GCSE – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Results Day

There are very few pieces of paper capable of making a sixteen-year-old cry before breakfast, making their parents feel physically sick and causing an entire family to wake up several hours earlier than usual, teenagers included. A GCSE results sheet is one of them.

This morning, thousands of teenagers will have collected a handful of numbers that they have spent months, sometimes years, believing will tell them something fundamental about themselves. For some, those numbers will be a source of enormous joy and pride. For others, they will be a bitter disappointment. Most will fall somewhere in between, opening their results with a mixture of relief, excitement and mild bewilderment. What fascinates me is the disproportion between the importance we attach to results on this particular day and the significance they are likely to have in the lives of the people receiving them.

I do not mean to suggest that GCSE results are unimportant. That would be a rather glib thing to tell a sixteen-year-old who has just discovered that they have missed the grade they needed for the college course they wanted to pursue. Results have consequences: they can determine which subjects a student can go on to study, which courses they can access and, in some circumstances, which opportunities are available to them. Academic attainment at sixteen is also associated with a range of later outcomes, including employment and earnings, and there is evidence that GCSE results can be particularly consequential for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

So no, I am not going to tell disappointed students that their results “don’t matter”. They do matter. What I would like to suggest is that they don’t matter in quite the way that they currently think they do.

Sixteen is an extraordinarily young age at which to receive what feels like a definitive verdict on your intellectual capabilities. Yet this is exactly how examinations can come to feel. A student who has spent years being told that they are clever may look at one disappointing result and conclude that they have somehow been exposed as a fraud. Another who has always struggled may see a low grade as confirmation of something they have already come to believe about themselves. Even the student who gets a collection of grade 8s and 9s can be convinced they are a failure, if their parents have set them the heinous target of a perfect set of 9s.

A GCSE is an assessment of what you knew and could do in a particular subject, at a particular age, under a particular set of circumstances. That is, as it happens, a useful thing to know. It is not, however, a comprehensive psychological assessment. Your GCSE results cannot tell you whether you are going to be kind, funny, interesting, resilient, creative, courageous, generous, successful or happy, nor can they tell you what you are going to be good at for the rest of your life.

I am always struck by how little we remember about other people’s results once a few years have passed. Ask somebody in their thirties or forties what their school friends achieved at GCSE and most will struggle. They may remember the person who got a clutch of top grades and went on to medical school. They may remember somebody who failed spectacularly and was devastated at the time. They may remember their own results with surprising clarity (although these days, for my own part, I have to think quite hard about it). But the grades of the vast majority of the people they sat beside in the classroom have disappeared completely from memory.

This is particularly strange when you consider the emotional intensity of results day itself. At sixteen, it can seem as though everybody will remember what you achieved forever. The grade you received in English literature can feel like a permanent addition to your identity. You can almost hear the adults around you mentally filing you away: bright, average, disappointing, exceptional. Yet life has a rather irritating habit of refusing to respect these classifications.

People evolve. They discover things they did not know they were interested in. They meet people who alter the course of their lives. They leave school and discover that they are suddenly rather good at something nobody had ever noticed before. They fail at things they expected to succeed at and succeed at things they had assumed were beyond them. They make spectacularly bad decisions and, occasionally, spectacularly good ones. Some become doctors. Some become plumbers. Some become teachers. Some become artists. Some start businesses. Some spend twenty years doing something they thought they would love before deciding that they hate it and changing direction completely.

When I was sixteen, I had no idea what my eventual career would be. I certainly could not have predicted that I would spend my adult life teaching Latin. Had somebody shown me a list of the things that I would eventually do, I would probably have assumed that most of them belonged to somebody considerably more organised and sensible than me. Life does not unfold according to a careers questionnaire completed at sixteen. (I think the one I did told me I should be an analyst: I have still got absolutely no idea what that is).

There is a tendency, particularly on results day, to divide young people into winners and losers. Newspapers love photographs of teenagers holding up results sheets with enormous grins, surrounded by delighted parents and teachers. There is nothing wrong with celebrating success, and students who have worked hard and achieved the grades they wanted deserve every bit of the celebration they receive. But the visual language of results day can be rather unforgiving. One group gets to stand outside the school holding their grades aloft. Another group quietly disappears home, perhaps feeling that they have failed at something considerably larger than an examination. The reality is much messier. One student can achieve excellent grades and be miserable; believe me, I’ve met dozens of students like this and my heart aches for them. Another student can achieve disappointing grades and feel liberated. I always think of Robbie Williams, who got the call to say he had been selected to join a new boy band called Take That, just a couple of days after he had received his frankly atrocious GCSE results. Some students get exactly the results they wanted and discover six months later that they have chosen the wrong course. Others can miss their grades, take a different route and eventually find themselves thriving doing something they would never have considered had everything gone according to plan.

This is not an argument for pretending that educational achievement is irrelevant. Quite the contrary. Education opens doors, and some doors are considerably harder to open without particular qualifications. The point is that a door is an opportunity, not a destiny. GCSE results can influence the route you take through the next few years without determining where you eventually end up.

Perhaps this is why I find results day so emotionally complicated. It is entirely reasonable to be proud of a good result and entirely reasonable to be devastated by a bad one. What is unreasonable is to imagine that either response tells us very much about the person standing in front of us.

Endgame

As I write, there is one more optional paper outstanding for the OCR Latin GCSE, albeit one that very few of my students will be sitting. By the time this piece is published, all of the examinations will be over.

For those of us who work in education, the end of the examination period marks not only the conclusion of a set of assessments, but also a kind of letting go. While we can explain, reassure, encourage and prepare, we cannot sit the papers for them. When the scripts are placed down on the desk and the clock begins its inexorable march forward, that student must go it alone. The weeks leading up to that moment are often characterised by a steady accumulation of worry. Students fear forgetting what they know. They fear difficult questions, poor sleep, unexpected illness and disappointing results. Even the most capable candidates are rarely immune. Indeed, some of the highest-achieving students often carry the heaviest burdens, acutely aware of the expectations they have placed upon themselves.

Alongside the students stand their parents. Public discussion of examinations often overlooks them, yet many experience the season as a prolonged period of helplessness and worry. They can provide revision resources, quiet spaces and encouragement, but they cannot sit the papers either. They must watch their children navigate stress, self-doubt and exhaustion and, quite naturally, absorb all of those emotions themselves.

Teenagers are notoriously good at emotional projection. Adults who work with teenagers often report walking into a room feeling calm and leaving feeling worried, pressured, angry or overwhelmed, all without immediately understanding why. In psychodynamic theory, it is purportedly possible for someone to unconsciously induce another person to experience feelings that they themselves cannot comfortably hold; rather than saying “I feel anxious”, the anxious person behaves in ways that leave everyone around them feeling anxious. Psychoanalysts have long reported experiencing sudden feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, irritation or helplessness that seem to originate in the patient’s emotional world rather than their own, and they are trained to reflect on their own feelings after a session and identify whether those feelings may reflect those of their clients.

In a similar way, tutors can become vessels into which the worries of students (and indeed their parents) are poured. A student arrives at a session convinced they have forgotten everything. A parent sends a message late in the evening asking whether their child is doing enough. Another student worries that a single mock result has predetermined their future. A parent fears that one poor performance will close doors forever. Perhaps most significantly at this point in the process, a parent accepts their child’s report of a disastrously poor performance in an examination as gospel: in fact, as I have written about before, research shows that students are generally very poor at assessing their own performance.

One of the less discussed realities of educational work is that emotional labour forms a substantial part of the job. We carry confidence when students temporarily lose theirs. We maintain perspective when parents struggle to see beyond an approaching exam date. We absorb fears that we know are disproportionate while simultaneously respecting the fact that, to the person experiencing them, they feel entirely real. During the examination season, this responsibility intensifies. Every session acquires a heightened significance and every practice paper feels loaded with meaning. A student’s disappointment over a dropped mark is rarely about the mark itself, it is about what they believe that mark represents, which is weakness and failure. The role of the educator becomes part teacher, part interpreter and part custodian of perspective.

When I worked in schools, this experience was concentrated within a single cohort. There was a collective rhythm to the year. One group of Year 11 students moved together through the same milestones, the same assemblies, the same revision sessions and eventually the same examination timetable. Their anxieties often echoed one another. For better or for worse, there was a shared atmosphere in the classroom and across the school. The pressure was intense, but it was unified.

Independent tutoring has altered that experience in unexpected ways. Rather than accompanying a single cohort through a common journey, I now work with numerous individual students, whose educational lives rarely intersect. I work across two examination boards and across all the myriad of choices that their teachers can make (hence the variety of end-dates I mentioned in my opening lines). Their examination timetables differ, their schools differ and (to be brutally frank) the quality of the teaching they have received also differs.

The cumulative effect can be surprisingly profound. While a classroom teacher may be carrying the concerns of thirty students in a single year group, an independent tutor may be carrying the concerns of dozens of individuals whose worries arrive separately and require separate attention. There is no collective narrative, rather there are multiple overlapping stories, each wildly significant to the person who is living it.

This is not a complaint. On the contrary, it is one of the privileges of the profession. Trust is not given lightly, particularly by adolescents navigating one of the most scrutinised periods of their education. To be entrusted with those concerns is an honour. Yet it would be dishonest to pretend that educators remain untouched by them. This year, it has been particularly challenging, for we have also been in the process of trying to move house. We accepted an offer on our property back in February and since then we have been playing the horrifically stressful game of strategy with agents, solicitors and some very anxious, very inexperienced first-time buyers. At last, as of this week, it looks like the deal is about to go through. Given the period of anxiety-inducing uncertainty that we’ve been through during the run-up, I’m almost looking forward to the stress of packing.

As examinations take place, many teachers and tutors find themselves carrying a quiet sense of responsibility that extends beyond any rational measure of their influence. We know that success or failure does not rest solely on our shoulders. We know that students ultimately achieve through their own effort and ability. Yet anyone who cares deeply about their work will recognise the feeling. We celebrate their successes personally and experience their disappointments personally too.

This is why the final examination of the season often brings relief not only for students but also for those who have supported them. The relief is different, of course. Students are relieved because the challenge is over. Teachers and tutors are relieved because the waiting can finally begin. There are no more last-minute questions, no more urgent revision plans, no more attempts to compress confidence-building into the final twenty-four hours before an exam. The work has been done. The papers have been written and nothing further can be added.

The weight that educators carry during examination season is rarely visible from the outside. It does not appear in timetables, performance measures or inspection reports. It is measured instead in conversations, emails, reassurances and moments of calm offered to students who need someone to remind them that an examination is important but not defining.

Results day remains ahead, of course. There will be celebrations, surprises and occasional disappointments. Yet results day belongs to a different emotional landscape. The uncertainty of preparation has ended. The long months of revision have passed. Whatever happens in August, the students have already done the hardest part: they have walked into the examination hall and faced the challenge.

Effective study

Examinations are looming on the horizon. This year’s GCSE candidates will no doubt be receiving revision advice, yet I fear that much of it will be inadequate. While there are some schools that are doing a great job on this, others are still behind the curve when it comes to their knowledge base: teaching is sadly a profession that has been historically prone to fads and unevidenced practice, something I witnessed during my training and throughout my career. In recent years, many individual teachers have gone out of their way to inform themselves about what cognitive science has to say about effective study, and this increasing knowledge and understanding about memory and learning is finally beginning to impact upon the advice that is given to students. This can be seen in the sheer number of teachers who choose to attend ResearchED conferences on a Saturday during their own time, to inform their understanding of good learning techniques. Despite this quiet, grassroots revolution, there is still a remarkable amount of misinformation out there, and I still occasionally reel in mortification at the sorts of things that are said to my tutees when it comes to revision advice.

Much of the problem stems from the very language that is used by teachers, students and parents when it comes to revision. It is hard to know where that language comes from, but much of it seems to be ingrained and on an infinite loop, like a scratched record. Students still frequently say to me that they need to “go over” something, which by its very nature implies revisiting the content to refresh their memory. In practical terms, the advice that a student needs to “go over” something encourages them to reread their notes. A student who is attempting to be proactive about their studies may highlight key information while they read. Yet cognitive science teaches us that reading and highlighting in this way are entirely ineffective practices, for they provide the learner with a feeling of familiarity without genuinely increasing or securing their knowledge-base. Reading and highlighting can feel genuinely productive, to the extent that the student believes that they are actively engaging with an effective learning process; in reality, they are giving themselves false reassurance and not practising the process of retrieval, which is essential both for learning outcomes and for examination practice.

Kate Jones, a teacher and an expert in sharing good practice for effective, evidence-based learning, has this week published a short blog on the Evidence Based Education website, highlighting the importance of what she calls responsive revision. In the blog she did what she does so well, which is to summarise and consolidate what we know from cognitive science into a practical and effective format that is easy for both classroom teachers and students to apply. Responsive revision, according to Kate Jones’ blog, is “a deliberate, structured method of independent study in which students use retrieval to generate evidence about what they know, what they can recall, and where gaps remain. They then respond to that evidence by directing their time and effort towards strengthening those gaps. It shifts revision from passive review to informed action. It also ensures students don’t keep going over their favourite or familiar topics but instead identify and tackle gaps in knowledge and understanding.”

One of the most important things for students to understand is the difference between what feels familiar (the process of recognition) and what is genuine recall (the process of retrieval). When a student rereads their notes or sits and listens to a concept being explained to them again, the material will feel familiar. This gives them the illusion that they can remember something when in fact, under pressure, they will not be able to recall it. The illusion can be so convincing that it can even cause the learner to fool themselves in the process: for example, research shows that many students have the tendency to use flashcards wrongly by turning over the card too soon, resulting in the phenomenon of them recognising the answer and then convincing themselves they did indeed know the answer. The trap is surprisingly easy to fall into. One simple way to guard against it is to work with someone else and to put them in charge of flipping the cards over. Because recognising information is so much easier and more comforting than the process of forcing yourself to recall it independently, students often cling to methods that allow them to experience the process of recognition, like a comfort blanket. They may even insist that the method is working for them, because it feels safe and encouraging and gives them the illusion that their knowledge base is strengthening. In reality, they are doing nothing to aid their recall under pressure.

In her blog, Kate Jones argues that revision should generate evidence, and by that she means evidence of absence as well as evidence of knowledge. Students need to test themselves in order to evidence the knowledge that they possess and to reveal the gaps in that knowledge, keeping themselves in a constant information loop of what they can retrieve successfully and confidently, what they can partially remember, and what they cannot yet call to mind. Armed with that information, the student can then take effective ation, a process which she explores in her blog.

If I could convince any learner of one thing that seems counter-intuitive, it would be that they should be testing themselves at every stage of their learning, including at the beginning. Students tend to resist this, for the process is challenging and uncomfortable (especially if they are not used to it in school) and the notion that they should be testing themselves on an area where they are aware that their knowledge-base is inadequate can feel rather daunting: perfectionists find it especially difficult to tolerate. Yet testing is essential to learning. When a student attempts to recall a piece of information from memory, they create the evidence base for what they do and do now know. Even more than this, not only does the process of retrieval make their knowledge (or lack of it) visible, it is also part of the learning process. For every time a student attempts to recall something and each time they manage to do so, they are working on the very thing that they will need to rely on in the examination; they are also strengthening the foundations of that knowledge base.

I cannot recommend Kate Jones’ blog highly enough for a simple, evidence-based explanation for how to go about the process of revision. Her ability to distil complex, research-informed ideas into a practical, workable guide is quite remarkable and as a result she is quite brilliant as a go-to advisory service for teachers. Her books on retrieval practice should be the benchmark for any classroom teacher. For advice directed at learners, regular readers of my blog will know that I am a huge fan of the psychologist Paul Penn’s advice on how to learn, which can be found both in his book on effective studying and on his YouTube channel.

Cambridge hangovers

The Cambridge Latin Course: love it or hate it, you can’t ignore it. Longterm readers of my blog and listeners of my podcast will be aware that I have been quite critical of the CLC in the past, despite the fact that it did form the backdrop to my classroom teaching for most of my career. While I continued to use the stories (albeit adjusted) and the characters from the course, I moved further and further away from its approach to grammar during my time at the chalkface and rejected its underlying principles (show, don’t tell) pretty early on. Towards the end I had completely re-written the curriculum and had stopped using the text books altogether.

Now, as a full-time tutor, I am increasingly aware of the legacy that the CLC has left Latin teaching and I am genuinely curious to know how long this legacy will last. Whilst many schools have ostensibly stopped using the CLC, its influence on teachers’ approach remains apparent in ways that many of them are perhaps not even aware of. In this blog post I hope to reveal some of the habitual oversights that classroom teachers of Latin are making as a result of what I believe is a hangover from the CLC curriculum.

One key blind spot for classroom teachers aiming to prepare their students for the OCR examination is a failure to teach the verb malo at the same time as they teach volo and nolo. I cannot explain this, other than a legacy of the fact that malo is not taught in the CLC when volo and nolo are taught. Taylor & Cullen introduce malo at the same time (in chapter 7 of their text book), but the overwhelming majority of students that I teach are reasonably well-drilled on volo and nolo but have never been taught the verb malo. Students following the WJEC/Eduqas syllabus do not need to know malo, but those aiming at the OCR examination need to know it, so to miss this tricky verb out of one’s teaching is a major oversight. I believe that this is purely and simply because schools are following curricula that were originally built around the CLC, which makes a big deal out of volo and nolo in Book 2, but never mentions malo.

Another legacy from the CLC which I have written about before is the decision to teach the purpose clause before the indirect command. It was many years ago now when it suddenly hit me what a massive mistake this was. I asked myself why students were so wedded to the habit of translating ut as “in order to” whenever they see it and realised that it is because this is how they first see it and after that they can’t let it go. I have yet to meet a single student who has been taught the indirect command prior to the purpose clause unless they have been taught by me, and this is genuinely fascinating. Every single Latin teacher seems to assume that it is a good idea to teach the purpose clause first, and I believe that the all-pervasive influence of the Cambridge Latin Course is partly to blame. Even Taylor & Cullen do in Latin to GCSE: despite mixing up the approach taken by the CLC (they teach ut clauses first, leaving cum clauses and the indirect question until later), they still take the decision to teach purpose clauses first. In my experience, this is a massive error, and leaves students convinced that ut always means “in order to” when in fact it only means this when it’s used in a purpose clause.

My final grammar-based concern when it comes to school curricula being based around the legacy of the CLC is that teachers are still teaching the perfect active participle as if it is a broad grammar feature. This is done in the CLC, which for some extraordinary reason introduces PAPs towards the beginning of Book 3, long before deponent verbs are even mentioned in Book 4. Students really struggle as a result, since they form the understandable belief that the perfect active participle is a grammar feature that is common to all verbs. They thus struggle with the concept that most verbs have a perfect passive participle because they have not been taught that perfect active participles only exist because of deponent verbs. I have to spend a great deal of time unpicking students’ misapprehensions and misconceptions about this, teaching them in detail about deponent verbs and their features and then mapping this onto their participle. It takes so much time to dispel these misunderstandings, which would never be there in the first place were schools to adjust the curriculum to introduce the perfect active participle solely as a feature of deponent verbs.

It is genuinely fascinating to observe the fallout from text book use and to be able to identify where students’ misconceptions are coming from as a direct result of the curriculum that many schools are adhering to. I do find it worrying that so few schools are asking themselves why they are using text books that are not built around the examination that their students are aiming at, not least because the vocabulary in those text books is quite often a monumental waste of time. While the 5th edition of the CLC goes some way towards addressing this, it doesn’t solve the problem entirely and too much of its old stucture and principles remains for the problem to be solved in its entirety.

A general lack of guidance

I struggle to understand why so little guidance is given in many schools about how students should go about the process of learning. To be clear, I’m not talking about school assemblies on “study skills”, which I realise that most teenagers will zone out during. No, guidance needs to come directly from each individual classroom teacher, the subject expert; it also needs to be explicitly taught, modelled and demonstrated on a regular basis. Schools need to agree what methods they are going to recommend and this needs to be reflected right across the school in all subjects, tailored specifically to what works best in each academic discipline.

Startlingly often, students are still being told: here is your Latin set text, now off you go and learn the first section. I was guilty of this in my first few years of teaching — rote-learning comes relatively easy to me and I didn’t really comprehend the fact that most students need to be shown how to go about engaging with the process of committing something to memory. Furthermore, I was working in a very high-achieving grammar school, where we were not really encouraged to support students proactively with their learning; it was assumed that all the students in the school could cope well in academia without such support. This was a foolish assumption, but it was the one we were subliminally encouraged to make.

When it comes to the literature element of the Latin GCSE, whether or not a student knows the translation of the set text off by heart and whether they can relate that knowledge to the the Latin version in front of them is without doubt the single most important differentiator between a student’s success and failure in the exam. Despite this inescapable fact, few Latin teachers appear willing to dedicate classroom time to the learning process, so wedded are they to the conviction that students can manage the learning in their own time. Many of my tutees have been told time and again that they don’t know the text well enough, that they need to learn it, that they need to spend more time doing so. Yet when I ask them, “what methods have you practised in class?” they stare at me, blankly. I have come to realise that most students are not being taught how to learn things off by heart, beyond the most rudimentary of suggestions.

Now, I am not naive. Having taught in secondary schools for 21 years, 13 of those years in a comprehensive setting, I am more than well aware of students’ uncanny ability to claim that they have “never been taught” something that they have in fact been told on multiple occasions. However, the extreme cluelessness of so many of my clients when it comes to what to do and their apparent awe when they are taught some very basic methods such as colour-coding and the first-letter technique do leave me increasingly convinced that many classroom teachers are simply not dedicating enough (or in some extreme cases any) classroom time to learning methodologies. I’ll bet most of them are doing what I used to do in my first few years of teaching — giving students a few bullet points of advice on how to go about learning the texts, then assuming that those students will remember this going forward. But why do we believe such nonsense? We would not (I hope) present them with the endings of the 1st declension in one lesson then assume that they will remember those endings for the rest of time — so why on earth should that be the case when it comes to study skills?

One possible reason is teachers’ anxiety about time. One of the greatest strains that GCSE Latin teachers are under is time pressure. Very few schools offer enough space on the timetable for our subject and I am fully aware that making it through both set texts within the time available is a mammoth task. I rarely finished the second set text prior to the end of March; on the few occasions that I managed to do so, it was real cause for celebration. Yet despite this, as my career progressed, I allocated an ever-increasing amount of classroom time to teaching students how to go about the learning process and also to giving them short bursts of learning time to actually get on with it in silence. Any spare few minutes that I found myself in possession of at the end of a new section or a new concept, I would allow them to bow their heads and spend 10 minutes using the first-letter technique to get a few sentences of the text under their belts. I wonder whether classroom teachers are afraid of allowing students this time, as if it somehow undermines the important of our teaching role. I used to remind students that I was painfully aware how much pressure I was putting them under, asking them to rote-learn a new chunk of text almost every single week. So part of the deal I made with them was that — whenever I could — I would let them have a few minutes of classroom time to kick-start the process.

The benefits of allocating this time are twofold. Firstly, it literally does get the children started on the process and is an opportunity to remind them once again of the methods that have been recommended: I used to put them up on a summary slide, even when they could all recite the methods without hesitation. Secondly, while students are studying, a teacher can circulate the room and check whether they are actually using the recommended methods — there will always be a few determined recalcitants, who claim that the recommended methods “don’t work for them”. This is when a teacher needs to be strong. The evidence for what works and what doesn’t work in terms of how we learn is overwhelming, and unless that child can perform perfectly in every test you give them then they need to get on board with the methods.

As for what the methods should be, I recommend a variety but one is definitely stand-out brilliant and so far has worked for every student I have ever met. So if you haven’t read my old post on how to use the first-letter technique then do so straight away — you will never look back! For broader guidance on effective study I would recommend looking at the work of Dr. Paul Penn, Professor of Psychology and author of The Psychology of Effective Studying. His book is fantastic, as is his YouTube channel.

GCSE Latin set texts – why students struggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fake news: ancient style

The notion of “fake news” is generally considered to be a feature of the modern world. Yet, while the proliferation of false narratives and the digital means to both invent and spread them at high speed is indeed a modern problem, the issue of fake news is not in itself entirely new.

I have recently been ploughing my way through the four new Latin set texts listed by OCR for GCSE examination in 2026 and 2027. One of the prescriptions included two prose texts, one a letter by Pliny the Younger and another an extract from Attic Nights by Aullus Gellius. Both stories involve wild animals and I was vaguely familiar with both of them, indeed the one by Aullus Gellius is quite remarkably famous. Pliny claims that his story about dolphins is “true, but very similar to fiction” — the modern saying “stranger than fiction” would perhaps express the sentiment he is going for. He claims that the source of his story is unquestionably reliable and there is good reason to believe that the source is Pliny the Elder, who was the younger Pliny’s uncle and in many ways a father to the younger Pliny. Pliny the Elder tells a very similar story in his own work, so it seems plausible that the passionate academic and naturalist was indeed the source of this story. A shame, because the story is clearly hugely exaggerated.

The tale reports that a city in the province of North Africa had a large estuary, which the locals used for fishing, sailing and swimming. One day, some boys in the lake were joined by a dolphin, who engaged with them and played. So far, so plausible: dolphins are indeed famously intelligent and sociable and there are many documented modern accounts of dolphins playing with humans in the water. The truth of the story is stretched somewhat when the dolphin takes a boy on his back and carries him out to sea, but even this I could just about accept. What I cannot accept is that eventually the dolphin becomes so enamoured with the boy that he regularly hauls himself out of the water to spend time with him on land, returning to the water only “when he gets too hot”. No, Pliny, that didn’t happen. Fake news.

The tale by Aullus Gellius is the one about Androcles and the lion, a famous story about a man who escapes the dreadful fate of being killed by wild beasts for the entertainment of the Roman crowd. When Androcles is approached by the lion, it turns out to be the very same lion that he had helped with an injury and befriended whilst fleeing cruel treatment by his master, again in the province of North Africa. The story was later adapted and turned into a Christian triumphalist tale, with various versions popping up and placing a different protagonist at the centre of the lion-taming. The whole story is beyond ludicrous, but Aullus Gellius claims that his source (who is named as Apion Plistonices, a Hellenised Egyptian and the author of a work on all things Egyptian) “saw the event as an eyewitness” in the city of Rome. The event he claims to have seen was the lion refusing to attack Androcles, which in fact was not uncommon in wild beast hunts. The animals were starved but terrified and their handlers had little to no idea how to look after them. Most of them died en route from Africa and those that did survive usually had to be goaded into attacking their victims. So, the notion of a lion not leaping enthusiastically on its prey is perhaps entirely plausible; however, the idea that it “gradually and calmly approached the man as if recognising him, then moved his tail in the manner and way of dogs showing affection” does not sound in any way plausible to me.

There is no doubt that authors in the ancient world struggled with a significant amount of ignorance, thus they were vulnerable to fake news just as much as we are. Ironically, their vulnerability to fake news and propaganda was perhaps caused by the exact opposite problem to the one that we face: in the ancient world, news spread incredibly slowly and came largely through word of mouth. Was it easier for an emperor to maintain an aura of mystique when nobody saw him, except perhaps as an etching on a coin? Certainly, we have evidence that emperor worship was more common in the distant provinces, places where the reality of the man would never be seen.

Obviously, it was not just the way that news was proliferated in the ancient world that was the problem, it was their relative ignorance when it came to matters of science. While philosophy, studied and practised rigorously by many academics in the ancient world, was the mother of science and Aristotle is rightly hailed as the father of the scientific method, he and other philosophers had little past knowledge to build upon in the field of biology. While the ancient thinkers made quite remarkable observations in the fields of what we would now call mathematics and astronomy, they really were a right bunch of dullards when it came to biology, I’m afraid. I would strongly advise you not to take any of their health advice, particularly when it comes to female biology!

One of the most depressing things about the ancient philosophers is how tightly constrained they were by their own cultural blindness. For me, it is a sobering lesson that even the most brilliant minds in the history of time have been deadened by their cultural milieu. Take someone like Aristotle: I would argue that his intellect is one of the greatest that man has ever seen. His fascination with everything, his breadth of knowledge and interests, his capacity for learning, his ability to understand that morality is complex and nuanced (something really not grasped by any of his philosophical predecessors) and his tentative forays into what we would call the scientific method, all of these things and more make him a genuine phenomenon. Yet this man argued doggedly that some people are “natural slaves” and wrote a whole treatise on what a jolly good idea slavery was. Slavery in the ancient world wasn’t really questioned by any of the great thinkers. Some, particularly the Stoics, argued against the cruel and unusual treatment of slaves, but none really made the case that slavery in and of itself was an aberration of morality. This, more than anything, should prove to us that people are always at the mercy of the time in which they are born: however great their intellect, it remains very difficult for them to leap outside of the assumptions that they have been presented with as the cultural norm.

One of the many reasons for studying the ancient world is to be able to view a whole society through a dispassionate lens. It is much easier, for example, to talk about the concept of slavery when you are talking about something that happened in a society that existed 2000 years ago, whose ills do not feel like your responsibility on any level. It is much safer than discussing the much more recent transatlantic slave trade, for example, indeed I know plenty of modern historians who do not consider it to be an appropriate topic for younger students: it is, quite simply, too raw. Further than this, what few people seem capable of grasping is that the ancient world should give us cause to reflect on our own ignorance. If some of the greatest minds that have existed since the dawn of time could get some things so spectacularly wrong, then what concepts are we failing to grasp? What will our successors be horrified by in the future? What will they laugh at? How will we seem uninformed? What are our inevitable blind spots? What, indeed, are we lying about?

Photo of a recent anti-Trump protest at LA International Airport by Kayla Velasquez on Unsplash; nice to see the correct use of the subjunctive on a placard!

Who needs decent resources?

It is an absolute miracle. For the first time in the history of the subject, a publisher has produced a complete Anthology, containing all of the OCR GCSE Latin set texts for examination in 2027 and 2028. In an unprecedented move, someone has had the ground-breaking idea of actually publishing the resources that OCR wish teachers to teach and children to study. Such radical thinking can only be attributed to a stroke of genius.

Previously, it may surprise non-specialists to know, only some of the GCSE Latin literature texts were published in a modern format and only some of those publications were formally ratified by OCR. What an incredible leap of imagination it must have taken for the intelligentsia behind the wheel at OCR to think of the idea of a published Anthology of all the texts that they have selected, in the fancy modern format of a book! To be fair, they have been very busy coming up with their dramatic new rebrand, an imminent name switch from “OCR” to “Cambridge OCR”, billed in an email they sent me this week as “an exciting change”. Fundamentally, it means that a group currently called OCR, which stands for “Oxford, Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts” will now become “Cambridge Oxford, Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts”. I hope that’s clear.

Anyway, back to the majestic leap of imagination that is the new Latin Anthology. Not only has someone printed the texts out, they have even glued the pages together! It really is quite the thing. And get this. You can buy it through the publisher, you can buy it through bookstores, you can even buy it on Amazon! Did you know that you can purchase books on Amazon? Imagine my excitement. What relief and joy this publication will bring! Obviously, it will be aimed at students, will it not? Or perhaps aimed rather at teachers, as a complete preparation tool? I was breathless with anticipation. However, within five minutes of glancing through my much-anticipated purchase, it became apparent that this Anthology was an attempt at both of these things and a success at neither.

The first thing to note about the publication is the distinctly bizarre “endorsement statement” from OCR (soon to be Cambridge OCR) at the beginning. It states that while “the teaching content of this resource is endorsed by OCR” (for which I read that they’ve managed to select the correct bits of the text) we are told that “all references to assessment, including assessment preparation and practice questions of any format/style, are the publisher’s interpretation of the specification and are not endorsed by OCR.” Erm, okay. There follows some further language of accountability avoidance that goes on for quite some time, but the general gist is a clear and rather anxiety-inducing attempt by the board to distance themselves from the statement printed on the front cover, which is that the book is “endorsed by OCR”. Does this even happen in other subjects?! Maybe it does, but it seems distinctly odd. Either the book is endorsed or it isn’t, surely?

Things then get worse. The preface and “how to use this book” both seem to slide and shift constantly between the implication that the resource is aimed at teachers for preparation purposes and that it is aimed at students as a workbook. The result of this apparent attempt at dual purpose (or perhaps confusion/indecision as to the purpose at all), is unsurprising: the Anthology fails in its attempt to achieve either of these things. Whether this is the fault of the publisher or the authors is impossible to tell, but it really is a tangible fail.

So far, I have only worked through the Virgil text (extracts from Book II of the Aeneid), and I am already half way to despair. Firstly, despite its promise in the preface to students and non-specialist teachers that the book “aims primarily to help readers understand what the Latin means” there is one rather glaring omission. The authors do not provide an English translation of the texts. For the love of God, why not?! As a friend and fellow tutor put it to me in a message last week, “If [OCR are] going to be so picky as to what they allow … they might as well provide [a translation] and put everyone out of their misery.” Exactly this. In mark schemes over the years I have frequently seen phrases such as “do not accept [perfectly legitimate translation of the word in my reasonably well-informed opinion]”. So, teachers are still expected to somehow divine what it is that examiners will and will not consider to be an acceptable translation of every single word and phrase in every single text. It is genuinely exhausting and I simply do not understand why we have to play this game every single year. Just give us the translation that you approve of, for crying out loud.

The authors’ (or perhaps OCR’s) decision not to provide a translation causes further, compounding inadequacies in their notes, since they frequently fail to give sufficient thought to their suggestions for the translation of individual words. For example, they suggest the translation “waves” for both undas and fluctus, when those two words occur very close together and surely need differing translations to avoid confusion and to mimic the original Latin; in the same lines, the authors provide “raised” for the participle arrecta, then “rise above” for superant, which comes very soon after it. Following their instructions, this would render the lines:

pectora quorum inter fluctus arrecta iubaeque
Their chests raised above the waves and their blood-red crests

sanguinae superant undas.
rising above the waves.

Not only does this fail to do Virgil any kind of justice, it lacks clarity for the novice reader. The authors’ failure to sit down and decide how they would render a full and competent translation of the lines in their entirety (a task which will be asked of the 16-year-old novices who will be examined on this text) leads inevitably to some thoroughly confusing suggestions on their part for the translation of individual words. This is merely one example, but I found multiple cases throughout the Anthology which evidenced this lack of coordinated thinking.

In addition to the conspicuous omission of an approved translation and the knock-on effect that this has on the notes, the notes are disappointing in other ways. While some of them provide useful textual support, there have been times when I have wanted to wail in frustration. My exasperation stems from the authors’ palpable lack of clarity about the purpose of this Anthology, their inability to decide their target audience. Here is just one example of what I mean: at the end of the first section of the Virgil text, Aeneas claims reluctance to recount the painful story of how the Greeks sacked Troy. He says, quamquam animus meminisse horret luctuque refugit, incipiam: “although my mind shudders to remember and recoils in grief, I shall begin.” I would love someone to explain to me the purpose of the facing note in the Anthology, which relates to the final word of this section: it says, “what tense is incipiam?” Ugh. Obviously, I can tell you what tense incipiam is, because I am a Latin teacher: I do not need help with recognising the future tense. But if I were needing help with this (for example, if I were a student, or if I were a non-specialist who was wrestling with the material), then what is the point of asking me a question to which I may not know the correct answer? This is exactly the kind of infuriatingly pointless annotation that is useful to precisely nobody. For a subject expert, it is superfluous; for a novice, it is maddeningly unhelpful.

I am honestly quite a cheerful person, with a positive outlook. Yet, with so many people in institutions that have power and influence over my own working life so unrelentingly mediocre at what they do, it is becoming increasingly difficult to remain sanguine.