Emma Williams: Latin tutor – Page 11 – Latin teaching and online tutoring

The use of the historic present in Sagae Thessalae and Pythius: OCR GCSE set texts

This week’s post is 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 in Sagae Thessalae 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!!

Students do find historic presents hard to spot and I believe there are a variety of reasons for this. Firstly, something we Latin teachers perhaps fail to address is that students are specifically taught by their English teachers that a change of tense is a very bad thing. They get marked down for it. In the ancient world, by contrast, a switch in tense was considered fine writing and done for deliberate effect; I do wonder whether the modern view that it is poor writing inhibits our students in their ability to respond to it.

A technical reason students find it hard is that most of them are not taught morphology in detail. Certainly I did not have the teaching time to enlighten students as to the details of all five conjugations and how their stems change, so students’ ability to spot the difference between a present tense of a 3^rd or mixed conjugation verb and its perfect tense, and indeed the difference between a present tense verb and the future tense of the 3^rd, 4^th and mixed conjugations will probably be hazy.

One possible approach is to scrupulously translate historic presents in the present tense, but given our modern disquiet with switching tenses this can end up spoiling the narrative as a whole in translation. Another solution is to mark them up in the text, and the version of Sagae Thessalae which I have borrowed and adapted from the inimitable Mark Wilmore does exactly that – all historic presents are marked with an asterisk.

It is important for students to bear in mind that not every present tense verb will be in the historic present. A historic present is defined as a change into the present tense when the narrative is taking place in the past. As a general rule, therefore, direct speech doesn’t count, as the present tense is probably simply a report of exactly what was said. Nor does it count if the entire narrative is written in the present tense, although of course if an author decides to write an entire narrative in the present, then that in itself is done for effect. But what you’re looking out for for the historic present is a sudden switch into the present tense within a past-tense narrative. This is done deliberately to make the scene vivid.

Given the imminence of the literature examinations and the fact that this student who contacted me is probably not the only one struggling with this, I have decided to do a quick sweep of the main set texts and point out the historic presents in them. This week I am looking at the prose, which is being examined on May 26^th – I will look at the verse texts next week and the week after.

Examples of the historic present in Pythius

Most of Pythius is written in the past tense, but a series of historic present tense verbs towards the end highlight Canius’s bewilderment and panic as he realises he’s been conned: invitat Canius postridie familiares suos. venit ipse mature. cumbam nullam videt. quaerit a proximo vicino num feriae piscatoram essent: on the next day, Canius invites his close friends; he himself comes over early; he seems not one fishing boat; he asks his nextdoor neighbour whether it was a fishermen’s holiday. Note that three of the verbs are promoted also, which further strengthens the vivid effect.

Examples of the historic present in Sagae Thessalae

Sagae Thessalae is peppered with verbs in the historic present; below is a summary of them:

medio in foro senem conspicio: I catch sight of an old man in the middle of the forum.
animum meum commasculo: I strengthen my spirit. Actually the verb means something like “make manly” – Thelyphron actually tells himself to “man up”.
et statim me perducit ad domum quandam: he leads me at once to a certain house. perducit is also a compound verb – the preposition per glued onto the front of it also makes the action more vivid.
ubi demonstrat matronam flebilem: where he points out a weeping woman.
mustela terga vertit et a cubiculo protinus exit: the weasel turns its back and goes out of the bedroom immediately.
somnus tam profundus me repente demergit: a sleep so deep suddenly overwhelms me.
cadaver accuro: I run over to the corpse.
omnia diligenter inspicio: nihil deest: I carefully inspect everything: nothing is missing.
ecce! uxor misera flens introrumpit: look! The wretched wife burst bursts in, weeping. Here you could talk about the emphatic interjection ecce! as well as the historic present verb.
reddit sine mora praemium: she hands over my reward without delay. Here you could mention the fact that the verb is promoted as well as in the historic present.
immitto me turbae: I push my way into the crowd. Here again you could mention the fact that the verb is promoted as well as in the historic present.
et surgit cadaver et profatur: and the corpse rises up [and] speaks out. The use of polysyndeton (repeated conjunctions/connectives) further dramatises these historic presents.
respondet ille de lectulo et … populum sic adloquitur: he responds thus from the bier and addresses the people in this way. The first of these two historic presents is promoted also.
igitur ignarus exsurgit … ianuam adit: therefore he unwillingly gets up … [and] goes to the door.
sagae ceram … ei applicant nasumque …. comparant: the witches attach wax to him and fit on a nose.
temptare formam incipio. manu nasum prehendo: sequitur; aures pertracto: deruunt: I begin to examine my appearance. With my hand I grasp my nose: it comes off. I touch my ears. They fall off. Here you could talk about the tightly-packed sequence of historic presents. I would also mention the literal meaning of sequitur – his nose “follows” his hand as he takes it away from his face.
et dum turba … me denotat … effugio: and while the crowd identifies me … I make my escape. Mention also that denotat is a compound verb.

OCR Latin GCSE language – exam technique

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

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

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

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

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

Derivatives

It was the year 2000, I was an NQT and I was standing in front of a class, teaching a subject I had not trained in, perhaps rather less well-prepared than I should have been.

The class were reading The Turn of the Screw, a novella I felt reasonably confident I could bluff my way through for half an hour, but the inevitable happened – I was presented with a word I had never seen before. The governess in the novel was describing how much the children in her care were absorbed in their imaginary games and how they would assign to her a role in their game that was befitting of her position – “a happy and highly distinguished sinecure.” I had never seen the word sinecure before.

Given my knowledge of Latin, alongside the context of the passage, I was able to deduce that sinecure meant something that required little effort: sine in Latin means “without” and cura means “effort, care or worry”. This is just one of a thousand ways that a knowledge of Latin can help widen your scope as a reader – it can help you to deduce the meaning of a word you have never met before.

Most students find derivatives much more difficult than adults imagine, and this is something I have only come to realise in recent years. The derivatives question in the OCR GCSE language paper is worth 4 marks – that’s 4% of the whole paper – yet most classroom teachers (and I include myself in this) have not prepared students well for it. It is easy to assume that students will be able to do the question without any support or guidance, but in my experience the marks that students score in this element of the paper do not bear out this assumption.

I’ll be honest – I don’t like the derivatives question and I don’t think it should be there in its current form. The question significantly advantages students who have read more widely, students who like and respond well to reading and who have been exposed to a lot of challenging books from a young age. Yet even they sometimes struggle with the question unless they are prepared for it.

The GCSE question in its current form looks like this: students are asked to state an English word which derives from the Latin and to define the English word. It is the latter that even strong readers can struggle with, given that parts of speech are no longer something which their English teachers will be making much reference to. Asking students of 16 years to give a dictionary definition of a word is a fair bit more challenging than one might assume. The question always gives an example to show students what to do, but they still need to practise it.

I used the above example this week with a very intelligent and very well-read student. His mother is an English teacher. He could not come up with a derivative for annos – fascinatingly, he came up with annular, a word which I had never heard of, but which derives in fact from the Latin for ring (anulus, also spelled annulus, meaning “small ring”). The word therefore means “ring-shaped” and I believe that he knew the word because he does astronomy! He could not think of the word annual and only recognised it when I gave him examples of it in compound words such as biannual. The second word in the question gave him no problem and he confidently both named and defined sedentary; but in my experience this is very unusual for a 16-year old, as most of them have not heard of this word and are more likely (if they can come up with anything at all) to draw on their studies in geography or chemistry and come up with sediment.

Common Entrance papers in the past have taken a slightly different approach to derivatives questions. They used to say something like “explain the connection beteeen the Latin word sedebat and the English word sedentary“. This at least gave students the derivative rather than expecting them to come up with it, but it still advantaged strong and/or experienced readers because they were still going to struggle if they had no experience of the English word.

In terms of how students can get better at this question, I’m afraid I feel a little dismal about it because “read more widely” is advice that they need to have been given from an age when really responsibility lies not with them but with their parents or guardians. The extent to which children struggle with this question is just one tiny example of how important reading is and how much advantage it gives to those whose parents have had the money, the time and the education to promote its importance at home.

I certainly recommend to all GCSE students that they get hold of a copy of Caroline K. Mackenzie’s GCSE Latin Etymological Lexicon. The book works through the whole of the GCSE vocabulary list and explores suggested derivatives for each word, so it is definitely worthwhile as a supplement volume for students who want to gain mastery in this part of the exam.

One thing I would recommend from experience is that students come back to the derivatives question during the spare time that almost all of them have at the end of the language paper. Many students plump for a poor choice of derivative, my favourite example of which is when shown a Latin word such as audivit (he heard) and asked to give a derivative, nine times out of ten they will say “audio”. Now, audio is in the English dictionary. But can they define it? Of course they can’t. Much better to give the matter some more thought and come up with audition, audience or audible, all of which are likely to be words that they know and can define.

Like riding a bike

You’d think I’d have managed one full academic year before ending up back in the classroom. And not just any classroom. My classroom – or at least, the one that was mine for 13 years. But an argument between his elbow and some uneven ground has left my successor incapacitated and at the mercy of our crumbling NHS, leaving me once again in front of Year 11. It was something of a surprise – for me and for them.

The timing might seem like it couldn’t be worse but in many ways it couldn’t be much better. When one first imagines the idea of a teacher unable to work immediately prior to the GCSE examinations, it’s easy to panic. But the more I thought about those current Year 11s, the more relaxed I felt for them. They are ready for the exams. They have been taught everything that they need to know by two very competent and experienced teachers – me, if I do say so myself, and my successor, who has spent even longer at the chalkface than I have and who has an outstandiing record when it comes to results. Really, I am just a familiar, reassuring face, reminding them of these facts and helping them along the way in their final preparations.

I thought I would be nervous. Suprisingly, I wasn’t. As one old colleague remarked, “I bet it’s like stepping back into a pair of old, comfortable shoes.” I certainly knew exactly what she meant. Everything is familiar, from the classroom surroundings (although I will confess that my successor is a little less fanatical about classroom tidiness than I was …) to the students (whom I have taught for four years) and the material (which I have taught for more years than I care to remember). Nothing was news to me, other than a few tweaks to the decor inside the school.

One thing that did strike me once again is just how dreadfully long an hour is. I have written before on why I tutor in 30-minute sessions rather than an hour and whilst I understand the practical reasons why schools favour longer lessons, it really hit me on my return to the classroom just how long a time 60 minutes is and just how much time is wasted as a result. Students – especially younger students – will inevitable tire in that time-frame and the amount of learning time that is lost due to poor concentration makes me feel queasy. There has been much welcome discussion recently in some educational circles about the importance of children’s 100% focus and just how the classroom teacher can seek to ensure that they have everybody’s full and undivided attention – it isn’t easy, to put it mildly. The reality, I believe, is that one cannot in fact expect it when one is asking a young person to focus for so long a time on one subject and in one seat.

I greatly enjoyed my return to the classroom and will look forward to further revisitations once a week over the next month (assuming that the NHS waiting time is as long for my successor as I fear it will be). Their reaction was complete underwhelm, which I take as a testmanet to their resilience and a compliment to all the work that my successor and I have achieved with them: they know they are ready, they know they are looked after, they know they will do well.

This wonderful photo of a bicycle propped up against a market stall in Rome is by Mark Pecar, sourced from Unsplash

You’ve had enough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Off you go and learn it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

errare humanum est

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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