Emma Williams: Latin tutor – Page 10 – Latin teaching and online tutoring

Pink spots, pink lines and seeing red

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A glorious image of the Colosseum in Rome by Dario Veronesi on Unsplash

Beyond the chalkface

Why I left teaching after 21 years

Yesterday I listened to several panelists explain their journey into tutoring at the Love Tutoring Festival run by Qualified Tutor. Some of them had been a teacher for many years and some of them seem to have disliked it from the start. This got me thinking about my own experiences, for I was someone who loved my job, indeed I felt it had helped to keep me sane in times when I might otherwise have struggled to stay afloat.

No other job takes you out of yourself in quite the way that teaching does. No other job brings you so many laughs per hour, with so much variety woven into it, despite the fact that outstanding teaching can only thrive (in my humble opinion) within watertight perameters and established routines.

Teaching is a wonderful job and it genuinely pains me to see it talked down by the media. It pains me even more to see how the profession is haemorrhaging its own staff – often its best and its brightest – as we helter-skelter into a recruitment and retention crisis of epic proportions. When I left teaching in 2022 I was part of a very depressing set of statistics, as retention reached its worst level in history. There is something very terrible going on.

Some members of the tutoring profession, of which I am now a part, seem to me to have some rather fanciful ideas when it comes to mainstream schooling. Their belief seems to be that there is no “one size fits all” and that provision must be broadened to suit the whim of every child and every parent, to bend its nature to every individual need. The reality – of course – is that this is simply not possible. If the state is to provide a basic education for all children and if that provision is to be free to access – and I cling to the belief that these principles are not up for debate – then we have to provide that education in a setting where it can be delivered to large numbers of students at a time. There really isn’t any other option that works. Sure, you can tweak things around the edges and many schools do outstanding work accessing a variety of provision for individuals that goes beyond that model, but I haven’t yet met a sensible Headteacher that would throw out the model altogther.

One of the main problems in the profession, as I see it now from the outside, is that teachers are our own worst enemy. Whenever we are provided with models that take the pressure off us, we complain. Schools which centralise behavioural systems and provide staff with explicit guidance on how to teach and provide materials to use face complaints that teachers’ autonomy and professionalism is being questioned. It’s all pretty exhausting. I felt that morale was low amongst the teachers that I knew when we returned after Covid, but nobody seemed able to agree on why they felt this way. All of us seemed to have a different opinion on what the problems were and even where we could agree that something was an issue, SLT faced wildly differing takes on the solutions to that problem. I am very aware that whenever I beat a path to the door of my go-to Deputy Head, what I was saying to him probably contrasted irreconcilably with something that somebody else will have pitched to him just half an hour earlier.

So what I have to say is entirely personal and my pathway out of teaching – although not uncommon – is peculiar to my own experiences and my own responses to them. It is true that my attitude towards my job changed and that my feelings shifted quite dramatically over a reasonably short period of time. I am not sure that much could have been done to prevent this, although I have a few thoughts that I will choose not to share about how my departure could have been prevented, or at least postponed.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Covid pandemic played a part in my shift out of teaching. First of all, it exposed me to a different way of working. Tough as that period of isolation was, it did expose me to the experience of working from home and I didn’t hate it in the way I expected to – in fact, I rather enjoyed it. I liked the freedom of not having to be up, dressed, out and battle-face on by 7.30am. It made me think about the benefits of flexible working in a way that I had never done so before. Combined with this, the pandemic changed the world irrevocably, and this created other pull factors. I work in a very niche subject and I knew that finding enough work would rely on parents embracing the concept of online tutoring. I had pencilled this in as likely to happen within the next five to ten years, but the pandemic fast-forwarded the process overnight. Likewise, whenever I had previously considered the idea of quitting the chalkface in favour of full-time tutoring, I had dismissed it on the grounds that I would be free all day while my friends and husband were at work, and starting work at the point when they all became free; this seemd like a bad idea in terms of my personal life. However, once again, the pandemic changed all that. All of my friends – with the exception of those that are teachers – now work from home either some of the time or all of the time, meaning that their time is also flexible and that it is possible to schedule an early-morning walk, a coffee or a lunch into their day.

The year we returned to school after the switch to online learning during the pandemic was – let’s face it – hell on earth. Bubbles were a dismal failure in secondary schools, a frankly appalling and ill-thought-through brainchild of government that to this day I fail to see the point of. We were forced to teach in unsuitable environments, we were forced to be peripatetic, we were freezing cold, some of the time we were forced to wear masks and all of the time it was miserable. I hated every last second of it. So when we returned to normality the year after and I found myself back in my own classroom, mask-free, I expected my love of the job to return. It didn’t. Perhaps the experience of the year before had fast-forwarded a process that was already happening? I’m not sure. For whatever reason, the love had largely gone.

In the end, the decision to leave was quite sudden and precipitated by a couple of incidents that happened in that final year. A couple of incidents while on duty in the grounds of the school tipped me over the edge and made me feel – quite simply – that I did not want to do this job any more. Both involved groups of older boys and both found me as a lone adult, feeling threatened and being pushed around by a bunch of teenagers – either physically or emotionally. It was not pleasant. I handled it at the time and indeed was able to get back into my own classroom and get on with my job. But I was overwhelmed by a sense of fear and rage – fear that as I got older this would get less and less easy to deal with, and rage that I was expected to do so. Truly, there is no other job in which you can feel threatened – either emotionally or physically – by a gang, then be asked to reflect upon what you could have done better in that situation. Do I think that behaviour in schools has got worse since the pandemic? Yes, I do. Was it perfect beforehand? Far from it. But my tolerance has gone and I am simply not prepared to put up with it any more. Ultimately, this was what drove me out of mainstream teaching.

The Summer Slump

At around this time last year I was in my final few weeks at the chalkface and I wrote about how difficult we make things for ourselves in schools. Believe me, I remember only too well the exhaustion that teachers feel at this time of year, but it was my experience that my job was made harder by the messaging sent out by the school. Everything from the ditching of uniform to the multiple interruptions to the timetable meant that students were given the subliminal message that school was already out for summer. Getting them to focus on work for what amounted to a still-significant percentage of the year was difficult.

This year I am on the outside, working with multiple tutees in dozens of schools. It is clear that in many schools the curriculum has stalled or been cancelled altogether and the school is free-wheeling towards the end of term. Many teachers have suspended normal teaching and told students to work on projects. Many of these are of dubious value, although there are exceptions: one or two schools are doing some excellent work with Year 9 foreshadowing the literature study that they will face next year, asking then to examine some portions of text as pieces of writing. Generally, however, students are working on “background” studies and messing about with PowerPoint presentations, none of which appear to be relevant to their current or future curriculum; most of them are only too aware that they have been given “busy work” in which the teacher is not really interested.

“My teacher says not to produce anything that they will have to mark,” said one tutee this week. As a marking-phobe myself, I cannot help but feel the teacher’s pain on this one, but it was perhaps not the wisest remark to make to the class. My favourite anecdote, however, is the school that has already collected in all text books for all subjects – that’s three weeks prior to the end of their year! Such extraordinary efficiency will do little to convince students that there is valuable work yet to be done in class and I do have to wonder how much say teaching staff had in this triumph of administrative order over learning.

Nothing will ever make me forget the sheer exhaustion that can overwhelm teaching staff at this time of year – and yes, the heat doesn’t help. But my own recollections are of frustration at the constant interruptions and the very clear assumption – by students, by parents and even by school leaders – that the learning was coming to an end. So I do feel for the teachers out there who are desperately trying to keep the learning on track. Certainly the students I work with now are somewhat puzzled by the downturn, especially those that have recently been pushed hard in the run-up to internal examinations. All of a sudden, it seems, their learning is no longer of crucial importance and some of them feel a little abandoned. It’s been a sobering lesson in just what an impact our own demeanour and our messaging can have on the students in front of us.

Can Chat GPT write in Latin?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defining your terms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critiquing literary criticism

As we approach the second and final GCSE literature exam and as I continue to work with a huge number of Year 11s preparing for the verse paper, I cannot help but feel a little depressed about how difficult students seem to find the process of stylistic analysis. There is no other area in which I have observed even the most brilliant of scholars to be floundering so badly. So what are we getting wrong when it comes to the teaching, or is this aspect of the exam just insurmountably difficult?

Before I make my observations I wish to say that I include myself and my own teaching in what I have to say. Throughout my career I have watched students struggle with this aspect of the examination, so my observations of my tutees who are now wrestling with this are in no way meant to imply that I think I was “getting it right” when I was at the chalkface – indeed what follows is definitely a criticism of myself and my own approaches. How I have tackled the teaching of literary criticism evolved and improved over the years and my focus now with tutees is different from how I might have approached the problem 20 years ago, but students in my class struggled just as much as I see my clients struggling now. I believe this is something that all of us in Classics education need to do better and the more I think about it the more I believe we are woefully lacking in ideas when it comes to what to do.

Below are a couple of key observations of what seems to happen in Latin classes (including my own in the past) and which I think might be compouding the difficulties that students have with this particularly challenging element of the syllabus.

First of all, many schools massively over-teach technical/rhetorical terms. This mistake is encouraged by the resources published by ZigZag, used in Classics departments across the country, which start the process of literary criticism with a baffling list of rhetorical devices which (it is implied) students must have a grasp of before they even embark on the process of responding to the literature.

A ZigZag resource I was sent for review started with 16 pages of explanation of various terms from anaphora to polyptoton, each with an accompanying activity. Students are expected to learn the meaning of all of these devices and then learn to spot them in the Latin. Full disclosure: I used to do this. Why? I have absolutely no idea. It was stupid. I probably did it partly because everybody else was doing it. Also, like many other Classics teachers, I rather like literary devices and personally gain quite a lot of geek-filled pleasure from spotting them in everyday language and popular music. He watches afternoon repeats and the food he eats is a zeugma in a song by Blur from the 1990s; you held your breath and the door for me is another great one in a song by Alanis Morisette. But do students need to know any of these stylistic terms to gain full marks in the literature questions? No, they don’t. A brief look at any mark scheme makes it clear that technical terms offer little advantage other than time-saving; if a student calls something an anaphora rather than just “repetition at the start of a line/clause” it won’t gain them any more marks. Furthermore, the mark scheme’s expectation is that students answer the question with a plausible response as to why the author did what he did, rather than simply play a game of spot-the-device. The examiner doesn’t want to see “there is anaphora in these lines”. What he wants to see is something like, “the repetition of ter … ter (three times … three times) at the start of these two lines highlights Aeneas’s desperation to embrace his father, which he tries to do in vain”. No technical terms are required – students must simply consider why Virgil chose to repeat the word ter at the start of the line. In my experience, teaching students to spot the technical devices is counter-productive: it makes them think they have made a valid point when they haven’t because they have used a clever word.

The second thing I think we get wrong is to give students too much complex information. Many of my tutees have admitted that their notes are so jumbled and full of information (and technical terms) that they can’t make any sense of them. To ask a 15-year-old to take clear, decipherable notes on such a complex topic which they will then be able to learn and apply in an examination situation is asking rather too much in my opinion. Allied to this is my belief that “learning the style notes” is simply not possible. There is way too much literature to make this a viable approach. Students instead must learn to respond to a section of the literature and say some sensible things about it under pressure.

In recent years I have tried to teach students to look for really basic techniques and encourage them to think about the author’s craft using a simple acronym: MRSVP

Meaning
Repetition
Sound
Vivid (= historic) present
Position

Meaning is at the top because students must always be able to tell the examiner what the word means (and therefore why the author has chosen to repeat it or promote it or whatever). However it is the other four points that students need to be using to be talking about style. They are things which are relatively easy to spot – is a word repeated? Has it been put at the start of a line or next to another word for a reason? Is there a sound repeated for a reason? These are the basic fundamentals of the kind of literary criticism that the examiner wants to see.

I am confident in my use of this method as a few years ago I shared it at a training day which was being run by an OCR examiner. Not only did he describe it as “brilliant” but he started using it himself – indeed, it was included in his materials at the next training session I attended. However, in my experience it is no silver bullet. I have taught the acronym to every cohort of students in my final years at the chalkface and they still found the process incredibly difficult. Now I have had time away from the chalkface to reflect, I think what I was getting wrong is not being explicit enough in training them in the process of “seeing” these things in a text. If I had my time again I would dedicate a part of a lesson to each individual device and give students multiple sections from the text and ask them to spot it – “which words are repeated in this passage?” or “find the historic present verbs in this passage.” I would then use that task – spotting one of the basic stylistic methods in a familiar passage – as a regular Do Now at the start of every lesson. Until they were frankly sick of it.

I think it was this lack of very explicit training that was the mistake on my part – finding examples seems such a simple task to a subject expert and we must remember that it is not: children need to practise how to do it. One of the most interesting things about teaching is the process of constant reflection and asking yourself how you could do something better; it is somewhat frustrating that these thoughts are coming to me with perhaps even greater ease now I have had some time away from the chalkface to reflect. I hope perhaps that others will read this and consider applying my ideas.

The use of the historic present in Echo & Narcissus: OCR GCSE set text

This week my blog continues to be inspired by a random question which was sent to me via WhatsApp by a student:

Hi! I’m doing my Latin GCSE next week, and I was wondering … how to recognize the historic present, as I’ve tried to simply learn the words … however thats not quite working and I was wondering if there were any specific sign posts to signify that it is the use of the historic present. Thank you!!

A fortnight ago I examined the prose texts currently being studied in the overwhelming majority of schools and last week I covered the Virgil text. Here I shall take a look at Echo & Narcissus, the longest text in the alternative verse selections for 2023 and 2024. For details on the historic present in general and why I believe that students find it trickier than we might imagine, please refer to my original blog post on the prose texts.

Examples of the historic present in Echo & Narcissus

The set texts opens with a historic present verb, although it is important to remember that this is not the beginning of Virgil’s narrative – the GCSE set text is an extract from a very long work called The Metamorphoses. Still, the very first word of our text is not only in the historic present but is a promoted verb: aspicit hunc trepidos agitantem in retia cervos: she catches sight of this man, driving frightened stags into his nets.
The next occurence of the historic present, when Ovid jumps out of his past narrative for effect is here: sequitur vestigia furtim: she follows his footsteps stealthily. The same verb is repeated in the same form in the line below – repetition occurs throughout the text and is part of the game that Ovid is playing with the idea of echo and reflection throughout the text.
The next clear example is when Narcissus first responds to Echo: hic stupet: he is amazed. His reaction continues in the historic present for this entire section, with dimittit, clamat, vocat, respicit and perstat all in the historic present, making vivid the young man’s bewliderment as he hears his words repeated back to him.
Echo’s joyful response to Narcissus also uses the historic present, when she acts out the words she is able to repeat (let us come together): et verbis favet ipsa suis: and she herself follows her own words.
When it comes to Echo’s response to her rejection, the entire passage which describes her feeling rejected, hiding in the woods, covering her face with leaves and wasting away into a non-corporeal entitry is all written in the present tense.
The poem slides back into the past tense briefly to describe Narcissus tiring from the heat and hunting, before jumping back into the present tense to describe him quenching his thirst at the spring and his second thirst (for his own reflection) coming upon him: dumque sitim sedare cupit: while he wishes to quench his thirst is the first example, then dum bibit (while he is drinking) and spem sine corpore amat (he falls in love with hope without substance). The present tense verbs then continue for the enstire description of Narcissus’s love for himself; many of them are repeated in different forms as Ovid plays around with the idea of reflection throughout this section. Ovid does not return to the past tense narrative until his exclammation irrita fallaci quotiens dedit oscula fonti: oh how often he gave kisses to the deceitful spring. He then returns immediately to the present tense when he returns to his game of reflection: quid videat nescit, sed quod videt: he does not know what he is seeing, but what he is seeing … and oculos idem qui decipit incitat error: the same delusion which deceives his eyes provokes them.

A section of the painting “Echo and Narcissus” by John William Waterhouse; it is held at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool

The use of the historic present in Virgil Aeneid VI: OCR GCSE set text

This week my blog continues to be inspired by a random question which was sent to me via WhatsApp by a student:

Hi! I’m doing my Latin GCSE next week, and I was wondering … how to recognize the historic present, as I’ve tried to simply learn the words … however thats not quite working and I was wondering if there were any specific sign posts to signify that it is the use of the historic present. Thank you!!

Last week I examined the prose texts currently being studied in the overwhelming majority of schools – Sagae Thessalae and Pythius. I started with the prose texts because the student enquiring asked specifically about the Sagae text, plus the prose exam is imminent, on May 26th. From my work with a wide range of tutees it seems that there is a more even split between students who are studying the Virgil text and those who are studying the Amor texts – Echo & Narcissus plus the three shorter poems – so I am going to look at both selections. This week my attention is turned to the Virgil.

For details on the historic present in general and why I believe that students find it trickier than we might imagine, please refer to my blog post from last week.

Examples of the historic present in Virgil Aeneid VI

The first thing to note is that much of the whole text is written entirely in the present tense, where Virgil is describing what this area of the Underworld looks like or when he is using direct speech, both of which occur throughout the selections on the specification. It is only the examples I highlight below that should be classified as historic present.

The first concrete example of the historic present occurs after Virgil has begun to describe the events observed by Aeneas in the past tense in lines 313-314, then suddenly switches into the present in lines 315-316:

navita sed tristis nunc hos hunc accipit illos,
ast alios longe summotos acrcet harena.
But the grim boatman takes now these, now those,
while others he pushes away, driven off far from the sand.

Virgil has already created a sense of pathos in the previous lines, describing the souls begging to be allowed across the Styx; here the arbitrary and callous nature of Charon is heightened by the historic present verbs.

The next example is in line 384, where the continued journey of Aeneas and the Sybil is given in the present tense, which then switches back to the past narrative in the lines that follow:

ergo iter inceptum peragunt fluvioque propinquant.
Therefore they continue the journey [they had] begun and approach the river.

In line 387 Charon’s aggressive greeting to Aeneas and the Sibyl is also introduced in the historic present:

sic prior adgreditur dictis atque increpat ultro
First he addresses them thus with words and rebukes them spontaneously.

The next example occurs in line 407 where Charon has been affected by the Sybil’s response:

tumida ex ira tum corda residunt.
Then his heart calms down from its surging anger.

Charon’s immediate response is then enlivened by a series of numerous historic present verbs in lines 410-413:

caeruleam advertit puppim ripaeque propinquat:
inde alias animas, quae per iuga longa sedebant,
deturbat, laxat foros. simul accipit alveo
ingentem Aenean.
He turns around his dark blue craft and approaches the riverbank, then he drives away the other souls , who were sitting along the long benches, and he clears the gangways; at the same time he receives mighty Aeneas into the boat.

The description of Aeneas climbing into the boat then reverts to the past tense narrative, before the next action of Charon in line 416:

incolumes vatum virumque … exponit
He puts ashore both the priestes and the hero, unharmed.

The next example is not until line 703 where Aeneas catches sight of the more pleasant aspects of the Underworld:

interea videt Aeneas
Meanwhile Aeneas sees …

This is done again in line 710 when Aeneas’s response to the sight of numerous souls is one of strangeness and fear:

horrescit visu subito …
Aeneas shudders at the sudden sight …

The promotion of the verb and the use of the adverb subito further heightens the vividness of this descrption.

The actions of Anchises where he takes hold of Aeneas and leads him to a position where he can better see the march of future souls is the final use of the historic present, in lines 753-754:

dixerat Anchises natumque unaque Sibyllam
conventus trahit in medios turbamque sonantem,
et tumulum capit …
Anchises had spoken and he takes his son and the Sibyl alongside him into the midst of the assembly and the murmuring crowd and chooses a mound …