latin teaching – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Vocabulary acquisition

An essential challenge faced by students and teachers alike is the acquisition of vocabulary. I have written before on the best methods that students can employ when tackling vocabulary learning, so I do not plan to reiterate those here. What follows are rather some observations and musings about what we’re getting wrong in the Latin classroom when it comes to vocabulary acquisition, especially when compared to our counterparts in modern languages.

In my experience to date, supporting students in the accretion of vocabulary is a responsibility undertaken more effectively and proactively by modern language teachers than by those of us who specialise in Latin. It is possible that Latinists are under more time pressure in the curriculum and thus have no choice but to place the responsibility for vocabulary learning onto our students, but I think it more likely that we are simply less well trained in how to go about it than our colleagues in MFL. Classicists suffer from the fact that our training is somewhat broad – a qualified Classics teacher will necessarily have spread their training time across Ancient History and Classical Civilisation subjects, dramatically reducing the time that they spend focused purely on the teaching of the Latin language. I have little to no recollection of being given any significant guidance on how to help my students to develop their knowledge of vocabulary, so all my knowledge in this area has come later – through experience and through reading.

One of the many differences between the manner in which ancient languages are taught compared to modern ones is in the presentation of vocabulary to students. While modern linguists favour grouping words into themes or topics (e.g. “going to the shops” or “hobbies”), Latin teachers tend to present vocabulary in the following ways:

By chapters in a text book (e.g. Cambridge Latin Course, Suburani, De Romanis or Taylor & Cullen). Sometimes these may have a loose theme, but it’s generally pretty tenuous.
As one long alphabetical list (e.g. OCR GCSE or Eduqas GCSE).
In parts of speech. Some teachers invite students to learn the GCSE list in types of words, e.g. 1^st declension nouns, 2^nd declension nouns etc.

Each of these approaches has its drawbacks, so let’s consider those one by one. First of all, let us consider the approach of learning vocabulary by text book chapter. If one were to use Taylor & Cullen for this purpose, one would at least be learning the set vocabulary for OCR and thus there is some longterm justification for the approach. The vocabulary also reflects what is being introduced in each chapter and therefore there is some pedagogical justification for students learning it as they go. All of that said, you wouldn’t believe how few schools are actually doing this and to date I’m not sure I have met a single student that is working systematically through the chapters of Taylor & Cullen and learning the vocabulary as they go: some students are being tested on the chapters retrospectively, but I have not worked with any who are using the text book as it was designed. This is most likely because Taylor & Cullen is an ab initio course and thus the early chapters are not suitable for use with Year 10s who have studied Latin in Years 7-9. Why don’t schools use it during those years? Well, I’m assuming that its somewhat sombre presentation and lack of colour pictures puts teachers off the idea of using it a basis for KS3, when (to be frank) they are under pressure to recruit bums onto seats for KS4 or else find themselves out of a job. This means that there is no text book explicitly aimed at preparing students for a specific GCSE exam board being made wide use of in schools.

None of the text books commonly used in schools at KS3 build vocabulary that is explicitly and exclusively aimed at a particular GCSE course. While Suburani is supposedly linked to the Eduqas course, it diverts from using the vocabulary that is relevant to this in favour of what suits its own narrative. For example, students of Suburani will be deeply familiar with the word popina as meaning “bar” (not on the GCSE list for either OCR or Eduqas but used widely throughout the first few chapters), yet they are not introduced to the word taberna meaning “tavern” or “shop” (on the GCSE list for both boards) until chapter 12. Similar problems occur in terms of the thematic focus of Suburani: because it focuses on the life of the poor in Rome, students are taught that insula means “block of flats”. While it does mean this, I have never seen it used in this way on a GCSE paper – the word is used exclusively by both boards in a context in which the only sensible translation is “island”. I shall say more about the problem of words with multiple meanings later on.

Presenting words in an alphabetical list seems to be the practice used by most schools when students reach Years 10 and 11 and are embarking on their GCSE studies. Most students that I have worked with are told to learn a certain number of words from the alphabetical list and are thus tested on multiple words that have nothing in common, either in terms of their meaning or their grammatical form. One advantage of this is that students are forced to look at words with similar appearance but different meaning. However, multiple and in my opinion worse problems arise from this method. Students learning the vocabulary in alphabetical order give little thought to what type of word they are looking at (e.g. whether it is a noun or a verb) or to its morphology. This means that students do not learn the principal parts of their verbs, nor do they learn the stem changes of nouns and adjectives. This can cause considerable frustration and demotivation when students struggle to recognise the words that they have supposedly learnt when those words appear in different forms. Teachers could mitigate against this by testing students on those forms, but most seem reluctant to do so. Do they think it’s too hard?

The method I used was to present the GCSE list in parts of speech and invite students to learn different types of words in groups: all the 1^st declension nouns, all the 2^nd declension nouns etc. The advantage of this method is that it allows for the opportunity to link the vocabulary to the grammar. For example, the first vocabulary learning task I used to set my Year 10s in September was to learn/revise all the 1^st declension nouns (in theory they knew most of them already from KS3) and to revise the endings of the 1^st declension. In the test, they were expected to be able to give the meaning of the nouns I selected for testing and they were expected to be able to write out their endings also. I felt (and still feel, on the whole) that this was the best approach, but that does not mean that it does not have its own disadvantages. Firstly, it made some learning tasks excessively onerous and others too easy: for example, that task of learning the 1^st declension nouns was very easy (because most of the words were already familiar and the forms of the nouns are very simple) but the task of learning 3^rd conjugation verbs was much harder (fewer of them were previously known and their principal parts are a nightmare). This meant that students were often hit with homework that turned out to be extremely difficult at what might not have been the ideal time for them. A second disadvantage was that it was impossible to give students a translation test, because one could not create sentences out of a set of words which all belong to one category. Thirdly, and related to that point, testing according to parts of speech made it very difficult to link vocabulary learning to classroom teaching in any meaningful way: in class, we might be studying the uses of the subjunctive, and that could not necessarily be linked to the homework task that was next on the list. This is something that I have been thinking about more and more in recent years as a massive problem in Latin teaching – a disconnect between what students are learning in the classroom and the vocabulary they are invited to learn for homework. The more I think about it, the more I believe this is a fundamental problem which requires a complete curriculum re-think.

The difficulty of linking vocabulary learning to explicit classroom teaching is something that modern language teachers would probably be very puzzled by. Modern linguists are way ahead when it comes to tying vocabulary learning to what’s happening in their classroom and to the relevant grammar. Given this, imagine my excitement when one of my tutees shared with me that she has been presented with the OCR vocabulary list in themes! I was full of anticipation as to how her school was planning to test their students on those themes. For example, one theme might be “fighting and military language”, within which students learn nouns such as “battle” and “war” alongside verbs such as “fight” and attack”. Call me daft, but I hoped and expected that she would be tested using some simple sentences, which would afford teachers the opportunity to observe students’ (hopefully) increasing understanding of grammar and morphology alongside the acquisition of the relevant vocabulary. Surely no teacher would have gone to the trouble of dividing up 450 words into a set of themes unless they were going to make use of some innovative testing methodologies? No? Well … actually, no. The school are testing the students on a list of words, with no link made between the meanings of those words and the learning that is going on in classroom. I have absolutely no idea what the point of this is. Maybe somebody in the department has read somewhere that “themes” is a good way to classify vocabulary and I am sure it is – but I’d place a hefty bet that there is no tangible pedagogical gain unless that learning is linked to the use of those words in sentence-structures, the kind of approach favoured by Gianfranco Conti.

I said that I would come back to the issue of words with multiple meanings, and that is something I have noted with interest from my tutee’s themed list. Words with multiple meanings appear more than once on the different lists, with their meanings edited to suit the theme of that list. This is an interesting idea and I am still pondering whether or not I think it is a good one. Multiple meanings are a real menace, particularly when the most obvious meaning (i.e. the one which is a derivative) is the least essential. For example, on the GCSE list for both boards is the word imperium, which can mean “empire” and all students immediately plump for that meaning as it is an obvious derivative. However, the word is more commonly used on language papers to mean “command” or “power” – it is therefore those meanings that must be prioritised when a student is learning the word. Similarly, all students need to be drilled on the fact that while imperator does come to mean “emperor” in time, it originally meant “general” and is usually used in that way on exam papers. Even worse is a nightmare word such as peto, which is listed on both boards as meaning anything from “make for”, “head for”, “seek” and “attack”. Students really struggle with learning all of its multiple possible meanings and it is important to show them multiple sentences with the verb being used in lots of different contexts so that they can grasp all of the possibilities.

As so often, I reach the end of my musings having criticised much and resolved little. I am thankful to be working in a one-to-one setting, in which I can support students with vocabulary learning in a proactive and detailed way, one which goes way beyond what is possible in the mainstream classroom and supports their learning in a way that simply cannot be expected of a classroom teacher. I shall continue to ponder what I would do were I in a position to re-shape the curriculum all over again, but I fear that this would entail writing an entire text book from scratch. Many have tried to do this, and even those who have made it to publication remain flawed: I have no conviction that I could do any better.

Time Phrases

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”

Andy Warhol.

If you regularly peruse my blog for the vague philosophical musings and/or feminist rants, this one may not be for you. For on my mind this week is a spreadsheet I’ve been creating, which logs the frequency and regularity with which individual grammatical constructions come up on the GCSE Latin language paper, both for OCR and WJEC.

Yes, I’ve had quite the rollercoaster of a week so far.

For some time, I’ve had the feeling that time phrases are under-taught in most schools. It’s an easy fix, so it’s something I have always addressed with all of my students unless they show immediate and obvious evidence of confidence with them (which is rare). Imagine the validation I felt, therefore, when my analysis of all the exam papers available to us so far (a total of eight years) revealed that time phrases are one of the constructions which occur with the highest frequency in both examination boards.

There are a grand total of 23 time phrases in OCR language papers to date, a number equalled only by the ablative absolute, which also occurs 23 times, and exceeded only by the indirect statement, which comes up a whopping 28 times in the OCR papers; the indirect statement is universally acknowledged to be a tricky construction, so most schools spend a great deal of time on it (often, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, to the detriment of student understanding, but that’s another issue). The indirect statement occurs far less frequently in the WJEC examination (only 12 times) and its complexity is limited by the fact that students are not expected to know the range of infinitives that are required by OCR. Compare this to the fact that time phrases occur on the WJEC papers with a greater frequency than any other construction – a total of 18 appearances, with the next highest being the indirect command and the purpose clause, which both occur 13 times across the eight years.

Time phrases are not complex but they are – in my experience – something which students grasp with less ease than most teachers assume. In this blog post, I plan to explore why this is and to make the case that they should be addressed more frequently and with more care than is currently occurring in most classroom settings.

Time phrases are used in Latin to express either how long something went on for, or to specify when an event occurred; sometimes they are also used to indicate the period of time within which an event occurred, but the latter is infrequent at GCSE level. The reason that students find the construction more puzzling than their teachers perhaps assume is the nature of how these constructions translate into English.

The accusative case in Latin is used to express how long something went on for. Here are some examples:

milites duos dies pugnabant
The soldiers fought for two days

in taberna tres horas manebamus
We stayed in the pub for three hours

The use of the accusative to express length of time is perfectly logical to a subject specialist. We understand fully that the accusative is used to express passage of time and motion towards and we therefore find the translation into “for two days” or “for three hours” perfectly natural. For a novice, however, who is still wrestling with the very concept of noun cases and how to express them, the use of the word “for” in our English translation is deeply confusing. Isn’t the word “for” how the dative case is expressed? It is essential therefore to explore and unpick this potential confusion and explain to the novice that the English language is using the word “for” to express an entirely different concept here. The dative case means “for” as in “the slave prepared the meal for the master” – in other words, for the master’s benefit. This is quite different from the use of the word “for” to express how long something went on for, which is expressed by the accusative case in Latin. The use of the word “for” in our translation has to be tackled head on and explained carefully until the novice fully grasps the difference between the concept of the dative (“the slave prepared the meal for the master – i.e. for his benefit”) and the accusative (“the slave prepared the meal for three hours – i.e. that’s how long it took the slave to prepare it”). This cannot be skimmed over, otherwise a novice’s understanding is likely to be shaky – the knowledge will not stick, because it is built on shaky ground. Virtually every single student I have worked with have furnished me with evidence for this – only those carefully drilled in one or two schools with a reputation for extremely rigorous grammar teaching have not fallen prey to this misunderstanding.

The ablative case is used in Latin to express when something happened. Below are some examples:

milites prima luce oppugnaverunt
The soldiers attacked at first light

amici illa nocte advenerunt
The friends arrived on that night

milites nocte fugerunt
The soldiers fled by night

Here, students can experience some confusion due to the myriad of possibilities when it comes to rendering the ablative case in a translation. The variety with which English expresses the concept of when something happened depending on the vocabulary used can be really confusing, so once again the novice must be taught carefully. It must be thoroughly explained that “at”, “on”, “in” or “by” are all possibilities and the students must be given lots of practice in selecting the most appropriate choice. Only when students have seen multiple occurrences of these time phrases and thus practised all the different possible ways that they might be translated can they be said to have gained full confidence in this concept.

Having worked in a state comprehensive I understand better than most that classroom time is a precious and finite resource. Yet having performed my analysis of exam papers I feel I have a strong case that teachers should be devoting more of their chalkface time to this concept. All students can grasp it and they all stand to make tangible gains in the examination with the full understanding that more thorough teaching will afford them.

This beautiful photo is by Aron Visuals on Unsplash. I have used it before and I absolutely love it.

The best use of curriculum time

“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.”

Theophrastus.

On Wednesday, I had my regular fortnightly meeting with the new teacher who has taken over the teaching of Latin in the school where I used to work. This teacher is an ECT (in her first year of teaching) and while she will of course have a professional, in-house mentor to oversee her development within the school, the Head was conscious of and rightly concerned about the fact that she will have no subject expert in the building to offer her support. That’s where I come in. This week, I found my young protégé in a bit of a flap about one particular part of the language curriculum and since reflecting on our time together I realise that I was less helpful than I could have been. Rather than letting our conversation continue when it comes to the grammar at a granular level, what I needed to do was to get her to reflect on which aspects of the curriculum actually require the most time spent on them. Next time I see her, I shall do so.

One of the most frustrating things about leaving teaching is at last having the time to see and understand how one could completely re-write the curriculum to reflect more accurately the way that the exam papers are written. What those outside the profession will find difficult to understand is that it is left in the hands of often new and experienced teachers to design an entire curriculum to prepare for an exam they did not write. No real guidance is shared by the exam boards (and on the odd occasion when some guidance is offered, it is usually either unrealistic or unworkable in some or most settings). What we really need is for exam-setters to work alongside schools to build an appropriate curriculum, but that’s never going to happen.

As we talked, my instincts were telling me that this teacher was becoming unnecessarily bogged down by her worries about a particular construction and was planning to spend a huge amount of time on it. I need to make sure that she does not do this. The reason? Well, I have just reviewed the 8 separate past and specimen papers that we have from the exam she is entering her students for, and this particular construction appears either once or twice in each language paper. Around half of the time, its appearance is supported by comprehension questions, which guide the candidate towards the correct interpretation. The rest of the time, the examples used are almost exclusively ones which most students would be able to translate on instinct, even if they had never been taught the existence of this particular construction. Compare that to another kind of construction, which most teachers skim over very briefly, but which in fact appears multiple times in every single exam paper. Which would you focus on? Sounds obvious now, doesn’t it? But you wouldn’t believe how few teachers go through this thought-process when designing their curriculum and planning their lesson time.

Having made the switch from the classroom to private tutoring, I am in contact with dozens of students from multiple different types of schools. Something I have come to realise is that almost all teachers over-teach the aspects of the curriculum that they believe to be difficult. It is not that their beliefs are incorrect, but what they get wrong is the amount of curriculum time that they dedicate to these concepts as a result of their relative complexity. It’s a common assumption in education that one must spend more time on something because it is difficult. In fact, this must be weighed up against three crucial realities: firstly, the nature, knowledge and curriculum history of the students that we have in front of us; secondly, the amount of time that we actually have with them; thirdly – and perhaps most crucially – the relative weighting that this difficult concept carries when it comes to final outcomes. This requires an understanding of how much, how often and with how much depth that difficult concept is tested, as well as how many marks that testing carries. Once you start trying to balance this equation, it can lead to some surprising conclusions, which might not seem obvious to anyone but the most experienced in curriculum design.

If a concept or construction is so difficult that its full understanding will require multiple hours of curriculum time, yet that very construction is only likely to add up to three marks on one paper, which converts to 1.5% of the student’s overall score … is that concept actually worth teaching at all? It’s something to think about, at least. Perhaps one could teach it in a very condensed form, teach some broad strategies that work in the majority of cases and leave it at that. Certainly, what one should not do, is spend hours and hours of precious curriculum time trying to bring students to the point of full understanding whilst neglecting other concepts which we might consider simpler but appear multiple times on the paper and are thus integral to success. It simply isn’t the sensible approach, given the huge constraints that all schools face when it comes to curriculum time.

The tendency for teachers to labour what’s difficult is something which I share openly with my tutees. I am very careful not to criticise or undermine the school’s curriculum, but I simply explain that it is natural for teachers to spend lots of time on the things that they know are difficult as they are setting the bar high for their students. Children of the age that I work with are perfectly capable of understanding that this might be a noble and understandable approach, but is perhaps not the best strategy to help them if they are struggling with the basics. Even the most able students, who are aiming at the highest grades, can still be reassured by the knowledge that the most challenging aspects of the curriculum are of less importance than perhaps they thought they were; it actually frees them up to grapple with them, once they have been released from the anxiety that their full understanding of this concept is absolutely essential for success. Knowing that you’re working on something that might gain you an extra mark or two is very freeing, and it enables the students who are aiming high to make sensible decisions about how to spend their own time, which is often very stretched.

In Latin, it is not only the language paper that requires this frankness of approach and a realistic analysis of where one’s time should be directed. I have written before about the extent to which teachers over-teach the stylistic analysis of literature texts, when the overwhelming majority of marks are gained in the exam through students simply knowing the text off by heart. I emphasise this over and again to the students I am working with, many of whom come to me because they are scoring very low marks in this aspect of the examination. Students can score at least 80% by simply knowing the text like the back of their hand, so this should be the overwhelming focus of the lesson: despite this, I have so far come across only one school where I would say this is happening – where the focus is on drilling and making it clear to students that they must be learning the text in detail. I shall not name the school, but one thing I will say is that it is a very high-achieving school, where the Latin department produces results of almost exclusively 8s and 9s in the GCSE every single year: this goes to show that the school is not avoiding the trickiest concepts – there is no way a student could score a Grade 9 without getting a decent score in the style questions – but it shows that they understand how to balance their curriculum and focus their efforts on what gains students the biggest advantage. The emphasis must be on knowledge, with the complex skills being supplementary to that. The final clincher, which again I share with my students, is that the high-level questions become infinitely easier and more doable once you know the text. Thus, a student who has already gained a solid knowledge of the text that is in front of them has a much better chance of being able to understand and apply the ideas he/she is being taught to gain those elusive extra marks.

On bugbears and juxtaposition

An old Head of Department from many years ago used to start his Year 7 German course in the same way every year. Every year he would ask students to name any famous Germans they could think of. Every year he hoped to hear names like Michael Schumacher or Boris Becker, or perhaps one of the countless famous German composers from over the centuries. Every year he was given Hitler. It never seemed to occur to this lovely man that perhaps there was a better way of starting off his first German lesson. Something made him do the same thing over and again and I think a bit of him somehow relished the inevitable disappointment. We all have our crosses to bear in our chosen subjects.

For anyone who teaches or touches upon Roman culture, for us it’s waiting for the inevitable moment when a child will inform us that the Romans used to eat so much at their dinner parties that they would go and make themselves sick so that they could eat more. I’ve even overheard the guides at Pompeii help to perpetuate this myth by mischievously telling tourists that any random passageway that they can’t account for is a “vomitorium”, where guests would relieve themselves to create space for more gluttony. They know that this is nonsense. The confusion seems to have come from the word vomitorium itself (which actually was used by the Romans to refer to any passageway leading crowds out of a public building) combined with satirical pieces such as Trimalchio’s Feast, sometimes called The Millionaire’s Dinner Party, which describes the imagined excesses of dinner parties held by the nouveaux riches. We also have the disapproving remarks of authors such as Seneca, who wrote of slaves cleaning up the vomit of drunks at banquets and criticised what he saw as the excesses of Rome. It’s a depressingly familiar picture for anyone who has worked in a hotel or similar establishment in modern Britain; wealthy Romans were no more or no less gluttonous than the comfortably-off in any society, especially those societies which have alcohol at the heart of their culture.

Eye-roll inducing as this was, my personal bugbear of misinformation I simply cannot wait to hear is different. I tell myself I have to go there to prevent students from getting it wrong in their exams, but in truth there’s a bit of me that cannot resist it for my own torture. When working on the literature, I always ask every GCSE candidate what they think the term juxtaposition means. Almost without exception, students will tell me that the word means “contrast”. On an exceptionally good day, they will tell me that it means “putting things next to each other in order to create a contrast”. In actual fact, it means “putting things next to each other” and this may be done in order to highlight a contrast.

While I hate to be a massive Latin bore, I’m afraid this is yet another case where a simple knowledge of the Latin roots of words can help. To juxtapose has its origins in the Latin words iuxta (which means “next to”) and iungo (“to join”, also notable in derivatives such as join, conjunction, conjugation, conjugal) alongside the Latin word positus (“place” or “position”). It quite literally means “a placing next to”: there is no mention of the notion of contrast in the original etymological meaning of the word. The frequency with which the technique is used to highlight a contrast means that it is arguably justifiable to include this in the definition, but the etymological roots of the word really must be prioritised. Fundamentally, juxtaposition is placing a word or phrase next to another word or phrase, often but not exclusively to highlight a contrast.

Unfortunately, students (and teachers) Googling the word will find an avalanche of quotations using the word to mean simply and exclusively “contrast”. Just this morning I spotted a horrendous meme quoting American guitarist Dean Ween of all people: “the juxtaposition of fishing and touring couldn’t be greater”. Sigh.

Another part of the problem with this misunderstanding is that English really isn’t very good at doing juxtaposition. Our language requires too many supplementary words to make sense, plus we cannot muck about with word order in the way that Latin can without a serious change in meaning. Word order is sense-critical in the English language: “man bites dog” means the opposite of “dog bites man”. Latin, being an inflected language (i.e. one where the endings of the words dictate their meaning and role) has the advantage in that an author can place words next to each other with ease – certainly to highlight a contrast or frankly to do whatever he wishes.

The good news is that once a student realised what juxtaposition means it becomes much easier to spot in Latin. Once a student understands that it simply means placing words next to each other, they can assume that an author as adept as Virgil has always done so for a reason – it does not have to be limited to the concept of highlighting a contrast. An author may juxtapose a string of sounds, for example, or indeed words with a similar rather than a contrasting meaning. It’s entirely up to him.

Photo taken in Athens by Alexandra on Unsplash

Thoughtless examiners

While I am the last person who would advocate for whitewashing the ancient world, I do sometimes wonder at the sheer lack of sensitivity shown by examiners when it comes to the selection of the material that Latin GCSE candidates are faced with on the day.

The ancient world abounds with a plethora of stories fit for adaptation. The possibilities are endless. Given this fact, I fail to see the necessity of including stories that even prior to the #metoo era would unquestioningly be classified by all but Andrew Tate’s very worst acolytes as a story of sexual assault. The ancient world abounds with these stories too, and I am not suggesting that we should remove them from the corpus, nor that we should hide the truth of them from students who elect to study this material; it is profoundly important not only that we address these accounts but that we examine what they have to tell us about attitudes towards women and towards consent in the ancient world. But this is an examination I am talking about. Let us remember that there will be a range of students sitting each and every paper, some of whom may (or – according to the statistical reality – will) have experienced sexual assault for themselves. For some of them, the abuse will be ongoing. I’m sorry if this is upsetting news to anyone reading this, but if you work with young people and have undertaken any kind of safeguarding training then it should emphatically not be news to you that this is the case. So, to write an examination that includes a story of sexual assault is either to feign ignorance of the fact that some of our students will have suffered in this way, or is to declare that one simply does not care about the impact that the examination’s contents may have on some of our most vulnerable children, on what amounts to a very important day for them: a day on which their knowledge and hard work is being put to the test.

In an examination, a student who is already in a potentially stressful situation is forced to sit with the material in front of them and process it alone. If they are translating a passage, that means sitting with the material for some considerable period of time. It is clear that the examiners gave no thought to this and I refuse to accept that one has to be some kind of super-woke convert to the concept of trauma-informed education to raise an eyebrow at their monumentally insensitive decision to include this material. Personally, I have some concerns about the spread of trauma-informed practice into education, often pushed by advocates who know nothing about the realities of classroom teaching; I consider some of its most lethal mutations potentially harmful when it interferes with a school’s basic need to provide a robust disciplinary framework for all students to thrive within. Yet humanity and frankly common sense surely teaches us that one should think carefully about the impact that the content of our lessons may have on students, and even more so about the content of an examination that will be sat by thousands of them, on their own, without support.

During my teaching career I worked with the OCR specification, so have come to the WJEC specification in recent years as demand from tutees has increased. I am now at the point where I am looking closely at individual past papers and last week I worked through the contents of the 2020 WJEC GCSE language paper. I was frankly appalled. I have spoken to a couple of contacts who have far more influential voices in the field than I possess and they confirmed to me that they have already raised concerns in the past, to no avail.

So let’s see what everyone else thinks of the content, shall we? The first passage on the 2020 paper consists of Jupiter disguising himself in order to have his wicked way with an innocent young nymph named Callisto. So far, so typical Jupiter and perhaps euphemistic enough for most of us to be broadly okay with the story’s use. However, things do not remain euphemistic. In this particular retelling, Jupiter disguises himself as the virgin goddess Diana, a close companion of Callisto, so that he can enter Callisto’s bed, and the story continues as follows – below is my version of what the students were asked to translate; I have not quoted the Latin extensively, in case they come at me with copyright complaints, but you can view the paper freely here on their own website:

Callisto, when she saw the goddess, was happy; but as soon as Jupiter lay down next to her and gave her a kiss, Callisto realised that she was not a woman but the god. She was terrified. For she had avoided men her whole life, just like Diana. Although she tried to escape, Jupiter held her down easily.

The passing mention that she had “avoided men her whole life, just like Diana” may (one hopes) have gone over the head of most students, but the truth is that it is spelling it out for readers that Callisto is still a virgin. This, plus the clear implication that Jupiter forced himself upon Callisto and physically held her down, is bad enough, but the disturbing content continues:

Having entered the woods with her other companions, Diana greeted Callisto, who was again so terrified that she wanted to run away: she thought that the god was coming back for her. But after she saw the companions, she hurried towards them, crying. “Why are you crying?” they asked. “What happened?” “Nothing,” the unhappy girl replied. After a few days, however, they persuaded Callisto to tell them what had happened.

She thought that the god was coming back for her?! Who thought that line was a great one to include? The Latin is deum ad se redire putavit, a marvellous opportunity to test candidates on the indirect statement with a past tense main verb and a present tense infinitive, well done chaps! Didn’t think about what the statement actually meant, though, did you? I really do despair. (I know I shouldn’t assume that they’re all men but really … what else can one assume? That a woman thought this was okay? I do hope not).

Perhaps worst of all, in a final turn of events, Callisto’s friend and protector Diana turns on her and blames her for her own assault, as does the ever-jealous wife of Jupiter:

Callisto’s companions, shocked by such serious news, hurried to Diana to report the matter to her. Diana, who was very angry, ordered Callisto to leave at once. “You are not blameless” she said. “Do not ever return to us.” Callisto left, very unhappy. She was forced to live in the woods for many months. Meanwhile Juno was watching her. Juno was the wife of Jupiter. Although Jupiter was always trying to deceive her, Juno had found out what he had done. “That very bad nympth will pay for this” she said.

The word (glossed on the exam paper and translated as per the examiner’s instructions as) “blameless” is casta. The phrase could be translated “you are not innocent”, “you are not pure”, “you are not chaste” (our closest equivalent as a direct derivative) or indeed “you are not a virgin”.

The messaging here is clear. A girl is sexually assaulted, is deeply distressed by the assault, is terrified that it will be repeated and finally is told by others that the assault is her fault and that she is sullied goods. How on earth is it possible that this material made it past the huge number of eyes that one presumes (hopes?) get to look at it before it makes it onto the final draft of an examination paper? Did not one of them think to ask whether the content was appropriate or frankly even necessary? Was there no other single story that would have sufficed, from all of the other thousands of ancient stories that are in our possesion? One can only imagine that every single examiner involved was so blissfully ignorant as to the realities of life for some of our young people that they simply did not consider the fact that the material might be unfit for purpose. All I can say is lucky for those who live their own lives knowing so little about other peeople’s pain and distress.

In the past I have written about the content of the text book Suburani and consider some of it inappropriate for younger students, but at least in a text book the material can (and indeed should) be managed by the classroom teacher, who can skip out that section altogether should they decide – as I would – that it is simply not appropriate for their class. If they do decide to tackle the material, they can manage how this is done and provide guidance and a supportive atmosphere for students to respond to it. In an examination, students are left completely exposed, with no gatekeepers to protect them and no safety net to catch them if they end up in freefall. For me, that is simply and emphatically not acceptable and a clear betrayal of our duty of care.

Last-minute help?

This is the first of two remarkably busy weeks working with a very large number of Year 11s during their school holidays, preparing for the forthcoming GCSE examinations. Many of these students have approached me in just the last few weeks seeking help, and it is remarkable how much can be achieved in a short time prior to the final exams.

Many clients are surprised by the assurance that help can be worthwhile at this late stage. Many contact me in a state of panic or near despair, convinced that the situation is unsalvageable and unsure why they’re even asking for my advice. Yet within a few weeks it is possible to have an impact on a student’s confidence and their attainment, so long as you know what to focus on.

First and foremost, it is essential to assess the particular areas with which a student is struggling. This in itself can be a challenge, since many students (and certainly their parents) can struggle to identify where the problems lie. Students often present with nothing more than the fact that they need help with “the grammar”, so I rely largely on my own detective work to get to the bottom of what can be done to improve the situation. At a late stage of intervention this may well not mean delving into complex material, nor indeed trying to ask them to learn basic fundamentals. At this stage, it’s about identifying and selecting some concrete things to address that will gain them a win.

One thing that can be tackled head-on is their performance in the grammar questions, which make up 10% of their language mark. The examiner is remarkably repetitive and we are now in possession of enough past papers to prove this concept. Showing students every single past paper in quick succession, focusing entirely on the grammar questions and demystifying what it is that the examiner is looking for in their answer can be a real game-changer. In just one session it is usually possible to help get most students to the point where they can achieve 8 or 9 out of 10 in that section. To achieve full marks, students require a whistlestop tour of the uses of the subjunctive, which is a question the examiner has asked every single year, and that can take up another session or two. The uses of the subjunctive are another relatively easy win because most exam papers contain at least 5-10 sentences containing one of these constructions, so an understanding of how to translate those clauses gains them a significant margin.

There are further gains to be had if we have time to look at several practice papers as they can be coached on the types of phrasing that come up on a regular basis. I have identified a collection of common phrases that appear on exam papers with striking regularity, and a student who is perhaps overwhelmed with vocabulary learning can benefit from focusing their revision on these phrases. In addition, I have a list of high-frequency words that come up time and again on exam papers. Focusing on the high-frequency words will not gain a student a top grade in the exam (you need all the vocabulary for that!) but it can be a real game-changer for students who are struggling at the pass-mark.

Some students come to me for help with the literature and the majority of the time it is because they are completely overwhelmed by how to go about committing the texts to memory. I have written before on the fact that too many teachers tend to assume that students have the knowledge, experience and skills to rote-learn vast quantities of material without support, but in my experience, this really is not the case. My grades went up significantly when I started to assume that students did not have this knowledge and I taught them explicitly how to go about the process. Likewise, my grades went up when I took the risk of allowing them short bursts of class time to make a start on the process – this afforded me the opportunity to model the process and then monitor them using it. Many students are resistant to advice when it comes to study skills, so it’s important to ensure that they do give effective methodologies a chance so that they can be converted to the process. If left to their own devices, many students will ignore the suggestions made by their teachers, attempt to do it their own way and fail.

I am finding the work that I am doing immensely rewarding. Just this week I had a particularly heartening message from a client saying that her son is really seeing a difference. “He’s just said to me “ a few weeks ago I wouldn’t have had a clue and now I am getting them all right”. So grateful.” This particular student has been through exactly the process I have outlined above – I took him on a whistlestop tour of the uses of the subjunctive, we reviewed all the grammar questions on past papers and now we’re onto as many practice papers as we have time for, tackling some further easy wins such as time phrases along the way. Once the student is on board with the notion that it is never too late to turn their performance around, it’s quite remarkable what can be achieved.

Nobody said it would be this hard

Why does Latin have the reputation of being so difficult? Everybody thinks that it’s difficult and to some extent it is – but so is any language, once you get past, “Bonjour, je m’appelle Emma”.

Grammar is tricky and it’s still not taught in our own language to the degree that it is in most other countries. To listen to educators, writers and commentators report on the increased level of rigour in the teaching of literacy in primary schools, you’d think that the problem was solved. In truth, the level to which grammar is taught discretely in English schools is still woeful by comparison with schools in other countries. To a certain extent, this is a self-perpetuating problem caused by failures in the system over the last couple of generations. Many current teachers admit that they struggle to teach concepts that they themselves were never taught in school, and if I had a £1 for every English teacher that has come to me for help with basic English grammar, I’d have enough for a slap-up meal.

Let’s take a closer look at why some children struggle so much with Latin over and above their other subjects and – specifically – more than any other language they might be learning in school. One obvious reason, I think, is the unfamiliar territory which this dead language presents to family and friends. Many parents and guardians feel able to offer support to their children in other subjects, certainly in the early years. I work with many families who are really involved with their children’s homework and study and children certainly do benefit from this kind of proactive and interested support at home. Lots of families employ me because they care about their children’s studies but they themselves feel ill-equipped to support them in Latin due to their own lack of knowledge; with only around 2.5% of state schools currently offering Latin on their timetable, I don’t anticipate that situation changing in a hurry. As a result of the fact that so few people have experience of Latin as a subject, it maintains a kind of mystique, and that all feeds into its reputation as an inaccessible and challenging subject.

Furthermore, and at the risk of stating the obvious, Latin is an ancient lanaguage and a dead one. What does it mean that the language is dead? Quite simply, that nobody speaks it any more. As a result, the content of what children are asked to translate will often seem very obscure. 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 then into a whole new world of weirdness. The thing is, children generally like the weirdness – and indeed the darkness – of these ancient tales; if you think that children don’t appreciate the darkness of the world then explain the thundering success of a children’s author such as Patrick Ness. Children are not necessarily put off by the puzzling nature of what they are translating, but it can certainly contribute to their belief that the material is obscure.

The realities of learning an ancient language compared to a modern one are summed up by this absolutely hilarious snippet which has been doing the rounds on the internet for donkey’s years:

So, we’ve dealt with Latin’s reputation and we’ve explored the inherent fact of it being an ancient, dead language that may make it potentially difficult to access. On top of that lies the truth that Latin as a language is very different from our own and indeed from any others we are likely to be taught in UK schools.

The most important thing to understand is that Latin is a heavily inflected language. What that means is that word-formation matters: we’re not just talking about spelling here, because if you look at a word that is wrongly spelled in English, you will still more than likely be able to recognise it in context and thus understand the sentence. However, 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, but in Latin (and in other heavily-inflected languages such as German) nouns are inflected too (as are adjectives, participles, pronouns and some numerals). So, words change and therefore become difficult to recognise. What blows students’ minds 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 in Latin means “to the woman” in the sense of “towards the woman”, so I might use the phrase in a sentence such as “the boy ran over to the woman”. However, as well as ad feminam, the word feminae, with that different ending and no preposition, can also mean “to the woman”, but this time in the sense of “giving something to”. I would therefore use feminae in a sentence such as “I gave a gift to the woman”. Using ad feminam in that context would be completely wrong. Trying to unpick why two grammatically different phrases sound the same in English is just one tiny example of myriad of misconceptions and misunderstandings that children can acquire and that can cause problems later down the line. What’s great about one-to-one tutoring, of course, is that these kinds of misconceptions can be uncovered, unpicked and rectified.

Due to its inflection, many Latin words become extremely difficult to recognise as they decline or conjugate. This brings us to what many students find the most disheartening thing about the subject, which is 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 when it comes to translating. A child may have learned that do means “give” but will they recognise dant, dabamus or dederunt, which are all versions of that same verb? Well, without explicit instruction, lots of practice and a huge amount of support, probably not. This can be really depressing for students and can lead to them wanting to give up altogether, which is where a tutor comes in.

Another consequence of the fact that Latin is inflected is that a Latin sentence has to be decoded – you can’t just read it from left to right. Breaking the habit of reading from left to right is one of the biggest challenges that we face when trying to teach students how to succeed in Latin. 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 the sentences in front of them. Most Latin teachers really underestimate the amount of time, effort and repetition that it takes to help them to break this habit. Once again, this is where one-to-one tuition can be really powerful: working with a child to model the process is key.

The reluctant Luddite

I am anything but a Luddite. Technology is remarkable and wonderful and I could not be luckier to have been born in the late 20th century and have the privilege of seeing our access to the written word proliferate thanks to the digital world.

As someone cursed with poor (and increasingly deteriorating) eyesight, I thank my lucky stars on a daily basis for the advent of smart screens, giving me the power to choose the nature, size and resolution of fonts, not to mention the simply glorious dawn of the audiobook. The younger among you will not recall, but the reading options for people with poor eyesight even just 20 years ago were dismal: a vanishingly small number of books were put onto audio CD and very few places stocked them. These days, the best actors are squabbling over the reading rights to books. Not long ago, I listened to a simply perfect narration of The Dutch House by Ann Pratchett, read by some chap called Tom Hanks. In a world where current research seems to indicate a worrying downturn in children reading for pleasure, I support any and all routes for them to access stories and tales, by whatever means.

As a result of all this, I always feel slightly uncomfortable when I find myself making a case against digital technology. I am the last person to criticise for I acknowledge and appreciate the huge benefits that the advent of the internet and digital technology have brought to me. Not only could I not do my job without them, my life would be infinitely poorer and less diverse. Yet one must always be cautious of what one is throwing away, and when it comes to children’s development of literacy we should be particularly so. First and foremost, we should be hyper-focused on the best ways of helping children to learn to read and write.

In January, the Guardian highlighted that “a ground-breaking study shows kids learn better on paper than on screen,” but the truth is that this information has been out there for at least two decades. Modern cognitive science evidences that motor and sensory aspects of our behaviour have a far-reaching impact on our knowledge and recall. Of course it does. Our brain is an embodied phenomenon that makes sense of the world through the physical data it receives. In a study carried out way back in 2005, subjects were shown a series of words and asked to indicate whether each word was positive or negative by moving a joystick. Half of the subjects were told to indicate that a word was positive or “good” by pulling the joystick towards their bodies, while the other half were told to indicate “good” by pushing it away. A consistent correlation was observed between meaning and movement: the quickest, most accurate and most confident responses were produced by the subjects who were told to indicate “good” by pulling the joystick towards themselves, and to indicate “bad” by pushing it away. The hypothesis is that this relates to our natural embodied state – what’s “good” feels natural drawn physically towards us, what’s “bad” feels like something we should naturally push away. This direct and inherent involvement of the body and senses in our cognitive processes helps to explain how writing by hand (as opposed to on a keyboard or a tablet) helps us to learn letters and words most efficiently. The fact that forming letters by hand is superior to doing so with the use of technology is well accepted among cognitive scientists and literacy specialists.

Furthermore, it is not just the early-years essentials of learning to write that are supported by the process of hand-writing. A study in 2021 compared subjects’ recall of words learned either by typing or writing by hand and found that recall was better when words had been learned using a pen and paper. In another study, a small group of adults learned symbols from an unfamiliar language that they then had to reproduce with either a pen or a keyboard. When they had finished learning the symbols, there were no differences in recall between the two methods, but the keyboard users forgot a significant amount of what they had learned as time passed. In other words, the process of handwriting the symbols was much more effective for long-term recall. Evidence for the effectiveness of handwriting over typing when it comes to learning is now pretty overwhelming and neuroscientists suggest that learning with a pen and paper is better because it is more “embodied,” meaning that it involves more complex sensory-motor feedback for each letter as it is written down. This complexity leaves a more distinctive blueprint in our memories and hence makes things easier to memorise and recall.

I have written before on a methodology I teach to help students to learn their set texts off by heart. The process involves writing down the first letter of each word and works only if students do so by hand. The effectiveness of the method is increased hugely if the student can be persuaded to say the whole word aloud as they write the letter. So, to learn the opening line of Portia’s speech to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, students would say out loud “The quality of mercy is not strained” while writing the letters “T q o m i n s” in time with their articulation of the words. The physicality of the process and the immersive nature of writing, saying and repeating is quite remarkably powerful and I have never had a student fail to learn the texts using this method.

The data and current research on the importance of physical texts and handwriting have not gone unnoticed. Sweden, a country often cited as superior to ours when it comes to education, experienced a downtrend in literacy levels from 2016 onwards and is back-peddling wildly on their roll-out of digital technology in schools, returning to a focus on physical books and handwriting. What’s worrying for me is that the trend may be going in the opposite direction in the UK. Perhaps most worrying of all, the major examination boards have all indicated their desire to move towards digital examinations, despite the overwhelming chorus of dismay from Headteachers across the country who know that they simply do not have the infrastructure to support such a move. It is unsurprising that examination boards want to push the digital model, as the current process of collecting and digitising examination scripts no doubt costs them a fortune; but beyond the logistical nightmare for schools that the digitisation of examinations will present, I genuinely fear for the impact on students’ literacy and understanding. A move towards digital examinations will push schools further down the road of letting students do everything on screen (many private schools and well-funded academies are already there) and the effect on their learning will be catastrophic. Some of the students I work with are already in this position and their grasp of the texts they are learning is woeful; their teachers allow them access to a simply overwhelming number of documents, all of which they are expected to have the skills to access and draw information from, when in reality they have little to no idea what’s actually in front of them and how that relates to what they need to commit to memory.

So I find myself a somewhat reluctant Luddite, telling my students to reach for a notepad and pen and encouraging them to form letters on a page by hand. The irony in the fact that I am doing so over Zoom is not lost on me, but here’s the thing: technology is incredible, it is life-changing, it is illuminating, it is wonderfully democratic and a great leveller for those of us with physical disabilities. We must, however, be circumspect with how we use it and thus ensure that we do not unwittingly lose more than we gain.