Emma Williams: Latin tutor – Page 2 – Latin teaching and online tutoring

I’ll bring the ideas

This week, I had an appointment with a man who mainly works with people who have sports injuries. This might seem totally mad, since I do not partake in any sports and – to all intents and purposes – I am not injured. So, what on earth am I up to?

More than one local friend had spoken highly of Greg and I was intrigued to see whether he could help me. As someone who lives with chronic scoliosis I have seen various osteopaths over the years, but that has reached something of a plateau in terms of how helpful I am finding the sessions. Furthermore, I suddenly realised that I was becoming somewhat frustrated by the gloomy outlook taken by the osteopath who was treating me. He was well aware of the fact that – despite my lifelong recalcitrance with regards to all things exercise-related – I now attend a local gym and have successfully improved my overall fitness, particularly my muscle strength. My range of movement, however, has proved to be a more stubborn nut to crack. When I asked him for suggestions as to what I could be doing that would help with my restricted mobility, he shrugged and stated that there was nothing that would help in that department.

Now, it is true that I have an untreatable and irreversible spinal condition which is not going to disappear. Nothing will fix the curvature of my spine, nor unfuse the bits which are resolutely fused together. I will never attain perfect posture nor the mobility of someone with a normal spine. And yet … I remember a time when I wasn’t in pain or discomfort. I remember a time when my mobility was dramatically better than it is now. So, despite the reality of a chronic condition, I simply refuse to accept that the way things are at the moment – which, to be honest, is pretty awful – remains the harbinger of my future. I refuse to believe that this is as good as it gets and that it’s downhill from this point on.

So, in a fit of self-investment, I’m trying a new approach with this recommended local physical therapist. I explained my situation to him and gave him plenty of room to turn me down, stating that I would understand if he felt that I was not a suitable client for his expertise. To my delight, he was really keen to help, so we met within a couple of days. His assessed me as I was, whilst asking me a considerable number of questions about what I currently do in terms of exercise as well as what my goals are – something nobody has ever asked me before: not the numerous consultants I saw as a child, not the (mainly useless) physiotherapists provided by the NHS, not the several private osteopaths I have seen over the years. To be fair, Greg was probably pretty relieved to be told that I am not planning to enter any iron-man endurance races or aim at the next Olympics, but he seemed to share my determination and my enthusiasm for the idea that things could be greatly improved from the state of near-seizure that I am currently in. He wrestled and pulled me about for a bit in the manner that these specialists like to do, then carefully taught me some new suggestions for exercise, bespoke movements which he felt would benefit me and work against my most troublesome symptoms. This is exactly what I was looking for and I am already beginning to notice a difference.

While very much a realist, I cling to the idea that most of us can make improvements to our own health and wellbeing; I believe that pain can be reduced with the right kind of management, one that doesn’t involve taking more pills or drinking more alcohol. I am determined to find ways to ameliorate my situation whilst I am still young enough and fit enough to find the energy to do so, to instill good habits in myself that will benefit me as I age. Unless I do so, I fear that the prospect of ageing is pretty bleak.

It is often said (a quotation usually misattributed to Einstein) that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. If I want to experience change, then I need to make those changes happen; kick-starting that process means investing in someone who agrees with me that change is both desirable and possible. At the end of my first session, I felt the way that many of my clients report feeling when they have met with me for the first time: that feeling when you’ve found the right kind of person with not only the experience but the confidence and the belief that they can potentially help you. It’s the kind of conviction that years of experience brings, as well as a genuine passion for what you do. Greg’s energy for and interest in what he does shone through from the moment I contacted him, and I realised with a jolt that he had communicated this to me before we even met, in just a few simple words. He wrote: “I’ll bring the ideas”.

As soon as I read that message, I knew that I had potentially found the right kind of person to help me. I’d been experimenting with difference types of exercises and had become deeply frustrated by my lack of progress. I was all out of ideas and so was my osteopath. As for the physiotherapists I have tried in the past, the last one genuinely shrugged and said, “you seem to be managing okay.” Sure, I’m managing okay … I mean, I’m standing upright. But is that honestly as good as it gets? Is there no hope for improved mobility, reduced discomfort and better prospects for old age? For me, “managing okay” is no longer acceptable and I’ve decided to believe that things can be better. It feels great to have found someone who agrees.

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.

Fulfilling your destiny

“Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.”

Jawaharlal Nehru

Currently, I am obsessively plugged in to an audiobook, the latest release from my favourite author, Liane Moriarty. Moriarty writes what is often scathingly referred to as “chick lit”: a genre which at its worst can be undeniably vacuous, but no more so than the two-dimensional thrillers churned out by authors marketed to men. The withering contempt with which “chick lit” is viewed says a lot more about how society treats the everyday lives and concerns of women than it does about this particular genre of popular fiction.

It is undeniable although perhaps a little depressing that Moriarty is an author unlikely to be read by vast quantities of male readers. Her stories revolve around people – mainly suburban women – and the thoughts inside their heads. Often there is an unfolding plot, but the focus is on the development of character and relationships rather than on action or suspense. Moriarty is an absolute master of the genre and writes with an effortless charm that belies her talent; the best authors make it look easy when it isn’t. It’s a great shame that more men aren’t interested in some of the things which interest women, and a truth that I have pondered the reasons for on and off. I speak as someone who has read quite broadly and have flirted with books categorised in modern times as “lad lit”: I am a huge fan of Martin Amis and if you haven’t read David Baddiel’s forays into novel writing in this genre then you should – they are annoyingly good. So if I, as a woman, can enjoy books written from a male perspective and read by men, I find it somewhat irksome that so few men have the desire to show any kind of interest in the fiction favoured by women. Anyway, I digress.

Much as many of Moriarty’s books (perhaps most famously Big Little Lies) focus on the lives of suburban women, some of them are intricately plotted and follow the lives of a complex set of characters, all of which cross paths in various ways and with a myriad of consequences. Because of this, I was greatly surprised when I heard the author interviewed and she revealed that she writes without a plan. Prior to her most recent release, the last novel she wrote called Apples Never Fall followed the tensions and anguish within a family from whom the matriarch has disappeared: most of the novel we spend wondering what has happened to this character (including whether she has merely walked out of her life or has been horribly murdered by someone within it), and Moriarty reports that she too spent much of her writing time wondering the same thing. She had not, by her own account, decided what had actually happened to this key character when she began to write the book. She started with the idea of the disappearance and discovered the truth behind it along with her characters. It is perhaps this very unconventional approach to plotting that enables her to write with such authenticity – she’s not dropping hints or trying to plant red herrings in relation to the real outcome, for she has no idea what that outcome will eventually be.

I am around one third of the way through Moriarty’s latest and am gripped as ever by her writing. Here One Moment is perhaps her most ambitious novel yet as it circles around the idea of free will and destiny. In summary, the scenario is that a group of people on a flight from Hobart to Sydney are each pointed at by a woman on board the flight and told the supposed time and manner of their death. Some passengers are given what amounts to welcome news by most people’s standards (heart failure, age 95), others – inevitably – are told that they will die very young. Some are even told that their death will be as a result of violence or self-harm. The rest of the novel is about the fall-out from this thoroughly alarming and unscheduled in-flight entertainment.

One of the ideas explored in the novel is the impact that such an experience might potentially have, not only on the feelings of those receiving the predictions but on their actions too. One of the passengers pays a visit to another “psychic” after the flight, and this “psychic” points out to him that he will not be the same person after the reading as he was before it. He points out that whatever he says to his client will make him act differently and that this will then potentially have an impact on the outcome of his life. Moriarty refers constantly to the idea of chaos theory throughout her writing – the idea that one small event in nature has a ripple effect that causes huge impact in other areas. At the point in the novel where I am right now, a mother who has been told that her baby son will die by drowning while still a child has elected to take him to swimming lessons. He takes to the lessons like the proverbial duck to water and it becomes clear that he is going to become a huge lover of swimming. As readers, we now sit with our hearts in our mouths and await the inevitable: will the mother’s decision to take her child to swimming lessons, sparked solely by the psychic’s so-called prediction, end up leading to the death of her child in the future?

The same thought experiment was run by a Greek playwright called Sophocles almost 3000 years ago. He wrote what I would argue is perhaps the most influential work of literature ever published, in the form of the tragedy called Oedipus Rex. Most people know the name “Oedipus” only as a result of Freud’s early 20th century ramblings about motherhood and sexual repression; very few people have any idea what a frankly brilliant and chilling story that of Oedipus was when it was written. It is emphatically not a story about motherhood, nor is it a story about sexual repression; to be honest I don’t think I can ever forgive Freud for making it so. Oedipus Rex is a story about destiny, about free will and about the extent to which we have control over either of those things. If you don’t know the story, it can be summarised as follows …

In ancient Greece, a king and queen are horrified to be told by an oracle that their baby son will grow up to murder his father and marry his mother. Terrified by this ghastly prediction, they send the baby away to be exposed on the hillside and die. The kindly old shepherd gifted with the unhappy task cannot quite bring himself to do the dreadful deed, so he ends up passing the baby to another ruler and his wife in a far-distant land who are childless, and they bring the baby up as their own. The baby is named Oedipus. He has no idea that he is adopted.

When Oedipus grows up, like all curious young men, he too consults the oracle and asks his destiny. The oracle tells him that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he does the only sensible thing: he removes himself from his family home and goes off on his travels, thus removing any possible risk of somehow murdering his father and marrying his mother. Oedipus believes that he has taken control: he is the master of his own destiny and he has cheated the oracle. Trouble is, remember … he doesn’t know he is adopted.

Several months into his lonely travels, Oedipus gets into an altercation on the road with an arrogant older man who tries to tell him what’s what. Long story short, Oedipus does the only thing any decent red-blooded young male would do, he kills the old fool. Afterwards, he continues on his travels and eventually comes to a kingdom which is in a bit of trouble because it’s being harassed by a nasty monster. Clever Oedipus defeats the monster by solving its riddle and – would you know it – it turns out that the king of this particular dominion has recently died and they’re in need of a chap to take over. What a stroke of luck! Oedipus marries the widowed queen – who is granted a little older than him but still young enough to bear children – and becomes King of Thebes. The rest, as they say, is a truly horrible history.

The whole point of Oedipus’ story is exactly the thought experiment that Moriarty is playing out in her novel. To what extent does a sense of destiny itself predetermine our actions? To what extent do people inevitably fulfil the path that they are told lies in front of them? It is easy to point out that if the oracle had not said what it said – on either occasion – the story of Oedipus would not have unfolded as it did. In the ancient world, the story was taken as a morality tale about man’s arrogance: humans are convinced that they can outwit the gods and cheat their destiny, and that arrogance begins and ends with asking the question. If nobody had asked, would nothing have happened? Does the asking trigger the event?

It is easy to assume that these big philosophical questions don’t affect our lives on a day-to-day basis, but in fact this loop of thought is inescapable and resonates in daily life. During my career, a trend came and (thankfully) went of sharing what were laughably called “predicted grades” with students. These grades were not teacher predictions (although teachers are indeed asked to make such psychic predictions and that nightmare continues) but based on a crushing weight of data that looks at “people like Student A” and attempts to make a mathematical prediction about how “a person like Student A” is most likely to perform in an exam. All sorts of data get included in the mix, from prior academic performance to socio-economic background. The happy news that a bunch of data analysis that hardly anybody fully understands “predicts” that Student A is likely to get a Grade 3 or below was – until alarmingly recently – shared with Student A. What an absolute travesty. I will never forgive the system for sitting a child down and telling them that the computer says they’re likely to fail. Likewise, I have seen children who are “predicted” a line of top grades spiral out of control under the pressure. For heaven’s sake stop telling kids what “the data” (our new name for the divine oracle) says about their destiny. It’s a seriously grotesque thing to do.

For similar reasons, I know parents who are understandably jumpy about their children being labelled as anything. Who doesn’t remember well into middle age having “he’s shy” or “she’s anxious” being said over their head, while they were going through an entirely normal phase of being wary of strangers? Before you know it, the label of “shy” or “anxious” or whatever the grown-ups have decided befits you becomes you. I am absolutely in support of my friends who will not have their children referred to in this way: if history teaches us anything, it’s that people tend to fulfil their destiny. So be careful what path you pave.

Reading their minds?

Classroom teachers are expected to be psychics. According to the Teachers’ Standards, which are many and complex, every classroom teacher must not only understand how children think and learn but must know when and how to differentiate appropriately, using approaches which enable pupils to be taught effectively; they must have a secure understanding of how a range of factors can inhibit pupils’ ability to learn and how best to overcome these; they must have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with special educational needs, those of high ability, those with English as an additional language and those with disabilities; they must be able to use and evaluate distinctive teaching approaches to engage and support all of these different young people … and all of this must happen while there are 30 of these diverse learners in the same room.

Much of what is demanded of the average classroom teacher is impossible. I say this not to be a doom-monger or to preach the acceptance of mediocrity – far from it. Throughout my career I strived to be the best teacher I could possibly be. Yet in reality, we cannot be all things to all men and we cannot possibly fathom the inner workings of every single one of the minds that are sat in front of us.

I have written numerous times on the differences between classroom teaching and tutoring but this week something hit me that had not occurred to me before. While I have always been aware that one-to-one sessions give me an insight into the misconceptions each child may have and thus the ability to address those, it has not previously dawned on me that tutoring a large number of students in the way that I do has given me a broader insight into how children think and learn in a way that I could not have experienced as a classroom teacher. Working one-to-one means that I get to listen to how my students think and reason in real time.

It is often said by modern cognitive scientists that education has placed too much focus on the diversity of learners in the past. While every parent likes to think that their child has a unique set of needs that can only be met in a unique way, the reality is that there is far more that unites young learners than divides them. We now know a great deal about how memory works and how best to support students with the learning process: this is not to say that some will not find it harder than others and require more time and effort than others, but broadly speaking the approaches that work for those with special educational needs in fact work well for the mainstream classroom as a whole. If you tailor your classroom towards providing the best learning support for your neediest learners, everyone benefits as a whole.

Working one-to-one with the huge number of students that I do has furnished me with a real insight into how students tackle the process of translating and what the common pitfalls are when they are doing so. It has also provided some perhaps surprising insights into which constructions that children tend to be able to translate on instinct, without a full grasp of understanding. This information is actually gold dust and links to what I blogged about last week – the necessity of designing a curriculum around the learners sat in front of you and in relation to the time you have available as well as the end goal when it comes to examinations. I have realised in the last year or two that there are some complex constructions which many classroom teachers tend to focus too much time on, to the detriment of the basics, when in fact many students could translate those constructions without difficulty so long as they had a grasp of their verb and noun forms and their vocabulary.

Working one-to-one has given me more of an insight into what doesn’t need to be taught as well as what does. While most of my students have gaping holes in their basic knowledge, many of them have spent an unnecessary amount of time being taught things that they do not need to understand in detail. Sometimes, a construction has been so over-taught that a child has been left in complete confusion; their natural grasp of it, one which they would in all likelihood have stumbled upon if given the right basic tools and a decent dose of confidence, has been lost forever.

I am still pondering what to do with these insights as it occurs to me that they could quite honestly be of enormous use to any classroom teacher who is willing to listen. For now, my understanding of how children go about acquiring the skills that they need to do well in Latin is ever-increasing and remains endlessly fascinating to me.

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.

In Praise of Idleness

When I was around 13, my grandfather advised me to read an essay by Bertrand Russell called In Praise of Idleness. I don’t recall what his point was at the time, but it was probably a side-swipe at what he rightly saw as my privileged middle-class upbringing compared to his own. Well, better late than never, so almost 40 years later and 30 years after his death, I have taken my grandfather’s advice and read the essay.

Since giving up my full-time career at the chalkface, I have been plagued by more or less the same question from everyone. “What are you going to do with yourself?” asked my mother. “What have you been up to?” asks my sister, almost every time we speak. “Doing anything today?” asks my hairdresser every six weeks. “What are you doing for the rest of the day?” asked the fellow tutor I met for a Zoom coffee yesterday. Now I am not working in a job that is universally acknowledged to be all-consuming, people have suddenly become fascinated by what I must be doing with my time. The pressure is on to come up with something life-affirming that I can cite as evidence for the validity of my existence on earth. Usually, I come up blank.

Partly, I think, it’s because I struggle with this kind of small talk. While I literally cannot bear to outline to someone else the uninteresting activities that will, inevitably, form part of my day, most people seem only too happy to share the most mundane aspects of their lives under the apparent the assumption that everyone else is fascinated by them. In the modern world, this is evidenced by the quite remarkable plethora of social media posts in which people inform everyone else of every single unremarkable act they perform. Doing was always the point … if you recall, when Facebook first came up with the idea that people should post updates on their own lives, the status bar read “Emma Williams is …” and you had to fill in the rest. There was a huge campaign to remove “the mandatory is” and Facebook listened. The rest is history, if you can bear to read it. I can’t.

You see, I simply cannot be bothered to say, “well, today I’ll go to the gym, then I’ll come back and write my weekly blog post, then I might do 5 minutes of mad dancing because that’s what I do for my regular dose of HIIT to get my heart rate up, then I’ll make coffee and I might treat myself to an episode of The Mentalist on Amazon Prime as I’m really into that, then I’ll finish my work on the last OCR set text, which I need to translate and put onto Quizlet for my students, then after lunch I’ll make sure my evening’s lessons are prepared. Oh, and there’s a load of washing to do, Sainsbury’s are coming with our groceries and David wants me to put the lawn sprinklers on and I might also go to Morrisons at some point. Are you bored yet? I mean … who gives a rat’s ar*e? And that’s all before I actually start tutoring in the evening, when I will do the work I am paid to do. See, I am perfectly happy with my day today, indeed I am really quite looking forward to it: that does not mean it’s interesting to anybody else.

Russell would argue, I think, that I have not had sufficient education in order to make the most of my abundant leisure time. According to his essay, an education is required for the wise use of leisure and without it then we are prone to time-wasting, examples of which include watching the football. Despite this, Russell is actually trying enormously hard not to be a snob, and I love the fact that the whole point of his essay was to challenge the assumption that “workers should work” and to float the idea that everyone, including the working classes, should be working significantly fewer hours: his model actually argues for everyone working four hours per day instead of eight. He attacks the futility of unfettered capitalism (although, by the by, he’s got some spectacularly naïve views on the equity of Russia’s economy) and takes a very pleasing swipe at the way in which the Christian work ethic has been used as a mechanism of control, to keep the workers in their place. He ruefully observes that “Athenian slave-owners … employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system”, although he later goes on to show some insight into the fact that not all of intelligentsia are deserving, remarking that – for every Darwin, “against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting.” Bravo, Bertrand.

All in all, I really enjoyed the essay and am drawn to read the next one in his collection entitled “useless knowledge”. I am still not sure what reason my grandfather had for recommending it to me, but it is rather nice that his recommendation has come in handy some 40 years later in order to help me express my current thoughts on my relatively free and easy life compared to the one I was leading a few years ago. One of the things that I have taken back with both hands is the opportunity to read, which I all but lost during my busiest times. Would I have found the time to read a philosophical essay when I had a full day’s teaching ahead of me? Like heck I would. Such time in itself is a luxury and one which I value enormously.

What price safety?

Within the last week, the BBC have reported that over the past 20 years more than 90 private tutors working in the UK have been previously convicted of sexual offences involving children. Dame Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner for England, is now calling for reform in light of the BBC’s findings. Currently, there is no legal requirement for people offering private lessons to undergo any kind of criminal record check before working with children and young people.

No legal definition exists of “tutor” and anyone can set themselves up as one. This also applies to many other professional-sounding titles such as “counsellor” or (one which might shock you slightly more because it sounds kind of medical) a “psychotherapist”. These are not legally-protected terms and the gravitas which people tend to assume they embody is entirely imagined. This is not true of all professional services. To take one example, I regularly see an osteopath. By law, to call himself an osteopath, the person that I see must be registered with the General Osteopathic Council (GOsC), which only accepts practitioners who have a qualification in osteopathy that is recognised by them. They must also comply with their standards of practice. Osteopathy is therefore a regulated health profession and you can look up the details of this on the NHS website.

While a professional body for tutoring with proper checks and a Code of Practice does exist in the form of The Tutors’ Association, membership is entirely voluntary and is shockingly small in comparison with the number of adults who are actively marketing themselves as a “tutor” and taking people’s money for their services. This should give all of us pause. One of the things that has troubled me most about leaving the teaching profession and switching to self-employment is the feeling of being in the wild west when it comes to safeguarding and due diligence. All you need to do is to take a sweep through Facebook chat rooms to discover hundreds of self-employed tutors chatting openly and almost proudly about how membership of a professional body such as The Tutors’ Association “isn’t worth it” and how the process of acquiring a DBS check “isn’t necessary” either. For the record, my membership of The Tutors’ Association costs me just over £8 per month – that’s around the same amount that I pay for my Fellowship with the Chartered College of Teaching. (The latter, by the way, does not require me to update evidence of my criminal record check – The Tutors’ Association now does). The DBS update service – which renews my criminal record check every year – costs me just over £1 per month. Getting your first check done and getting onto the update service when you’re self-employed is a little more onerous and expensive at the outset, but that is something which The Tutors’ Association can do for you, as can a paid membership organisation such as Qualified Tutor. To be brutally frank, there is zero excuse for a tutor not to have invested in an enhanced DBS check if they are to call themselves a professional: if you’re currently paying a tutor who baulks at the question when you ask them, I would advise you to sever all ties with them immediately.

One of the things that has been most striking about the news reports has been people’s incredulity that these checks and legalities do not currently exist. So cushioned are we by the robust processes that do exist in vetting the adults that work with our children in schools, we perhaps tend to assume that this situation must apply to all walks of life. Do we forget that legislation does not control every single facet of our private lives? “I guess I kind of assumed there was some sort of protection in place,” said one parent interviewed by the BBC. In truth, if a parent employs a private tutor without researching their credentials, they are inviting a random stranger to work with their child.

It is perfectly legal to market oneself as a tutor with no relevant qualifications – be they in one’s subject or in teaching or education – and it is also legal to do so without a criminal record check. Finally, and this is what will upset and shock people the most, it is legal for a person to do so if they have already been convicted of offences that would disbar them from working in a school. The BBC investigation found that, over the past 20 years in the UK, 92 working private tutors have been convicted of sexual offences involving children. The figures, which the BBC obtained by combing through newspaper reports and court filings, are very likely to be an underestimate.

It is often said that an enhanced DBS check is the bare minimum that anyone working professionally with children should have, and I completely agree. All a DBS certificate proves is that the holder of the certificate has no prior convictions for a crime that would disbar them from working with children in a school or through other official services (social services, the police etc). Nothing more, nothing less than that. Beyond that basic minimum check for prior convictions, it relies again on the professionalism of the tutor to ensure that their own knowledge and understanding is up-to-date, both when it comes to their own professional knowledge and when it comes to safeguarding. I was privileged last week to attend the in-person safeguarding training held at the school in which I used to work. I am a regular visitor to the school, so it’s good for them that I was a part of this training and it’s good for me too. It keeps me informed and supplements the regular training that I keep up with online, which is detailed on my website under safeguarding.

I would appeal to all those employing the private services of a tutor to do their due diligence and ensure that anyone they employ to work with their children is – as a bare minimum – in possession of an up-to-date criminal record check. Personally, I would also ask them what safeguarding training they have undertaken within the last two years. Can they evidence it? Beyond that, I would also quiz them about what relevant and direct experience they have with the specific qualification they are claiming to be able to help my child with. Because believe you me, there are an awful lot of cowboys out there.

John Nichols, President of The Tutors Association, on BBC breakfast last week

Reflections on Failure

Well over two years ago, I resolved to write a blog post every single week. So far, I have managed to do so. One of the many ways that this has been possible is that I forgive myself when the writing and/or the idea I come up with in one particular week is not exactly going to set the world on fire. If I am going to achieve the goal of writing something every week, I need to accept that not every single post is going to be a work of art. I can’t even imagine the pressure of coming up with a weekly Op Ed for a respected newspaper or journal. Indeed, the only paid writing gig I ever managed briefly was fortnightly and even that was one that I had to resign from after a while; the expectation to produce a well-researched, top-quality piece of writing on a topic of interest that was relevant to the right readers was something I simply couldn’t cope with. And by the way, the going rate for writing of this sort is utterly dismal – well below minimum wage if you calculate your earnings by the hour.

One of my earliest blog posts remains one of the ones that I am most fond of. It’s called “The one that got away” and was a reflection on the student that I remember with the most regret from my career at the chalkface. A student I felt I had failed. I’m a huge believer in the fact that one should acknowledge one’s failures and reflect on them. Too often we are encouraged not to even use the word “failure” but I think it’s important. All of us fail. It’s not a dirty word, it’s a part of a full life well-lived and an ambitious career. “Show me a man who has never made a mistake and I’ll show you one who has never tried anything” is a viral internet quote which – in various forms – has been attributed to pretty much everyone including Albert Einstein, Theodore Roosevelt and – my personal favourite – Joan Collins. Whoever said it (and today I truly cannot be bothered to try and find out who did so) was absolutely right.

My failures in tutoring have been few and far between. I say this not to boast about how great I am at what I do but rather to demonstrate how much easier and more powerful one-to-one tutoring is compared to classroom teaching. If you are an expert in your subject (by which I mean the academic content and the expectations of the relevant examinations), plus if you’re used to communicating with students of the age you’re trying to work with, tutoring is a breeze. One-to-one work is so phenomenally powerful that you really don’t need to be a genius at it for it to have a tangible impact. I like to think that I am good at what I do, but compared to the ambition of being a good classroom teacher, being a really good tutor is remarkably easy. Being a really good classroom teacher? Oh my goodness it’s hard. Like you wouldn’t believe. I cannot emphasise this enough. You wonder why teachers are leaving the profession in droves? I’ll give you a hint. It isn’t the salary.

Being good at what you do does not mean you will not fail sometimes. I keep a record of students who have discontinued (as opposed to those who have simply reached the end of their time with me because they have completed the course or finished their exams). There are not many, but given the sheer volume of students that I work with there are always going to be a few. This week I decided to reflect on each case and try to glean what – if anything – can be learned from them. It turns out, they all have one thing in common.

Generally speaking, the underlying reason why a student will discontinue working with me is that they remain reluctant to engage with the sessions. This is sometimes because the tutoring has been foisted on them, rather than something they have asked for themselves, or it’s sometimes when they realise that they will have to do some work during the sessions – a student may have asked for help, but the process is not going to work unless they are up for a challenge. I have worked with scores of students who are deeply reluctant to work independently outside of the sessions, and I always make it clear to the bill-payer that the impact of what I do will be limited when this is the case; yet so long as a student engages with the sessions during our one-to-one time together then it is still possible to have some kind of impact on them. By contrast, a student that really won’t engage with the learning process will not progress. It is often because they are afraid of failure and while I’m pretty experienced with helping a disaffected student to overcome this barrier, I accept that I simply cannot win them all.

So, what can I do to mitigate against such failures? After all, there is no point in reflecting on failure unless to improve. Well, something I have got better at is the early identification of students who are not responding well to the process. I would much rather get in touch with home and have this frank conversation than continue to take someone’s money when I believe that I am unlikely to have much of an impact on that student’s outcomes. Sometimes, that very frank conversation can jolt a student into realising that they have been resistant to the process and if they actually do wish to continue with the tutoring then it’s usually the catalyst towards engagement and progress – a turnaround in what might otherwise have been a failure. If the student does not want to keep working with me, it gives them the opportunity to say so, which is fine too.

Beyond that, another way in which I have tried to mitigate against the risk of failure is to specialise more and more in the areas I know best. I am a GCSE expert and now I am so much in demand then that’s what I offer. I work with students who are preparing for the GCSE or who have it in their sights and am no longer advertising myself as a tutor who works outside of this field: my expertise at working with that material and that age-range is the greatest and the more I am in my field of expertise, the more likely the process is to succeed. My advice would be to be wary of tutors who offer a bounteous range of subjects and/or levels: the best tutors hone their skills in one particular offering and become a genuine expert in what they do.

One of the things I tell my students is that mistakes are important. They inform me of their misunderstandings and misconceptions, so they’re a hugely important part of the tutoring process. Mistakes and failures make us better at what we do and we should embrace them and learn from them, not see them as a reflection on us as a person or a professional. It is not the failures that define us, but rather how we respond to them. Failures can make us more likely to succeed in the future.