Hiring a tutor can feel like a leap of faith. Tutoring is an entirely unregulated industry and anyone can set themselves up as a tutor. It is my personal belief that the best professional tutors are also experienced teachers and I am disquieted by the number of people in the industry that have very little or even no classroom experience. This is not the orthodoxy, as a growing number of tutors seem alarmingly anti-establishment and – perhaps most upsettingly – anti-classrooom teachers.
To illustrate the kind of risk that I believe people are taking when they employ a tutor who has not worked as a classroom teacher, I wish to share the story of a student in the school I used to work in. It is perhaps the worst case I have personally come across of a family being let down at the hands of an unqualified, inexperienced and frankly unprofessional tutor. I do not say these things lightly. Sometimes frankness is required. I share this story in the hope that people will think carefully before they employ someone with no experience of the classroom and the examination process. The story I am about to relate is extreme, but it is true and it illustrates the risk you are taking when you employ an inexperienced tutor. It involves a girl I used to teach. I shall call her Laura.
At the end of Year 9, Laura opted not to continue with Latin to GCSE within the school options system. However, her mother decided that she would like Laura to pursue the subject outside of school through private tuition. Sadly, Laura’s mother did not seek my professional advice, and the first I was made aware of the situation was when the child came to see me in the January of her final year (Year 11) and asked if she could sit the Latin Mock examination along with my students. She explained that she had been receiving private tuition over the last two years and hoped to sit the exams that Summer.
My initial response was that it was absolutely fine for her to sit the Mock that I had written, but I explained that there would be a problem if she had studied different texts from the ones that my students had been working on.
She looked at me blankly.
“Texts?”
“Yes,” I said, “the verse and prose literature that you have studied. Which texts have you covered? The specification offers a choice, so it depends which ones your tutor has selected. My examination will only be suitable for you if your tutor has chosen the same options as the ones I have been teaching.”
Well. To cut a long story short, it quickly became apparent that Laura had not studied any texts or indeed any source material. This meant that she had not covered around 50% of the examination material. When I pressed further, it transpired that she also had not been given the required vocabulary list of around 450 words to learn.
I was aghast.
I contacted the girl’s mother and upon further investigation it turned out that the child had not even been entered for the exam, her mother blissfully unaware that this is a formal process that must be done (and indeed paid for) well in advance – it doesn’t just happen by magic. That’s how schools make it feel, because they do it all for you: it is one person’s full-time job to manage the examinations entry process for all the students in a large school.
It took me some considerable time to explain that not only was it quite likely already too late for her child to be entered for the examinations that year, it would also be absolutely impossible for her to sit the three compulsory written papers and perform well in them given her lack of formal preparation; even giving the tutor the benefit of the doubt that she had taught the grammar well (although since she had not read the specification, I fail to see how she knew which aspects of grammar she was required to teach), the child did not know the required vocabulary and the literature papers would be a complete mystery to her.
Remarkably, the child’s mother defended the private tutor hotly, insisting that she was happy with the service that the tutor had provided. I pointed out that this tutor had taken her money, claimed to be preparing her daughter for a series of examinations that she knew frankly nothing about and had failed to advise her on the entry process. Still, Laura’s mother defended her. “She’s a good woman” she kept saying. That may well be so. However, she clearly had no idea about what was required of her as a professional.
Should a parent wish to pay for a child to be tutored in preparation for a public examination, it is essential that the tutor be an expert in that examination. My advice to parents would be to ask searching questions of the tutor – how many cohorts have they seen through that particular examination? What are their results like? What training have they received? This last point is one that is overlooked even by some classroom teachers, many of whom advise their classes on “what the examiner wants” when they have neither worked as an examiner nor attended any courses run by them – so this is something to ask about. Attending such courses and/or working as an examiner demystifies the examination process and gives teachers concrete guidance on what the examiners require from students.
A tutor should pride themself on their professional experience and continued professional development. This does not just mean being up to date on safeguarding (essential though that is). It means having a working and ever-evolving knowledge of your subject and the way it is examined. This comes at a price, and once a teacher has left the classroom it is one that they must be prepared to fund for themselves as and when necessary. So ask any prospective tutor what relevant training they have done: their answer may surprise you.
Last week I reviewed the 5th edition of the Cambridge Latin Course Book 1. While the changes were notable, they were perhaps only apparent to someone who knows the course inside out. By contrast, the moment one opens the second book and compares it to its 4th edition predecessor, it is apparent that the changes here are far more radical. From the very first set of cartoons, the difference it striking.
Okay. Full disclosure from the outset: I don’t like Book 2. As a result, I’m afraid that this review is not going to be gushing. It is difficult enough to hold the attention of Year 9 (especially once they’ve chosen their options, which happens remarkably early in the academic year); with CLC Book 2, it was nigh on impossible and I have never felt so liberated as when I ditched it altogether. Yet the authors of the 5th edition have clearly made significant improvements to make the transition from the first to the second book is more palatable. To date, students have struggled to move on from the loss of Caecilius and other favourite characters, so the authors of the new edition have done the right thing in attempting to give Quintus more character in Book 1 and providing him with a new companion to accompany him on his travels. I retain my reservations about Book 2, even in its new format but, with such radical changes employed, it is undeniable that the authors have given it their best shot to adapt it.
The first stage of the book (Stage 13 in the series) has been radically altered. The lazy slave motifs of yesteryear are gone, and the opening cartoons demonstrate this from the outset. The monumentally dull opening story Tres Servi has been removed and replaced with a much better story entitled Romanus Vulneratus, which introduces us to Salvius in the distance, observed by a local farmer and his family. This is a much cleverer way to spark interest in the story Coniuratio which follows, and which we now hear as an explanation as to how the wealthy Roman Salvius came by his wound. I think the very idea of seeing these Roman characters through local eyes is excellent and a terrific approach taken by the authors throughout the new edition.
Rufilla is given a more dominant role, notable in the way the cartoons are presented and how the story of Bregans is shaped around her rather than Varica. The story is now divided into two parts, but still introduces the dog sent as a gift by King Togidubnus (renamed in line with updated research). A new character of Vitellianus is introduced and there is much better story-telling, with Rufilla noticing that her husband is wounded, and much less “Romanising”, with Bregans no longer being the stupid, lazy slave. The twins, Loquax and Anti-Loquax, are notable by their absence in this Stage. Salvius Fundum Inspicit has been renamed Fundus Britannicus, and once again this story has been adapted to reflect the viewpoint of local farmers living under the Roman occupation.
The order in which the grammar is introduced throughout Book 2 remains the same. For example, Stage 13 still introduces the verbs volo, nolo and possum used with the infinitive, and this grammatical point is rather better represented throughout the stories than it was before. I still ache for the lack of exercises provided; regretfully (and – as I undetstand it – deliberately) the CLC still relies heavily on the classroom teacher supplementing students’ studies. The authors have moved the practising the language exercises to the back of the book and added in extra comprehensions in every stage; given that the exercises require extensive vocabulary support, I do wonder whether the authors have considered just how much work the CLC demands of the clasroom teachers who work with it. When I think of the thousands of Latin teachers all over the country typing out hundreds of exercises on the most basic of grammatical principles, it makes me want to weep at the inefficiency. Changes have been made to the vocabulary checklists, largely (although not entirely) to better represent the list of words required at GCSE. I retain serious concerns about the vocabulary used outside of the checklists, which I shall come back to later.
The authors have decided to ditch the motif of Rufilla as the nagging, 1970s-style housewife, which is a great relief. She has an equally if not more dominant role in Stage 14 as before, but the row between her and Salvius, in which she was portrayed as fickle and spoilt, has been replaced with Familia Occupata, in which her focus is preparing the guest bedroom – a much better way to build anticipation about who that guest might be. The household slaves are also much better represented throughout Stage 14 in the build up to Quintus Advenit, now renamed Familiaris Advenit to allow students to discover the guest’s identity for themselves as they translate. The story of the silver tripods remains, followed by a new story for comprehension, which once again replaces the exercises now moved to the back of the book. This certainly cements the “reading course” approach – to those of us unconvinced by that philosophy, I fear it is another nail in the coffin for the CLC. Many teachers, however, will be very pleased to see some beginners’ level literary criticism brought in – I am aware that some schools take this approach with the CLC already and it seems the team has taken it on board.
It is notable that the background sections, which continue to exploit the idea of the characters appearing as talking heads, are now spread out more widely throughout some of the stages, meaning that teachers are perhaps more likely to weave the background material into their lessons as originally intended by the philosophy of the CLC. Women are better represented (i.e. they are represented full stop) and there is a pleasing exploration as to why we know so little about them and indeed about anyone who was not rich, male and powerful. I will not explore and discuss the changes to the background in depth because – like many state-school teachers, I had no time for them anyway and therefore lack the expertise. Suffice to say it is clear that the changes are radical, thorough and for the better, so schools with the time to explore them in depth will have much better quality material to work with.
The changes to the stories in Stage 15 appear less radical and therefore what’s most noticeable is once again the practising the language being a comprehension rather than exercises, which have again been moved to the back of the book. There is a welcome change to the cartoons at the start of Stage 16, which previously had the most extraordinary representation of enslaved people with dwarfism, randomly juggling for the entertainment of some dinner guests. While it is absolutely undeniable that the Romans did this kind of thing, to make this image the only representation of disability within the pages of the CLC and drop it in without comment was frankly appalling and something that I am very glad to see the back of. These unfortunate (and nameless) characters have been replaced with the previously absent twins, named in previous editions as Loquax and Anti-Loquax, who make an appearance here although are not named. In the same set of cartoons the authors have also removed the bizarre and frankly distracting moment when a dancing girl appears out of an enormous egg and have replaced her with some birds. Below is the image as it appears in the 4th edition followed by its replacement in the 5th.
I was pleased to see Quintus De Se still in place, as this is a pivotal and grammatically useful story, where Quintus articulates his trauma and which I used to use in an adapted form to test students on verb endings. The story has some pleasing tweaks, incorporating the fate of Lucia, Quintus’s sister, and explaining how Clemens found the two siblings after some time and gave Quintus the ring handed to him by Caecilius at the end of Stage 12 (which to my recollection was never mentioned again in previous editions).
But Stages 15 and 16 in general are the point where the CLC starts to go a bit wild, in my opinion. To my dismay, the authors have chosen to keep the storyline about Belimicus, the tedious boat race and the bear – in my experience, children honestly do not find these stories even half as exciting as the authors seem to think they are, but maybe other teachers have found differently. And yes, of course, I used to throw myself into it, get the children to act out the stories, draw diagrams of the race, label what happened at each point, you name it, I did it. We were all doing it back in 2010. Some teachers are still doing it. What an epic waste of class time! Let’s focus on the language: in my experience, by this point in the course, the amount of unusual vocabulary weighs so heavily upon students that they find themselves endlessly frustrated by the translation process and therefore lose heart with it. My concerns in this regard are perpetuated in this new edition, where the authors have elected to continue to use relatively unusual vocabulary to introduce and demonstrate core grammar. As just one example, the sentence which demonstrates the pluperfect in Stage 16 is constructed almost entirely out of words which do not appear on either of the GCSE specifications, nor in Dickinson’s One Thousand: artifices, qui picturas pinxerant, peritissimi erant. Other than the verb to be and the relative pronoun, these words are frankly irrelevant and I think it’s madness, given the depth of the overhaul that this course has undergone, that the authors haven’t taken the opportunity to resolve this issue. I suspect it is because they genuinely don’t see the excessive amount of unusual vocabulary as an issue to the extent that I have found it to be in the classroom.
Stages 17-20 remain, as in prior editions, a flashback to Quintus’s time in Alexandria, with the notable change that his sister Lucia, introduced in the new 5th edition of Book 1, is also a survivor and therefore joins Quintus on his travels. An extra story in Stage 17 entitled Tres Aves focuses on her and makes further pleasing mention of the siblings’ losses in Pompeii – in previous editions, there wasn’t enough opportunity taken to make links for the characters with their past, so this is really good to see – the course and its narrative certainly feels more coherent now. Stage 18 retains its focus on Clemens, his Alexandrian shop and the protection racketeering and Stage 19 still introduces the characters of Aristo, Galatea and Helena – mention is now made in the cartoons that they are friends of Barbillus, which goes some considerable way towards maintaining the thread of the storyline better than in previous editions. Lucia is also woven into the stories of Stage 19, with this being the focus in a total re-write of Dies Festus. The story of the hen-pecked Aristo has – mercifully – been removed and we are then into endgame, with the story Venatio depicting the scenario which will finish off Barbillus, who has thus been much better woven into the extended narrative throughout Book 1 and Book 2. Barbillus’s demise seems much more poignant, not just because he has been better painted as a character and friend of the family, but because his will is represented nicely in the book and the relationship between him and the siblings Quintus and Lucia is much more explicitly drawn.
While the storyline hangs together really well and the narrative is undeniably entertaining, I maintain that the vocabulary of Book 2 is overwhelming for students and that this burden will continue to cause them to lose interest, both in the narrative and in the language itself. Were I still a classroom teacher I do not believe that I would have re-embraced the use of Book 2, solely due to this fact. While Book 1 requires heavy supplementation, this is just about manageable and definitely worth doing. But when I found myself glossing virtually every single word in a lengthy story – as I did for Book 2 – and when those words are, on the whole, not useful for GCSE, I had to ask myself what purpose the book was serving. My professional judgement that Book 2 was not serving my needs as a time-pressed classroom teacher sadly remains the same having examined the 5th edition: the authors simply haven’t addressed the core reasons behind why I ditched it in the first place. Others will feel very differently of course, and I suspect that ardent fans of the course will be delighted with the changes.
I was always going to be a tough audience, with my fundamental dislike for Book 2 and my sincere belief that it is pretty much irreconcilable with the needs of the classroom teacher, particularly in a comprehensive setting. I remain convinced that the CLC and its usefulness starts to crumble beyond repair at this point. The passages are packed with too much difficult, irrelevant and overwhelming vocabulary and – perhaps most crucially of all – far too much relies on the classroom teacher to produce countless supplementary worksheets; the requirement to do this is so onerous that one is left wondering why one would invest in these expensive text books at all, when they fail so fundamentally to provide the core content of a Latin course.
The Cambridge Latin Course has endured for so long that it has become a lens through which our subject is viewed by the outside world. Written originally in the 1970s as a radical push-back against traditional methods of Latin teaching, the CLC has become the orthodoxy for recent generations. Whilst complained about and much-discussed by tradtionalists and modernists alike, Book 1 in particular is used in the overwhelming majority of schools that teach Latin. I personally used it throughout my 21-year career, despite having much to say about about its approach and scope; the first book is truly inspired and therefore inspiring, and even those of us who take issue with its theoretical approach to the language find it hard to resist its allure.
The course is currently in the midst of a radical overhaul, overseen by Caroline Bristow and her team of writers at CSCP, whom she describes as passionate curators of the characters and their stories. I recently interviewed Caroline for my podcast, and found her insights into how the course has been restructured and reinvented for the modern world truly fascinating. I immediately ordered myself a copy of what’s already available, which is the first two volumes, and have decided to review the changes to Book 1 in this blog post; next week I shall examine Book 2 as there is far too much to say about both volumes to cover it all in one post. There has been a surprising lack of response from the Classics world about the 5th edition, although its attempts to rethink itself have been seized upon with tedious predictability by certain quarters of the mainstream media, who found themselves in a panic that Caecilius and his friends were going woke.
So what exactly has changed for Caecilius?
To the untrained eye, the changes to Book 1 might seem somewhat superficial. As a perhaps reluctant CLC expert, I can assure you that they are not. I have worked with this course for 21 years and I probably know Book 1 better than most people – not least because I spent the last few years of my career re-writing it in order to resolve some of the concerns I had with its approach. Many of the changes I chose to make were as a result of the fact that I am not convinced by the philosophy behind the CLC and other courses which are usually named “reading courses” – if you’d like to know more about this, then my discussion with Caroline is definitely worth you listening to, as is my final interview of the same season with David Carter, who is an advocate for comprehensible input. My ongoing concerns aside, my focus for this blog post is on the specific changes made between the new 5th edition and its predecessor. The pedagogical philosophy behind the course remains unchanged.
The first thing to say is that the cartoons are now colourised. This may feel less radical and exciting since we have had access to the colourised versions online for some time, but let us not forget that this is the first time that these have appeared in print. The 4th edition was streets ahead of its predecessors in terms of presentation and the use of colour photographs, but Caecilius 5.0 is colourised throughout and the cartoons far more appealing as a result of this simple fact. Aside from this, the cartoons attached to the model sentences remain largely familiar, with the addition of Lucia, a sister for Quintus. She seems like as good a place to start as any, so let’s begin with Lucia and the portayal of women.
Why Lucia – and what about women in general?
There are numerous and overwhelming benefits to the inclusion of a daughter for Caecilius and Metella. To start with the obvious, the book is immediately more balanced, with the addition of a female character being shown reading within the first couple of pages. Her prior non-existence had little to do with the realities of the Roman world and far more to do with the fact that the CLC was written in the 1970s. It may have escaped some people’s notice, but the female characters in the series to date reflect the way in which women were portrayed in 1970s situation comedy: you have nagging wives and and you have pretty girls without much to say for themselves other than what men purport to find pleasing. It is surely not to enter some Daily Express reader’s fantasy of radical wokeness to suggest that we can do better than this now.
Lucia is given an important role in the book and – much as I do not wish for her to be nothing but a foil for the male characters – she does indeed provide opportunities for the writers to flesh out the character of Quintus, who has always been somewhat flat in the first book. I’ll come back to why that’s important later.
In general, the writers have done a magnificent job of illustrating the realities of life as it was for Roman women. Metella has been fleshed out as a character and appears by Caecilius’s side, as per the reality for the wife of a wealthy, successful man. Previously, it had felt like they didn’t have any kind of partnership at all and led entirely separate lives, when the reality would have seen Metella involved in Caecilius’s business relationships and friendships. Some of the changes made are subtle but crucially important for this; for example, the opening line of Fabula Mirabilis now reads “multi amici cum Caecilio et cum Metella cenabant” instead of “multi amici cum Caecilio cenabant”. So Metella is there as a host also. Likewise in the story Felix et Fur it is the daughter, Lucia, who asks why Felix was freed (at last making sense of the use of the 3rd person in the last line, which has always grated on me!) Small tweaks matter, because they flesh out the image of the ancient world we are portraying to children.
At the end of Stage 7, after the radically adapted story that portrays Melissa (more on her below), the authors introduce a new story called Lucia callida, which echoes the language used in the story Decens and shows Lucia and a female friend outwitting a rather unpleasant gladiator. By the by, the feminine version of the Latin word for friend (amica) was not previously used in the book, which only serves to illustrate the extent to which women were overlooked in previous editions.
Workers and slaves
The 5th edition authors swap the painter Celer for a female character called Clara, basing their decision to do so on original sources and opening up the opportunity for teachers to explore with their classes what kind of work women might have been seen performing. They also radically adjust the presentation of the slave girl Melissa, giving her a back story and making her welcomed by the other slaves; previously, the story of Melissa showed her as being easy on the eye, simpering while being purchased by (a potentially somewhat lascivious) Caecilius and appreciated by all the men in the household but not by Metella. Distinctly less than ideal. This has been removed, as has the storyline of Melissa getting everything wrong, being criticised by the other (supremely happy) household slaves and eventually settling in to the proper ways of the house. The story which used to be called Metella et Melissa in Stage 7 has been radically transformed, showing empathy between the household slaves and explaining how Melissa ended up being sold into slavery. Metella is no longer the one who makes Melissa feel at home, it is her fellow slaves.
Empathy is also evoked between the slaves in a very interesting change to Stage 4. The authors have completely adapted the story Grumio et Leo, which previously portrayed Grumio as being so drunk that he mistook a fresh mural for reality and became convinced that there was a lion in the house. Ho ho ho for all concerned, isn’t alcohol abuse hilarious? Possibly less than ideal, one has to admit. The story has now been adjusted and has Melissa comparing the image of Hercules in the painting to Grumio and Clemens being unconvinced. Grumio still retains his naughty side, and rest assured that his ongoing flirtation with Poppaea remains in place, as does Clemens’s smug usurpation at the end of the playlet in Stage 11.
Overall, the shift away from portraying the household as packed with a bunch of enslaved workers who were thoroughly happy with their lot is subtle but distinct.
Foreshadowing Book 2: Quintus and Barbillus
One of the many reasons, in my opinion, that children’s interest in the stories wanes after CLC Book 1, is that students never get over the loss of Caecilius. Quintus is not developed enough as a character in Book 1 for him to become the hero in the later books, and this was one of the ways in which I felt things needed changing (the others all relate to grammar and vocabulary).
The authors of the 5th edition have gone some way towards adjusting this, with extra stories that flesh out the character of Quintus and give him a personality. Quintus audax has been introduced in Stage 8, which shows Quintus hunting with his father and Felix, a hair-raising encounter with a boar affording him the opportunity to pay back his debt to the old freedman. This leads us nicely into him being the focus in much of Stage 9, with his birthday and his visit to the baths, and in Stage 10, with his Greek friend Alexander. Pleasingly, Lucia shows an interest in Alexander in a short interaction with Melissa, and it’s nice to see the main characters forming attractions, which was previously only the preserve of the slaves (read into that what you will).
An inspired change for the better is the pointless characters of Marcus and Quartus have been ditched from Stage 11 and instead the debate regarding which candidate’s name to paint on the wall of their house happens between Quintus and Lucia, giving both characters life and illustrating what we know from the very kind of graffiti being portrayed – that Roman women supported political campaigning and put both their voice and their wealth behind their preferred candidates. Another pleasing addition to this stage is a discussion between Metella and Lucia, in which Metella reveals that Caecilius is looking to his wealthy contact Holconius (boo!) to help him arrange a marriage for Lucia. There is lots of scope for discussion in the story, which shows Lucia’s feelings (she only has eyes for Alexander) and touches on various other themes relating to marriage and how women were treated in the Roman world. The notion of arranged marriage was distinctly missing before, along with pretty much every lived reality for 50% of the population of the ancient world.
One of the cleverest adjustments made by the authors is easy to miss and I confess I might have done so had Caroline Bristow not flagged it up to me in her interview. In a stroke of genius, the authors have tweaked the cartoons and the storyline ever so slightly in Stage 2, taking the previously nameless merchant friend from the cartoons and calling him Barbillus. He then pops up again in Stage 12, replacing the hitherto pointless Iulius, who is introduced in previous editions only to be left to an unknown fate and never mentioned again. As a result of all this, Barbillus – a pivotal character for Book 2 – is flagged as a solid friend and business contact for Caecilius in Book 1, enabling the authors (one hopes) to create more of a bond between him and the surviving members of the family in Book 2 and thus more pathos for his death.
The presentation of the background
As a state school teacher with excessively limited classroom time, I am far less of an expert with how the background material is presented. However, the differences are still striking even to my eye. The “talking heads” are a great idea, as the background sections become an opportunity for the characters to tell us about their lives rather than the background seeming unrelated to them. From what I can see, the authors have also made significant improvements to how the background sections are written, meaning that teachers in a similar situation to mine might at least feel able to set a reading homework for students, facilitated perhaps by the “thinking points” or questions now included to promote discussion; previously, some of the language used was so archaic and/or so advanced that this was never really an option with younger children in a comprehensive setting.
Conclusion: euge!
The 5th edition is a marvellous rewrite and a credit to the authors. I only hope they succeed in persuading schools to make the leap in these financially testing times; to date, I will confess, not one of my tutees is in a school which has made the switch, although it may be early days. But truth be told, if you’re a fan of the course, the new edition holds nothing to fear and everything to like. For pedagogical doubters like myself, I’m afraid that the language elements remain the same, with the one exception that they have (I believe under pressure from teachers) introduced a mention of the ablative case after prepositions in Stage 11. Personally, if I were still a classroom teacher, I would still be teaching the grammar explicitly in the old-fashioned way and I would also still be re-writing the stories to remove nominative pronouns and tweak the vocabulary (small issues like the constant use of contendo – not on the GCSE vocabulary list – instead of festino). I would also still be adjusting the way that the vocabulary is presented (I take issue with verbs being listed in the 3rd person).
I did all this with Book 1 as I believed the story arc was magnificent and maintained an undeniably engaging appeal. Book 2, as of around four years ago, I had ditched altogether for numerous reasons, in particular the excessive use of irrelevant vocabulary which overwhelmed students and caused them to lose all heart. I have not studied Book 2 in detail yet, and look forward to considering whether it could have tempted me back into the fold.
Caecilius and his new family, complete with Lucia. Image from the opening chapter of CLC Book 1
Twice this week, working with two very different courses, I have been struck by an author’s decision to challenge students at a very early stage in their Latin with complex word-order.
“Traditional” Latin word order will have you believe that the subject (should there be one) will come at the beginning of the sentence and the verb at the end. Everything else, with a variety of rules within that, will come in the middle. Yet when it comes to studying real Latin literature, a student has to face up to the fact that this so-called tradition is – at best – a very simplified version of reality; if one were to be truly critical, one might say that the whole concept is a nonsense. Real Latin authors break away from the formalised shape of a Latin sentence – sometimes for effect, sometimes just because they felt like it.
With one small group of tutees I have just started the second booklet of Clarke’s Latin, an ab initio course aimed ostensibly at Common Entrance candidates, although you’d be hard-pushed to find a better introduction to Latin whatever your ultimate goal and indeed I am using it with an adult learner also. Students have been taught all of the cases and their meanings, but only in the 1st declension. Students have also been taught the endings of the present indicative active in the 1st conjugation, and we have just reached the point where the author has introduced the imperfect tense for the first time. Not surprisingly, things are starting to get a little trickier, but my students are rising magnificently to the task – a testament to the robustness of the course so far.
The author has challenged the students from the beginning when it comes to word order, forcing them to engage with both their verb endings and their case endings. But I was struck in particular by this sentence, in exercise 47:
poetas, ubi appropinquant, feminae agricolarum salutant.
Wow. Even the students were impressed.
After some discussion with my fearless group of three, they deciphered that poetas was accusative and therefore not the place to start. I then encouraged them to look at verb endings and to consider whether they could find a subject. With this relatively light-touch coaching, they were excited to deduce that the subject of the main clause was feminae and that the subordiate clause contained the subject in the verb ending but referred back to the poets. The genitive case gave them no trouble at all. With careful thought but relative ease, they came up with the perfect translation: the farmers’ wives greet the poets when they approach.
So far so unremarkable you might say – although personally, having taught Latin for 21 years, I think it is indeed remarkable the extent to which a robust course such as this one enables students to think like a true Latinist at this early stage. But what happened next was perhaps even more exciting. One of the group said, “why would an author put poetas at the beginning like that, instead of the subject?”
It then occurred to me that Clarke’s course is not only producing better results when it comes to the children’s understanding of the underlying grammatical principles; it is also preparing them for much more complex skills later down the line. Firstly, it is preparing them for literary criticism: why an author chooses to place a word in a particular place is exactly the kind of question that GCSE and A level candidates need to be able to answer in their study of literature. Furthermore, when Clarke uses challenging sentences such as these, he is opening children’s eyes to the challenge of translation at a higher level; as a result of this child’s question, we were able to discuss how a translator might attempt to render the sentence into a format that mimics the emphasis that is expressed in the Latin. I suggested something like “it is the poets that the farners’ wives are greeting, when they approach” and invited the children to critique my suggestion: does it stray too far from the original, or is it in fact more faithful to the text?
Clarke’s course offers some extraordinary opportunities for high-level thinking and dicusssion, even when students are at a very rudimentary level. These students have only met the 1st declension and the 1st conjugation in the present and the imperfect indicative active; beyond that, they’ve met a few adverbs and basic subordinate clauses using words such as ubi and antequam. Yet already they are asking questions that would not be out of place in an A level class. Already they are considering that word placement might be important or significant to a Latin author. Already they are pondering a variety of ways that the spirit of the Latin might rendered in translation, and beginning to realise that translation is not a simple or straightforward task in which you only follow a set of rules. This is, quite frankly, extraordinary.
On the very same day I had a session with a child whose school uses Suburani, a course which has gained popularity in many state schools. This course could not be more different from Clarke’s Latin and its authors are no doubt very happy about that – their philosophy is wildly different. The sentence that got me thinking was in chapter 8. By this point, students have met the present, imperfect and perfect indicative active. They have met only the nominative, accusative and ablative cases but they have seen them in three declensions, including neuter versions. Like with the Cambridge Latin Course, all three declensions and all five conjugations are used from the very beginning of the course due to the desire to create an interesting and varied storyline. Laudable as this might be, in my experience students who struggle with Latin have literally no idea what is going on by this stage.
My tutee was presented with the following sentence:
gentes Britannicas opprimunt Romani
It is not the only and not the first sentence where Suburani has used varied word order, and I like to think that this is a deliberate attempt on the part of the authors to encourage students to look at their verb and noun endings – just the same as Clarke’s course aims to do. However, this process is undermined in so many other ways by the course that my tutee was not able to parse the sentence above (which although it contains nouns and verbs from a wider variety of declensions and conjugations, is actually a good deal more simple than my example from Clarke’s Latin).
The translation that my tutee suggested came as no surprise: “the British tribes oppress the Romans”. This is due to a phenomenon I have written about before, the tendency for students to read from left to right, just as they have been trained to do in their own language. The trouble with Suburani is that it does nothing to break this habit. It might teach students their verb endings, but its constant and excessive use of pronouns in the nominative case encourages them to continue to read from left to right and guess the meaning of the sentence. It was this issue that I wrote about in my previous blog post criticising the course.
Now don’t get me wrong, the mistake made by my tutee is what I would expect any child to do; even my tutees using Clarke’s Latin have to be reminded on occasion not to read in this way – it’s a habit so deeply ingrained that it is nigh-on impossible to break. But students who have been taught using Suburani – when prompted to explain which noun is in the nominative or accusative case – usually find this really difficult. They have been shown too many declensions at once and as a result have found it bordering on impossible to memorise how the noun endings change as they decline. And they’ve only met three cases!
My issues with Suburani go beyond its grammatical faults – criticisms which could just as easily be aimed at the Cambridge Latin Course, for which I retain an undeniable fondness and used (albeit heavily adapted) throughout my career in classroom teaching. Suburani contains material presented in a manner that I consider to be quite frankly inappropriate for younger children, another thing I have written about before. Having reached chapter 8 and encountered a simplified version of Caesar’s account of the Druids’ wicker man, reproduced without critique and in graphic detail (with a nice firey background graphic to boot), I have to ask myself what on earth they thought they were doing. While the Cambridge Latin Course is currently undergoing a re-write and the team has agonised about how to present certain aspects of the ancient world faithfully yet sensitively, the authors at Suburani seem out to create shock and awe. I am disliking it more and more the further I get through it.
Yesterday I was reminded during one of my sessions that revisiting the best ideas and the best advice is important.
In today’s blog post I want to share the best and most effective methodology of learning a piece of text off by heart. The method is one used by many actors to learn their lines, and is certainly one that can be used if you or your child takes on a large part on stage. I teach the same method to my tutees as a means of learning the translation of their Latin set texts off by heart, the purpose of which is to make the literature element of the examination super-easy.
Let us take for example the first few lines of Sagae Thessalae, the most commonly-studied prose set text for the current OCR specification for GCSE Latin. Below is the first section of the Latin text, with a suggested translation underneath. It is the translation that your child will need to learn off by heart (not the Latin – that really would be a nightmare!)
iuvenis ego Mileto profectus ad spectaculum Olympicum, cumhaec etiam loca provinciae clarae visitare cuperem,peragrata tota Thessalia Larissam perveni. ac dum urbem pererrans tenuato viatico paupertati meae fomenta quaero.
“As a young man I set out from Miletus for the Olympic Games, since I also wanted to visit these areas of the famous province. Having travelled through the whole of Thessaly, I arrived at Larissa. And while wandering through the city, with my travelling allowance diminished, I was looking for remedies for my poverty.”
To go about learning a section like this, the best thing to do is to break it up into sections and learn it using the first-letter technique. The passage breaks up quite nicely into five short chunks as follows:
As a young man I set out from Miletus for the Olympic Games,
since I also wanted to visit these areas of the famous province.
Having travelled through the whole of Thessaly, I arrived at Larissa.
And while wandering through the city, with my travelling allowance diminished,
I was looking for remedies for my poverty.
Below is a representation of the first-letter technique for these lines. A student writes down the first letter of each word, spaced out in short chunks. Notice that I have used the punctuation – making use of capital letters, commas and full-stops acts as a further trigger for the memory:
While most people will struggle to learn these five sections of prose off by heart, the use of chunking combined with the first-letter technique enables most people to do so within a couple of minutes. Once a student has written out the first chunk in first letters, they should find that they are immediately able to recite the first chunk merely by looking at the letters. They should then repeat the process with the remaining chunks, then try to recite the whole thing, using the letters as a prompt. Within a couple of minutes, their ability to recall the entire passage will be notable. Students can then go on to repeat the process with the remaining text – not too much at once though!
Once a student has mastered the translation of a reasonable amount of text, that’s the time to turn to the Quizlet flashcards. It’s important not to wait too long to do this, as the rote-learning of the English translation will not be much use to a candidate without at least some grasp of how it relates to the Latin. A child who has learnt the translation off by heart should be able to use the flashcards to prompt themselves on each section as follows:
You will notice that I have divided the flashcards into smaller chunks – this is to assist the student in recognising which Latin words and phrases map onto which sections of the translation. There will be some hesitation as a student learns to map their rote-learned translation onto the Latin as represented on the flashcards – but that’s fine. Remember, the rote-learning is merely a prop to assist them in coping with the set text in an examination. It’s very important to move onto the flashcards swiftly, in order to begin the process of making the rote-learned translation do its job of supporting the student in recognising the Latin text.
A student should repeat the flashcards in chronological order until they are fully confident with the translation for each. Once confidence has been gained, it’s then time to hit the shuffle button and see if they can recognise and translate small chunks in isolation – that’s when they can really prove to themselves that they are recognising individual Latin words and phrases and can render them into English.
The whole process might seem arduous when a student first begins, but I have yet to find a student that is not converted to the the system once they realise how effective it is and how much power it gives them over the text. Knowing the text thoroughly is 80% of the battle – and I mean that sincerely. A student should be able to score a pretty good grade in the literature element of the examination simply on the basis of knowing the text really well; many of the questions are comprehension and ask for nothing more than for the student to explain what the text means. Once a student has gained mastery with a section of the text and can perform well on basic comprehension questions, then time can be spent on fine-tuning their response to the text and training them in how to answer the more complex questions, something which I have addressed in other posts.
All schools will be analysing their Mock results in January, a process I am grateful to be detached from these days. Good or bad, encouraging or worrying, the results will be pored over and teachers will be challenged. This happens even more so in August. However good their results, teachers will be asked to explain the students that ended up below par. One student was one mark off a 7: what went wrong there? What could you have done differently? Until this stops happening (and I fail to envisage a future in which it does), then teachers will teach to the test.
Yet this is not the only reason that teachers do so, and I would argue that teaching to the test is only undesirable when it happens to the exclusion of all else. When teaching to the test becomes the sole purpose of education, of course we have a problem; but teaching to the test involves exam technique and is an essential part of a functioning education system; we’re doing the students a disservice if we pretend otherwise.
Examinations are a game – a sport, with complex rules. Students with privilege are taught how to play the game and are drilled over time for the match. They have parents that support them in their training and cheer from behind the touchline. They have coaches, experienced in honing their skills and their mindset. They have the right equipment. One of the most powerful things that we can do for our kids is to teach them the rules of the game; to send them onto the field without such preparation is setting them up for failure.
The notion that well-taught students will perform to the best of their ability without direct and explicit preparation for a particular examination is a ludicrous fantasy, and I am stunned at the number of high-ranking educationalists that seem wedded to it. Until we find a fair and robust way of testing students other than written examination (which hasn’t happened to date) what would we all prefer: a teacher who understands the examination process or a teacher who doesn’t?
One of the single most useful things that a teacher or a tutor can do is to mark for the relevant exam board. The training that you receive demystifies the examination process and the unhelpful mark-schemes filled with phrases such as “wide-ranging response” and “answer fully shaped for purpose”. Train as a marker and the chief examiner will enlighten you as to what on earth these statements actually mean (for example, with a ball-park figure on the number of points expected in a “wide-ranging” answer). Marking is a tedious and stressful responsibility to take on board on top of your teaching load and is certainly not worth it for the money – but the benefit to students is immense. This is most especially true for subjects with extended-answer questions and is also especially important at A level.
My core experience is in preparing students for the GCSE examination, for Common Entrance and for scholarship. No system encourages gaming more than this one, and I am unashamed in sharing my in-depth knowledge of the examiners’ habits and my understanding of what they are looking for. It’s essential to success. In my view, a student should walk into an examination feeling totally prepared for what will appear in front of them. There should be no surprises, no shocks. The process should be an opportunity for students to show what they can do: yes, under pressure, but not intolerable pressure. Enough to get the adrenaline pumping.
Latin has a reputation for being difficult, something which I have explored in other posts. It is offered in many schools as provision for academic stretch and challenge. Those who speak against teaching to the test accuse teachers of losing sight of the bigger picture, of failing to prepare their students for becoming future specialists in their subject in favour of a blinkered, exam-focused approach. But the notion that any teacher can guide their students to excel in an examination without furnishing them with skills that are transferable to A level is startling to me. Who is actually doing that?! This does not mean that students will find the switch to A level unchallenging – of course they will find it difficult, and so they should; but the analytical skills they have been taught at GCSE will transfer, as will the study skills, as will the method of approaching an exam with their eyes wide open, armed with the knowledge and know-how required to succeed.
If this is not the purpose of what we do, I’ve been getting it wrong for more than two decades.
This week, I’ve been thinking about illness and absence. As someone who has entered the post-pandemic trend of working from home, I feel remarkably cushioned from the winter bugs currently circulating. By this time of the year, as a full-time teacher, I would have been hit by at least one virus, maybe two. I worked in a building filled with over a thousand teenagers and around one hundred adults. The results were inevitable.
The news is currently filled with the tangible threat of being in such close proximity with others. It seems unsurprising that cohorts of children, who have spent a significant part of their formative years in lockdown, are now experiencing a surge in both viral and bacterial infections, a spike in cases which might otherwise have been spread out over the last two years. I have around 30 online clients who are under 18 and every single one of them has been suffering with something over the last few weeks – even those who are home-schooled, since they live with siblings who attend school and bring the bugs home. It’s simply unavoidable.
One of the few positives that I hoped would arise out of the recent pandemic was a shift in attitude away from dogged presenteeism and towards a more pragmatic approach towards what it means to keep your colleagues and your schoolmates safe and healthy. The schools I have worked in were as guilty as most when it came to dolling out awards for 100% attendance, something which has always made me acutely uncomfortable.
My own attendance record as a colleague was excellent, but something which colleagues will not have known about me was that my school attendance as a child was absolutely dire. Percentages weren’t recorded in the 1980s with the same zeal as with which they are now, but I would guess that my attendance hovered at 70-80% – well into the “danger zone” by modern standards. I have no desire to bore you with the reasons in detail, but suffice to say I was in and out of hospitals a lot plus I was – to be frank – just a sickly child. If I got something, I got it with bells on, and I usually lost several kilos in weight during the process. All in all it was not a happy time – for me, or for my family.
Thankfully, in recent years there has been some pushback from professionals against the use of attendance awards, with several high-profile voices in education raising the obvious point that they are discriminatory. This is especially true of awards which pool the results of a group or a cohort, thereby harnessing the toxic influence of peer pressure. A student such as I was, with complex medical issues leading to unavoidable absences from school combined with what amounted to a string of bad luck, would have been hammered mercilessly by the modern system. Not only that, but the students who are the real targets – you know, the ones who could definitely do with getting their tails into school a little more often – remain markedly unmoved by the whole system.
It never ceases to amaze me just how much schools somehow convince themselves that their rhetoric and pressure-systems will have any effect whatsoever on the miscreants they are supposedly aimed at. As it happens, my oldest friend was one of those miscreants. She was perfectly fit and healthy but managed to attend school rather less frequently than I did. She just didn’t like school (or at least, she didn’t that particular school, a sentiment with which I have some sympathy). And yet, when our maths teacher lost her cool with my friend, and let it slip one day in front of the entire class that she was nicknamed “the part-timer” in the staff room, she embraced the title like a badge of honour. I still throw the so-called insult at her occasionally, and it still makes us both laugh nearly 40 years later. The very notion that she would buck her ideas up and attend school more often as a result of this gibe is utterly laughable to anyone who remembers what it was like to be a teenager. Why on earth would she have cared? Get real, Mrs Rutherford. Yes, I remember you.
Of course, attendance is important. But it is unrealistic to think that our pathetic attempts to maniupulate the teenage mind is having any effect on the Ferris Buellers of this world. More than this, our heavy-handed systems are indeed having an effect: they are pressurising the most anxious of students to attend school when they shouldn’t. I can name countless students over the years who dragged themselves into school when they should have been at home in bed. Not only was this detrimental to their own health, it was detrimental to the rest of us who were exposed to their viruses. Even worse than this, I have known students distressed that their attendance record might be affected by their presence at a family funeral or arising from otherwise distressing circumstances. This is madness. And it’s our fault. Presenteeism is a horrible curse upon the dutiful, the well-behaved, the sensitive and the anxious child – and that’s before we even return to the issue of students who suffer from underlying medical conditions or disabilities which require regular medical attention and/or intervention. By contrast, it has no impact whatsoever on young Ferris.
As if these systems being used on children were not bad enough, many of us on EduTwitter were made aware this week of a school which has been marking its staff’s identity badges according to whether that member of staff had achieved 100% attendance at work. The justification for this was that it would “raise a great opportunity for staff to start conversations with students about the importance of attendance.” Not only was I blown away by what a spectacularly toxic thing this is to do to your staff, I once again found myself thinking of the vanishingly small handful of staff that this policy is (presumably) aimed at.
Come on, admit it. We’ve all worked with at least one or two of them in our time; the one whose name appears on the cover sheet with such glorious regularity that it becomes a kind of performance art. But will they be shamed by a policy like this? I guarantee you that they will not – they certainly weren’t shamed by me covering their lesson for the umpteenth time in a term, so I fail to see why anything so prosaic would make a difference to their attitude. Once again, we have a system which punishes the dutiful and fails to address the actual problem. Poor attendance by individuals (a rarity in schools in my experience, but something which does occur on occasion) is something which needs tackling directly, frankly and robustly by SLT; manufacturing a shaming system for every staff member that falls foul of this year’s worst winter virus is heartless in the extreme.
When it comes to both staff and students in schools, we need to stop idolising the notion of “in at all costs” for the costs are too great – costs to the sick individual and costs to the community. If your child is ill, they should be at home. They should also make a conscious and proactive effort to catch up on their return. Schools should have an effective and workable cover policy, one which leans towards usage of set work and does not pressurise the sick individual to be sitting at their laptop at 4.30am writing cover sheets (which I have done in my time). Schools also need to face up to the fact that policies need to focus on making life less comfortable for the individuals that do make a habit of their absence – not introduce shaming systems which will harm members of the team who are trying their hardest.
Something which has struck me this year is the huge variation between schools when it comes to handling their mock examinations. Some schools have set them in November, some in December, some in January. Some schools have provided infinite details and guidance as to what the examinations will contain, some have not. Some of my tutees didn’t even know how many examinations they were due to have in each subject and on which topics, although I am hyper-aware that teenagers are not always the most reliable of sources! It is always interesting to ponder just how accurate a reflection of reality I am receiving from the outside …
Mock examinations are important to schools for a number of reasons. As a general rule, they are considered to be an indicator as to whether a student is on target to achieve their predicted grade, although the jury is still very much out on the accuracy of this process. Most schools put their staff through an agony of results analysis, with students being flagged or colour-coded as to whether they are on, above or below target. Sometimes this coding is even passed on to the students. I have heard of schools that hand out the results on colour-coded paper: green for on/above target, amber for close to but below target, red for well below. Apparently it can make for some very interesting reactions, when students who might otherwise have been pleased or distressed at their results were shown them in the context of how they were performing against their targets.
Personally, I don’t like target grades, as I feel that they categorise children unfairly and set up a mindset that is not always helpful. Students with very high targets can feel overwhelmed by the pressure, students with lower ones can feel like the system doesn’t believe in them. So in my eutopia we wouldn’t have them at all. I once met a Headtacher who worked in an outstanding school with outstanding results. They gave every child the same target – to get as far above the pass grade as they could.
One disadvantage of mock examinations is the amount of curriculum time that is eaten up by the very process of examining, a factor which led directly to the demise of the AS/A2 system at Key Stage 5 – losing most of the summer of Year 12 to an examination period was considered simply too costly. In Year 11, however, the mock examination period is mercifully short, with most schools cramming all of their examinations into a two-week or three-week window. The price is paid by the students and by the staff, who face a very intense time during that period.
But, despite the gruelling nature of the winter exam-sprint, mock examinations are truly essential for Year 11 students. In many schools this is the one and only time that students experience a practice run of what it will be like to sit their final papers in the summer; many schools don’t have the physical space to facilitate formal examinations for all year groups, so it’s really important for Year 11 to get this one real chance at experiencing what it is like to line up as a year group according to a designated seating plan, file into the room in examination conditions and sit a series of examinations, one after the other. Students experience what it’s like to receive formal instructions from the Examinations Officer, to be told to hand in their mobile phones and check their pockets for banned materials (pretty much everything), to have to have their equipment in an appropriate clear container and to surrender any equipment that is more modern than an analogue timepiece.
All of the above can create tension for students, but it is hugely important for them to experience the process so that they know what to expect in the summer. It can be a real balancing act for schools to create the right atmosphere – just the right amount of gravitas so that students experience the seriousness of the real thing, without sending the entire year group into a state of controlled (or, even worse, uncontrolled) panic.
One of the things which students struggle the most with when it comes to their first experience of examinations is timing, and this is indeed one of the many reasons why mocks are so important. There’s nothing like the full experience of being in a large exam hall and having to work to timed conditions to make you realise that this is something that you need to practise, practise and practise again. There is no point in working on exam-style questions if you are not doing so in timed conditions – in fact, I would argue that doing so could potentially be damaging in the long-run; if a student gets used to tackling a question over a longer period of time, they’re going to struggle to adjust their performance to what is required in the final paper. This is why it’s important to practise things under time pressure from the very beginning.
But mock examinations are more than just an opportunity to experience “the real thing”. They are (or should be) an opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. Teachers expect some students to read the paper wrong, to answer the wrong section, to tackle too many questions or not enough. The point is that they get to experience the impact of this and learn how important it is to approach each paper in the right way. Beyond that, they also get to dissect their performance in detail and (in an ideal world) receive thorough, individualised feedback from their teacher. The mock examinations should highlight areas of weakness and shine a light on the skills which need honing and improvement.
So what of the worst case scenario? A student totally bombs in the mocks? Well, even that’s not a disaster. I have seen students turn things around in a manner that I might not have believed possible had I not seen it with my own eyes. A real stinker of a performance in an examination can even be the catalyst that some students need to get them focused – if no amount of their teachers or their parents telling them to buck their ideas up has worked, then sometimes totally crashing down to earth with truly disastrous grade can be the ticket.
So do not despair. We have around six months until the final examinations in the summer. That’s more than a quarter of the curriculum time remaining. Time to re-group and time to focus. Success may be closer than you think.
