the material go unsupported because their teacher’s attention is taken by the disruptors in the class (who may, of course, be struggling themselves). Schools which have not yet faced up to the inescapable fact that impeccable behaviour is the central, non-negotiable foundation on which all teaching and learning is built, those schools will continue to let young learners down.

One of the things I find most puzzling about the teaching profession is that we cannot seem to agree on how to manage behaviour. Debates continue to rage about schools which set the bar high, with cries from numerous educators claiming that vulnerable students and/or SEND students cannot handle such a high bar and that clear boundaries such as the use of SLANT in classrooms and the insistence on silent corridors are oppressive and stifling. I find this baffling, not to mention an insult to the children with those needs. As someone who has worked in schools rated Good or Outstanding for behaviour, I can tell you that there were times when I was frightened in the corridors. There were times when I felt pushed around and intimidated by some students. There were times when I felt humiliated. What this all translates to in schools with behaviour that ends up being classified below Good I cannot even begin to imagine. Moreover, if I as a middle-aged adult felt like this in the school corridor, how did our most vulnerable students feel?

A recent survey on Teacher Tapp, a daily survey app for classroom teachers, highlighted the ever-increasing use of ear defenders by some students in our schools. As I pointed out in response to the discussion, I find their necessity deeply depressing. How did we get to the point where we simply accept that some school environments are too noisy and overwhelming for some of our students? Like that’s ok? And like noisy, boisterous environments aren’t actually a negative for all learners? How on earth did we end up in a situation in which the kind of equipment required by men on building sites using machines to break up concrete becomes a necessity to protect our students from the environment in our schools?

Let me tell you about my one of my own experiences in the classroom. I was sent to an expensive girls’ boarding school (although I didn’t board, I was one of a small percentage of day pupils). In Year 9 (or the Upper Fourth, as it was called would you believe) I was part of a Classical Civilisation class run by a young female teacher whom I shall call Miss Jones. Poor Miss Jones was a sweet, kind and well-meaning woman, who no doubt went into teaching because she cared about her subject and wanted to share it with the world. I suspect she had no training, because in a private school in the 1980s teacher training was considered very much optional and barely even desirable. The school was tiny, consisting of 400 girls in total and had a pretty strict regime – for example, silent corridors. The Head was terrifying – genuinely so. But poor Miss Jones, with her reticent nature, her lack of training and her lack of experience, had no control over our class. One girl was particularly disruptive. I shall call her Millie. Millie was taller and looked older than most of us. She terrified many of us and was a merciless bully to some. That included Miss Jones. Millie refused to cooperate with the class, to the extent that she would not sit where she was told, she would not participate in the class in any way, she would not even unpack her bag. She would lay her head on the desk in a flagrant show of disdain. Miss Jones’s methodology was to ignore her and try to teach around her, but behaviour in general was so poor that we all learnt very little. She never received any support or help with the situation and did not last long in the job.

I share this to illustrate the fact that issues with poor behaviour occur in all schools. Another recent survey from Teacher Tapp, carried out just this week, indicates that student behaviour, alongside workload, is now the overwhelming reason why teachers are leaving the profession in their thousands. There is much talk about “challenging” schools and understandably so, because getting behaviour right in such places has very real safeguarding issues, as explained in this brilliant blog post which I have cited many times before. Yet I would like to highlight the fact that behaviour that is disruptive enough to impact on teaching and learning goes on everywhere – in schools rated Good or Outstanding, in grammar schools and in private schools. Some of what I hear from my tutees would not be out of place in a chapter of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies – and these are the sorts of schools with Latin on their timetable.

While I do not wish to promote panic or cause any pearl-clutching, I do believe that disruptive behaviour in our schools is an issue that nobody wants to face up to. Nobody – whether they are a parent or a teacher – wants to believe that our children’s education is being hampered by disruption in the classroom. It is hard for all of us to accept. While writing this blog post, a memory from close to a decade ago came back to me with a jolt. It is a comment made by a boy in one of my past Forms, a boy who was one of the most disruptive members of the class (and indeed the school). “Your PSHE lessons are like watching a YouTube video with crap internet, Miss: you keep buffering.” I recall being somewhat non-plussed by this rude remark, one which was called out across the class and interrupted the flow of the lesson in exactly the way he was describing. Out of the mouths of our not-so-innocent babes can come the real truth: my ability to share information was being constantly put on pause, meaning that the flow of explanation was consistently and endlessly interrupted. This was painfully obvious, even to the members of the class who were causing most of the interruptions, a fact we should perhaps give some thought. I remember being further stunned when an out-of-control student expressed his desire to join the army; as I picked my jaw up off the floor and used it to point out to him that he would have to behave in the army, he said “yeah. That’s the point.” I’ve never forgotten the fact that he knew he needed more discipline than we were providing for him. We let him down. Badly.

So, back to my tutee, who was complaining about the behaviour in his Latin class. He described exactly the kind of intermittment “buffering” that the lovely Liam pointed out to me a decade ago, so it sounded all-too familiar, but this week it really hit me just how truly appalling the situation is for so many young learners and just how many of them have come to accept it as part of their school experience. “Just as I think I’m starting to get something,” he said, “the teacher has to stop and then I’ve lost it all over again.” That’s when my heart broke a little.

It’s hard to know who needs to hear this but I suspect it’s all of us: classroom teachers, parents and senior leaders all need to face up to the problem for what it is and reassert our right and our responsibility to be the adults in the room. Disruption – low-level or otherwise – is kryptonite to every child’s understanding and progress. To ignore this is to let all of our children down.