classroom teaching – Page 2 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Results and Expectations

As GCSE results roll in today, I’ve been thinking about expectations and how they shape our response to students’ results. It’s a painful and undeniable fact that there are some students every year who will not only be disappointed but will have to deal with the disappointment of their own parents. In my experience, this usually happens with relatively high-achieving students, some of whom have families that expect nothing but the best. This can transfigure into the genuinely distressing situation in which a line of excellent grades will be met with disinterest.

I sometimes wonder whether this is a very modern phenomenon. I recall a family friend, whose daughter was a year or two older than I was and who therefore sat her GCSEs before I did. She achieved straight As and I remember my father (a man of excellent academic ability himself) being genuinely agog. He simply couldn’t believe that anyone could achieve the top grade in every single subject. I remember thinking the same. This, of course, was long before the existence of the A* and the starred grade was indeed brought in as an attempt to recognise the absolute top of the top – an elite class of those who achieved the A-grade and not originally envisaged as something that would be achieved in multiple subjects. Likewise, the current grade 9. As many of us predicted at the time, this philosophy was completely lost on everyone, and failed with immediate effect: the A* and the grade 9 became simply the top grade as far as everyone was concerned and as a result, we now have families who report “disappointment” with an A-grade at A level or a grade 8 at GCSE.

While I’ve never been one to shy away from setting high standards, I really do have to wonder what’s gone wrong for a person who isn’t happy with their child achieving an A-grade or an 8. What do they think the problem is? Exam results are undeniably important, but they do not define you as an academic. Want to know my GCSE grades? Okay. I sat nine GCSEs in 1990, relatively few by modern standards, but that’s how it was in those days. Some students sat nine, some sat only seven or eight. I achieved six grade As, one grade B and two grade Cs. To this day I swear they mixed up my biology paper with somebody else’s, as I was expecting a C grade (along with the C grades I did achieve in maths and chemistry) but that subject came out at a grade B. I was probably more knocked out by that grade than by any of my others, which overall were much better than I was expecting.

My line-up of grades would probably be considered pretty mediocre by some of the families I have worked with. They will perhaps be rather surprised (possibly even alarmed!) to learn that I did not achieve straight As in everything. But here’s the thing. Not only did I go on to achieve a 1st class honours degree, I achieved the highest degree mark in my whole year group (the Head of Department told me). After that, I achieved a Masters with Distinction and then went on to complete a PhD. My perfectly decent but perhaps unremarkable GCSE grades were no barrier to this, and while I don’t want to sound like Jeremy Clarkson rolling out his tedious yearly claim to a champagne-fuelled, Lamborghini-driving lifestyle on the back of two Us in his A levels, I would definitely suggest that everyone should keep their exam grades in perspective.

There are numerous reasons why I wasn’t one of the absolute top-performers at school. I wasn’t very good at studying when I was younger and it took me a while to learn the methods that worked best for me (there was no decent research or advice in that area in those days). As an adult, I am fascinated by the psychology of effective study, and it is a real focus in my tuition sessions. If you want to consult a genuine expert in the field, look up Dr. Paul Penn, who is a psychologist and researcher who specialises in how to study. You can visit his website here and he has a great YouTube channel. I interviewed him for Teachers Talk Radio in 2022, and you can listen to that episode here.

Other reasons for my relatively unremarkable performance in my GCSEs? Well, I didn’t enjoy school very much and if I’m brutally frank I found a lot of my teachers tiresome and dull. That’s no excuse for anything of course, but it may have been a factor in my distinctly average peformance in some subjects. Finally — and this one’s the killer — I know that a lot of teachers believed me to be significantly cleverer than I actually was. That might sound odd for someone who ended up with PhD, but quite honestly a doctorate is no indicator of brilliance. You wouldn’t believe the number of mediocre academics who manage to scrape together enough to qualify for that title. Making it through a PhD is actually a case of whether you can hack the process and apply the required amount of discipline rather than an indicator of genuine excellence. As I once heard someone say of the difference between those who make it in elite weight-lifting and those who do not, the main deciding factor is whether or not you have the tolerance to endure the sheer, unrelenting tedium of repeated effort.

So why did my teachers believe that I was so clever? I think it’s because I was very articulate and good at writing. As I came to realise when I read The Language Instinct by Steve Pinker, while this is not necessarily an indicator of high intelligence, it is assumed to be so by most people, even those who are supposed to be experts in the field of education. Thus, as a result of my linguistic fluency, all of my teachers laboured under the impression that I was seriously smart. My genuinely poor performance in mathematics and the sciences was put down to laziness, bloody-mindedness, wilful ignorance or just about any other character flaw you could imagine. (God forbid it could be down to their poor teaching). I tried many times to tell my maths and science teachers that I was genuinely struggling and needed help with basic concepts, but I was ignored. The only reason I passed maths was because they eventually realised that I was in serious danger of failing (due, in their view, to my sheer wilfulness) and — in a panic about their pass-rate — they made the correct call to enter me for the intermediate paper, which is designed to help candidates get over the threshold to achieve a C grade. The only reason I passed chemistry was because in Year 11 we gained a new teacher who was not particularly likeable but was actually rather good — a rarity indeed, for most of our teachers were truly terrible, as they could be in the 1980s. After a few weeks of observing my wild guesswork when it came to balancing chemical equations, he looked me straight in the eye and said, “you don’t even know what the valency table is, do you?” I enlightened him as to the fact that not only was this true, but I didn’t actually understand what the periodic table was either. Or indeed … anything. He nodded. He gave me some basic remedial help plus a few bluffing techniques and I made it through the exam thanks to him. As for biology, like I say … Lord knows. I swear to this day that it was an error and I wasn’t going to tell them that.

So, as results are announced today, I find myself thinking of those students and their families across the country who will be disappointed with excellent grades. How very sad that sounds. My grades were a source of celebration in my household and I recall not only that I was delighted with them but that my parents were too. While we all want to set high standards for ourselves and our children, let us not forget that a string of top grades in everything are not the be-all and end-all for a happy and successful life. Even Einstein didn’t get top grades in all of his subjects.

Make No Assumptions

“Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in while, or the light won’t come in.”

Alan Alda, American actor

One of the biggest luxuries of one-to-one tutoring compared to classroom teaching is the opportunity it gives you to make no assumptions. In the classroom, hauling large cohorts of students through a curriculum means that you have to make assumptions sometimes: you can explore responsive teaching and effective questioning all you like, but fundamentally the class has to move on. Without (or even with) some quite remarkably skilled classroom practice, a few may still be left behind. In an ideal world they wouldn’t be, but we don’t live in an ideal world.

In its best and most effective form, one-to-one tutoring is an opportunity for the tutor to make no assumptions and — as a result — for the student to gain understanding at a level that they may never have experienced before. This applies no matter what level they are working at. Those who appear to be thriving can be challenged and have their understanding tested. Such examination can really shore up their mastery by picking holes in any misconceptions that they may be harbouring, misapprehensions which may trip them up at a later date. Whenever I have a student who is performing at a high-grade level, I remind myself of the number of students I have worked with who are working at a low grade and who report high performance in their first two years of the subject. Never. Make. Assumptions. Just because someone appears to be thriving does not mean that their understanding is perfect or complete, nor does it mean that they will not struggle at a later date.

Here’s another assumption for you. When working with high-performing students, many teachers and tutors assume that “stretch and challenge” must mean new material, going beyond the curriculum. This absolutely has its place and may well be warranted in some cases. But in my experience, those cases are phenomenally rare in Latin. In this highly-inflected language, a subject in which the greatest gift you can offer a student to guarantee future excellence is a cast-iron grasp of the basics, I have yet to meet a student that does not benefit from being challenged to justify and unpick their understanding of the work that’s already in front of them; this applies especially to students who claim to find such work “too easy”. There are times when a high-performing student can translate a GCSE-level passage with relative ease and it would be tempting to nod along and congratulate them. But making assumptions based upon their apparently confident performance is letting them down. Asking them a range of pertinent, incisive questions and challenging them to explain and justify their translation usually reveals a myriad of tiny holes in their presumed comprehension. This is by no means a disaster, it is rather something to be celebrated. Through this process, a student working at a high level can improve the quality and depth of their understanding and that can make all the difference to their ability to thrive at the next level in the future.

Many students come to me with their own assumptions. A common belief that some students hold is that it is only the difficult material that they are struggling with. They base this supposition on the fact that they started to experience problems as the material became more challenging. But with rare exceptions, it is seldom the case that the so-called “difficult” material is the problem. I could take a student’s assessment of their problem at face value, and start tackling their knowledge of the indirect statement, the ablative absolute or the uses of the subjunctive. But I have learnt that this is a false assumption. Instead, I start by showing them a basic table of noun endings and ask them how familiar they are with that material. I then ask them whether they can name all the noun cases in the correct order and tell me exactly how those cases are used and translated. In all my years of tutoring, it has been an extremely rare occurrence that a student can do so without mistakes or hesitation: it’s happened maybe once or twice. This is because such students will have been taught the basics a very long time ago and then their teacher has assumed that these basics have been retained ad infinitum. If I could advise classroom teachers of one crucial tweak to their classroom practice, it would be this: get properly informed about memory and retrieval practice and use it proactively to revisit the basics. It will be a better use of classroom time than anything else you are doing at the higher level. For example, as a starter task, ask your Year 11 (or even Year 12 or Year 13) students to write down the cases in order and also give a rough summary of how each case is used. You will be amazed at how many of them cannot do it.

Students also have assumptions about themselves or their own abilities, all of which require challenge. Presumptions such as “I’m no good at this” or “I can’t do it” are obviously damaging, but perhaps even more so are postulations such as “I know the basics”, indeed these blithe suppositions can actually be more difficult to overcome. Students who are convinced of their own weaknesses can be easy to work with, as all you need to do is use the power of one-to-one support to show them that they absolutely can do it: the revelation is so exciting and inspiring for most of them that they tend to be an easy convert to the tutoring process. A harder sell can be persuading those who are convinced that their early progress in the subject is not to be questioned and who thus request a focus on the most complicated constructions. It can be something of an unpleasant shock for them when small fissures are revealed in what they were convinced were solid foundations and it is these students who actually require the most reassurance. Students who have found the subject difficult from Day 1 are used to the struggle; it is those who hit problems later down the line that can falter at the very suggestion that they might need to revisit the subject at a rudimentary level.

Photo by Kyle Gregory Devaras on Unsplash

The importance of safeguarding

This week I attended an online training session on safeguarding, something which is included as part of my membership of The Tutors’ Association. The session is by no means the only way in which I keep my knowledge and awareness of safeguarding and child protection up to date, but it is one of the many things I choose to do to stay informed. I say “choose,” because tutoring remains an unregulated industry and — contrary to what many parents may assume — there are currently no legal protections in place to safeguard minors or their families when it comes to private tuition.

Last year, the BBC reported that more than 90 private tutors working in the UK have been previously convicted of sexual offences involving children within the past 20 years. This is frankly horrifying. The children’s commissioner for England called for reform in light of the findings, but currently there is still no legal requirement for people offering private lessons to undergo any kind of criminal record check before working with children and young people; there are also no guidelines about training for tutors when it comes to safeguarding (or indeed anything else).

While I labour under no illusions that teacher training is the be-all and end-all when it comes to education, indeed I would rate my own PGCE from St John’s College, Cambridge as one of the most woefully inadequate and borderline useless qualifications I have to my name, at least that process required some formal training in safeguarding. Beyond that, if a tutor is a qualified teacher with experience in schools (and by the way, those two things are not the same thing at all!) then they will have been put through mandatory safeguarding training on a regular basis, in accordance with the law. For this reason more than any other, I would personally be rigorously frisking any tutor who has no longterm experience in classroom teaching as part of their background for evidence that they are alert to and aware of the meaning and importance of safeguarding. People should be particularly aware that there are plenty of tutors who advertise the fact that they have a teaching qualification, but in fact they spent no time in the classroom beyond their training year. From a safeguarding perspective, this will mean that they are very inexperienced and will not have done much training in this area.

The current lack of regulation means not only that many tutors do not bother to secure a DBS check for themselves (the process is actually not as easy as you might think, and requires you to be attached to a recognised organisation who will process it for you), but perhaps even more concerningly many of them do not have experience of any training in safeguarding. A simple browse through online discussions between tutors reveals a plethora of would-be professionals claiming that membership of a professional organisation is “not worth it” and that securing a DBS is “not necessary, because parents don’t ask.” As for training, it doesn’t seem to occur to any of them that it might be important or useful for them.

My own role in schools was broadly that of a classroom teacher with the occasional bit of further responsibility thrown in, and I climbed no further up the pastoral ladder than the role of form tutor. Despite this, I always took the safeguarding aspects of my job extremely seriously. Not only did I follow and absorb all training to the letter, I used to (and still do) read the relevant serious case reviews published by the government; they are now archived by the NSPCC. Such reviews are, in my opinion, important for ordinary members of any workforce who come into contact with children, as they often highlight individual and institutional failings that everyone should be aware of. Despite this, I have never met anyone else in my profession who reads them, except people who have to do so as a part of their job description (Designated Safeguarding Leads).

The training I attended this week was good and I said so. Let’s be honest, I am notoriously difficult to please, being one of those teachers that has sat through so many shockingly poor in-service training sessions that I have become what I am more than prepared to admit is hyper-cynical. I’m deeply intolerant of any kind of flannel and even less tolerant of what I like to call institutional back-patting, when everyone sits around and tells each other what a terrific job they’re doing. I see this a lot in tutoring: it’s usually dressed up as “this is a positive/safe space” but really it amounts to nothing more than ridiculous complacency arising from a lack of challenge, which is not good for any professional in my humble opinion. But The Tutors’ Association have done a good thing in appointing Holly Goodwin as their Designated Safeguarding Lead and indeed it is testament to the vastly improved professional approach of the new regime in the Association that it has appointed a DSL in the first place. Holly has experience as a DSL in schools in both the state and the independent sector. She now works as a consultant and trainer in schools, universities, children’s homes, hospices and charities, helping organisations to build safer environments for children and vulnerable adults. So, she’s a great appointment, and it is really good to know that I can contact her for advice.

One of the things I miss most about being in a school is being able share my low-level hunches in an appropriate way. People without experience in this area often imagine that safeguarding is high-drama revelations and interventions, and of course, sometimes such things happen. Most of the time, however, the process is all about the little tiny things, the things that seem like nothing in isolation. As a tutor, if I notice something small like a child being consistently tired, or I note that the father seems somewhat domineering, I cannot do anything with such an observation. As a classroom teacher, I would have shared my thoughts on the confidential system. My school, like many, used CPOMs, a software system designed to streamline safeguarding concerns within institutions. We were actively encouraged to log even the most insignificant of observations, because they might form part of a wider picture. In an ideal world, when safeguarding training is really effective, every teacher is proactively using the system on a regular basis; as a result, for some children, a picture starts to form from all the little tiny raised flags, something which might start to indicate a bigger cause for concern. Thus, while an individual observation such as “Dad seems a bit domineering” would never warrant any kind of intervention on its own (it is not illegal to be an unpleasant man), it might one day be relevant to a bigger picture that does indeed lead to further investigation. I don’t have access to anything like this now, and I really miss it.

UK schools are among the most important places for children’s safeguarding because they serve as a central, consistent and regulated environment where children spend a significant portion of their time. Teachers and other school staff see children daily, allowing them to observe patterns of behaviour, appearance, and emotional wellbeing. Because of this routine contact, schools are often the first place where signs of concern are noticed. I really do miss being part of this schema and am alert to the fact that private tutoring puts individuals like me in a rather different position from a regular teacher, who is a part of something bigger.

The stupid cow deserved it

This week, a Scottish school-pupil who seriously injured his female teacher by picking her up and slamming her head-first onto a concrete floor has been given a community sentence. Kieran Matthew, who was 17 at the time when he attacked his victim, left his teacher unconscious in a pool of blood after throwing her to the floor “like a rag doll.” Following the attack, the court was told that Matthew sat down, put his feet up on the teacher’s desk and said: “The stupid cow deserved it.”

Matthew avoided time in custody due to his age and an early guilty plea. He has been placed under social work supervision for three years, given a one-year curfew and ordered to attend a mentoring course that includes anger management training. While I am not in favour of custodial sentences being handed out without due cause, especially when it comes to such young offenders, I will confess to being downright horrified that an offence this violent did not lead to some time in prison.

The incident highlights the risks faced by teachers, especially female teachers, in some settings. Matthew was teetering on the age of legal adulthood and inhabiting the body of a fully-grown man. There were times, when I was in mainstream school, that I became viscerally aware of the physical advantage that male pupils beyond a certain age had over me, a very small female weighing significantly less than 50 Kilos. We need to be frank about this. There was one occasion in which I was prevented from exiting my classroom by a 15 year-old boy, rendered helpless until I was rescued by a male maths teacher, who physically intervened and pulled the boy back by his collar. In my final year, in an incident that helped to precipitate my departure from the classroom, I was surrounded and harassed by a group of 16 year-old boys while I was on duty outside. When I confronted them the next day, backed up by their Head of Year and a member of SLT (both male), I tried to address the matter as directly and as frankly as I could. “Had I not been a teacher, had I not felt the fact that you were holding back because of that invisible line of authority, I would have been afraid of you,” I told them. The truth? I was already afraid of them. Why wouldn’t I be? They were much bigger and much stronger than I was, and they appeared to be showing me no respect. That, as any woman who has heard male footsteps approaching behind her on a dark night will tell you, is frightening. You’re a fool if you claim otherwise.

I was determined to educate them, to get the boys to see the error of their ways. “Do you want to become the sort of men that women are afraid of?” I asked them. Some of them, I am pleased to say, did hang their heads in shame at this point. These are the boys I have hope for. They didn’t think in the moment and they acted like yobs, but I don’t believe they were violent. But the ring-leader held my gaze and smirked. This was a boy who had apparently witnessed his father being violent towards his mother and had already started experimenting with this life-path for himself, so I’m afraid I held out little hope for the man he was destined to become.

What I cannot accept is the idea that vulnerable female teachers must empathise with violent offenders and that we must make allowances for their behaviour. Matthew, we are told, has ADHD and a “very low IQ”. I see no link between either of these facts and such violent behaviour, and would argue that it is a grotesque insult to anyone else who has these things in common with Matthew to suggest that there is a link. How very dare you. Matthew had previously shown significant aggression towards other pupils and according to his defence lawyer had “longstanding issues managing his emotions.” Dear God, what a ghastly euphemism. How often do we have to hear this? How often must women and girls be subjected to male violence, only to be told that we should understand the “difficulties” that men and boys have with “managing their emotions”? To quote a line attributed to Margaret Atwood, “men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Until the world stops making excuses for males who behave in this way, nothing will ever change.

The casual misogyny of the line uttered by Matthew after his attack is perhaps the most chilling part of the whole incident. “The stupid cow deserved it.” I would struggle to accept any performative “remorse” shown by a young man who is capable of doing what he did and behaving as he did so afterwards. Feet on the desk. Not my problem. She asked for it. And yes, he was a young man, not a “boy” as newspaper reports would have it. At 17 years old, Matthew was legally entitled to learn to drive a car, to apply for a private pilot’s license, to donate blood and to join the armed forces. He could choose his own doctor, work and be interviewed by the police without an appropriate adult present (although, given his reported low IQ, one may well have been appointed in his case). A care order could no longer be placed upon him. He was, according to the law at the time he committed this horrific offence, virtually an adult. At the time of sentencing, he was fully adult. So no, I will not call him “a boy”.

While most teachers will never face such a horrific physical assault during their working life, there is mounting evidence that violent assault in UK schools does go on and is becoming more common. A recent report from the Health and Safety Executive reported that hundreds of teachers are assaulted per year in the UK. This is one of the main reasons why I am so dismayed that Matthew’s sentence was not custodial. To me, the fact that the attack was on a teacher should be an aggravating factor, in the same way that assaulting a police officer is an offence in its own right. Assaulting someone in a position of authority and trust, whether it be a teacher, a nurse, a doctor or a police officer, should be seen by society as an assault on us all. As Matthew was told in court, his teacher “has dedicated her life to vulnerable school children such as you … You have robbed her of her career as she has been unable to go back to school due to panic attacks, nightmares and night terrors as a result of this assault.” Serious actions warrant serious consequences. If society places any value on education whatsoever, it needs to demonstrate that it can prioritise the safety and dignity of the people we ask to perform this role. Without that commitment, we may find the teacher’s side of the desk increasingly empty.

What GCSE students don’t know about the Aeneid

Since last week, when I wrote again about the power of one-to-one tutoring, I have had even further cause to reflect on its essential benefits.

It would come as shock, I suspect, to most classroom teachers, the extent to which students forget, misinterpret or loftily ignore what they have no doubt been taught in school. I say “no doubt” because I refuse to believe that students have never been taught the basic background to the texts that they are studying, despite their protestations.

What does happen, I believe, is that teachers over-estimate students’ ability to absorb and remember complex material. It certainly came as a shock to me when I started to read more about how memory works (a criminally overlooked field of study in my training) and came to realise just how much repetition is required for students to grasp the basics. In this blog post, I plan to outline the opening few lines of one of the current OCR set texts and explore the things that have puzzled, baffled and troubled the students I have worked with this year. I hope that this will enlighten readers as to the extent that some students struggle with complex material.

One of this year’s texts is taken from Virgil’s Aeneid Book 1. It starts at line 13, so as close to the beginning of the text as one could wish for. This potentially makes for a much easier life than the times when a set text has been taken from Book 10 or Book 12. One would have thought that it would be an easy task to get students to comprehend the basic facts of what the text is about and its core purpose. Well, one would have thought wrongly. With only one exception, the students requesting my help with the Virgil text this year have not been able to define what an epic is, nor were they able to say what Virgil’s purpose was in writing the Aeneid. Most of them swore blind that they’d never been taught the definition of an epic. Beyond this, they have all been baffled to the point of total and utter confusion as to who the Trojans were and what on earth they had to do with the Romans and their self-definition. So, let’s look at some extracts from the opening lines of the text and see in more detail what’s been troubling my charges.

urbs antiqua fuit, Tyrii tenuere coloni,
There was an ancient city, [which] Tyrian settlers inhabited,

Karthago, Italiam contra Tiberinaque longe
Carthage, opposite Italy and the far-distant mouth of the Tiber,

ostia, dives opum studiisque asperrima belli;
rich in resources and most formidable in the practices of war;

Out of those who have requested help with the Virgil, most of them were unable to tell me where Carthage was and why it’s described as a formidable stronghold. None of them – genuinely no exceptions – understood the historical fact that the Romans had destroyed Carthage over 100 years before Virgil was writing. While I would not for one moment expect any of them to have detailed knowledge of the three Punic Wars, I was a little surprised that none of them seemed to be conscious of the fact that Virgil was writing in a world in which this rival superpower had been razed to the ground decades earlier, and that this was a crucially important part of how the Romans defined themselves. Does it seem likely that this was never mentioned by any of their teachers? I think probably not. Is it likely, however, that this was perhaps mentioned once in the first lesson and then rarely – if ever – reiterated? That, I’m afraid, seems plausible. I think teachers need to think very hard about what’s happening in the first couple of lessons of set text work. When you present the students with the text, their minds are completely preoccupied with the length of it and how on earth they are going to cope with learning it; they are thus even less likely to absorb any background information you’re giving them.

Very few students were able to tell me what the Tiber is (a river in Rome, as iconic to the Romans as the Thames is to Londoners) and none of them seemed to understand how Carthage is “opposite” Italy. Carthage lay on the other side of the Mediterranean sea, located on the coast of north Africa, in what we now call Tunisia – indeed, it kind of bulges out into the sea and looks to be the bit of land mass in Africa that is closest to Italy. Perhaps it is because my own sense of direction and general geography is so embarrassingly poor that I always look all of these places and features up on a map and contextualise them for myself in detail. Do teachers assume that their students’ knowledge of geography is as sound as their own? Maybe so, and if so, I guess my advantage is that my own geography is so awful that I assume absolutely nothing! Anyway, the text and the description of Carthage continues:

quam Iuno fertur terris magis omnibus unam
[one] which Juno is said to have cherished more [than] all [other] lands,

posthabita coluisse Samo; hic illius arma,
valuing [even] Samos the less;

Now we’re getting on to the meat of the text and what Virgil is building up to in this opening section. He sets out to explain why Juno, the queen of the gods (most students didn’t know that, by the way), has a massive beef with the Trojans. Here, he highlights the fact that Juno values Carthage even more than Samos. What’s he on about? My students didn’t know. Samos, an island off the coast of modern-day Turkey, was the birthplace of Juno and a centre of her worship. The fact that she values it less than Carthage highlights the importance of Carthage to her and hence her overwhelming desire to protect it. This is why Virgil mentions Samos.

progeniem sed enim Troiano a sanguine duci
But indeed she had heard [that] a breed [would] arise from Trojan blood,

audierat, Tyrias olim quae verteret arces;
which would one day overturn the Tyrian stronghold;

hinc populum late regem belloque superbum
from this would come a nation, wide-ruling and superior in war,

venturum excidio Libyae: sic volvere Parcas.
for the destruction of Libya: thus were the Fates unrolling.

I have asked all of my students to tell me who “the breed that would arise from Trojan blood” are, which could absolutely come up as a one-mark question in the exam. Until I explained, very few of them understood that it was the Romans. They seemed genuinely unsure about the point of the Aeneid‘s opening, which is to highlight how difficult the goddess Juno made it for the Trojans to make it to Italy, which was their destiny. Why were they headed to Italy? Again, when asked, students had not grasped the fact that Aeneas and the rest of the Trojans were refugees, survivors of the Trojan War and in search of a new city now that theirs had been destroyed. It seems remarkable given current events in both Europe and beyond that students seem to find this resonant fact so easy to forget. Has the analogy with modern refugees setting sail across dangerous waters ever been drawn for them? I do hope that is has, but again, maybe that’s happened only once. Students had failed to grasp that the Trojans are trying to get to Italy and that Juno is trying to prevent this because she is trying to prevent the Roman empire from existing and thus to prevent the destruction of Carthage by the Romans. Now, here’s what’s really interesting: I have explained this multiple times and in multiple ways to several different students individually, and most of them have really struggled to grasp it. I suspect it’s partly because they are having to think about multiple timelines and this is difficult for younger people; I also think it might have something to do with the fact that some of what they are being told is historical fact and some of it is legend – they genuinely find it difficult to get a handle on what it all means and how it fits together. I am still thinking about how it could be better explained in the future, since it’s clearly a lot more difficult to understand than those of us who are subject experts realise.

necdum etiam causae irarum saevique dolores
not even now had the causes of [her] resentment and bitter griefs

exciderant animo: manet alta mente repostum
left [her] heart: deep in her mind remained the far-off

iudicium Paridis spretaeque iniuria formae,
judgement of Paris and the insult of her beauty scorned,

et genus invisum, et rapti Ganymedis honores.
and her enmity towards the tribe and the honours paid to the stolen Ganymede.

Here, Virgil lists the reasons that Juno has for hating the Trojans. It seems that students find this really difficult, too. This is perhaps because they must grasp two separate things: firstly, they must understand that Juno’s over-arching reason for hating the Trojans is that they are destined to give rise to the Romans, who will eventually destroy her beloved Carthage. They find this really difficult to grasp, as I explained above. In addition, they must also understand that Juno has some other more petty reasons for hating the Trojans, mentioned here by Virgil. She has a general enmity towards the tribe because it is descended from someone called Dardanus, who was the son of her husband Jupiter as a result of one of his numerous extra-marital affairs. Thus, the existence of the entire Trojan race was an insult to Juno. In addition (and this is the only story that most of the students seemed familiar with) there was the beauty contest between three goddesses that Paris, a Trojan prince, was given the dubious task of judging. His choice was ultimately the cause of the Trojan War, since the bribe he was offered by the winner (Venus) was the most beautiful woman in the world, which was Helen, who happened to be married to a Greek. Hence, when Paris claimed his prize, the Greek tribes waged war upon the Trojans. More importantly for our purposes, the fact that Juno was not selected as the winner of the contest was yet another slight against her by a Trojan. The third petty reason mentioned, the “honours paid to the stolen Ganymede” is all about Jupiter’s promiscuity again. Ganymede was a handsome Trojan that Jupiter took a fancy to and abducted, yet another insult to his wife. (Note: Ganymede was not, as one of my students was absolutely convinced of, a horse. Not that taking a fancy to a horse was beyond Jupiter, miind you, but that isn’t what happened in the story).

his accensa super, iactatos aequore toto
Inflamed further by these [things], she kept the Trojans [who were] left by the Danaans

Troas, reliquias Danaum atque immitis Achilli,
and by ruthless Achilles far-distant from Latium, storm-tossed in every corner of the sea;

arcebat longe Latio, multosque per annos
and for many years

errabant, acti fatis, maria omnia circum.
they wandered around all the oceans by an act of fate.

tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem!
Such a great undertaking it was to found the Roman race!

Here, Virgil sums up his overall point: that it is Juno’s hatred of the Trojans and her fear of their impending destiny, which causes her to work against their journey and to thus postpone their fulfilment of fate. One of the final things that I have noticed students really struggle to grasp is that fact that Juno knows full well that she won’t succeed: as a goddess, she can see the past, the present and the future, and she knows that the destruction of Carthage by the Romans is fated and inevitable. Still, she’s going to do everything in her power to prevent, or at least delay, the inevitable. I find it interesting that young people should struggle to understand this very human kind of motivation – that we might still strive for something that we already know is doomed to failure in the longterm. I guess they haven’t had experience of it yet.

Before teachers feel too dismal, I should point out that I do tend to specialise in working with students who really struggle with the subject. That said, what has been interesting this year is that almost all of my students have struggled with this text, even the high-fliers. I hope that this post has given some food for thought. It is so easy to assume that students have understood what we have told them, so easy to imagine they are following what we say. Until we delve a little deeper – one of the immense joys of working one-to-one as I do now – we can delude ourselves that they have understood the point of a text and are following its meaning.

The unbeatable value of one-to-one tutoring

Last week I wrote about how class size doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to outcomes for students. While it can have a notable effect on a teacher’s workload (and I believe that this is important), the evidence that smaller class sizes improve student performance simply isn’t there, certainly at secondary level.

You’d think, given both this and my commitment to being evidence-informed, that I would thus be in support of the idea that tutoring in small groups can be as effective as tutoring one-to-one. Quite the opposite. The very fact that research and my own experience tells me that the size of the group seems not to impact upon the outcomes for students only serves to reinforce my belief that there is something uniquely special about working in the one-to-one model. David Cameron once said that his support for equal marriage was not in spite of the fact that he was a conservative but because he was a conservative. By the same token, I don’t support the view that one-to-one tutoring has a greater impact than working with small groups in spite of the fact that there is no evidence that reducing class sizes improves outcomes; I support the view precisely because of this fact. It is my view that groups – however small – will never provide a child with the same level of intervention as working with an expert one-to-one.

During my last few years of teaching, I had the opportunity to teach a group of five students. The official line was that the small group was due to a timetabling glitch, but the full story was that the Headteacher had unwittingly made a promise to a small handful of parents, a promise which turned out to be impossible on the timetable. Because the mistake had been made by the Headteacher, she had the power to say “make it happen.” Thus, after a considerable amount of shuffling, the staff responsible for timetabling came up with a solution: we would create an extra group to accommodate the subject combination promise that had been made to those students and their parents. This left me – the only Latin teacher in the school – with three Year 9 groups instead of my usual two: one was the usual size of around 28 students, one was somewhat smaller at around 23, the third was the group of 5.

Initially, I was quite excited by the idea. As someone who had tutored one-to-one in my spare time, I felt quite certain that working with such a tiny number of students would feel more like tutoring than teaching. I would be able to offer them close supervision and thus, I presumed, their progress would be exponentially greater than that made by students in the other groups.

Certainly, I was able to pay those students more attention than I otherwise might have been able to do and certainly they all did well. Yet, so did the students in the other two groups. Over the two years I was not able to identify any measurably different outcomes for those students and the experience of teaching them was nothing like the experience of tutoring. Small class size or not, all the other variables were the same. They had the same teacher – me, like it or not – and they had to be marched through the same curriculum. Five students is still enough for there to be considerable diversity among the group, so the pace was still on the slow side for some, rather too pacey for others. While I was – of course – able to offer more individual support than in a larger classroom, it was genuinely surprising how limited the impact of this was overall. Had any of them chosen to engage a private tutor, they would have benefitted as much as any of the students in my group of 28.

As a result of the high expectations that are placed upon teachers, it is easy for them to feel threatened by the very existence of private tuition. I experienced this myself, when I watched a boy who was struggling in my subject transform his performance as a direct result of working with a local private tutor. It was a truly humbling process to witness, and I don’t deny that for a short while I felt rather dismal about my own apparent failure as his classroom teacher. But as a private tutor, I have seen the game from the other side of the fence. I know that what I can do with a child in a regular series of bespoke one-to-one sessions bears little or no resemblance to what I can achieve in the mainstream classroom. It is because I work one-to-one that I am able to do this.

As a private tutor, everything I do is in direct response to one individual’s needs. The key to outstanding private tuition is developing the ability to read each person closely; in a one-to-one session, I can watch for every tiny non-verbal cue that a child is giving: every shift in the chair, every bite of the lip, every furrow of the brow. Of course, I often noticed these signs in the classroom too, and I endeavoured to pay close attention to those individuals who were expressing some puzzlement. But how often must I have missed such nuances, due to the sheer number of faces in front of me? Every missed moment is another tiny chink in that student’s progress, another fissure in the delicate and ever-evolving construction of knowledge and understanding.

In a classroom, children must wait – an individual query may not be relevant to the whole class, and some students, especially in the younger years, seek to reassure themselves by querying what a teacher has said before the sentence is barely out of their mouth; this desire to ask questions at every stage of an explanation can ruin the flow of a lesson for the majority, and students must learn to save their questions for later, when a teacher is circulating the room. Teachers try then to address each individual query and pay personal attention to every child, indeed the importance of this is one of the things that makes teaching both challenging and rewarding. But the rules are reversed in private tutoring, when a tutor can actively encourage a child to interrupt as many times as they wish; as a result, the lesson is truly tailored to the individual and every potential misunderstanding is addressed – simply impossible in the mainstream classroom.

I am not unsympathetic to those educationalists who have concerns about private tutoring. In stark contrast to the case of my student whose progress was transformed as a result of tuition, I have also come across cases when a child has been thoroughly let down by a tutor with no professional experience. Many of those advertising at the more affordable end of the scale are university students – I would willingly have tutored for £10 an hour as an undergraduate – and some of them do an excellent job. However, such tutors have no experience of the ever-changing expectations that children are working towards; if you are simply looking for someone to de-mystify a subject then this kind of tutor can work very well, but if you are looking for your child to make progress towards a specific educational goal or to excel in a particular set of examinations, you’re taking quite a risk in paying someone who is not an expert in this process.

Yet the main objection against private tuition often raised is not a lack of professionalism on the part of some tutors; rather, it seems to touch on the wider issue of so-called “helicopter parenting” and a tendency to problem-solve on behalf of our children. In truth, no matter how much a parent might wish it to be so, private tutoring is not a magic solution; it is merely an opportunity, with which the student has to engage in order to progress. A few will rock up confidently with a myriad of questions, but the vast majority have spent so long hiding at the back or trying to bluff their way in a subject they are struggling to understand that it takes some time to strip away their defences and encourage them to participate without fear.

The tutees that come to me are often in a state of despair. More than one parent has described the dreadful bouts of gut-wrenching anxiety and floods of tears as a child finds themselves getting further and further behind their peers. My subject is obscure, and few parents are blessed with the knowledge to help their child through the quagmire of this difficult and unforgiving discipline; so, they can watch in despair while their child suffers, or they can find a compassionate and competent professional to provide the right kind of support for them. As one parent put it to me, “you have turned dislike and dismay into enjoyment and enthusiasm.” Sounds like something worth paying for.

Does size really matter?

Most of my teacher-training took place in an independent school. This is not uncommon for Classicists, because our subject is not taught in enough state schools to make placement in the state sector possible for everyone. While I spent my first short placement in an absolutely delightful comprehensive called the Herts & Essex High School, the bulk of my training took place at Brentwood School, a large independent school in Essex. So, by the time I was at the stage of leading full classes like a proper teacher, I was in a school in which the largest class size was, from memory, around 20. This, as any state school teacher (or indeed pupil) will tell you, is not normal.

My earliest lessons in my first job, at a state grammar school in North London, felt like walking into Wembley stadium. I simply could not believe how enormous a class of 31 felt after the classes I had experienced at Brentwood. It took a considerable amount of getting used to for me. But what about for my students? Would they have been better off at Brentwood?

Class size has long been a topic of debate in education systems worldwide, particularly in the UK and the US. Historically, the assumption has always been that smaller class sizes are associated with better student outcomes. Many people both claim and assume that reducing class sizes leads to significant improvements in educational attainment, particularly in the early years of schooling. On instinct, I find it highly likely that small classes could be hugely impactful in the early years, when personalised learning can make such a massive difference to a very young child’s development. But do small(er) class sizes really lead to better outcomes at secondary level? In all honesty, the evidence is surprisingly unconvincing.

A meta-analysis conducted by John Hattie, while it did find a very small positive effect of reducing class size, the impact was so small that it was written off as negligible. The effect size for reducing a class from 25 to 15 was typically around 0.1-0.2, well below the standard for statistical significance. The problem, according to Hattie, is partly that teachers do not significantly adapt their teaching to reap the benefits of smaller class sizes. Hattie is Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne and is an expert on performance indicators. He has dedicated a lifetime of research to analysing the impact of differing measures on student attainment, including class size, and even he can’t prove that it matters. Hattie’s work, it is fair to say, has met with a good deal of criticism from other scholars, but then it wouldn’t be a significant piece of work if it had not done so. It seems to me that lots of people are so invested in the belief that size does matter, they simply cannot accept the results when they indicate otherwise.

The Education Endowment Foundation, which is dedicated to improving educational outcomes for low-income students, found that reducing class sizes has low impact for very high cost; they argue that the case for reducing class sizes in state schools is based on very little evidence. The same was found by The Sutton Trust, the UK’s leading social mobility charity. They found that reducing class size is not an effective way to improve school results and while smaller classes can have a small positive impact (around +2 months on average), the benefits are not significant until class-sizes are reduced to below 15-20; this kind of reduction is never going to happen in the state sector, as the cost would be simply astronomical.

So, reduced class size does not seem to be convincingly linked to improved outcomes for students. But what about improved wellbeing for the staff? There is a reason why teachers get so understandably upset when someone says that size doesn’t matter, as they did on Twitter this week when behaviour advisor and co-founder of ResearchEd Tom Bennet shared this blog by a US educationalist (who has since deleted his Twitter account!) saying “This upsets a lot of people but it’s pretty clear: class sizes don’t make the difference people think. They have to be massively reduced in order to have a real impact, and to cut class sizes even by half you’d (obviously) need to employ twice the number of teachers. That’s simply not going to happen. So let’s focus on better, achievable improvements, like AFL, direct instruction, behaviour curriculums.” The thing is, he’s absolutely right! But the reason teachers get so upset about it is that they struggle to separate the issue of their own workload from the research into student outcomes. In reality, these are two separate issues, but I would argue that they are of equal importance. I don’t think we should write off the idea of small (and thus potentially affordable) reductions in class-size if we can argue convincingly that this would make a tangible difference to teachers.

With the UK facing an escalating recruitment and retention crisis and teacher vacancy rates at a record high, teacher workload is perhaps the most important problem we face in education today, yet the government does not want to talk about it. Reduced class sizes without question lead to a reduction in workload for teaching staff. Just off the top of my head, each reduced class means fewer books to mark, fewer assessments to grade, fewer appointments at Parents’ Evenings, fewer EHCPs to cope with, fewer individual relationships to build, fewer parents sending emails. This is not insignificant and we do need to examine whether even a small reduction in class size would make enough of a difference to teacher workload (and thus potentially improved retention) to balance the cost.

There is no question that making dramatic reductions to class sizes in the UK – reductions to the extent that the marginal gains for students uncovered by Hattie’s research would be take place – that’s never going to happen. There’s no point in even talking about halving the size of classes and hence doubling the number of teaching staff. Yet how about we agree that capping classes at – for example – 24 might be worth exploring? Is it completely beyond our wit to do a cost analysis on that? Some people seem to believe that, unless the reductions are hugely significant, they won’t make a difference to teachers. I suspect that these are people who have never had a few extra bodies in their class. Have they never been in a situation where a timetabling glitch means that their class has swelled to 33 or 34? I have. The difference is tangible and undeniable. It is also hugely significant when the numbers go the other way and your class peaks at 24 or 25 instead of the usual expected standard of 31. Small reductions could have tangible gains for teacher wellbeing and I for one think that matters enough to at least explore the possibility.

Latin language GCSE

Tomorrow the several thousand students studying Latin across the UK will sit their language examination. The Boards clearly collaborate when it comes to exam timetabling, so both OCR and Eduqas/WJEC have their Latin language examinations on the timetable tomorrow, both of them setting a paper that lasts and hour and a half.

Having worked with both Boards for three years now and having worked proactively through the existing past papers for both Boards in somewhat obsessive detail, I consider myself something of an expert on the quirks of each. Broadly, the Boards take a markedly different approach to examination, although they have a couple of interesting quirks in common. For example, both Boards seem somewhat obsessed with candidates noticing whether or not an adjective is in the superlative, including when that superlative is irregular. Personally, I don’t really understand why it is so crucially important that candidates translate plurimi as “very many” rather than just “many”, but for whatever reason, both Boards are very keen on it. Neither Board lists the irregular comparatives and superlatives as separate vocabulary, which given their obsession with their accurate translation seems a drastic oversight to me.

The language exam for OCR has a much longer history than Eduqas, which is the relatively new kid on the block for Latin. Those who taught the subject prior to the examination reforms in 2018 will understand why the OCR paper is divided into two sections, which bear no relation to each other: Section A represents what used to be Paper 1 and Section B what used to be Paper 2: the Board have simply merged what used to be two language papers into one, which I remember thinking at the time was quite extraordinarily lazy and has made for the current exam seeming bizarrely disjointed. Section A, worth 30 marks, consists of a 16-mark comprehension, a 4-mark derivatives question and then a choice between some grammar questions based on the comprehension passage or three English to Latin sentences. I always advise candidates to attempt the grammar questions as these are relatively straightforward (although considerably harder than the ones on the Eduqas paper). The grammar questions are quite ridiculously predictable and it is easy to drill even the weakest candidates to get full marks or close to full marks on this section. Section B of the OCR paper starts with a completely new story and contains a longer comprehension followed by a translation, which is worth 50% of the candidates’ overall marks. Section B is considerably harder than Section A and candidates do need to be aware that 50% of their overall mark is represented by that final translation passage.

Eduqas takes a completely different approach, one which followed the spirit of traditional “momentum” tests of old: the same storyline is maintained throughout most of the paper (which seems much more sensible), and what is labelled “Section A” is 90% of the paper: it consists of a short passage for comprehension, two short passages for translation and then a longer comprehension at the end; because the story is continuous, candidates benefit from completing the paper in order. Section B is worth only 10% and consists of a choice between some English into Latin sentences or some quite remarkably simple grammar questions, based on a very short and very simple passage of Latin, which is not even close to the complexity of the rest of the paper. As for OCR, the grammar questions are repetitive and predictable, thus it is easy once again to drill candidates to gain full marks on this section.

One notable quirk of Eduqas, and it is one I dislike, is that they seem particularly keen on candidates being able to follow the story. The reason I dislike this is I feel it advantages students who come from a background of traditional schooling, who may know the story involved. Candidates are often asked to infer things that are not actually contained in the passage and I find this unfair as those who have spent time in the prep school system or know the ancient stories from general interest may well find themselves better off. Another thing I dislike about the way that Eduqas examines candidates is that it uses a huge number of multiple choice questions, many of which seem specifically designed to trick candidates. They will, for example, encourage candidates to select the wrong meaning of words that are easy to mix up. That said, their approach to derivatives is much more benevolent: OCR seem ludicrously wedded to the idea of forcing candidates to define the meaning of the derivative they select, which I simply do not understand. I generally dislike questions about derivatives as again I feel they disadvantage candidates from certain backgrounds; they certainly disadvantage those for whom English is their second language, especially if that language is not European.

I am reaching the point where I know the vocabulary lists pretty well for both Boards, and there is roughly a 90% crossover. If anything, Eduqas has more words that are easy to mix up due to its inclusion of adiuvo (often confused with audio) and pareo (often confused with paro). That said, OCR included the word liber (book) as well as liberi (children), whereas Eduqas only has the latter. Both Boards have both iacio and iaceo, a nightmare to distinguish, and they also both have puto as well as peto, neco as well as nescio. All of these are regular traps that candidates fall into. When it comes to irregular verbs, OCR has more of these and includes the particularly awkward verb malo, which in my experience is massively undertaught in schools, which all focus on volo and nolo (as per the Cambridge Latin Course) and do not appear to teach malo discretely at all. Eduqas do not included it on their list.

As candidates make their final preparations for the exam one can only hope, as ever, that we have prepared them for the relevant pitfalls to the best of our ability. Michael Gove once said that he wanted to eliminate teachers’ ability to teach to the test but I’m afraid he has failed dismally in that department. While results continue to matter, teachers will continue to prepare candidates for the specific exam that they are facing. Not to do so would be sheer negligence.