classroom teaching – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Let me count the ways

How do we let young people down in 2025? Let me count the ways. Beyond our inexplicable willingness to allow them unfettered 24-hour access to the dark world of the internet, beyond our discomfort with and unwillingness to take the responsibility that lies with adults, to be in charge and to be the grown-ups in the room, beyond this lurks yet another way in which we can let them down. We can teach them an inflated sense of their own importance; we can let them believe that the world revolves around them and let them imagine that, when they reach adulthood, their employer will bend to their every whim. How do we do that? Let me give you an example.

It is not often that I read a post on LinkedIn, as it’s never an enriching experience. But imagine my horror when I happen upon someone who claims to be a fellow educationalist openly celebrating the news that a child is missing their lessons for no good reason other than the fact that it is their birthday. “Let’s normalise taking your birthday off without any further explanation or drama required,” she exclaimed. “Life’s too short not to!” She also celebrated “the beauty of flexi/online schooling,” showing at least some awareness of the fact that the average UK school would take a pretty dim view of any student – or their parents – citing a birthday as a reason to take a day off.

To be clear, it was apparent from her post that this person was talking about the kind of tutoring that is there to replace traditional schooling, not supplement it. As someone who works with students who attend mainstream school, I have had several occasions on which parents have cancelled their evening appointment with me due to birthday celebrations, and that is just as it should be: the child has already done a day’s schooling and it seems more than reasonable to reserve their evening time for birthday celebrations with family and/or friends. But this tutor was celebrating the fact that their student was missing an entire day’s worth of schooling, and even seemed to be implying that – in an ideal world – schools would be willing to accommodate such a decision. The responses were mainly positive, with several people – all of them no doubt making money out of the increasing trend of parents taking their children out of the traditional education system – applauding the sentiment. “Brilliant! Joy, wellbeing and belonging first, then education will flow and be valued” asserted one, a remarkable claim which I would love to see the data on. “All my students take their birthdays off, and I encourage it,” said another. “Absolutely brilliant,” said a third: “I too encourage my students to take their birthdays off!”

There were one or two of us speaking up for sanity, so all is not lost. One or two people commented that allowing students to take random days off is disruptive to both the teacher and the learner. I commented that allowing students to take time off in this way is surely setting them up for future disappointment in life. There are not many people in this world who are so blessed that they can pick and choose whether or not they go into work on a particular day. If at least part of education’s purpose is to prepare students for working life, then what kind of precedent are we setting by normalising the expectation of a day off on their birthday, rather than explaining to them that school is still there – birthday or not – and reassuring them that celebrations will be had when it is finished for the day?

There are innumerable jobs which do not allow for days off at your preferred time, including some quite noble careers. Teaching, for example, is well known as a profession in which you do get lots of time away from the chalkface, but the price you pay for the significant chunks of flexible free time undeniably allowed to you is that the times when you are tied to the chalkface are 100% dictated by your employer. It is quite remarkably difficult for classroom teachers to negotiate any time away from their classroom, for blindingly obvious reasons. I remember a wealthy friend once invited myself and my husband to Glyndebourne, in an ill-fated attempt to convert me to opera. “You’d have to take the afternoon off,” he said, airily. I snorted with mirth, for this was just one example of how someone in his wealth-bracket tends to presume that the world works for everybody else. It was almost worth me booking an appointment with the Headteacher, just to see the look on her face when I requested the afternoon off “to attend the opera.” Many of our young people will end up in jobs like mine, when time off at one’s own behest is simply not on the cards. Granted, many of them won’t. The point is: all jobs include “have-tos” (true even for my wealthy barrister friend), and young people need to learn this simple fact. Otherwise, we are letting them down.

Beyond the fact that school attendance teaches children about the “have-tos” in life, allowing time off at a child’s behest devalues education itself. Taking students out of school for random events should not be done lightly, for in doing so we are inevitably sending a message to a child that their schooling is not important to us. This then echoes down the line when it comes to their day-to-day studies, their preparation for examinations, their overall efforts to achieve academically. Why should it matter to them, if we are constantly undermining the message that it matters to us by taking them out of school?

My third and final objection to the idea of allowing and encouraging students to take time out of school for their birthday is perhaps a little controversial, so brace yourselves. Here goes. Quite simply, I think it is too self-indulgent. I am so depressed at how society seems to be shifting more and more towards an entirely individualistic mindset, one which prioritises the wants and needs of the individual over and above the needs of the community as a whole. While I would never object to the idea that one should be mindful of one’s own health and wellbeing, indeed I write often about my efforts to centre my own, the expectation of one’s right to do so has become so unquestionable that we are beginning to forget what binds us together as a community. In our relentless pursuit of independence and self-efficacy, I fear we may end up with a world full of egocentrics.

In the grand scheme of humanity, nobody’s birthday is actually that important, because nobody is the centre of the universe. We need to keep our special dates in perspective. They matter to us and – if we are lucky enough – to those who care about us. They do not – nor should they – impact upon the rest of the world. If that seems a little too nihilistic for your liking, then here’s another way of looking at it: if it’s their birthday, wouldn’t it be better for a child to go into school and celebrate by sharing the love with their classmates? Over the years, I have had several colleagues who liked to make a fuss on their birthday, so they brought in cakes and shared them with all of us. It was an absolutely lovely thing to do and everybody enjoyed it. And everyone wished them a happy birthday! So, if we believe that birthdays are so special and important, then why don’t we teach our children that their birthday is a chance to bring some joy to their usual routines and responsibilities, not an opportunity to evade them?

Spurious pipelines

If you’re searching for a reason why so many of us have left the teaching profession in the last few years, then look no further than the ceaseless school-bashing that so many apparent professionals are willing to partake in.

I’d like to think that the situation is improving, but just this week we had a self-styled “training and strategy consultant” who claims to “help parents and professionals understand children with trauma” share the image below yet again and state as follows: “The power of this image is its simplicity. It makes us feel uncomfortable. And it should.” Yet another armchair philosopher, who has never taught in a UK school, willing to promote the lazy stereotype that schools are institutions of oppression. In response to the understandable pushback he received from some professional teachers, he commented “I am very happy for people to criticise this image and add to the discussion.” Ha! Yeah, right. People who promote this kind of facile commentary for clicks are not interested in discussion; they’re only interested in being patted on the back by the people who agree with them.

What’s most depressing is the number of people – many teachers included – that buy into this kind of nonsense. So many teaching professionals are so beleaguered by their circumstances, so ground down by the incessant white noise that tells us that the system is failing, they can’t even see when they’re being sold a self-defeating falsehood.

I have no intention of spending my time debunking the ludicrous premise here, that any school issuing basic level sanctions and – in extreme circumstances – exclusions, somehow sets a child on an inevitable path to crime. There have been plenty of well-informed challenges to this frankly mind-bogglingly stupid assumption, which fails to take into account the most obvious fact that correlation is not causation. How on earth can someone who claims to be an intelligent and empathetic professional fail to comprehend why it might indeed be the case that adults who commit crimes deemed worthy of imprisonment might have been children who found themselves in trouble at school? Can anyone honestly be that stupid? Are they so blind to the realities of human nature that they have to pretend that every teenager is a pure blank slate onto which The System somehow stamps an inescapably dark future? This is not to say that children who find themselves excluded from school are not troubled and should not be provided for. They are society’s responsibility and society’s problem. But so are the hundreds of other individuals in that school. Schools do not exclude lightly, indeed they go out of their way to avoid it. But if some recent, violent events have taught us anything, they surely have taught us the obvious fact that there are certain offences that warrant exclusion. Bringing a knife into school is just one of those offences.

I have written before about the fact that poor behaviour in schools was a significant part of what drove me out of the profession. In many ways, this is a simplistic way of looking at things. What truly drove me out was the presumption – in many schools and in much of society as a whole – that the poor behaviour was my responsibility and indeed my fault. Something I hear frequently from tutees are reports that their teacher “cannot control the class” and I never let it pass without challenge. “Why is it your teacher’s job to manage the way that you and your friends choose to behave?” I like to ask them. They tend to back-pedal vigorously, usually of course denying that they or their friends have anything to do with the poor behaviour being reported. But the truth is, this is what the kids genuinely think, this is what their parents think and this is what society thinks. Everyone believes that teachers should somehow, by dint of their vibrant personality and an indefatigable love for the traditional educational process, be able to manage and control the whims of the 30 individuals in front of them. If they can’t do that, it’s because they’re too uninspiring, too reticent, too reactive, not good enough at their job or they take their job too personally.

The truth is that the only way for schools to manage behaviour successfully is by setting their standards sky-high and expecting their staff, the students and their parents to be fully on board with the school’s ethos. That ethos must permeate every interaction and every conversation that takes place between every student and every member of staff. Such a culture is extremely hard work to create and there will be large numbers of people – professionals included – who will attempt to push back against it and defend a more individualised approach, in which each teacher is left to carve their own path. This individualised approach is how most schools are run and it doesn’t work. If you want to be sure of what behaviour is like in a school, find out how cover lessons go, most especially those supervised by a supply teacher. That’s the only way you’ll find out whether the school runs on a unified ethos or whether it runs on the force of personality and/or the years of brow-beaten experience chalked up by its staff. From the stories I hear from the classroom, we’ve got a long way to go.

Radical traditionalism

It is easy to forget, sometimes, how far we have come. In a social milieu that is changing so fast it makes your head spin, it can be tempting to hark back to simpler times, when teachers ruled the classroom and when students did as they were told. The trouble is, as a Professor of Greek once said to me, the good old days were never really that good. “In the good old days,” he mused, “with my background, I wouldn’t have been a Professor and a Head of Department. I’d have been ram-rodding the drains.”

One of the most frustrating things about politicians is they all seem to believe that they understand education. In fact, it’s not just politicians: it’s everyone. Everyone has been to school and so everyone can and does have a supposedly valid opinion on how schools should be run and how children should be taught. But as Katharine Birbalsingh observed this week, the “government team saying the Education Secretary doesn’t need lectures from successful school leaders because the Education Secretary went to school herself would be like the Health Secretary saying he doesn’t want to hear from doctors because he once went to hospital.”

Birbalsingh was frustrated by a recent (and extremely brief) audience that she and other extraordinary Headteachers had been given with the Education Secretary, who by all accounts was distinctly uninterested in finding out how a school with a socially disadvantaged intake such as Michaela’s can achieve results which rival those of Eton College. The Education Secretary was not in the least bit curious to explore how Michaela had reached such heights of attainment. I’d like to say that I find this extraordinary, unbelievable and shocking, but I don’t. Until people let go of their passionate political affiliations – and I find it highly unlikely that an elected Member of Parliament is capable of doing so – then education will continue to remain a bruised and punctured political football.

One of the most depressing things about modern times is how unwilling people seem to learn from the past. We have seen a plethora of radical experiments and we now have a wealth of evidence about which environments work best for the majority of students. With the opening up of academia and a terrific movement towards making the most useful discoveries in cognitive science accessible to the average classroom teacher, we also know a huge amount about how children learn and remember. Despite all of this, huge swathes of educationalists remain unshakably wedded to outmoded ideas. The infuriating thing is, they consider themselves to be the progressives, kicking against what they call “the traditional methods”. But surely, if you’re hanging on to so-called “progressive” ideas that were first mooted more than 50 years ago, then you’re anything but a radical. You’re a dyed-in-the-wool conservative.

I find it indescribably irksome that my stance on learning and education – which has changed radically over the years along with my own experience, with the reading I have done and with my willingness to change my mind – is labelled as “traditionalist”. If you want to know about “traditional” in its very worst sense then you could have sat through one of the Divinity lessons I was forced to attend at school. Oh yes. Divinity. Imagine that. The lessons were led by a Reverend and the man seemed determined to spread and perpetuate ignorance to the best of his deeply limited ability. He lived in a fantasy world, in which children were still drilled in their Bible studies at home, thoroughly steeped in an understanding of chapter and verse. Our so-called “lessons” consisted of him selecting a passage for one of us to read from the Bible, after which he would pontificate circuitously for the rest of the hour. The worst thing was, due to his unmitigated fantasy about our Bible knowledge, he offered no education as to the shape and structure of the Bible, he simply barked a reference followed by a name and waited for the girl to start reading. Any girl who found herself floundering to locate “Mark, chapter 15, verses 32-38” or whatever reference he had pronounced, was left to flounder. If she started reading from the wrong section he would simply shout “NOOOOOOO!” and wait for her to try again. On occasion, this happened multiple times until the girl managed to stumble upon the correct lines. I don’t think it even occurred to him that most children in the room wouldn’t even have understood what “chapter and verse” actually meant.

What indescribable apathy in the face of a golden opportunity. This man had no exam to prepare us for, no dull syllabus to force his hand. (The school, it may interest you to know, did not allow us to sit a GCSE in Religious Studies, because it objected to the fact that to do so would require studying “other religions”.) With such total freedom, the Reverend could have given us an immensely useful grounding in a text that has arguably shaped western values and western literature in more significant ways than any other written work in history. But no, he couldn’t be bothered. He was just waiting for retirement.

So, I smile to myself when I am reminded that I am supposedly in the “traditionalist” camp when it comes to education. Personally, I think that those of us in this camp should identify as something with a bit more of a rallying cry. How about “radical traditionalist”? A radical traditionalist believes that knowledge is not only important but the right of every child. A radical traditionalist takes on board the overwhelming body of evidence that direct instruction is more effective than discovery learning when working with novices. A radical traditionalist refuses to accept the soft bigotry of low expectations, the heinous and insulting prejudice that kids from ordinary backgrounds aren’t capable of academic rigour. I find it indescribably depressing how many people who consider themselves to be genuine liberals cheer on the pursuit of mediocrity for our most disadvantaged and vulnerable members of society, whilst patting themselves on the back for being progressive. Quite honestly, I don’t know how they sleep at night.

Revelations

One of the strangest things about humans is what they reveal about themselves. Never is this more apparent than at a school Consultation Evening, when the parents or guardians of a child sit opposite their child’s teachers to discuss their child’s progress or – at times – to reveal in glorious technicolour their warped sense of reality and chaotic lives to the person sitting opposite them.

Recently, The Huffington Post invited readers in the teaching profession to reveal the most remarkable things that parents have said to them over the years. “When teachers go into their profession, they do so with the expectation that they will have to deal with some student misbehaviour. … But when you speak with teachers about the behaviours that cause them the most distress, it’s not the students who are to blame, it’s their parents — some of whom seem to badly need a lesson in courtesy, respect and common sense.”

“I had a parent tell me that their child … was a genius and I just wasn’t smart enough to comprehend that” said one. “I had a parent tell me that they didn’t need to teach their child morals, as that is what school should be teaching them,” reported another. Over the years, I also experienced some quite remarkable condescension from some of the adults I had to deal with, although nothing quite this bad: “I once had a parent tell me, ‘I worked in daycare too, then I decided to get a career’,” reported one pre-school teacher with 17 years’ experience. This comment is particularly revealing of a fact that became apparent during the pandemic- how some people see schools as there to provide day care for their children, not an education.

Generally speaking, such people are so rare and so jaw-droppingly ridiculous that I have wiped the recollection of most such comments from my memory. The majority of parents are respectful and only too supportive of their child’s teachers. One memory I do maintain, however, is not of a child’s parents setting out to undermine me, but rather seeming to reveal such malfunction in their own lives that I have never forgotten it. This happened in my very first year of teaching, which is now 25 years ago, so I feel pretty safe telling the story. It was my very first Consultation Evening, one of hundreds that I would attend, and it remains the one I have never forgotten. It was also the time when I truly learnt the definition of passive-aggressive behaviour, or what in modern parlance is often referred to as gas-lighting.

The parents of this particular child were divorcing but were attending the Consultation Evening together with their child. There is nothing unusual about this and most manage to do so with only the faintest whiff of awkwardness in the air. I remain convinced that the overwhelming majority of parents want the best for their children and that includes protecting them from the worst of the fall-out when it comes to a separation. These parents, however, appeared to be going through a particularly acrimonious separation and there had been some confusion (possibly confounded by at least one of the people involved) about to whom communications regarding their child’s progress should be sent. This was made clear to me the moment that the family sat down – the child deposited like a military buffer zone between the individuals at war – and informed me that this was the case. Not a great start.

Neither parent would look at or speak to the other parent, so it was close to impossible to have a normal conversation that would include their child in the process without extreme awkwardness. Nevertheless, I pressed on as best I could, taking the opportunity to explain how well their child had been doing recently (remarkably well, given the family situation in which they found themselves). Just as I was beginning to round up my report, I was interrupted by the child’s mother, who appeared agitated and unable to contain herself any longer.

“I wish to make one thing absolutely crystal clear,” she barked, pointing her finger at me. “I wish to clarify the fact that I have not – nor have I ever – been suffering from any kind of mental illness. There is nothing wrong with me!”

There was a long, mortifying pause.

“Um. Okay,” I said, unsure where this was going but very sure that I didn’t like it or have any idea of how to handle it.

“So whatever has been said about me – and I mean by anyone – is not true. I want it wiped from your records!”

Personally, I was unaware of anything on anyone’s record about mental health issues, and I was genuinely at a loss as to what to say. Now, with more experience, I realise that I should have said something like “you clearly have some concerns, so can I suggest that you speak to …” and pass the buck onto someone considerably higher up the pay grade than I was (which, at that time, was pretty much everybody; I suspect the assistant caretaker earned significantly more than I did). From my recollection, however, I was incapable of anything other than opening and closing my mouth like a dying fish.

“I hope I’ve made myself clear,” snapped the mother, at which point her soon-to-be-very-ex-husband piped up.

“As I was saying,” he remarked, smoothly, “I’m keen to be kept informed of any ways in which I can help with vocabulary learning. Do you have any particular suggestions?”

There was another silence, while I stared at him, then at his trembling wife. It was as if she had not spoken. She did not exist. Her presence was not merely irrelevant, it was a non-fact. He had not heard her, for she was not there.

He continued.

“Just keep me in the loop with regards to anything I can do to help in that department.”

So, that was my stark introduction to the psychological concept of passive aggressive behaviour. I could immediately begin to see where this woman’s apparent neurosis was coming from. When you have someone who quite literally acts as if you have been expunged from the universe, where do you go other than the path of frustration, protestation and rage? What choice do you have other than to act out? I tried to imagine a lifetime of being ignored, of being talked over, of being erased and expunged. I’m not sure I would have handled it with any more dignity or diplomacy than she was managing.

To this day I will never know the full truth behind what was going on in that family, but I do know that the acrimonious divorce took them down a path of heart-breaking consequences for their child. Since they were unable to agree on custody and access and since the child was old enough for the courts to take their individual preferences into account, the child was forced to testify in open court about which parent they would prefer to live with and why. Quite how a couple who once made vows to each other and chose to bring a child into this world can end up so horribly broken I struggle to imagine, but the consequences for all concerned were devastating. So, more than any ignorant insults hurled at me and the profession I represent over the years – and there have been a few – it is this early experience that I recall with genuine regret.

Digital snake-oil

Picture the scene. You’re in a posh restaurant. The sort with linen napkins, thick carpets and snooty waiters. Everyone is dressed smartly and all the subliminal messaging is telling you that – whatever the food is like – you are expected to behave in a certain way.

The couple next to you are hunched over, staring at their smart phones. So are the couple behind them. Your partner is also staring at his phone. When your gaze returns to the table, your own phone awaits. No, this is not an indictment of society’s mass phone addiction, it is an unfortunate situation rendered necessary by the fact that your holiday-provider has decided that Going Digital is A Good Idea. As part of your eye-wateringly expensive holiday package you might be entitled to eat in this restaurant, but apparently you’re not entitled to a menu that you can actually hold in your hands. No, you must access the menu by “following the QR code” using the camera on your phone. Each table has a glass ornament displaying the code, so you whip your smartphone out and away you go.

It was not just the fact that seeing people scrolling on their phones in a restaurant was depressing – which it was. It was also the fact that accessing the menu in this way afforded no tangible gains whatsoever: it was, in fact, a substantially sub-optimal way of looking at a menu. The very need for scrolling was an irritation, when real menus are arranged in a way that allows you to scan the whole offering in one. A traditional menu would have been- quite simply – a hundred times better. Even my husband heartily agreed, a man who had a career in software engineering and is a natural lover of all things digital.

This spectacularly pointless switch to digital puzzled me for the rest of the holiday. With the best will in the world, why would somebody do this? Have we actually hit the point where some people believe that things are made definitively better purely for the reason that they are sprinkled with digital fairy dust? The quite extraordinary stupidity of the whole thing was rendered even more ludicrous by the fact that the holiday company did not even have the imagination to exploit the (albeit slim) advantages that “going digital” could bring to the party. For example, if they were so determined to go the digital route, then why not share the QR code with customers ahead of time and encourage them to start choosing their menu options in advance? This would at least have added a whiff of anticipation, although I still would argue that a traditional menu would have been infinitely preferable once we were sat in the restaurant itself. Easy advance-sharing was literally the only potential advantage I could imagine arising from the digital model, and they didn’t even bother to do that. So, the gormless march towards everything going digital advances, it seems, with no thought applied either to the potential consequences or to how to actually reap the potential advantages it might afford.

Increasingly, secondary school students are provided with “everything they need” online. While digital tools will have meant some investment on the school’s part, I am suspicious that a lot of what happens now is actually about reducing their photocopying budget, an undeniable thorn in the side of every HoD who has responsibility for their department’s costs. Honestly, what schools spend on technology generally pales into insignificance when compared to their yearly photocopying budget. While really successful schools who are getting fantastic results and impressive Progress 8 scores have broadly shifted towards the use of printed booklets for the students and moved away from digital presentations on the part of the teacher, vast swathes of schools (including in the private sector) have shifted towards a digital model, where everything is presented to the students electronically and nothing is printed out. Ker-ching.

I have worked with dozens of students in this position and have seen the disastrous fallout of what this digital model does for students’ learning and understanding. Inevitably, like anything inherently flawed, it is the already-disadvantaged that it leaves behind. People seem to assume that being “disadvantaged” means a lack of access to expensive technology and it is true that there can be glaring differences between what an affluent child has access to by comparison with one who is eligible for free school meals. But this is not the only way that students can be disadvantaged and it is vastly outweighed by other, more serious handicaps. Think prior attainment, think organisational skills, think access to an ever-increasing range of vocabulary, think time and space. Students who are already struggling in class for a myriad of reasons – some of which may or may not relate to poverty – are demonstrably left behind when adults demand that they manage both their time and their resources in such an abstract way, often without guidance.

There is so much nonsense talked about the younger generation being fully au fait with the full range of digital technology on offer, as if being born in the digital age bestows young people with an innate knowledge and understanding of the skills and mindset required to navigate towards progress in the modern age. The reality is that most kids are completely clueless when it comes to managing their learning remotely. Of course they are! Just because a child has been pressing icons on the screen of an iPad since they were a toddler, this does not imbue them with the organisational skills required to manage their learning online. To assume so would be like assuming that a toddler who has mastered the fun that can be had from a pop-up reading book is thus fortified with the skills and knowledge required to negotiate a library full of journals, encyclopaedias and reference manuals.

An increasing number of students that I work with are studying the WJEC/Eduqas GCSE syllabus, the creators of which produce a simply baffling array of resources that even I took a while to get my head around. Some of them are aimed at teachers, some of them in theory designed to be student-friendly. Most schools dump all of these resources into an area where students can access them, a collection of ponderous PDF files that are long and academically challenging. The one file which is explicitly aimed at students is designed as a student booklet, with space in which students can write their translation and notes. Most schools don’t even bother print this one out, instructing the students to work electronically. I have tutees who have not held a pen in class for years, so wedded is their school to the use of tablets or Chromebooks. I could honestly weep for their basic skills and feel outraged that so many schools are so blatantly ignoring the research that we have on the link between the use of a pen and memory. These students come to me with simply no idea what they have supposedly studied, what materials are in their possession and what they are supposed to do with them. They are completely overwhelmed and can’t even articulate the basic content that they have theoretically covered in class.

Technology is an absolute wonder. In the last few years, I have embraced online learning to the extent that I have made a career out of it, I have embraced the time-saving advantages of AI and I am always open to the advantages that technical advances can bring. As someone in possession of the world’s worst sense of direction, I find the smartphone genuinely liberating and life-changing, as it enables me to negotiate my way confidently. It even knows all the local pathways! As someone with poor eyesight, I love the fact that there has been an explosion in the availability of audiobooks, and that I can now access most books and articles in a format that allows me to manipulate the size and shape of the font as well as the colour of the background. This is all wonderful! Believe me, I love technology! But I am heartily sick of two things that the digital snake-oil salesmen seem to have successfully convinced society of: firstly, the blind assumption that digital is always better, when in fact people should be asking themselves whether it is better and if so why – what other advantages might the technology bring and what are the potential pitfalls? Secondly, I am tired of the assumption that children born in the current epoch are all miraculously imbued with innate digital skills and knowledge, a bizarre fantasy which seems thoroughly ingrained, despite the ever-increasing pile of evidence to the contrary.

France is bacon and other misconceptions

When I was young, my father said to me: “Knowledge is power, France is bacon.” For more than a decade I wondered over the meaning of the second part and what was the surreal linkage between the two. If I said the quote to someone, “Knowledge is power, France is bacon,” they nodded knowingly. Or someone might say “Knowledge is power” and I’d finish the quote, “France is bacon” and they wouldn’t look at me like I’d said something very odd, but thoughtfully agree. I did ask a teacher what did “Knowledge is power, France is bacon” mean, and got a full 10 minute explanation of the “knowledge is power” bit but nothing on “France is bacon.” When I prompted further explanation by saying “France is bacon?” in a questioning tone, I just got a “yes”. At 12 I didn’t have the confidence to press it further. I just accepted it as something I would never understand. It wasn’t until years later I saw it written down, “Knowledge is power,” Francis Bacon, that the penny dropped.

Anonymous post on Reddit, 2011.

The ease with which such misconceptions can arise is something that all teachers should be aware of. Most likely, you can remember some of your own from childhood. For me, most memorably, it was the phrase “rich as Croesus”, which my mother used to use regularly. As a kid, unsurprisingly, I’d never heard of the ancient Greek king of legendary wealth, so I heard “rich as creases.” For years I wondered what being rich had to do with having creases, or why creases were considered to be the same thing as being rich. I just put it down to one of those weird things that grown-ups say.

It is important to remember that much of what adults say is inherently puzzling to young children. Before we berate them for a lack of intellectual curiosity (why on earth didn’t I just ask … ?), it is important to remind ourselves that pretty much everything that adults say or do can seem puzzling on some level to very young children. It is not, therefore, surprising when they shrug and accept a saying or something that they are told is a truism that makes little obvious sense: nothing makes obvious sense when you’re small.

Further to that, the account of the child who heard “France is bacon” illustrates the anxiety that most children have that they have at best missed something obvious or at worst that they are inherently stupid. You can feel the child’s unease as they anxiously test the waters with the various ways in which they attempt to have the saying explained to them. Even the teacher completely misses the opportunity to correct the misconception, as they clearly did not realise where the misconception lay. This illustrates the tendency that we have as teachers to assume that we already understand what it is that a child needs explaining to them: in this case, the teacher assumed that the child was puzzled as to the underlying message of the saying – in what sense can knowledge bring power? What the teacher actually needed to do was to quiz the child on why they were asking about it – what was puzzling them about the quotation? Had the teacher done so, the misconception would have been identified and rectified.

One of the things that I love about tutoring is the opportunity that the one-to-one setting brings to uncover such misconceptions or gaps in a child’s knowledge. This is partly because of the time and focused attention that it affords, but it is also because of the opportunity that you are offering a child to ask all of those “stupid” questions that they’ve been bottling up for years. Nothing brings me greater joy than a tutee who develops the confidence to interrupt me and demand an explanation for something, or to ask me a question that I did not realise that they needed to ask. That’s when the relationship between the tutor and their student has really developed, when a child gains the confidence to demand the most out of their sessions.

Just recently, I was reminded how careful we need to be when assuming what a child knows. I showed my tutee the translation of a Latin poem by Catullus, which contains the metaphor “my purse is full of cobwebs”. Now I went in with the assumption that the child might need encouragement to grasp the metaphor, as many children do not find these as easy as you might assume. During the discussion, however, I discovered that she did not in fact know what “a purse” was. There was no chance of her understanding the metaphor until that was rectified! It had not previously occurred to me that this might be a word that a 16-year-old might not know: but if your family have always used the word “wallet”, or your parents carry their change in their jeans, or – as is becoming increasingly the norm – they don’t really carry cash at all, then maybe it is simply not a word you have come across. We should never, ever assume.

Misconceptions that arise from mishearings such as “France is bacon” or “rich as creases” also illustrate the essential importance of dual coding. A couple of years ago, I realised that one of my tutees was convinced that the dative case had something to do with numbers. After a couple of minutes of trying to explore where this misconception had come from, I suddenly realised what had happened: his teacher had (quite rightly) taught his class that the dative case was to be translated as “to” or “for”. My tutee, however, had heard “two” or “four”. He heard numbers instead of words, and he had been understandably confused ever since. Yet had the teacher simply written the words “to” and “for” on the board as well as saying them out loud, this misconception would have been avoided. So many people confuse dual coding with the idea of simply putting a nice picture on their handouts, or the ridiculous belief that illustrations are essential for basic vocabulary learning. Not a bit of it. Dual coding is the process of combining words with visual stimulus. It is used to help the brain to grasp a concept without misconceptions: using a visual representation of what you are explaining in written words, or writing down what you are explaining verbally.

Children will always form misconceptions and that fact is nothing to be feared. It does, however, mean that teachers must be particularly alert to them and the methods that are most likely going to help to resolve them, or to prevent them from forming in the first place.

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

Stress? What stress?

For various reasons, I’ve been thinking about stress. More specifically, stress relating to the work that people do. As we bed in to the holiday spell (for some, I have read, quite literally), there will be people reading this who find themselves wondering where they will find the strength from to go back into work.

While everyone will experience work-related stress from time to time, it is a truth universally acknowledged that some jobs are apparently more stressful than others. This universally-accepted truth is riffed upon beautifully in an old Mitchell and Webb sketch, which I won’t link to because it gets a bit post-watershed towards the end. The scenario drawn is one partner coming home from a tough day at work as a paediatrician, working with sick and dying children; the running gag is his earnest desire to reassure his partner, whose job entails tasting new products at an ice-cream factory, that their careers are both equally important and equally pressurised. “Just because I’m a paediatrician dealing with severely ill children, doesn’t mean that you can’t have a tough day tasting ice cream,” he says.

People have wildly varied takes on the levels of stress that they assume come with classroom teaching. Some people seem irrevocably wedded to the idea that teachers are work-shy layabouts who finish at 4.00pm on the days that they do work, plus luxuriate in an almost unlimited supply of holiday time when they don’t. I lost count of the number of times someone hurled the “long holidays” at me like it was a brilliant gotcha. After a while, I used to hurl it back. “Teaching is a fantastic job,” I would say. “Did you know that there is currently an enormous drive to get more people into teaching, so given how convinced you are of the benefits, shall I send you a link to the courses that are recruiting? You even get paid to train!” That usually shut them up.

There have always been people who think that teaching’s a breeze. There are plenty of others who believe that it is horribly stressful. At times, they were right. While the average classroom teacher will not find themselves in charge of a multi-million pound budget, nor will they find themselves in a position where they are hiring and firing, nor indeed are they likely to find themselves presenting their work to a roomful of demanding CEOs, I’d like to see those same CEOs try their hand at managing a roomful of Year 10s on a hot afternoon when there’s a wasp in the room.

Let’s be honest. My subject, in the grand scheme of things, is relatively unimportant. While I can bang the drum of what A Good Thing Latin is for all students, let’s not be silly about this: whether or not a student attains a respectable grade in their Latin GCSE is not going to affect their life-chances (unless their life-plan is to become a Professor of Classics, and even then there are ways around that particular problem). However, most Latinists who work – as I did – in the state sector, will find themselves expected to earn their keep by offering at least one other mainstream subject. For me, that was English. As a result, I have found myself solely responsible for the GCSE English grades of several cohorts. This has included sets where there was an enormous focus on what used to be the C/D borderline and sets where their chances of making it to that borderline were considered slim. This, in very real terms, meant that I was directly responsible for a student’s life chances. I am not being over-dramatic, I don’t think. In all honesty, whether a child attains a pass grade in both English and Maths will shape their destiny in ways that few people outside education are fully aware of. A child who does not attain their GCSE English and Maths is largely condemned to a life on minimum wage. This may sound over-dramatic, but it is broadly true. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, including many successful entrepreneurs who take pride in citing their scholarly failures as a badge of honour. I’m glad for them that they overcame this hurdle, but a hurdle it is, and one which proves impossible for the majority to overcome. I have never cried more tears of joy than when my students who had been classified as unlikely to pass managed to do so. For them, it quite literally meant the difference between poverty and a fighting chance. These kids, by the way, fought me every step of the way and if they’d had their way they never would have sat the exam in the first place. That, I would argue, is a considerable pressure, one faced by thousands of teachers across the country every year: helping kids to get over a barrier, with them quite literally doing everything in their power to remain behind it.

Another factor which many people fail to appreciate is the number of safeguarding concerns that your average teacher is exposed to during their career. I never specialised in pastoral care and did not do any training in the field of safeguarding beyond that which is expected of anyone working with young people, yet in my time I came across cases of neglect, of child sexual exploitation, of child criminal exploitation, of illegal drug use and more besides. On the penultimate day of my 21 years at the chalkface I became aware of what I was concerned could be a potential case of FGM and was urgently summoning Designated Safeguarding Leads to my classroom for advice, all while maintaining a calm demeanour and continuing to run the classroom and teach my lessons as if nothing were afoot. This is the kind of thing that teachers do every day and I am not sure whether other people realise this. We don’t talk about it much, partly because it’s not appropriate, but partly because it is – or has become – the norm. It is not unusual for teachers to be working with children who are experiencing genuine trauma; it is not unusual to be painfully aware of some deeply troubling circumstances that a child may be experiencing at home.

For most of my career, I loved my job. I also considered it a considerably less stressful deal than others experienced by more high-powered friends who managed large budgets or were responsible for people’s livelihoods in their business. Yet sometimes I would remind myself that I was, in many ways, responsible for people’s livelihoods. A teacher can shape someone’s future in unimaginable ways and their influence – for better or for worse – can dictate which doors are open and which ones are closed in the future. If you are a teacher, never underestimate that power.

Responsive Tutoring

One of the most powerful tools for promoting student progress is what’s called assessment for learning (AfL). When I was first teaching and the phrase was all the rage, you wouldn’t have passed an interview without mentioning it. While the acryonym AfL is less often used these days, it still underpins modern teaching.

The thinkers credited with the founding principles behind the use of AfL in the classroom are on record as saying they wish they’d called it something else. Rather than “assessment for learning”, they wish they’d called it “responsive teaching” and I can see why. In many ways, AfL is about neither assessment nor learning – at least, not in isolation. AfL, or rather responsive teaching, is about what a teacher does differently in response to where their students are in terms of their understanding.

While summative assessments (such as a GCSE examination) focus on evaluating final outcomes, AfL is embedded in day-to-day teaching in order to gauge students’ progress, clarify misunderstandings and – most crucially – to guide further learning. Effective use in the classroom presents a unique set of challenges for teachers, especially when working with larger groups. The process is infinitely easier in a one-to-one setting, where the dynamic between the tutor and the tutee shapes the entire process.

Responsive teaching is meant to be a continuous loop, the gathering and interpretation of evidence used to shape a teacher’s instructional decisions. AfL can also be used to help students to recognise their own current level of understanding and set goals to improve. It is meant to be an ongoing, dynamic process and requires teachers to have a nuanced understanding of each student’s needs, strengths, and areas for improvement. To be effective, AfL requires not just frequent feedback but feedback that is individualised and actionable. In a one-on-one setting, a tutor can more naturally meet these requirements, while in a classroom with multiple students, the process becomes complex, requiring considerable skill and resourcefulness from the teacher.

When implementing AfL in the classroom, teachers encounter several challenges that are unique to managing large groups. In a classroom of 30 students, teachers must balance AfL with the demands of covering the curriculum, managing behaviour and addressing a multitude of diverse learning needs. The time constraints are significant. For each student, providing specific feedback and tailoring instructional adjustments is an ideal that is often close to impossible to achieve in practice. In any single lesson, a teacher may only have a minute or two to focus on each student. This time is rarely enough for comprehensive feedback, making it challenging to provide meaningful guidance on areas for improvement.

In larger classrooms, teachers have to rely on quick, general assessments, such as asking questions to the class or using hand-raising methods, but these approaches can miss individual nuances and only provide superficial insights into each student’s understanding. Real-time feedback is essential for the process to work, but logistical challenges mean that teachers sometimes delay feedback until they can examine students’ work. This delay can diminish the impact of the feedback and may hinder a student’s immediate progress. It also places a significant workload burden on the teacher: even schools who have understood and embraced the principles behind whole-class feedback are still placing a considerable assessment burden on the classroom teacher in terms of work that must be completed outside the classroom.

In any classroom, some students may actively participate and show enthusiasm, while others remain quiet or withdrawn. Unless a school has fully embraced and embedded the principles of “no excuses”, teachers will struggle to gauge the understanding of all students. Ensuring equal participation is challenging, and without specific engagement from each student, teachers may only get a partial view of the overall class understanding. Implementing AfL strategies requires significant time and energy, which teachers often need to dedicate to managing classroom behaviour. Students can become disengaged, especially if they don’t immediately understand a lesson or find it challenging. The need for behaviour management can take time away from delivering AfL, reducing the effectiveness of feedback and lesson adaptation.

By contrast, one-to-one tutoring provides an environment where AfL shapes and defines the entire process. In a one-on-one setting, the tutor’s focus is exclusively on a single student and this individual attention means the tutor can tailor questions, feedback, and guidance specifically for that student. Any misconceptions or gaps in knowledge are immediately identified and addressed, without the need for complex assessment. For example, a tutor might notice hesitation in a student’s response and immediately reframe the question to clarify understanding. This kind of personalised, immediate and dynamic intervention is impossible in a classroom.

In tutoring, feedback is instant. If a student misunderstands a concept, the tutor can pause and offer corrective feedback on the spot. There is no need to wait, no need to press ahead with the curriculum. This timely response to a student’s needs helps to solidify learning and build confidence, making AfL truly effective. Tutoring allows for a flexibility in pacing which simply cannot happen in the classroom. A tutor can spend as much time as necessary on a particular concept, adjusting the level of challenge to ensure that a student remains engaged. For example, if a student masters a topic quickly, the tutor can introduce more complex material. Conversely, if a student is struggling, the tutor can slow down, review foundational concepts, or use alternative explanations.

One-to-one tutoring fosters a relationship where the student may feel more comfortable expressing misunderstandings or asking questions. I actively praise my students for interrupting me and asking questions, although I am careful to highlight for them that this is the right environement in which to do so; it is important to me that I support classroom teachers by clarifying to students that they cannot – nor should they – demand this level of individual attention and feedback in the mainstream classroom.