classroom teaching – Page 6 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Keeping it short

New clients are often surprised by the fact that I recommend sessions of just 30 minutes. Many are swiftly converted to the idea when I give my reasons, but some remain deeply sceptical; I have even lost one or two leads as a direct result.

Given how critical many people are of the shortness of their own child’s attention span, and also given the fact that most people approach me because of the very fact that their child is struggling to cope in my subject, I do find it strange how bitterly wedded to the hour-long model some people are. I also find it strange how many tutors are still working to it.

The latter is perhaps easily explained: to be frank, it is easier as a tutor to fill your books and your time in hourly slots, as going with the half-hour model means that you have to source double the number of clients to make the same amount of money. However, I don’t believe that this is the reason why so many tutors are sticking to the hourly model, not least because I know so many who are already over-subscribed. I think it’s got far more to do with habit. We’ve always done it this way, so let’s just carry on. Some tutors to whom I have suggested the 30-minute model have reacted to the idea as if it’s some kind of revelation – it had literally never occured to them to tutor for any period of time other than an hour. Yet in the world of music teaching, for example, 30-minute lessons are really quite common.

The hour-long model for tuition is in many ways a hang-over from when all sessions were face-to-face and practicalities therefore came into play. Parents bringing their child to a tutor’s house probably preferred an hourly session; at least it’s enough time to nip round to the Co-Op and pick up a few basics, or do another quick errand. Half an hour would mean that they would probably have no choice but to sit in the car and wait. Yet these days, with online tutoring, 30 minute sessions are a viable, workable model and students gain untold benefits from working in this way.

Here are just a few of my key reasons for going with the 30-minute model.

Most tutoring sessions are very intensive and can be taxing on the working memory, which is exceedingly limited. Over-burdening a child’s working memory is counter-productive and will hinder their progress.
Tutoring is expensive for the client. Given what I have said in number 1, I truly believe that I am giving better value for money, because a child is more able to focus intensively for the whole session. Why pay for extra time that is potentially less valuable? This is why I recommend two sessions of half an hour if parents are really keen for their child to have an hour of my time – they pay me the same amount as they would at an hourly rate, but they’re getting better value for money.
Not all children are exactly thrilled at the notion of spending extra time being coached in a subject that they are struggling with and/or that they don’t (yet) like. This is especially true of teenagers. A 30-minute session is a much easier sell to a disaffected, disgruntled Year 11 student, especially when they see how much progress they can make in that short time. I have had teenagers request to go up to two sessions per week once they realise the progress that they can make in a 30 minute slot. We must all try hard to remember what it feels like to be 14, 15 or 16 years old. An hour feels like an absolute eternity. I remember being almost in tears before double geography, just at the thought of the interminable boredom. (Sorry, Mrs Winslow).
On a related note, 30-minute sessions also mean that I don’t get bored. Sorry if this is a shock to anyone, but tutors are human and we get tired during sessions as well, especially if that session involves the patient repetition and re-explanation of very simple concepts, multiple times, which it often does. I work with numerous students who need remedial help on very simple concepts. Keeping their sessions short keeps up the sense of urgency and the interest; I am fresh, focused and your child is getting me at my best.
The 30-minute model means I can help more people. I currently have almost 40 students on my books and there is no way I could work with that many clients in hourly slots. I am already getting to the point where I am turning people away: while I do have some slots available, unless a parent can agree to a very specific time, I am currently having to pass them on to other tutors. If they have selected me for a specific reason (usually because they have read my website really carefully), this can be disappointing for them, however wonderful I know my recommended tutors are. I understand that, and I want to work with as many people as I can who want to work with me.

Finally, some thoughts about schools. While many schools work with hourly lessons, this is not true for all and indeed it is the most academic schools that tend to favour shorter lessons. The grammar school I used to work in had eight lessons per day, each one of 35 minutes. The pressure to get the students in, settled and working as soon as possible was high; as a result, every minute felt urgent and pressured, and that’s actually very conducive to a thriving learning environment. One of the biggest changes I noticed when I left this grammar school and joined a comprehensive was a terrifying lack of urgency when it came to lesson time. I remember being totally taken aback by a student who once commented “is it even worth starting this? We’ve only got half an hour.”

Many schools worry that the introduction of shorter lessons would lead to wasted time, as students will be moving between classes more often. In my experience, the exact opposite is the case. Shorter lessons put the pressure on both students and staff, and it’s easier to promote the sense that we must be making the most of every minute.

INSETs I wish I’d walked out of

When I reflect on the hundreds, possibly thousands of hours I have spent sat on a plastic chair designed for children, listening to half-baked, poorly-researched, unevidenced clichés and banalities, it’s actually quite difficult not to be angry.

Like anything in life, you have to be detached from something to get it into perspective: and more perspective makes me more cross rather than less so. How much of my time was wasted at tax-payers’ expense? Even worse, how many children continue to be taught badly while undiscerning leaders pump out empty platitudes instead of making themselves aware of and sharing the wealth of information that we do have about how humans learn?

I wish I’d been braver. I wish I’d voted with my feet and walked out of some sessions, rather than saving my disapproval for the anonymous staff surveys. It’s easy to say now, I realise that, and when your salary is being paid by those presenting at INSET, it might seem a little foolhardy to make your feelings so apparent. But the SLT in the school in which I spent the last 13 years of my career were pretty good at taking things on board. They weren’t tyrants; they were humane, benevolent and willing to be challenged. Maybe if I’d been a little bolder I could have helped to drive them towards evidence-informed pedagogy a little sooner. As it was, I had to wait for some personnel changes at the top and for some of the figures at leadership level to start reading the right material. It took years. It was infuriating.

Even more than this, I regret not following my instincts in the early days of my career. In particular, the instinct that if something sounds, feels and smells like unscientific hokum … then that’s exactly what it is. I knew that “Brain Gym” was an unrelenting stream of hogwash. And yet I sat there and listened to it (eyebrows in my hairline, but still I sat there). Now I feel dirty and used. Fortunately for all of us exposed to this achingly bad presentation back in around 2006, on the next day, another colleague – one of the scientists, I suspect – pinned an article by Ben Goldacre onto the staff room noticeboard; the piece was a precursor to Goldacre’s book Bad Science, which I later read, exposing “Brain Gym” and its ilk as pseudo-scientific snake-oil. Thanks to that article, and to the teacher who anonymously shared it, the use of “Brain Gym” was quietly shelved by anyone in the school who was even borderline capable of critical evaluation.

“Brain Gym” wasn’t the only bad science that I had to endure. Within the last decade the school where I worked invited in an outside speaker (at I know not what grotesque expense) to tell us all that mind maps were the only way for children to learn because they look a bit like your brain does under a microscope. I kid you not, he showed us an image of neurons and pointed out how similar mind-maps look, like it was some kind of gotcha. He also espoused the “left-brain/right-brain” hypothesis, admitted that “neurologists think it’s a little bit more complicated than this” (they do?! It is?!) but then declared breezily that “for our purposes” it was “a good working model”. Right. Presumably his definition of “a good working model” was the fact that it enabled him to keep rolling out his useless PowerPoint rather than telling us anything that was actually true about the brain. The only thing that got me through that particular session was another colleague: every time this fraudulent salesman made a statement of about the brain, the biologist sitting next to me muttered “no, it doesn’t”. And thank heaven for her.

Bad science aside, the number of INSETs I wish I’d walked out of simply as a statement that SLT were wasting my time remain alarmingly high. Here are some further examples of some of what I have been made to endure and/or partake in over the years:

VAKing, now fortunately condemned to the bonfire by anyone who knows anything. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t agonising sitting through this claptrap at the time, then being made to interview children about what they felt their preferred “learning style” was (some schools put a sticker on the front of children’s exercise books, naming their “preferred style”. We got them to colour it in). The very concept of preferred learning styles is unscientific hogwash; unfortunately is still being peddled in some places, especially in the US.
It’s all about growth mindset. No it isn’t, nor was it ever, and now we have the evidence to prove that its impact in schools amounts to net zero. Next?
Drumming. Ah what an INSET that was. We each had to choose our own percussion instrument, and this in itself was made out to be some kind of personality test. We then all “learned” to perform a short percussive work. I believe that the message was something about working as a team for the greater good. Inspirational.
Juggling. Here the message was that it’s difficult to learn a new skill and we should remember that when we’re teaching. I am unclear as to why it took two hours of me attempting to catch small bean bags to drive this message home.
Guess what’s in the trainer’s head. I have a genuine issue with someone standing up at the front of the hall and asking me to guess the correct answer to a question they are then going to give me the answer to. How many cases of child neglect were reported in the Surrey area during the last academic year? I have no idea – why would anyone who hasn’t just checked the figures have any idea? I assume you’re planning to tell me, so can we just move on to the bit where you provide me with the actual information, rather than ask me to guess?
Death by PowerPoint. The trainer reads everything that’s on every slide then assures you that it will be on the shared drive for you to access, which begs the question why on earth you had to sit and listen to him reading it aloud.
Death by Ted Talk. No. Just no. If anyone is still in some kind of idealistic bubble in which they think that any Ted Talk is profound and worth hearing, then de-program yourself by watching this. “Let’s look at a picture of the planet for no reason” is I think my favourite moment.
Look at me and my big book. This was a recent lethal mutation from the welcome move towards schools becoming more research-informed. In this genre of INSET, a manager that you know full well rarely if ever opens a book puts the image of the front cover of one he’s been told to read on a projected slide so he can demonstrate how research-informed he is.
Mindfulness. Again, I’m afraid that the research on the impact of this in schools simply isn’t there. Until it is, I don’t want to hear about it and I certainly don’t want to do it with colleagues. Asking me to lie on the drama-room floor (seriously?!) while someone talks in a soothing voice is also a big no.
Bad quotations. Even if correctly attributed, there is nothing more cringe-worthy than an “inspiring” quotation on a PowerPoint slide. And I don’t know a single manager who hasn’t used a falsely-attibuted one at some point or another.

As Abraham Lincoln famously said, the trouble with quotes on the internet is you never really know whether they’re genuine.

Why is Latin difficult?

Latin has something of a reputation. Everyone thinks it’s difficult and indeed it is. But so is mathematics and so is any language once you get beyond “bonjour, je m’appelle Alain”. Grammar is difficult and still not explicitly taught in our own language to the degree that it is in many other countries.

So why do some children struggle with Latin over and above anything else?

One reason is the unfamiliar territory that the language presents to family and friends. Many parents and guardians feel able to offer some kind of support to their children in the majority of subjects, certainly in the early years. I work with many families who are thoroughly involved when it comes to the children’s homework and it’s true that many children benefit from adult support in their studies at home – during lockdown, this took on a whole new importance. Lots of families employ me because they care about their children’s studies and feel ill-equipped to support them due to their own lack of knowledge, and with only around two and a half percent of state schools currently offering Latin on their timetable, I don’t anticipate the situation changing in a hurry. As a result of the fact that so few people have any experience of Latin as a subject, it maintains a certain mystique, all feeding into its reputation for being inaccessible and challenging.

Furthermore, and at the risk of stating the obvious, Latin is an ancient language – and a dead one. What that means quite simply is that nobody speaks it any more. As a result, the content of what you are translating will often seem obscure to you, due to the fact that the world has changed rather a lot. The ancient world was very different from ours and much of what went on even in the most mundane aspects of daily life can seem unfamiliar or even bizarre. Add to this the fact that a lot of the time students will be looking at stories from ancient myths or founding legends and we’re in a whole new world of weirdness. This inescapable fact is captured rather brilliantly in this little meme, which has been circulating the internet for as long as I can remember:

The thing is, children generally like the weirdness and indeed the darkness. If you think that youngsters don’t like dark stories then explain the thundering success of an author such as Patrick Ness. Generally, children are not put off by the puzzling nature of what they are translating; but it certainly can contribute to their belief that the material is obscure.

So, we’ve dealt with Latin’s reputation and we’ve established that the inherent fact of it being an ancient, dead language may make it potentially difficult to access. On top of that lies the inesecapable fact that Latin as a language is very different from our own. The most important thing to understand about Latin is that it is a heavily inflected language. This means that word formation matters, but we’re not just talking about spelling here: we’re talking about the fact that the very meaning of a word is adjusted by its formation. In inflected languages, words are modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, voice, number, gender and mood. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation and this will be familiar to students of all languages. However, in Latin (and in other heavily inflected languages such as German) nouns are inflected too, as are adjectives, participles, pronouns and some numerals. The inflection of nouns is called declension.

What blows students’ minds the most, in my experience, is how this inflection translates into English and how the rendering of that translation can be confusing. For example ad feminam means “to the woman” but in the sense of “going towards”. I might use it in a sentence such as “the boy ran over to the woman”. However, feminae can also mean “to the woman”, but this time in the sense of giving something to: so I might use it in a sentence such as “I gave a gift to the woman”. And that’s before we’ve even explored the fact that we also use the word “to” when forming our infinitive “e.g. “the woman likes to run”). Trying to unpick why grammatically different concepts sound the same in English is just one tiny example of a myriad of misconceptions that children can be carrying around in their own head.

Misunderstandings can arise everywhere. Imagine I’m in front of a class and I say “the dative case can be translated as “to” or “for” in English. Pretty clear, right? But if you were hearing a teacher say this rather than reading it, I wonder if you might have heard “the dative case can be translated as “two” or “four” in English.” I discovered this misconception once and it exemplifies perfectly why dual coding (providing a visual representation of what you are explaining, ideally formed in real time) is essential when it comes to grammatical explanations. What’s great about one-to-one tutoring is these kinds of misconceptions can be uncovered and rectified.

Due to its inflection, many Latin words can be difficult to recognise as they decline or conjugate, and this brings us to what many students can find the most disheartening aspect of the subject: vocabulary learning. If a student has worked hard to learn the meaning of a list of words, imagine their disappointment and frustration when this effort bears no fruit for them. A child may have learnt that “do” means “give”. Yet will they recognise “dant”, “dabamus” or “dederunt” as parts of the same verb? Without explicit instruction and support, probably not. This can be really depressing for students and can result in them giving up altogether. It’s also why parental support with vocabulary learning can only take a student so far. That’s where a tutor can help.

Furthermore, due to the inflection of the language, a Latin sentence has to be “decoded” rather than read from left to right – breaking the habit of reading from left to right is something I have written about before and it is without a doubt one of the biggest barriers to students’ progress in my experience. Working on this and supporting students with their ability to tackle each Latin sentence in the right way forms much of what I do as a tutor. Even when a child has worked hard to learn all of their noun endings and all of their verb endings, they still need a huge amount of support and scaffolding to show them how to process these and map them onto what they are translating.

I remain unsure whether Latin really is any harder than any other subject. I believe that its reputation is mainly to do with the fact of its obscurity and how few people have the ability to access it. While this remains the case, however, the demand for support and tutoring will always be high.

One-to-one tuition

What is the benefit of working one-to-one with a student, and why does it trump group work every time? This is a question I have been pondering this week, as I listened to two podcasts aimed at private tutors, both released on the same day, both making the case for tutors like me to make the shift into setting up groups for online tuition. The podcasts were great. The group tuition model? I’m not so sure.

With the explosion of online tutoring into what amounts to one of the fastest-growing corners of the gig economy, I find myself and my recent career-change somewhat on trend. As usual, however, I also discover that I am swimming steadfastly against the tide. Well, thank goodness for that; being in the zeitgeist is definitely not something I’m used to and I’m more of a heckler than a celebrity.

Many online tutors are expanding their businesses into groupwork, to the extent that some are abandoning the one-to-one tuition model altogether. The reason seems obvious; as one parent pointed out to me when they first got in touch to seek help for their daughter, I could make a lot more money if I worked with several students in each slot. This does, of course, rely on there being a high-enough demand for a certain kind of tuition at a particular level: to be frank, in my rather niche subject – taught in only around 2.5% of state schools – I am not sure that’s ever going to be the case. I do have one group of three, which arose because a parent contacted me directly with the request that I work with three children of the same age who were all ab initio and wanted to learn together: in that circumstance, with three friends at the same level who are all keen to start a new project together, the model works very well and I’m enjoying it. But with remedial tutoring (by which I mean the process of supporting a student who has come to you because they are struggling), I have serious doubts. Firstly, I doubt that demand is high enough in my subject but secondly – and I am still idealistic enough to say more importantly – I do not believe that group tuition is a good model when it comes to making that kind of difference to an individual child’s progress.

One of the absolute joys in switching from classroom teaching to one-to-one tutoring is the incredible privilege of taking a child from the bottom of their class to the top. Taking a child who is failing and turning them into one who can achieve the highest of grades. Taking a child who hates your subject and turning them into a GCSE candidate. Taking a child who has been hiding at the back of their classroom for so long that they need a huge amount of coaching and coaxing before they find their feet. One parent told me that their child was coming home in tears after their Latin lessons because they simply had no idea what was going on in the class and had no idea how to access the learning; after working with me, that child went on to choose the subject at GCSE and achieve a very good grade. One of the client reviews I am proudest of reads “you have turned despair and dismay into enjoyment and enthusiasm”. Another says simply “your lessons were transformational.” None of this could be achieved without the one-to-one model. I stand by that. I simply cannot accept that you can take a child who is failing dismally in a subject and get them a top grade without working with them closely as an individual. It’s what tutoring is all about.

I have written before about the power of tuition and the overwhelming benefit which comes from the opportunity to delve in and unpick a student’s understanding – or rather their lack of it. A good tutor will uncover a whole raft of small misconceptions or gaps in a student’s knowledge within the first session. I likened a student’s developing knowledge of a subject to a wall; students who come to a tutor for help have often got bricks throughout that wall that are either misshapen or missing altogether, causing the whole structure to be at risk of collapse. One-to-one tutoring diagnoses the problems, finds the missing bricks and provides the repointing, replacement and reinforcement required. No amount of rhetoric will ever convince me that the same can be done in a small group. Of course, small group-work is great and you can achieve much more than can be achieved with a class of 30; but it still can’t beat the one-to-one model.

Quiet students can often suffer the most in the mainstream classroom – they can fall behind without being noticed or can have enormous potential in a subject – again, without being noticed. A good tutor (and indeed a good classroom teacher) is an excellent reader of body language. I’ve thought a lot in my work about non-verbal cues, those tiny indications that an individual student can give off when they’re not following something – a twitch of the mouth, a furrow of the brow. In a one-to-one session, that’s my cue to pause and rewind and it’s an absolute joy to be able to do so. In the classroom, not only did I not have the time to respond to every non-verbal cue but the reality of a large class meant that I more than likely missed the majority of them. Due to a quirk of timetabling which I won’t bore you with, I once ended up with an extra Year 9 class of 5 students. Yep. Five. I had another group of 24 and yet another of 28 and one of 5. Ask the previous Head why that ridiculous situation arose. Of course, the children in the group of five progressed – on average – better than those in the two larger groups. But it still wasn’t one-to-one tuition and they still didn’t progress as well as they would have done had each of them – in some kind of fantasy parallel universe – had a good private tutor as well.

I have no desire to stand in the way of progress and if enough online tutors are finding that there is enough demand for small-group tuition in their subject and can get decent results with that model then good luck to them. For me – and this is perhaps because I have spent far longer at the chalkface than any other professional tutor I have met so far, I do not believe my heart will ever be in it. I came into tutoring in the sure and certain belief that the one-to-one model is absolutely unbeatable when it comes to building a child’s confidence, tackling misconceptions, breaking down the mindset that they “can’t do it” and launching them onto a new path of success.

For me, nothing else will ever be as rewarding as that.

Happy New Year

tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis

For those of us whose lives are tied up with education, the academic year can be a far more powerful marker of the changing times than the winter solstice.

I have always found the gateway to January a strange thing to celebrate, yet the pressure you’re under to party like it’s 1999 on December 31st is relentless. Fast-forward 24 hours and suddenly everyone is on a detox, which is even more depressing: count me out on that one – as if January weren’t miserable enough! January is – without a doubt – the most intolerable month of the year. Long. Cold. Dark. Simply awful. One of my oldest friends has a birthday in the first week of January and she tells me it’s agony. Quite literally, nobody wants to know; everyone battens down the hatches and goes into hibernation when it comes to socialising. It’s a month to be endured, not enjoyed.

September 1st is the New Year for me – always has been. As someone who has never left education, my year has been shaped by the academic calendar for as long as I can remember. I left school for university, stayed there far longer than is decent and then went into a PGCE followed by full-time teaching. I have quite literally never seen the world when it has not been shaped by academic term times and academic holidays. So as the days start to shorten at the end of August, quite strikingly in that final week, it’s as if the world is preparing itself: ah yes, I think, time to sharpen the pencils and prepare the rucksack. Season of lists and hello brutalness: it’s back to the chalkface again.

This year, of course, feels somewhat different for me, and today is particularly symbolic. Today the local school I used to work at opens its doors to staff and welcomes them back for two INSET days prior to students returning on Monday: many schools across the country are following a similar pattern. For the first time in 21 years I will not be there. So what will I be doing? I have a couple of clients in the morning, one child who – like most – is not yet back in school plus a regular adult client. After that – and just because I can – I’ll be going into London to meet an old friend for lunch. Cheers!

I won’t miss the hard plastic chairs and the “vision” for the next five years. I won’t miss the results analysis. I won’t miss the overwhelming feeling that my time could be better spent preparing my classroom and writing my seating plans. I will miss the people, the camaraderie, the sense of belonging. I knew it would be this way: the price we pay for opting out of any system, for jumping off the hamster wheel, is a slight sense of wistfulness as we watch the other hamsters do their scampering. It’s still worth it.

For many teachers, the start of September is marred by anxiety dreams. Many teachers love their job, but this does not make them immune to feelings of apprehension when it’s time to go back to school. Six weeks is a long time away from a job which relies so much on performance and – like any performer – teachers are often plagued with self-doubt prior to their return to the stage. My most common recurring dream is being in front of a class which will simply not listen; I stand impotently at the front, wringing my hands, snapping at the children who either talk over me or laugh. There have been times when I have woken myself up shouting. Strangely enough (or perhaps it’s not so strange) I have still had a couple of these anxiety dreams this year; my subconscious has clearly not absorbed the fact that I will not be returning to the chalkface and is still convinced that I will find myself in front of a class next week; given that I still occasionally have an anxiety dream about completing my PhD – something which I did in 1999 – I’m not holding my breath for when these dreams will stop.

Teaching is a wonderful job in a thousand ways and while the end of the summer holiday was always a bit of a drag (as my husband puts it: fundamentally, work sucks) I did still look forward to the start of the new year in September. There was something wonderful about the fresh start and the preparation for the return of old students and the welcoming of the new. Each year I strived to do a better job than the last and each year – in incremental ways – I believe I managed it.

This year for me brings greater excitement though, as I step into my new guise as professional Latin tutor and start shaping my business for the academic year. The summer is a tricky time for tutors, with many families choosing to take the whole holiday away from the books; despite this, I have been pleasantly surprised by the amount of work that has come my way, with several new clients booking in for summer booster sessions and others wishing to make a head-start on their studies for the new academic year. I have an encouraging number of new clients booked in from next week and my weekend slots are already close to full for the year – something I could not have imagined happening so quickly.

So to mark the beginning of the academic year I shall be raising a glass to my colleagues and thinking of the scores of friends I have stepping back up to the chalkface once again. Like me, many of them truly love it, but also like me, many of them have found the last couple of years the toughest since the start of their career. I hope things get better for them. I hope the press and the government cut them some slack for once. I hope OfSted don’t come calling until they’ve at least got into the swing of things once more. I hope they’re able and allowed to turn the heating on when they need it. I hope the students know how lucky they are.

Mobile madness

Supermarkets are really good at making things go viral these days. Who didn’t love the image of a whole shelf full of wine bottles labelled “office essentials” during the height of PartyGate? They know how to push people’s buttons on social media in order to keep their brand in the spotlight.

One can only assume that the potential to go viral was the purpose of this display, photographed and shared by an MFL teacher called David on Twitter this weekend:

Predictably, and presumably as part of Tesco’s dastardly plan to go viral, EduTwitter went beserk. Huge numbers of us, myself included, were pretty annoyed about the fact that Tesco were depicting a mobile phone as an “essential” for children heading into school. Yet this notion is not an outlier and Tesco certainly did not come up with it on their own; I am reliably informed by multiple friends who are parents that it is now considered to be a “rite of passage” for children to receive a smart phone when they enter secondary school (if their parents haven’t caved in already), so Tesco know what they’re doing here.

There is overhwhelming evidence that mobile phones cause problems in a school environment, which is why so many schools have moved towards banning them in recent years. Many teachers have expressed growing concerns that smart phones pose a significant safeguarding threat and a tool which aids and abets bullying and child-on-child abuse. This is now well-evidenced. Most fundamentally of all however – given that schools are meant to be a place where children learn – the basic problem with smart phones is that they are weapons of mass distraction.

A blogpost by Innerdrive sums up the research evidence on mobile phone usage in schools and it makes for sobering reading. While much of the research focuses on the usefulness of banning phones in a school setting, there is also a great deal of evidence which should give parents serious pause for thought about their child’s usage of devices at home, particularly at night-time. In summary: please don’t let your child have access to their phone after bedtime and please make sure that you have access to everything your child is doing and seeing online and that you check this regularly.

What has puzzled me most in this whole thing is the number of people still willing to defend the notion of children having access to these devices throughout the school day. Unsurprisingly, not very many of them are classroom teachers. They are “educators”, EdTech pushers or – occasionally – much-loved children’s poets. Most teachers have been concerned about children’s usage of smart phones from day one, and those who have defended the notion in the past have in many cases shifted their viewpoint. One of the most irksome arguments used against banning phones in schools is the viewpoint that children must be educated in their usage and that banning them is part of schools being “out of touch” with the modern world. Okay. Apply that argument to sex education: children should be allowed to experiment with sex in school because they need to be taught how to do it responsibly. Apply the argument to alcohol and drug usage: children should be allowed to use alcohol and drugs in school so that we can teach them how to do so responsibly. And so on. Of course students need to be taught about responsible internet usage and the dangers of social media, and believe you me they get this by the bucket-load. But to suggest that in order to learn about the use of smart phones they need to have ready access to these devices in school (as if somehow otherwise they wouldn’t know what we’re talking about?) is laughable.

One of my earliest shows for Teachers’ Talk Radio explored the relationship that teenagers have with their smart phones and my guest, Dr. Kathy Weston from Tooled Up Education, used the phrase “digital hygiene” to summarise the kinds of discussions and agreements that should go on between parents and their child at the point when a child is given one of these devices. It’s important to note where the responsibility lies here: with the parents who, after all, are paying the bill. Of course schools should be addressing mobile phone usage as a part of their PSHE programme, and I cannot imagine there is a school in the land not doing so. But dealing with this issue in schools is a dismal attempt to hang a sheet over a door that a horse has not only bolted through but slammed so hard that the door is off its hinges. In my show I also interviewed Matt Crowley, lead DSL (Designated Safeguarding Lead) in the school in which I was working at the time; the serious safeguarding risks and the systemic damage to a child’s mental health, self-esteem and personal safety which can arise from the use of these devices – in school and beyond – simply cannot be over-emphasised, I’m afraid.

Defenders of the smart phone in schools piont to its “education benefits” and there is no question that there are multiple apps that children can make use of in their learning journey. However, it is a full-time job to micro-manage this kind of usage and that can only be done by a parent or carer. If only we could trust all of our children to make use of their phones to access their Latin vocabulary on Quizlet during break and lunchtimes! In reality, anyone who thinks that’s what they are doing with them is seriously deluded. During the period in which smart phones had become endemic amongst young people when I was working in schools, I knew of numerous cases of children accessing pornography and videos produced by terrorist organisations; I knew of cases in which these devices were used for horrific and systemic bullying, to film teachers and humiliate them on social media, and for children to watch age-inappropriate films and play age-inappropriate games. You name it, I’m afraid they’ve probably done it and done it in school. Is that what people want for their child?

So schools must hold the line and maintain their ban – not that I know of a single one that regrets it – and parents can (I hope) take inspiration from it. These devices are wondrous and I fully admit that I could not live without mine. I first attained a smartphone at the age of around 35, which is probably responsible enough. I cannot tell you how glad I am that they did not exist when I was a child.

My final thought brings me back to my new full-time role, as a professional tutor. It is a discussion I have had to have with numerous parents, advising them to take away a child’s mobile phone while they access my sessions. Working online, it is particularly difficult to spot when a child is distracted by their device, but I can still spot it. Most children find it too difficult to discipline themselves not to look at their phones whilst they’re doing anything (even something they enjoy!) so the odds of them being able to resist it during a tutoring session are vanishingly slim. So take control, which means take the device. They’ll thank you for it one day.

Summer term: and the teaching is not easy

It never fails to depress me just how much curriculum time goes out of the window in the second half of the summer term. This yearly saga is not simply the inevitable result of the students (not to mention the staff) being frankly desperate to begin their summer holidays; the atmosphere is facilitated – even promoted – by our school systems and by the people who organise them. Boy, do we make life difficult for ourselves in the summer term.

The run-down to the summer holiday has always been punctuated by events that disrupt the calendar. Year 10 Work Experience, that hilarious misnomer “curriculum week”, sports day, reward events and summer camps of various guises; one of my clients talked about an ominous-sounding “bush week” – something I am very glad to say I have never been forced to endure in my career. To some extent, these events in themselves send a message to students that we’re in summer festival mode and it’s time to wind down. Yet some of them (perhaps – dare I say it – even the bush week) have unquestionable value and I acknowledge that they have to happen sometime. So why not now?

One of the things I have thought about the most in my final year at the chalkface is the messaging we send out to our students: not just in what we say but in what we do. There is much talk about how important it is to model good behaviour, to show students what “good” looks like by demonstrating excellence, good manners and commitment at all times. So what message are we sending them, do we think, when things start winding down three weeks prior to the end of term? Three weeks is around 8% of the curriculum time we have with them. That’s 8% of curriculum time that is so disrupted that the only way to manage it as a classroom teacher is basically to write it off; I’ve always said that if you haven’t finished the overwhelming majority of what you need to teach by May half term then you’re going to struggle to finish it at all, as the second half of the summer term is a total bun-fight. My worry, however, is that this messaging leads to one inevitable conclusion for our students: that the curriculum doesn’t really matter that much after all.

Beyond the realities of curriculum time, we also create quite a problem for ourselves when it comes to behaviour. Children thrive on routines and boundaries and when those routines and boundaries become disrupted then behaviour gets worse. We all know this. Yet in some schools, just one day’s hot weather apparently means that students can’t possibly wear their (summer) uniform and are instead allowed to attend school in their PE kit – a concession that puzzles me given that at least one of the purposes of school is to prepare them for adult working life; last time I checked, most employers don’t allow their workforce to come into the office in a pair of loose-fitting boxers just because the thermometer has hit 30 degrees for a day or two. By all means, encourage students to remove blazers, loosen ties, remove garters or adjust whatever other crazy form of attire the school has chosen as its marker; this would happen in most adult settings – even the most formal – in extreme weather conditions. However, if schools choose to have a uniform (and most schools do) then the messaging has to be that the wearing of that uniform not only matters but matters a great deal. Why? Because otherwise the subliminal message that you’re sending out is this: we have rules, but they don’t always get enforced and so in the grand scheme of things they don’t actually matter.

Incidentally, uniform and how it is worn is something I have completely changed my mind about over the years. When I first entered the profession I saw no no reason whatsoever to sanction students for not tucking in their shirts or doing up their ties. “What does it matter?” I thought. “I want them to be thinking about the learning, not fussing about their clothes.” Correcting a child’s uniform seemed to me to be part of the gradgrindian system that I – a liberal educationalist- was dead set against. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I now believe that if we are in the business of preparing young people for all walks of life then that applies to everything: the fact that they may have to dress and act a certain way in certain circumstances, the fact that institutions have rules that they will be expected to respect if they want to be part that institution (their choice either way – that’s part of the gift we impart to them). Beyond this, and perhaps even more crucially, it simply isn’t fair to expect children to understand that adults mean what they say but only in certain circumstances; that some rules matter but others don’t; that I mean what I say when I tell students not to talk over each other, or not to run in the corridors, but not when I ask them to correct their uniform. My view would be that if you can’t get on board with being strict on uniform then get rid of it.

This final summer in school has felt like the hardest. Schools have been under immense pressure to cram in all the activities that our students have missed out on in the last couple of years. We feel like we owe them and in many ways I believe that we do. Society owes a great debt to its youth, whose lives have been curtailed and controlled to a degree that – in any normal circumstances – we would consider completely unacceptable. And not only that, they have been curtailed for the sake of the oldest and most vulnerable members of society. In all honesty I have been truly stunned at how they have taken it with such extraordinary good grace: we all owe them a great deal of gratitude. Yet – in my view – that debt is not paid by pandering to their every whim and by punching yet more holes in a curriculum that has already been eviscerated. Indeed no. We offer them that payback by being our most consistent, most loving, most insistent best. By believing that they can handle it.

Show me your best is now my mantra: for I believe that we can and should expect more of our young people: that they can do so much better than most adults expect them to do.