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

The waiting room

“How was school today?” I asked my young student at the start of her session.

She paused, considering her answer.

“Long,” she said, eventually.

“Oh really?” I enquired. “Did you have extra commitments before or after lessons, then?”

“Oh no,” she said. “It just felt long.”

“Ah,” I said. “I remember that. Time passes so slowly at your age. An hour can feel like an absolute eternity.”

“Oh my God,” she squealed, warming instantly to the subject. “We had double maths at the end of the day. I tried not to look at the clock as it’s the worst thing you can do, but I couldn’t resist it when I thought that surely it must have been at least half an hour gone, and we’d only done ten minutes!“

Oh, how I remember that feeling. For me, it was double geography. Poor Mrs Winslow’s descriptions of the savannah were so boring, I almost cried before each lesson, just at the thought of it. The time I had to spend listening to her stretching out ahead of me felt almost unbearable. I told my young student this and she nodded, fervently. For the young, time passes unbelievably slowly: it stretches into plains as wide as the savannah itself. Waiting for the end of the day feels like crossing a continent.

The immense sluggishness of time is perhaps our earliest companion, a constant presence, crouched in the corners of long afternoons, humming softly in the background. In good times, such as a long summer holiday, the seemingly endless stretches of the future to come are a welcome wonder; at the beginning of double maths, the lethargic passage of time feels like a yawning chasm, a charybdis that will swallow us whole. Each day feels both monumental and tedious. Each hour feels like an an arctic expedition.

Birthdays are essential, bright markers in that vast childhood abyss. To turn six, ten, thirteen — these are grand ascents and each new age feels like a gift. We count down the days, the weeks, the yawning months leading up to the celebration. The anticipation stretches out: slow and sweet but painfully long. It hangs in the air until it became almost unbearable. The day of arrival is luminous, the moment we finally get to unwrap the future we’ve been waiting for.

The way that the young perceive time can perhaps explain why so many of us remember those apocryphal long, hot summers. Lengthy school holidays feel truly colossal for children. Long mornings in pyjamas, drifting from cereal bowls to cartoons, then out into the world of bikes and sun-warmed pavements. Forts built out of sticks and blankets, bedroom kingdoms whose borders shift each day. Tadpoles in rivers, catching time in our hands. Summer inhabits a place where time is measured not by the clock or the calendar but by how many ice lollies we can melt along our wrists, how many bugs we can catch before dusk.

It is easy to forget how profoundly we once lived in these slow hours. As adults, we compress our days like folders, stashing them briskly into the cabinet of our memory. We hurry, we rush, we tick things off our to-do list. Children cannot constrict their days in this way. The agony of double maths is matched only by the ecstasy of free time, each day of which is immense and sprawling. Watching raindrops slide down a window feels like an event. Waiting in the car while a parent runs into the local shop is an adventure. Sitting at the dinner table, politely bored, feels like a vast eternity. We do not know that those minutes are brief and precious: we only feel that they are ours to endure.

Most of us forget, or remember only faintly, the extent to which childhood is a seemingly endless world of waiting. Waiting for the weekend, waiting for your turn, waiting for your parents to finish talking, waiting for the world to move on. Waiting, when you are young, is not the subtle impatience of adulthood: it is tangible, heavy, unbearable. Sat in a hot car seat, legs sticking to the leather. Time pools around you like syrup.

Then there comes a moment — unnoticed when it happens — when time begins to accelerate. Maybe it starts in late adolescence, when school is suddenly over. Or maybe it happens after we leave home, when greater responsibility claims our hours with a firm hand. The days fold in on themselves. A week becomes a blink. Summer vanishes before it begins. We look at the calendar and feel genuinely startled that entire months have passed. We ask where the time has gone, though the answer is always the same: somewhere unimportant, somewhere ordinary, somewhere we did not think to look. As John Lennon said, “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

Time speeding up is not merely a trick of perception; it is a change in how we function. With the familiarity of life, novelty fades and we no longer pause to savour each moment. Instead, we move efficiently, sliding from one experience to the next without pause or comment. We stop noticing the play of light on the wall, the smell of rain on the pavement. We stop counting down the days until our birthdays and start dreading them. We forget what it felt like to wait and we believe that things will always come soon enough. Too soon.

Being reminded by my young student of how time felt when I was younger makes me reflect upon how I spend it now. Perhaps, if we try, we can learn to cultivate that profound slowness again. We can take long walks, not to arrive anywhere, but to experience the act of moving through space. We can sit outside at dusk. We can allow an afternoon to lengthen lazily away. And sometimes, in such moments, time stretches like it used to. Not quite as far, but enough to remind us that it’s still there. Perhaps, if we pay attention to it, the slowness of childhood never truly leaves us. Perhaps it waits patiently, tucked into our memory like a pressed flower. Perhaps we carry it everywhere, even if we rarely take it out to admire it. Perhaps a scent, a song or a certain angle of sunlight can return us to that early, languid world. Perhaps we can find ourselves lying in thick summer grass once again, listening to the buzzing of invisible insects, watching clouds drift lazily overhead. Perhaps we can feel those hours stretch out, and feel ourselves stretched inside them.

Taken out of context?

Public discourse relies on the assumption that quotations accurately represent not only what someone has said but also what they meant. From traditional mainstream journalism in particular, we have the right to expect and assume that quotations on the news reflect both the intention and the context of the person being quoted. Quotations can be manipulated — intentionally or inadvertently — through selective editing or splicing separate statements together. This can exaggerate or change the meaning or the tone of what somebody said and in some cases it can completely invert the meaning from what the speaker intended. I know this, because it’s happened to me.

Back in the mists of time, I was embarking upon teacher-training. This would have been in around 1999. During the year in which I was training, the government suddenly realised that there was a teacher shortage and that the extremely recent decision that trainee teachers should pay for their own training was, shall we say, something of a mis-step. They announced that from the following year, not only would new aspirant teachers have their training paid for, those applying for what were classified as “shortage subjects” would be given extra cash: it was called the Golden Handshake. Given that there were no plans to remiburse the current year group of trainees for their costs, I was around £6000 out of pocket and I was pretty cheesed off, to say the least. I wrote to the Times Educational Supplement and received a response that they would like to use my letter. I gave them permission to do so and to be honest I felt rather chuffed about it.

They did not publish my letter in full. What they did was to take a few words out of it and included it in a wider article by one of their journalists. In itself, that would have been disappointing but acceptable, were it not for the manner in which they butchered the tone of what I said. In the context of my long letter about how I felt mistreated by the government, I mentioned that — as someone in possession of a PhD — I was one of the highly-qualified individuals that the government was saying it wished to attract into the profession. I referenced the amount of blood, sweat and tears that it had taken from me, all for the dubious honour of being able to title myself as “Doctor”, and made a joke about the fact that I was now choosing to enter a profession in which the generic title for women was — and always would be — “Miss.” They quoted this. They then jumped to the very end of my letter and took another quote, in which I summed up my rage at the fact that the government had forgotten about our year group and were happy to leave us in debt, whilst banging on about how important the next generation of teachers was to them. What therefore ended up being printed in the paper was something along the lines of this (although I cannot remember the precise wording): “I’ve worked really hard to gain the right to call myself “Doctor”, only to enter into a profession in which I will always be referred to as “Miss” … and I’m really angry about it.” This, my friends, is what it means to be quoted out of context. They made it sound like I was narked that my title would not be used in the classroom. Not only was this untrue, it was completely irrelevant to the purpose of my letter, which was to point out the fact that our cohort had been unfairly overlooked.

I complained. The TES acknowledged my complaint but said that they “didn’t agree that it made me look bad” and that I had after all “given my permission” for them to use my words, which is exactly what they had done. Of course, nobody actually reads the TES anyway, its sole purpose and use being the main medium for schools to advertise vacant positions, and within minutes of its production it was no doubt the next day’s proverbial chip-paper, but it gave me a small insight into what it feels like to be misrepresented in the press.

When someone speaks — in an interview, a lecture, a letter or a speech — the meaning behind their words depends on the full set of ideas they express longform. A quotation extracted from the larger discourse can lose the clarifying details, caveats, or reasoning that surrounded it. This practice is called contextual omission. For example, imagine someone says the following: “It would be terrible if people stopped participating in elections but, hypothetically, if no one voted, the law provides that the system would choose a winner.” A selective excerpt quoting them as saying “If no one voted, the system would choose a winner” removes the warning that voting is important and could even imply that the speaker is advocating for a system other than democracy. The quote remains “factual” but loses the speaker’s intended meaning entirely.

Equally powerful, in my opinion, is splicing. It’s what happened to me and what the BBC appear to have done with the speech made by Donald Trump after his election defeat in 2020. Splicing refers to the process of editing together separate audio, video or textual remarks into a single statement so that it appears continuous. This can create the impression that the speaker said something that they never actually said. Such manipulation is particularly powerful because viewers tend to trust the evidence of their eyes and ears — most especially if that evidence is presented on the BBC, that most trusted of British institutions, one which supposedly prides itself on its impartiality.

Whilst I often wonder the extent to which we suffer from this problem when looking at fragmentary quotations in our possession from the ancient world, it must be said that digital technology makes splicing easier than it’s ever been. Scholars can ponder the fact that fragmentary evidence of one philosopher’s beliefs will give us a frustratingly narrow and possibly misleading glimpse of his thinking, but audio and video editing software in the modern world can rearrange sentences, soften transitions and hide cuts completely: none of this was possible to do so seamlessly until recently. Thus, even when individual words and phrases are genuine, connecting them out of order can create an entirely new meaning. Despite all of this, I do wonder whether those at the BBC were even aware of what they were doing. People — hardened journalists very much included — tend to believe information that confirms their existing views: this is called confirmation bias. If a journalist already dislikes a politician or a public figure, they will read everything they want to read into whatever that that person says. For most of those working at the BBC, Trump is frankly beyond the pale and was unequestionably stirring up resentment among his followers after his election defeat: so they took what he said and magnified it, since they believed it’s what he meant. This, I submit, is not okay.

In an era in which both the reality of “fake news” and the chilling effect of accusing anyone we disagree with as peddling “fake news” are a genuine threat, I find it absolutely inexcusable that someone at the BBC made this decision and I believe that they have serious questions to answer. I am no supporter of Trump, indeed I find his rise to power bewildering in the extreme, but I resent being misled and manipulated by an institution that wears its own claim to impartiality like a badge of honour. In my opinion, there are numerous other issues that the BBC report on (or choose not to report on), on which I also believe that their bias is palpable, but those issues are far too contentious for me to address on this blog. All I will say is that people genuinely believe in the BBC and therefore if something is reported or indeed not reported by them, that has a tangible impact on what people will accept as the truth.

As our global world grows ever more complex and mass-communication continues to become even more fast-moving, it is essential for all of us to question what we are told, even (or perhaps especially) when we are being told it by an institution that we trust and hold dear. Things, as the saying goes, are not always what they seem.

Unknown Unknowns

“I am wiser than this man: for while neither of us appears to know anything … I do not assume that I know what I do not know.”

Plato’s Socrates, Apologia, 399 BCE

As they commence their tutoring, most students who come to me report that they are struggling in Latin. This, of course, is no surprise. Yet, when asked to explain why they are struggling, their answers are frequently vague. Some students may attribute their failure to what they believe is a lack of innate ability (“I’m just no good at this”), while others have simply no idea. Very few are able to reflect upon the likely causes or to pinpoint when things started to fall apart.

Research in cognitive psychology has consistently shown that students’ own perceptions of their learning are not accurate. This is true even among high-performing learners. My own anecdotal experience informs me that students rarely have any real idea of why they are struggling. As a general rule, most students cannot identify the areas in which they lack knowledge, and some overestimate their grasp of the basics. It may surprise people to know that the easiest students to help tend to be those who come to me in a state of despair: those are, in fact, the students who really know that there is a deep-seated problem and they are only too keen for any solutions that might be offered to them.

Students who come to me convinced that they have a reasonably good grasp of the basics are sometimes reluctant to engage with initial investigations into their knowledge of the fundamentals. This is because they tend to come to me with the fixed idea that, since they started to struggle only as the subject became more difficult, it is therefore the difficult topics that are the problem. In almost every single case (there are — of course — rare exceptions), what they do not realise is that they started to struggle when things got difficult precisely because their grasp of certain fundamentals was hazy in the first place. With students like this, the first thing I have to do, unfortunately, is to rock their world a little: the only way to help them is for them to realise that their basic grasp of the subject is not as secure as they assumed it was. Once they understand this, everything can be resolved.

As human beings, we generally assume that we have privileged access to our own mental processes. However, cognitive science has repeatedly demonstrated that self-knowledge — particularly knowledge about one’s own cognitive performance — is limited and often inaccurate. This insight is foundational for understanding why students misjudge their learning difficulties. Learners experience their cognitive effort subjectively, but subjective feelings of fluency or difficulty are poor indicators of genuine understanding or mastery. For instance, when studying a text, a student may feel that they “know” the material because re-reading it feels smooth and familiar; in reality, their fluency results from familiarity rather than durable comprehension or a solid knowledge base. While learning requires active self-monitoring and regulation, our introspective access to the mechanisms of learning is highly fallible, and a student’s subjective experience of learning is not necessarily a reliable guide to their actual competence.

A further barrier to students’ insight into their own struggles is the prevalence of misconceptions about how learning and memory work. Studies consistently show that learners hold naïve beliefs about the process of learning — for instance, that re-reading and highlighting are effective strategies, or that one can “multitask” while studying without cost to comprehension; if your son or daughter insists that they can listen to music while studying, this regretably false conviction will be familiar to you. Such beliefs can then shape a student’s behaviour and self-assessment. For example, when students fail after employing such strategies, they may conclude that they are “bad at the subject,” as this feels safer than questioning the strategies themselves. Cognitive research has shown that effective learning requires active engagement (such as retrieval, elaboration and connection-making) rather than passive exposure (such as re-reading and highlighting). However, because active engagement is much more cognitively taxing, students tend to avoid it. This failure to recognise the cognitive mechanisms which underpin successful learning can lead students to misinterpret their failures. For example, a GCSE Latin student who does nothing but re-read the vocabulary list multiple times and then cannot recall the meaning of the words in a translation test may conclude that they have a poor memory; in reality, the issue is inadequate and ineffective retrieval practice.

Students do not necessarily know why they are struggling in the subjects they study, not because they lack intelligence or motivation, but because the human mind is poorly equipped to reflect on its own cognitive processes. Research proves this. Learners often rely on misleading cues such as fluency and effort and may exhibit systematic overconfidence with the basics due to familiarity. Emotional and motivational factors can further distort self-assessment, compounding the inevitable fact that the novice status of most students deprives them of the structured knowledge needed for accurate self-diagnosis. A student anxious about mathematics may perceive problems as more complex than they are, reinforcing the belief that they are “not a maths person.” This self-perception can become self-fulfilling, as avoidance prevents improvement and reinforces failure. When students fear failure, they may prefer to attribute difficulties to uncontrollable causes (e.g. “the exam was impossible”) rather than to confront any deficiencies in their methodology. Conversely, overconfidence and fixed mindsets about ability can lead students to dismiss feedback and persist with ineffective strategies. Ever tried to convince your teen to try a different method of study and been knocked back? You are not alone. Convincing learners to try different strategies is notoriously difficult.

Cognitive research thus reveals a fundamental irony of education: those who most need insight into their learning difficulties are sometimes the least able to confront it. This means that teachers and tutors must never assume that students understand the reasons behind their struggles. Instead, support for all students should include explicit instruction in metacognitive skills (the methods of study) — we must assume that they don’t know how to go about it. Only by learning how learning works can students begin to see why they struggle and, ultimately, how to overcome those struggles. Despite all of this research, it is simply mind-boggling how little of this is still going on in most schools.

All of these thoughts have been triggered by a frankly bizarre discussion I had online with a couple of tutors this week. One remained absolutely convinced that the best way to tutor was to ask the student what they are struggling with and to start there. I must say I find this phenomenally foolish. While I do always ask students what it is that they are struggling with, this is largely with the purpose of gaining an insight into how they are feeling about the subject. Their response to the question gives me enormous insight into their emotional relationship with Latin and with their studies in general. To take their self-reporting at face value, on the other hand, would be monumentally daft and would betray my experience as a professional. Students rarely comprehend what it is that they need help with, and why should they? They are not the expert! That is what they have come to me for. I listen, I take note of their anxieties and fears and then I go back to basics. Every. Single. Time. If (as does happen in vanishingly rare cases) their grasp of the basics is cast-iron and Teflon-coated, then we can move onto the complex stuff at pace. More often than not, however, a student who claims to be struggling only with the more complex grammatical niceties of the subject, will in fact lack a few blocks in the foundations of their core subject knowledge. Finding these holes and fixing them is what I specialise in.

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

Unpredictable penmanship

I’ve just finished a novel about a superhero. I’ve never been a connoisseur of comics and haven’t bought one since around 1983, when as a small child I did indeed partake of the occasional copy of The Beano, but I never found myself particularly drawn to comic-based superheroes and their universe.

My brief foray into the world of Marvel came as a result of the fact that Lisa Jewell, a well-established contemporary novelist and one of my personal favourites, has been commissioned to write the first book in what has been billed the “brand-new Marvel crime series for adults, introducing fans to a grittier, street-level side of the Marvel Universe.” Whilst characters with superpowers are not my usual bag, I frankly didn’t care: if it’s written by Jewell, I’m definitely in. I placed the book on reserve immediately.

Responses to the novel have been predictably varied and it’s been a great deal of fun to watch people flailing with panic as the classifications by which they like their world to be defined take a superpowered punch to the gut. POW! BAM! BOOM! Comics and superhero stories seem to divide the world like nothing else can, inspiring cult-like loyalty and adoration from their fans, matched in intensity by the sneering contempt from non-fans, who consider the genre to be nothing more than commercialised tat, a world which has nothing to do with literature. As with all divisive topics, the truth no doubt lies somewhere in the middle. All in all, Jewell’s authorship of Breaking the Dark, a Jessica Jones Marvel Crime Novel seems to have annoyed absolutely everybody: an excellent reason to read it.

For me, there is something genuinely remarkable about a novelist who can turn their hand to a variety of writing styles. Jewell is pleasingly unpredictable as an author, and has penned stories in a variety of different genres, from poignant kitchen-sink dramas through coming-of-age novels up to dark, psychological thrillers. You never know what she’s going to write next and I absolutely love that about her. I punched the air with a BIFF when I discovered that Marvel had selected her as the wordsmith for their radical experiment with the genre of the adult novel, and I sincerely hope that she was renumerated to the extent that one might expect from such a potentially lucrative commission. Even if everyone hates it, the book will no doubt sell in the millions. KER-CHING as well as KER-POW.

Novelists that can turn their hand to a variety of genres make people a little uncomfortable, I think. Unless they are spectacularly successful, I suspect they make publishers uncomfortable too. When a writer has a success, most publishers want them to produce more of the same, and it can be a leap of faith for them to back a change of direction. Sometimes, authors write under more than one name, to indicate that change of direction. JK Rowling writes her Cormoran Strike novels under the name of Robert Galbraith, and indeed she approached the publisher under this pseudonym in a quest for genuine feedback. Ruth Rendell wrote psychological thrillers and crime fiction, whilst also writing more introspective, character-driven mysteries under the pseudonym of Barabara Vine. Some novelists, however, write with enormous range under their own name, leaving their fans guessing as to where their imagination will take them next: John Fowles, Kazuo Ishiguro and Lisa Jewell are three authors that exemplify this remarkable talent. While there is security in picking up the novel of someone predictable, there is real joy and adventure in entrusting yourself to an unpredictable penmaster. Jewell is one of those rare authors who writes so well in such a range of styles that I will try anything she produces: hence, this week I found myself immersed in the world of Jessica Jones, superhero, friend of The Avengers, who has superhuman strength, enhanced durability, rapid healing and the ability to fly (although she doesn’t like it). WHOOSH!

Not being in any way familiar with the Marvel universe, I read Jewell’s novel as a standalone and the character of Jessica Jones — a household name to die-hard Marvel fans — was new to me. A large number of those fans are infuriated by the imposition of Jewell’s writing upon their familiar world and an equally large number of Jewell fans seem to be incensed by the novel’s easy prose and youthful characterisation. “It reads like a YA novel!” wails one critic on GoodReads, as if the very notion of writing for a younger audience is an insult.

Is it a literary classic? Of course not. Was Jewell setting out to write one? One presumes that wasn’t the brief. What she has done is to produce a highly entertaining read, one which this relative newcomer to the world of the superhero enjoyed immensely. And let’s be honest: there’s nothing quite so pleasing as a successful book that infuriates almost everyone.

Photo entitled *Comic Books From The Past in My Private Own Comic Shop Basement* by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash

The road less travelled — pathways and how we learn new things

A few months ago, my husband and I discovered a local group of walkers in our village. The group meets informally every Wednesday morning and has grown over the years to around 50 people. There are a handful of committed types who turn up every week, plus dozens of others (ourselves now included) who show up regularly although not infallibly. We’ve met a variety of interesting people as a result, not least the couple behind the whole thing, both of whom appear to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the local area and its footpaths.

So many of the local footpaths were unknown to us before we joined the group and some, it turns out, were unknown to everyone. The aforementioned couple are both of the “can-do” and “why not us?” mindset, and over the years they have taken it upon themselves to take responsibility for opening up more than one village pathway that had fallen into disuse. And as Geoff put it to me, “once you open up the pathway, people start using it and then it more or less maintains itself.” The very frequency of use is what helps to keep a pathway established.

Imagine a field of grass that people often cross to get from one side of the field to the other. Over time, a pathway forms, along which most people walk: the grass becomes trampled, the soil compacted and the green fades to brown. This becomes an established pathway and will remain so just for as long as it’s used.

Now, suppose something changes: perhaps a new gate opens, a puddle forms on the old path, or people simply find a slightly shorter or more convenient route. Gradually, walkers begin taking this new line across the field instead of the old one. At first, only a few people use the new route. The grass along it begins to show faint signs of wear — blades are bent and bruised, and a pale strip starts to appear. As the weeks go by, the new route becomes more and more popular: the flattened grass eventually dies back, leaving a firm, visible track.

Meanwhile, the old path, now seeing fewer footsteps, starts to recover. Without constant trampling, the soil loosens a little, rainwater seeps in again, and new shoots begin to grow up through the bare patches. Mosses, wildflowers, and taller grasses reclaim it, softening its edges until it blends again into the rest of the field. Within a season or two, only someone who remembers where it used to run might notice a faint difference in the undergrowth or a subtle dip in the ground. The new track has become the main path — firm and easy to follow — while the old one has disappeared back into the living fabric of the field.

This is an illustration of how habits can change: the places where we pass most often grow clearer, and those we abandon are slowly forgotten, healed over by time and growth. It is also an excellent illustration of how our brains work.

Learning is a physical process, in which the brain changes in response to experience: the brain rewires itself as we practise, think and experience. At its core, it involves the strengthening and formation of neural pathways, networks of neurons (nerve cells) which communicate through chemical signals. Every thought, every memory, every skill we acquire is encoded within these connections. Our brain is quite literally rewiring itself day by day.

Each new connection represents not only new knowledge but also the remarkable ability of the human brain to change and grow throughout life. When we first encounter new information or attempt a new skill, specific groups of neurons are activated together. If this process happens repeatedly and is done proactively, the connections between those neurons will become stronger and more efficient. This is learning. Pathways that are rarely used may weaken through a process called synaptic pruning, a process which has evolved to make the brain more efficient by eliminating redundant connections. This balance between strengthening and pruning allows the brain to adapt continuously to new experiences and environments. Being aware of this is essential to an understanding of how we learn.

The brain’s remarkable ability to adapt and change is known as neuro-plasticity. As Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb said as early as 1949, “neurons that fire together, wire together”. Each time a pathway is used, the brain reinforces it, making it easier to activate in the future. Over time, this repetition transforms a once-effortful action into an automatic one. This, fundamentally, is why we get into habits – both good and bad. The really great news is that bad habits can be replaced with new ones: you simply have to start following the paths less travelled and keep treading upon them until they turn into the new, preferred pathway. The road less travelled may be difficult to start upon, but will become an established thoroughfare with repeated use.

Searching for Eboracum

As I write, my husband and I are spending a few days in the city of York. To my shame, and despite the fact that it has been on my bucket list for a considerable number of years, this is my first ever visit to this wonderful city. It is impossible not be awe-struck by York, which oozes tradition and culture from every corner. It also comes across as notably affluent throughout, which is perhaps unusual for a city; even the local Wetherspoons looks classy.

York feels like a place where multiple periods of history are jostling for your attenion. There are Viking streets and Georgian terraces, but York’s Medieval past and how this ties in with the history of the Church of England is most obviously dominant in its architecture. What is perhaps least obvious to the casual viewer is the city’s Roman origins, yet York was indeed one of the most important military and administrative centres in northern Britain, a legionary fortress and city called Eboracum.

A Roman presence in York began in the late first century AD. The ill-fated ninth legion, which has a mysterious history all of its own, established a large fortress on the north bank of the River Ouse in around the 70s AD. The fortress followed the distinctive plan of a typical Roman castra used across the empire: a defended rectangle with internal streets, command buildings, barracks, workshops and administrative areas. Over time, the original timber-and-earth defences were rebuilt in stone and a civilian settlement grew up adjacent to the military base. This, in fact, is the origin story of most Roman towns in Britain, and like all of them, York’s Roman origins can mostly be viewed piecemeal, woven into the fabric of what stands today.

York thrived continuously, from Roman times to the present. As the centuries slid by and when later builders needed stone, many Roman structures would have been pillaged for materials to support newer building projects. Most of the stones from the original fortress would have been removed and repurposed, but the Roman foundations remain: ramparts became the bases for medieval walls, Roman drains and sewers were incorporated into later systems and Roman roads turned into medieval carriageways and were given new names. My husband and I, both struck by the apparent affluence of the city, in which we found almost no disrepair, paused to ponder the single area of disuse we had come across: a large complex of buildings with boarded up windows. All became clear when we noticed a sign referencing an archaeological project attached to the railings around the area; it seems that a local building project must have come across something exciting beneath the surface, rendering the building works halted for now.

This indeed is what happened to the inn now called the Roman Bath pub in St Sampson’s Square. In around 1930, while work was being carried out in the cellar of the pub then called the Mail Coach Inn, which had suffered fire damage, builders uncovered a series of old stone structures and channels, which turned out to be part of a Roman bathhouse. Archaeologists confirmed that the remains were connected to the nearby garrison of Eboracum, and concluded that they were built by its soldiers for their own use. Thankfully, the man who owned the pub at the time was interested enough to preserve the remains, and today visitors can descend down to the cellar to see the original surviving hypocaust system. So, on entering the pub, you are greeted with the choice to visit the bar or the baths — or indeed, you can of course do both!

York has other places where one can poke one’s nose into its Roman origins. The Multangular Tower in the Yorkshire Museum Gardens is the most striking standing remnant of Roman occupation. It marks part of the south-west corner of the original legionary fortress, but what survives is a multi-period structure: it has Roman stone at its base, but evidences later reworkings (you can see the point of change in the picture below). There are also small stretches of the original Roman walls that are visible in the city, but York’s famous surviving city walls are of course Medieval. The Yorkshire Museum houses a collection of Roman artifacts, but to be honest it’s not exactly exciting unless you’re into looking at hunks of masonry. I know, I know. I’m a rubbish Classicist.

Given my day job, it was obligatory that to go looking for the Roman origins of York, despite my limited penchant for chunks of broken stonework. But to be honest, it is impossible not to be more intrigued by its Medieval history and by the things that mark out the city as unique: its glorious plethora of quirky ale houses, its equally notable profusion of churches, chapels and shrines and — perhaps most striking of all — its surviving city walls. Built originally to defend the city from rebellion, these structures were no longer used as a mechanism for defensive by as early as the 1800s. Parts of the walls from this point on became nothing more than a curiosity and began to be used as a walking route, so the surviving stucture was adapted to suit this new leisure pursuit. A new walkway was built inside the city walls to create a promenade and it is upon this walkway that you can survey the city today. In a world where it’s all too easy to convince ourselves that everything is always getting worse, I find it rather wonderful that what used to be an essential defence structure is now simply a place to pass the time and ponder.

GCSE Latin set texts – why students struggle

Few things risk being so damning as the insight of a one-to-one tutor. As an ex-classroom teacher myself, I am painfully aware just what a difficult job teaching is, and how it is entirely possible to leave some students behind, despite your best efforts. It is from this perspective that I come to this topic.

It is obvious and undeniable that many of the students I work with have been well-taught: they have simply lost their way or misunderstood for a variety of complex reasons. Others, I must confess, I do wonder what’s been happening in their classroom. Whatever the truth of the situation, once a student has indeed lost their way with their studies, it can be a Sisyphean endeavour for them to rejoin the road to success without support. As I write these reflections on what the students I am paid to help have missed and misunderstood about set text work, it is in the full consciousness that there will have been some members of my own classes over the years that became lost by the wayside. A classroom teacher who can claim otherwise is a rare creature indeed.

Set text work remains one of the biggest challenges that students face when they reach GCSE level in their Latin studies. Suddenly, there’s a whole new world of real, unedited Latin in front of you, some of it in verse. The expectation we place upon students to cope with this is frankly mind-boggling. Imagine asking a student of French to study Molière, Maupassant or Descartes at GCSE level: this is what we are asking students to do in Latin. The whole thing is frankly ridiculous, and I have written before about what a pointless exercise the whole business is, but given that the exam boards resolutely refuse to change their approach, we’re stuck with it. What follows are some observations about students who struggle with this element of the exam.

Perhaps the most striking thing I notice about some students’ understanding of the literature is the fact that those who are struggling with the set texts cannot articulate the very basics of what they are about. Teachers are often under enormous time pressure when it comes to the huge swathes of literature they must plough through, and – as a result – they often dive straight in to working through the text line by line, and do not find the time to ensure that their students understand the basic meaning and purpose of the text.

Currently, this is manifesting itself most strikingly with the Virgil text prescribed last year and this year for OCR (selections from the opening of Aeneid 1) and the Love & Marriage texts for Eduqas. For one student studying the latter, it took me more than one session with her to establish which texts she was studying, so non-existent was her grasp of what had been covered. With the Virgil, teachers have a particularly difficult task: how much to tell students who may have little to no knowledge of epic and/or mythological stories in general? Aside from this, however, is notable that not one single student that I have worked with during the last 18 months has had even the slightest inkling of an idea that Carthage had significance for a Roman audience. I find this genuinely sad. I cannot think of anything more important than explaining to them that the Carthaginian empire was a rival superpower that the Romans had overturned some 150 years before Virgil was writing. In a series of three conflicts between Rome and Carthage, Rome was ultimately victorious and utterly destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE. While the wars themselves were history to someone writing in Virgil’s time (the 1^st century AD), the experience and trauma of these conflicts, especially the long and harrowing campaigns of Hannibal, were a central and formative part of Roman collective memory and crucial to their self-definition. The Carthaginian Wars quite literally defined them as indefatigable warriors and the global superpower of their age.

Beyond this surely fundamental understanding of why Virgil is banging on about Carthage at the start of his epic work, no student that I have worked with understands or can define what an epic work is. I cling to the notion that they must have been taught this, but I can only assume that they are given this information in lesson one and that their teachers then assume that it has stuck. Such things are crying out to be used as a regular Do Now or similar quick retrieval task: what is an epic? Who was Homer? How is Virgil imitating him? A student should be able to tell us that an epic is a lengthy poem, written to be publicly performed, and focusing traditionally on tales of battle and self-definition; they should also understand that the gods and destiny play an important role in epic and that epic is a genre that evolved through the Greek oral tradition and that Virgil is doing something rather special by canonising this into a definitive Roman origin story in Latin. These basic notions really need to be revisited regularly to ensure that students remember them.

Beyond the fundamentals, the biggest mistake made by classroom teachers in my experience is their excessive focus on style, over and above teaching students how to learn the text. At this point, we come to the crushing reality and the reason why I believe that set text work is such a monumentally pointless waste of students’ time: the Latin is too hard for GCSE-level students to grasp in full, meaning that their only option is to rote-learn the text in English. Few classroom teachers labour under the illusion that this is not the case, but few also realise just how much guidance students need in order to do this necessary and time-consuming task successfully. When I was teaching, I learned to drill students on the best methodology for rote-learning, modelled it for them and then gave them short bursts of classroom time to start doing so, while I monitored them. It was essential, in my view, for me to see it demonstrated that students had understood the methods I had shown them and were trying them out. Students can be remarkably stubborn when it comes to study skills, and unless it is literally demonstrated to them that a method works, they will ignore your advice and go it alone. As a result, they will fail. Students who have been shown how to learn the text successfully come to realise that the demonstrated methods work and will stick with them.

The final issue with classroom set-text teaching arises out of a combination of two issues I have already raised: teachers being under time pressure to push ahead with the text line by line, combined with an excessive focus on stylistic features. What this means is that teachers generally introduce a new bit of text and talk about its stylistic features at the same time. The reality for novices is that this will be impossible to follow. My advice to students is always to attempt to get ahead of the class with the rote-learning, so that they are looking at a section of the text that they understand when their teacher starts talking about style. This gives them a better chance of following what the teacher is saying. When I was in the classroom, I would take the students through the meaning of the text and set them to learn it before I said anything about its stylistic features. It worked infinitely better than expecting them to follow what I was saying when working through a new bit of text.

Fundamentally, classroom teachers must remind themselves that students can achieve around 80% in the exam with only the haziest of grasps when it comes to the stylistic features of the text. The vast majority of their marks come from knowing the text, and yet this aspect of their studies is given the least amount of focus in the classroom. In their anxiety to help students with the most difficult aspects of the examination, many classroom teachers overlook the low-hanging fruit: how to help them to achieve the bulk of their marks.

Psychology matters

Most people understand that resilience is important. I’m not sure there is anyone from any walk of life who would argue that resilience is overrated and/or an unnecessary life-skill. What people tend to disagree on is the level of challenge. How much resilience should we demand of ourselves and our children? How much pressure is too much? If we could answer this question, we could probably find the answer to much of life, and we could certainly write the text book on parenting.

I’m a reasonably strong believer in the fact that most things that are worth doing are hard work, including the process of study. The fact that study is hard is rarely denied by students or by their parents, but what’s interesting is what you find when you unpack these beliefs a little further. I often refer clients to a book by the university lecturer and psychologist Dr. Paul Penn, who has written an outstanding book on the psychology of effective study. He argues that most students avoid more effective methods because they are actually under the false impression that the process of studying should come easily to them. In a recent post on LinkedIn, Paul wrote the following: “I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to convey to students that their intuition about what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to studying is often wrong. This is why the entire first chapter of my book is dedicated to metacognition and specifically how a raft of metacognitive errors can compel students to persist with ineffective studying methods because they “feel good or right”. Chief among these errors is the conflation of ease with effectiveness and short-term performance with longer-term learning. The notion that learning is supposed to be an effortful and difficult process is often revelatory to students (in a good way), because they tend to assume that finding studying challenging is a negative indictment on them and therefore gravitate towards ineffective methods such as re-reading, that generate illusory impressions of progress. Once they realise that failure is an integral part of learning, difficulty is often desirable and short-term performance should not be confused with longer-term learning, they are much more amenable to implementing advice on effective studying.“

The emphasis is mine, as I feel the final words in this quote are absolutely crucial. In recent months I have started using more and more analogies to explain this phenomenon to the young learners that I work with. Many youngsters in their mid to late teens play sport or work out at the gym, indeed there is a significant trend in that generation for weight and resistance training (when I was at school the trend was all aerobics and feeling the burn). While not every student works out, a notable number of them either do so or at least have a vague grasp of the concept. It can be really useful to their understanding of study to liken their efforts to a workout in the gym. Weight-lifting is a process which should be done to the point of failure, or near-failure. Just because you have found it impossible to lift an 8 kilo weight for the eighth time, that does not render your workout worthless: quite the opposite, in fact. The very fact that you have worked on those muscles to the point of failure or near-failure is the very same process that builds muscle and will make the lifting easier in the long-run. So short-term “failures” lead to long-term gains.

This is all well and good, and it’s important to explain this underlying truth to those who are new to the process of study (or, indeed, to working out). But I think there are other things that we can always do to support ourselves through such challenges, whatever they may be, and these come down to the fact that we need to forgive ourselves for the inescapable fact that the vast majority of us are naturally reluctant to leave our comfort zones. We’ve all met the odd exceptional person who runs endurance marathons across the arctic or the desert or both in the same week. These people are not useful models. The overwhelming majority of us find it hard to motivate ourselves to stick with things that are difficult and, to take inspiration from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, we need to accept that fact and to help ourselves out by removing as many barriers as possible. It is not productive or effective to tell ourselves we’re useless when we feel like giving up: it is much more useful to investigate whether we could be doing something slightly differently in order to mitigate against the likelihood of giving up. This is something that many teenagers fall foul of, especially those with a perfectionist streak: they set themselves up for inevitable long-term failure by failing to forgive themselves for short-term defeats.

As regular readers will know, I am currently in the process of learning to run on a regular basis. I experimented with the Couch to 5K programme and then switched to using music instead. Try as I might, I hit a wall when it came to running for anything longer than three to four minutes and I was becoming frustrated and upset by my lack of progress. I wasn’t enjoying the runs I was doing, in fact I was starting to dread them, and a little voice in my head was starting to say: you’re not going to stick with this.

Rather than beating myself up, I addressed the fact that I was at risk of giving up and faced it head-on. Let’s be honest, for every person on social media announcing their incredible progress at a feat such as running, there are at least ten, possibly twenty others, who have quietly given up on the whole thing. I don’t want to be in that group. To quote Marie Murphy, Professor of exercise and health at Ulster university, “the best form of exercise is the one you will do. That trumps everything else.” While fitness experts can argue about the minutiae of marginal gains and optimal exercise programmes, the general population is getting less and less fit because they’re not doing any of it. Sure, it would be optimal if I could stick with pushing myself to run for more than four minutes: but if I find this so miserable that I give up altogether, the end result will be entirely negative. So, I’ve completely switched the process and am now using the walk-run method, starting with 30 seconds of each. It is utterly blissful and I am enjoying the process again. This week, I cut the walk break by five seconds, so running for 30 seconds and then walking for 25 and it was absolutely fine. I will continue to reduce the walk breaks marginally, and see how that goes.

Somewhat anxiously, I shared my decision with a friend. This friend, by the way, can run 10K without stopping or taking a walk break. She told me I’d made absolutely the right decision and reinforced the mantra that sticking with the process was more important than anything else. We chatted about the psychology of cutting the walk times rather than increasing the run-times. Ultimately, the result will (hopefully) be the same, but for me there is something about the psychology of “I only have to run for 30 seconds!” that really works for me. She related a conversation that she had overheard at a swimming pool, where one woman was saying that she preferred 50m to 25m pools (“30 lengths feels so much easier than 60!”) whilst the other preferred 25m (“but each 50m length is sooooo long!”). As my friend pointed out, each of those swimmers is ultimately doing the same workout, but they feel differently about the two different approaches, and that’s what matters. Whatever happens, the trick is to adjust your challenges so that they remain challenges but are not so insurmountable that you risk calling it a day.

If there is a magic formula for that and someone discovers it, they’ll make a fortune.