Have I mentioned that this month is busy? For a few days it seemed like every time I picked up my smartphone there was a new message from an anxious parent seeking last-minute support for their child. GCSE Latin may be somewhat niche, but it is still sat by thousands of students across the UK every year, and many of them are feeling uprepared.
Last week I wrote about how many of the students that have approached me are woefully ill-informed about how to go about the process of learning their set text. We are rapidly hurtling towards a time when fixing this within the available time-frame will be a real challenge. Despite this, some students who have approached me for help only recently are rising to it; but their lives could have been made so much less stressful had they been taught these techniques in the first place and tested on the text regularly.
In the last week, however, I have been approached by students presenting with concerns across the whole specification. While at this stage it is not realistic to promise a dramatic turnaround, there are things that can be done to improve a student’s grade at this late stage. Many students present with concerns about the language paper, quoting a grade 3/4 in this element and a grade 7 in the literature. They express surprise when I tell them that more work on the literature might actually help them the most. At this stage, improving a child’s grade is little more than a numbers game. For example, if I can teach them some techniques which will help them to gain full marks in the 10-mark question (which is worth 20% of their literature grade and therefore 10% of their mark overall) I can make a difference. Students who know the text well should be able to achieve a grade 8/9 in the literature papers, which will pull up their overall result, even without any improvement in their language grade.
So is there anything that can be done at this late stage to improve a child’s performance in the language paper? Well, with five weeks to go, there is little to be gained by delving in and analysing how much basic grammar is missing from a student’s knowledge bank – that can’t be fixed in five weeks, especially given the plethora of other subjects that students are studying at GCSE: it’s not like they can dedicate the majority of time to their Latin. More realitically I can focus on one element of the examination and improve their performance in that. The easiest win is the grammar questions, worth 10% and gloriously predicatable.
I teach students a series of rules and show them dozens of past and practice papers one after the other, focusing entirely on this question; as a result, students are able to identify how predicatable the examiner tends to be and at this stage that can really help. It also empowers them by enabling them to understand the language used in the questions and to identify what it is that the examiner is looking for.
Most students, in my experience, have not been prepared well for this question and there’s a reason for that. Grammar questions are a relatively new thing at GCSE level. They were introduced to the syllabus in 2018 and most teachers saw them as an entirely new phenomenon. But grammar questions have been a feature of the Common Entrance syllabus for decades and guess what? Some of the same people involved in setting those are also involved at GCSE. If anything, the GCSE questions are easier – I would place them at between Level 1 and Level 2 at Common Entrance – Level 3 grammar questions go way beyond the expectations at GCSE. As someone who has tutored the Common Entrance for years, the “new” grammar questions introduced in 2018 looked entirely familiar to me and I was immediately able to predict how they would work. In addition, Taylor & Cullen have published a series of practice papers in their books that accompany the OCR GCSE, as well as further practice with the grammar questions. Teachers now have a minimum of 10 practice, specimen and past papers to model for them how the questions work – and they are consistently repetitive.
The best way to prepare students for this element of the examination is to show them as many examples as you can in quick succession – select just this part of each paper and do one after the other. That way, students are able to spot how certain words, phrases and expectations are repeated time and time again. I usually find that within two half-hour sessions I can take a child from one who was previously mystified as to what to do and guessing wildly to one who is able to score 8, 9 or – on a good day with the wind behind them – 10 out of 10 consistently on the grammar questions.
Time and again I am struck by how little guidance some students are given about how to go about the process of learning. I’m not talking about school assemblies on “study skills”, which I guarantee you most teenagers will switch off from; the guidance needs to come directly from each individual classroom teacher, the subject expert, and it 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.
Too often, it seems to me, 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 that students need to be shown how to go about engaging with the process. 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.
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” on it, that generally they need to do something to gain the knowledge required. 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 introductions.
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 in fact have been told on more than one occasion. 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 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 that? 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 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 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 methods – there will always be a few hardcore reluctants 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 previous post on how to use the first-letter technique then do so straight away – you will never look back!
How children respond to making a mistake is very telling. Working closely in a one-to-one situation with lots of different young people has really started to make me think about the psychology of erring and how an individual’s response to it can be a powerful indicator of their resilience and their potential for success – both academically and in terms of their emotional welfare.
I should stress at the outset that none of my personal observations are truly evidence-based; I work with lots of youngsters, but my reflections are no more than a series of anecdotes. However, my thoughts have sent me off on a bit of a whistlestop tour of what the research does say. For example, a child’s age radically affects their ability to cope with making mistakes and receiving feedback on them; younger children are much less able to cope with negative feedback and require more overt positivity and reassurance. However, recent research supports the notion that making mistakes is crucial to the learning process, and that setting the bar high is more productive in terms of learning outcomes. Yet children will not benefit from this if their response to making mistakes is riddled with anxiety or other negative emotions, and it is this insecapable fact which led to the popularity of the concept of growth mindset in schools; unfortunately, the longterm results show either no benefits or only very small incremental benefits for all the money and time that has been hurled into the concept.
Like many proven concepts in psychology, the truth about growth mindset is not greatly surprising: children with what could be described as a growth mindset – in other words, with the resilience that enables them not only to cope with making mistakes but to learn from them – these children do better in school overall. Well, duh. I’m not sure this is news to anybody. However, what happened in response to this proven research, inevitably, was a rush to develop and advocate for strategies through which schools could encourage a growth mindset in all children. Now, let’s be realitic. Of course, schools can model and encourage a growth mindset in students, but they’re never going to radically adjust the psychology of every individual sat in front of them; pretending that this is possible is part of the pressure that is driving teachers out of their jobs. Let us be clear: the model that children see at home is, always has been and always will be more powerful than what is modelled for them in school.
The observations I have been making about how children react to mistakes are something I am still pondering about. I have yet to meet a child with a truly mature response to the process and I don’t expect to – that maturity comes (if you’re lucky) during adulthood. But I think I can spot the ones that are already on their way there and the ones that I am concerned may struggle along the way.
The clients that worry me the most are the ones that immediately apologise for every error they make. If a child’s response to an academic mistake or misjudgement or mis-recollection is that it is something they need to apologise for, I can only imagine the psychological strain that this places upon them on a daily basis. The feedback loop is essential to study and the process of learning, and I have yet to find a way that reassures such children that this is the case, to the extent that they stop apologising. No matter how much reassurance they are given, no matter how well they are doing, such children will – in my experience to date – continue to apologise for errors. It concerns me greatly for their wellbeing, never mind the limitations that it may place on their longterm ability to learn.
At the other end of the scale are the children who won’t accept they have made a mistake. This too, I suspect, may stem from anxiety. The child will go to endless lengths to tell you why what they said is not wrong, or is the same thing as what you said, or is what they meant in the first place. For some children, granted, this can just be a bit of fun – I have one very high-achieving client who likes to be flippant and retort “same thing” when I tweak his translation; he knows and I know that he’s having a joke with me and will in fact file the correct answer for future reference. But I have met a handful of children who will tie themselves up in knots before they will admit that something is wrong, so desperate are they to avoid the suggestion. One problem with this is that so much learning time is wasted; a more serious concern is that their reaction to the situation belies a level of anxiety about making mistakes that will hold them back in the longterm.
A reaction I have noticed among some high-achievers is what I call self-policing. These students will wail “why on earth did I say that?!” when they make a small slip – they are hyper-aware when their mistake is a minor slip of the tongue, perhaps due to rushing, and they flagillate themselves for it mercilessly. Interestingly, such children are very concerned by minor errors, but deal much better with the process of puzzling out more challenging tasks, in which they expect to make mistakes and learn from them. I find this fascinating. Of course, we all have the urge to tick ourselves off when we do something that we perceive to be foolish, but I have found myself pondering recently whether something more complex is going on. Many of these sorts of children are in very high-achieving schools and/or come from families with high expectations. Are they used to being pounced on when they say something foolish? I remember a colleague who had worked in one of the most academically high-octane boys’ schools in the country telling me that the boys had a particular word that they would all shout in a chorus when another boy “said something stupid”. I absolutely cringed. What an awful learning environment for children, and what a dreadful place that must have been to teach. To what extent, I wonder, do such places contribute to an inability to face up to one’s own mistakes, when blustering and denial seems an infinitely safer option?
But here is the good news. A genuinely surprising number of students deal with mistakes superbly and every time I observe this I want to grab their parents and hug them. Do they realise, I wonder, what a great job they must have done in those formative years? Do they know just what a difference it will make to their child’s longterm wellbeing and their ability to learn? When a child is able to say “aha! Yes, I see that.” Or “ooh, so why is that wrong?” Or even “hang on, didn’t you say x earlier?” which will then help us to uncover a misconception or confusion or exception or false friend or other glitch in the matrix of learning. Such children feel the advantages of tutoring the most, for they are able to access its benefits face-on and without fear.
As a passionate tutor, I try to guide all my students towards this approach by helping them to develop this mindset and attitude towards their studies. But for some it comes naturally, for others I will always be fighting the tide of their previous experiences, their anxieties, their beliefs about themselves and their ability to learn, the way that they have been spoken to or had situations modelled for them by a myriad of family members, friends and teachers throughout all the challenges that they have faced so far. But the more I think about it, the more I come to believe that a child’s attitude towards mistakes is central to their potential for progress (and indeed central to their happiness and wellbeing), so it is something I shall continue to give a great deal of thoughtful energy to.
Last week I reviewed the 5th edition of the Cambridge Latin Course Book 1. While the changes were notable, they were perhaps only apparent to someone who knows the course inside out. By contrast, the moment one opens the second book and compares it to its 4th edition predecessor, it is apparent that the changes here are far more radical. From the very first set of cartoons, the difference it striking.
Okay. Full disclosure from the outset: I don’t like Book 2. As a result, I’m afraid that this review is not going to be gushing. It is difficult enough to hold the attention of Year 9 (especially once they’ve chosen their options, which happens remarkably early in the academic year); with CLC Book 2, it was nigh on impossible and I have never felt so liberated as when I ditched it altogether. Yet the authors of the 5th edition have clearly made significant improvements to make the transition from the first to the second book is more palatable. To date, students have struggled to move on from the loss of Caecilius and other favourite characters, so the authors of the new edition have done the right thing in attempting to give Quintus more character in Book 1 and providing him with a new companion to accompany him on his travels. I retain my reservations about Book 2, even in its new format but, with such radical changes employed, it is undeniable that the authors have given it their best shot to adapt it.
The first stage of the book (Stage 13 in the series) has been radically altered. The lazy slave motifs of yesteryear are gone, and the opening cartoons demonstrate this from the outset. The monumentally dull opening story Tres Servi has been removed and replaced with a much better story entitled Romanus Vulneratus, which introduces us to Salvius in the distance, observed by a local farmer and his family. This is a much cleverer way to spark interest in the story Coniuratio which follows, and which we now hear as an explanation as to how the wealthy Roman Salvius came by his wound. I think the very idea of seeing these Roman characters through local eyes is excellent and a terrific approach taken by the authors throughout the new edition.
Rufilla is given a more dominant role, notable in the way the cartoons are presented and how the story of Bregans is shaped around her rather than Varica. The story is now divided into two parts, but still introduces the dog sent as a gift by King Togidubnus (renamed in line with updated research). A new character of Vitellianus is introduced and there is much better story-telling, with Rufilla noticing that her husband is wounded, and much less “Romanising”, with Bregans no longer being the stupid, lazy slave. The twins, Loquax and Anti-Loquax, are notable by their absence in this Stage. Salvius Fundum Inspicit has been renamed Fundus Britannicus, and once again this story has been adapted to reflect the viewpoint of local farmers living under the Roman occupation.
The order in which the grammar is introduced throughout Book 2 remains the same. For example, Stage 13 still introduces the verbs volo, nolo and possum used with the infinitive, and this grammatical point is rather better represented throughout the stories than it was before. I still ache for the lack of exercises provided; regretfully (and – as I undetstand it – deliberately) the CLC still relies heavily on the classroom teacher supplementing students’ studies. The authors have moved the practising the language exercises to the back of the book and added in extra comprehensions in every stage; given that the exercises require extensive vocabulary support, I do wonder whether the authors have considered just how much work the CLC demands of the clasroom teachers who work with it. When I think of the thousands of Latin teachers all over the country typing out hundreds of exercises on the most basic of grammatical principles, it makes me want to weep at the inefficiency. Changes have been made to the vocabulary checklists, largely (although not entirely) to better represent the list of words required at GCSE. I retain serious concerns about the vocabulary used outside of the checklists, which I shall come back to later.
The authors have decided to ditch the motif of Rufilla as the nagging, 1970s-style housewife, which is a great relief. She has an equally if not more dominant role in Stage 14 as before, but the row between her and Salvius, in which she was portrayed as fickle and spoilt, has been replaced with Familia Occupata, in which her focus is preparing the guest bedroom – a much better way to build anticipation about who that guest might be. The household slaves are also much better represented throughout Stage 14 in the build up to Quintus Advenit, now renamed Familiaris Advenit to allow students to discover the guest’s identity for themselves as they translate. The story of the silver tripods remains, followed by a new story for comprehension, which once again replaces the exercises now moved to the back of the book. This certainly cements the “reading course” approach – to those of us unconvinced by that philosophy, I fear it is another nail in the coffin for the CLC. Many teachers, however, will be very pleased to see some beginners’ level literary criticism brought in – I am aware that some schools take this approach with the CLC already and it seems the team has taken it on board.
It is notable that the background sections, which continue to exploit the idea of the characters appearing as talking heads, are now spread out more widely throughout some of the stages, meaning that teachers are perhaps more likely to weave the background material into their lessons as originally intended by the philosophy of the CLC. Women are better represented (i.e. they are represented full stop) and there is a pleasing exploration as to why we know so little about them and indeed about anyone who was not rich, male and powerful. I will not explore and discuss the changes to the background in depth because – like many state-school teachers, I had no time for them anyway and therefore lack the expertise. Suffice to say it is clear that the changes are radical, thorough and for the better, so schools with the time to explore them in depth will have much better quality material to work with.
The changes to the stories in Stage 15 appear less radical and therefore what’s most noticeable is once again the practising the language being a comprehension rather than exercises, which have again been moved to the back of the book. There is a welcome change to the cartoons at the start of Stage 16, which previously had the most extraordinary representation of enslaved people with dwarfism, randomly juggling for the entertainment of some dinner guests. While it is absolutely undeniable that the Romans did this kind of thing, to make this image the only representation of disability within the pages of the CLC and drop it in without comment was frankly appalling and something that I am very glad to see the back of. These unfortunate (and nameless) characters have been replaced with the previously absent twins, named in previous editions as Loquax and Anti-Loquax, who make an appearance here although are not named. In the same set of cartoons the authors have also removed the bizarre and frankly distracting moment when a dancing girl appears out of an enormous egg and have replaced her with some birds. Below is the image as it appears in the 4th edition followed by its replacement in the 5th.
I was pleased to see Quintus De Se still in place, as this is a pivotal and grammatically useful story, where Quintus articulates his trauma and which I used to use in an adapted form to test students on verb endings. The story has some pleasing tweaks, incorporating the fate of Lucia, Quintus’s sister, and explaining how Clemens found the two siblings after some time and gave Quintus the ring handed to him by Caecilius at the end of Stage 12 (which to my recollection was never mentioned again in previous editions).
But Stages 15 and 16 in general are the point where the CLC starts to go a bit wild, in my opinion. To my dismay, the authors have chosen to keep the storyline about Belimicus, the tedious boat race and the bear – in my experience, children honestly do not find these stories even half as exciting as the authors seem to think they are, but maybe other teachers have found differently. And yes, of course, I used to throw myself into it, get the children to act out the stories, draw diagrams of the race, label what happened at each point, you name it, I did it. We were all doing it back in 2010. Some teachers are still doing it. What an epic waste of class time! Let’s focus on the language: in my experience, by this point in the course, the amount of unusual vocabulary weighs so heavily upon students that they find themselves endlessly frustrated by the translation process and therefore lose heart with it. My concerns in this regard are perpetuated in this new edition, where the authors have elected to continue to use relatively unusual vocabulary to introduce and demonstrate core grammar. As just one example, the sentence which demonstrates the pluperfect in Stage 16 is constructed almost entirely out of words which do not appear on either of the GCSE specifications, nor in Dickinson’s One Thousand: artifices, qui picturas pinxerant, peritissimi erant. Other than the verb to be and the relative pronoun, these words are frankly irrelevant and I think it’s madness, given the depth of the overhaul that this course has undergone, that the authors haven’t taken the opportunity to resolve this issue. I suspect it is because they genuinely don’t see the excessive amount of unusual vocabulary as an issue to the extent that I have found it to be in the classroom.
Stages 17-20 remain, as in prior editions, a flashback to Quintus’s time in Alexandria, with the notable change that his sister Lucia, introduced in the new 5th edition of Book 1, is also a survivor and therefore joins Quintus on his travels. An extra story in Stage 17 entitled Tres Aves focuses on her and makes further pleasing mention of the siblings’ losses in Pompeii – in previous editions, there wasn’t enough opportunity taken to make links for the characters with their past, so this is really good to see – the course and its narrative certainly feels more coherent now. Stage 18 retains its focus on Clemens, his Alexandrian shop and the protection racketeering and Stage 19 still introduces the characters of Aristo, Galatea and Helena – mention is now made in the cartoons that they are friends of Barbillus, which goes some considerable way towards maintaining the thread of the storyline better than in previous editions. Lucia is also woven into the stories of Stage 19, with this being the focus in a total re-write of Dies Festus. The story of the hen-pecked Aristo has – mercifully – been removed and we are then into endgame, with the story Venatio depicting the scenario which will finish off Barbillus, who has thus been much better woven into the extended narrative throughout Book 1 and Book 2. Barbillus’s demise seems much more poignant, not just because he has been better painted as a character and friend of the family, but because his will is represented nicely in the book and the relationship between him and the siblings Quintus and Lucia is much more explicitly drawn.
While the storyline hangs together really well and the narrative is undeniably entertaining, I maintain that the vocabulary of Book 2 is overwhelming for students and that this burden will continue to cause them to lose interest, both in the narrative and in the language itself. Were I still a classroom teacher I do not believe that I would have re-embraced the use of Book 2, solely due to this fact. While Book 1 requires heavy supplementation, this is just about manageable and definitely worth doing. But when I found myself glossing virtually every single word in a lengthy story – as I did for Book 2 – and when those words are, on the whole, not useful for GCSE, I had to ask myself what purpose the book was serving. My professional judgement that Book 2 was not serving my needs as a time-pressed classroom teacher sadly remains the same having examined the 5th edition: the authors simply haven’t addressed the core reasons behind why I ditched it in the first place. Others will feel very differently of course, and I suspect that ardent fans of the course will be delighted with the changes.
I was always going to be a tough audience, with my fundamental dislike for Book 2 and my sincere belief that it is pretty much irreconcilable with the needs of the classroom teacher, particularly in a comprehensive setting. I remain convinced that the CLC and its usefulness starts to crumble beyond repair at this point. The passages are packed with too much difficult, irrelevant and overwhelming vocabulary and – perhaps most crucially of all – far too much relies on the classroom teacher to produce countless supplementary worksheets; the requirement to do this is so onerous that one is left wondering why one would invest in these expensive text books at all, when they fail so fundamentally to provide the core content of a Latin course.
The Cambridge Latin Course has endured for so long that it has become a lens through which our subject is viewed by the outside world. Written originally in the 1970s as a radical push-back against traditional methods of Latin teaching, the CLC has become the orthodoxy for recent generations. Whilst complained about and much-discussed by tradtionalists and modernists alike, Book 1 in particular is used in the overwhelming majority of schools that teach Latin. I personally used it throughout my 21-year career, despite having much to say about about its approach and scope; the first book is truly inspired and therefore inspiring, and even those of us who take issue with its theoretical approach to the language find it hard to resist its allure.
The course is currently in the midst of a radical overhaul, overseen by Caroline Bristow and her team of writers at CSCP, whom she describes as passionate curators of the characters and their stories. I recently interviewed Caroline for my podcast, and found her insights into how the course has been restructured and reinvented for the modern world truly fascinating. I immediately ordered myself a copy of what’s already available, which is the first two volumes, and have decided to review the changes to Book 1 in this blog post; next week I shall examine Book 2 as there is far too much to say about both volumes to cover it all in one post. There has been a surprising lack of response from the Classics world about the 5th edition, although its attempts to rethink itself have been seized upon with tedious predictability by certain quarters of the mainstream media, who found themselves in a panic that Caecilius and his friends were going woke.
So what exactly has changed for Caecilius?
To the untrained eye, the changes to Book 1 might seem somewhat superficial. As a perhaps reluctant CLC expert, I can assure you that they are not. I have worked with this course for 21 years and I probably know Book 1 better than most people – not least because I spent the last few years of my career re-writing it in order to resolve some of the concerns I had with its approach. Many of the changes I chose to make were as a result of the fact that I am not convinced by the philosophy behind the CLC and other courses which are usually named “reading courses” – if you’d like to know more about this, then my discussion with Caroline is definitely worth you listening to, as is my final interview of the same season with David Carter, who is an advocate for comprehensible input. My ongoing concerns aside, my focus for this blog post is on the specific changes made between the new 5th edition and its predecessor. The pedagogical philosophy behind the course remains unchanged.
The first thing to say is that the cartoons are now colourised. This may feel less radical and exciting since we have had access to the colourised versions online for some time, but let us not forget that this is the first time that these have appeared in print. The 4th edition was streets ahead of its predecessors in terms of presentation and the use of colour photographs, but Caecilius 5.0 is colourised throughout and the cartoons far more appealing as a result of this simple fact. Aside from this, the cartoons attached to the model sentences remain largely familiar, with the addition of Lucia, a sister for Quintus. She seems like as good a place to start as any, so let’s begin with Lucia and the portayal of women.
Why Lucia – and what about women in general?
There are numerous and overwhelming benefits to the inclusion of a daughter for Caecilius and Metella. To start with the obvious, the book is immediately more balanced, with the addition of a female character being shown reading within the first couple of pages. Her prior non-existence had little to do with the realities of the Roman world and far more to do with the fact that the CLC was written in the 1970s. It may have escaped some people’s notice, but the female characters in the series to date reflect the way in which women were portrayed in 1970s situation comedy: you have nagging wives and and you have pretty girls without much to say for themselves other than what men purport to find pleasing. It is surely not to enter some Daily Express reader’s fantasy of radical wokeness to suggest that we can do better than this now.
Lucia is given an important role in the book and – much as I do not wish for her to be nothing but a foil for the male characters – she does indeed provide opportunities for the writers to flesh out the character of Quintus, who has always been somewhat flat in the first book. I’ll come back to why that’s important later.
In general, the writers have done a magnificent job of illustrating the realities of life as it was for Roman women. Metella has been fleshed out as a character and appears by Caecilius’s side, as per the reality for the wife of a wealthy, successful man. Previously, it had felt like they didn’t have any kind of partnership at all and led entirely separate lives, when the reality would have seen Metella involved in Caecilius’s business relationships and friendships. Some of the changes made are subtle but crucially important for this; for example, the opening line of Fabula Mirabilis now reads “multi amici cum Caecilio et cum Metella cenabant” instead of “multi amici cum Caecilio cenabant”. So Metella is there as a host also. Likewise in the story Felix et Fur it is the daughter, Lucia, who asks why Felix was freed (at last making sense of the use of the 3rd person in the last line, which has always grated on me!) Small tweaks matter, because they flesh out the image of the ancient world we are portraying to children.
At the end of Stage 7, after the radically adapted story that portrays Melissa (more on her below), the authors introduce a new story called Lucia callida, which echoes the language used in the story Decens and shows Lucia and a female friend outwitting a rather unpleasant gladiator. By the by, the feminine version of the Latin word for friend (amica) was not previously used in the book, which only serves to illustrate the extent to which women were overlooked in previous editions.
Workers and slaves
The 5th edition authors swap the painter Celer for a female character called Clara, basing their decision to do so on original sources and opening up the opportunity for teachers to explore with their classes what kind of work women might have been seen performing. They also radically adjust the presentation of the slave girl Melissa, giving her a back story and making her welcomed by the other slaves; previously, the story of Melissa showed her as being easy on the eye, simpering while being purchased by (a potentially somewhat lascivious) Caecilius and appreciated by all the men in the household but not by Metella. Distinctly less than ideal. This has been removed, as has the storyline of Melissa getting everything wrong, being criticised by the other (supremely happy) household slaves and eventually settling in to the proper ways of the house. The story which used to be called Metella et Melissa in Stage 7 has been radically transformed, showing empathy between the household slaves and explaining how Melissa ended up being sold into slavery. Metella is no longer the one who makes Melissa feel at home, it is her fellow slaves.
Empathy is also evoked between the slaves in a very interesting change to Stage 4. The authors have completely adapted the story Grumio et Leo, which previously portrayed Grumio as being so drunk that he mistook a fresh mural for reality and became convinced that there was a lion in the house. Ho ho ho for all concerned, isn’t alcohol abuse hilarious? Possibly less than ideal, one has to admit. The story has now been adjusted and has Melissa comparing the image of Hercules in the painting to Grumio and Clemens being unconvinced. Grumio still retains his naughty side, and rest assured that his ongoing flirtation with Poppaea remains in place, as does Clemens’s smug usurpation at the end of the playlet in Stage 11.
Overall, the shift away from portraying the household as packed with a bunch of enslaved workers who were thoroughly happy with their lot is subtle but distinct.
Foreshadowing Book 2: Quintus and Barbillus
One of the many reasons, in my opinion, that children’s interest in the stories wanes after CLC Book 1, is that students never get over the loss of Caecilius. Quintus is not developed enough as a character in Book 1 for him to become the hero in the later books, and this was one of the ways in which I felt things needed changing (the others all relate to grammar and vocabulary).
The authors of the 5th edition have gone some way towards adjusting this, with extra stories that flesh out the character of Quintus and give him a personality. Quintus audax has been introduced in Stage 8, which shows Quintus hunting with his father and Felix, a hair-raising encounter with a boar affording him the opportunity to pay back his debt to the old freedman. This leads us nicely into him being the focus in much of Stage 9, with his birthday and his visit to the baths, and in Stage 10, with his Greek friend Alexander. Pleasingly, Lucia shows an interest in Alexander in a short interaction with Melissa, and it’s nice to see the main characters forming attractions, which was previously only the preserve of the slaves (read into that what you will).
An inspired change for the better is the pointless characters of Marcus and Quartus have been ditched from Stage 11 and instead the debate regarding which candidate’s name to paint on the wall of their house happens between Quintus and Lucia, giving both characters life and illustrating what we know from the very kind of graffiti being portrayed – that Roman women supported political campaigning and put both their voice and their wealth behind their preferred candidates. Another pleasing addition to this stage is a discussion between Metella and Lucia, in which Metella reveals that Caecilius is looking to his wealthy contact Holconius (boo!) to help him arrange a marriage for Lucia. There is lots of scope for discussion in the story, which shows Lucia’s feelings (she only has eyes for Alexander) and touches on various other themes relating to marriage and how women were treated in the Roman world. The notion of arranged marriage was distinctly missing before, along with pretty much every lived reality for 50% of the population of the ancient world.
One of the cleverest adjustments made by the authors is easy to miss and I confess I might have done so had Caroline Bristow not flagged it up to me in her interview. In a stroke of genius, the authors have tweaked the cartoons and the storyline ever so slightly in Stage 2, taking the previously nameless merchant friend from the cartoons and calling him Barbillus. He then pops up again in Stage 12, replacing the hitherto pointless Iulius, who is introduced in previous editions only to be left to an unknown fate and never mentioned again. As a result of all this, Barbillus – a pivotal character for Book 2 – is flagged as a solid friend and business contact for Caecilius in Book 1, enabling the authors (one hopes) to create more of a bond between him and the surviving members of the family in Book 2 and thus more pathos for his death.
The presentation of the background
As a state school teacher with excessively limited classroom time, I am far less of an expert with how the background material is presented. However, the differences are still striking even to my eye. The “talking heads” are a great idea, as the background sections become an opportunity for the characters to tell us about their lives rather than the background seeming unrelated to them. From what I can see, the authors have also made significant improvements to how the background sections are written, meaning that teachers in a similar situation to mine might at least feel able to set a reading homework for students, facilitated perhaps by the “thinking points” or questions now included to promote discussion; previously, some of the language used was so archaic and/or so advanced that this was never really an option with younger children in a comprehensive setting.
Conclusion: euge!
The 5th edition is a marvellous rewrite and a credit to the authors. I only hope they succeed in persuading schools to make the leap in these financially testing times; to date, I will confess, not one of my tutees is in a school which has made the switch, although it may be early days. But truth be told, if you’re a fan of the course, the new edition holds nothing to fear and everything to like. For pedagogical doubters like myself, I’m afraid that the language elements remain the same, with the one exception that they have (I believe under pressure from teachers) introduced a mention of the ablative case after prepositions in Stage 11. Personally, if I were still a classroom teacher, I would still be teaching the grammar explicitly in the old-fashioned way and I would also still be re-writing the stories to remove nominative pronouns and tweak the vocabulary (small issues like the constant use of contendo – not on the GCSE vocabulary list – instead of festino). I would also still be adjusting the way that the vocabulary is presented (I take issue with verbs being listed in the 3rd person).
I did all this with Book 1 as I believed the story arc was magnificent and maintained an undeniably engaging appeal. Book 2, as of around four years ago, I had ditched altogether for numerous reasons, in particular the excessive use of irrelevant vocabulary which overwhelmed students and caused them to lose all heart. I have not studied Book 2 in detail yet, and look forward to considering whether it could have tempted me back into the fold.
Caecilius and his new family, complete with Lucia. Image from the opening chapter of CLC Book 1
Many people undestimate the importance of forgetting time. I’m not talking about forgetting painful experiences here (although the ability to wipe those from one’s memory might also be considered rather useful); I’m talking about giving your brain time to “forget” what it has learned, purely so that you can force it to remember again. Think that sounds weird? Well, let me persuade you.
Memory, as cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham so famously defined it, is the residue of thought. Students will struggle to remember things which they have not thought deeply about and the best teachers use a combination of methods to get students to think actively about what they need to remember. There has been much welcome discussion in recent years about retrieval practicein the classroom, and alongside that the importance of spaced learning. Believe you me, this was not the focus during my teacher-training 21 years ago, indeed there was little to no interest shown by the lecturers in how memory works, little focus on the inescapable fact that a child’s success or failure in the education system is defined by their ability to use their memory effectively – both their working memory and their longterm memory.
In the simplest possible terms, a person’s working memory is what they use to process information and acts like a kind of holding pad. Memory expert Tracy Alloway describes the working memory as like a post-it note: capable of holding only a tiny amount of information temporarily, and not suitable as a system for longterm storage. For effective learning to take place in the classroom, it is crucial that a student’s working memory is not overloaded and a large part of that responsibility rests with the classroom teacher. However, students themselves (and those supporting them) can help too. The more a student can do to transfer knowledge into their longterm memory (which, unlike the working memory, is limitless) the better their capacity to learn will be. In my subject, this means that the student should endeavour to learn as much vocabulary as they can, as well as the important noun and verb endings; this will mean that they are not over-burdened in the classroom, enabling them to access more learning.
So there’s the rub. How exactly does one transfer knowledge reliably into one’s longterm memory? Well, the more I work one-to-one with students and advise their parents and guardians, the more I have come to understand that most of them really underestimate the importance of forgetting time.
Some students have been taught about spaced learning in school, as part of a drive towards empowering them with a knowledge of metacognition (which is thinking about thinking – a knowledge of how we learn – exactly what we’re talking about now). This is fantastic. In schools that are switched on to this, students are taught to repeat their self-testing processes regularly, leaving a gradually-increasing length of time between each revisit. Some schools teach a fixed process, helping students by advising them on exactly how long those varied gaps should be, but the truth is that it doesn’t necessarily matter. In principle, students should be regularly testing themselves on things they learnt that day, that week, that fortnight, that month, that year; the best and most effective kind of retrieval draws on a range of learning distances.
Students can actually exploit their brain’s capacity for forgetting and retrieval during very short spaces of time, and I make this happen within my 30-minute tutoring sessions. As one simple example, I might help a student commit the endings of the 1st declension to memory in the first few minutes of a session. I might then test them on a series of nouns which follow the first declension. I will then return to the endings of the 1st declension and test them on those again at the end of the session. That’s a typical 30-minute lesson arc and allows for “forgetting time”. However, even within that arc, I will further exploit the brain’s ability to switch from one focus to another and, as a result, to temporarily forget; during the process of testing a student on the 1st declension endings, once they reach a certain level of competence, I might suddenly ask them a couple of random questions to distract them from the table: do they know how many declenions there are? What gender are most nouns in the 1st declension? Can they think of any words that they know which follow the pattern of the 1st declension? Once their brain has been distracted for a minute or or so by this Q&A, I will then ask them to recall the endings of the 1st declension once again. The constant exploitation of forgetting time increases the impact of learning because it is forcing the brain to retrieve something which has briefly exited the working memory (i.e. the student has not spent the last minute actively thinking about it and holding it in their head).
Perhaps the most important thing that students need to know is that forgetting is crucial. Forgetting is therefore not the enemy; forgetting is part of the learning process. Once students gain confidence with this, what they begin to realise is that their brains take less and less time to recall what they have seemingly forgotten with each reboot. The process of recall in and of itself is what cements learning and is crucially important.I have written before about the dangers of the forgetting curve, as posited by psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, when it comes to memorisation; but what the forgetting curve actually shows is that forgetting is not just inevitable, it is an integral part of the memorisation process. We cannot learn a large amount of information without allowing ourselves time to “forget” it prior to forcing ourselves to recall it again.
It is therefore important to reassure students that retrieval can and indeed should feel a little uncomfortable – you are forcing yourself to try and remember, and in these days of Google that is not something we do very much. Many a happy evening was spent back in the day when a friend might say “who wrote that song?” and one would spend several minutes (or several hours!) trying to remember collectively. Now we can just look up the answer, we’re perhaps less trusting of the fact that if we wait long enough, the answer will pop into our heads. As Daniel T. Willingham puts it, “people usually believe that forgetting happens over time; if you don’t use a memory, you lose it. This may be hard to believe, but sometimes the memory isn’t gone—it’s just hard to get to.” This is the most remarkable thing demonstrated in the whole process – you might think you’ve forgotten something, but the memory is actually there, lurking deep inside your brain. Retrieval teaches you how to access it.
So let’s hear it for forgetting. Forgetting is important. Forgetting should be exploited as part of the learning process. And let’s face it, forgetting is unavoidable. All we can do is work with it.
“Just one more thing, Sir …” Peter Faulk as the unforgettable Columbo, who made the art of seeming to forget his trademark
Twice this week, working with two very different courses, I have been struck by an author’s decision to challenge students at a very early stage in their Latin with complex word-order.
“Traditional” Latin word order will have you believe that the subject (should there be one) will come at the beginning of the sentence and the verb at the end. Everything else, with a variety of rules within that, will come in the middle. Yet when it comes to studying real Latin literature, a student has to face up to the fact that this so-called tradition is – at best – a very simplified version of reality; if one were to be truly critical, one might say that the whole concept is a nonsense. Real Latin authors break away from the formalised shape of a Latin sentence – sometimes for effect, sometimes just because they felt like it.
With one small group of tutees I have just started the second booklet of Clarke’s Latin, an ab initio course aimed ostensibly at Common Entrance candidates, although you’d be hard-pushed to find a better introduction to Latin whatever your ultimate goal and indeed I am using it with an adult learner also. Students have been taught all of the cases and their meanings, but only in the 1st declension. Students have also been taught the endings of the present indicative active in the 1st conjugation, and we have just reached the point where the author has introduced the imperfect tense for the first time. Not surprisingly, things are starting to get a little trickier, but my students are rising magnificently to the task – a testament to the robustness of the course so far.
The author has challenged the students from the beginning when it comes to word order, forcing them to engage with both their verb endings and their case endings. But I was struck in particular by this sentence, in exercise 47:
poetas, ubi appropinquant, feminae agricolarum salutant.
Wow. Even the students were impressed.
After some discussion with my fearless group of three, they deciphered that poetas was accusative and therefore not the place to start. I then encouraged them to look at verb endings and to consider whether they could find a subject. With this relatively light-touch coaching, they were excited to deduce that the subject of the main clause was feminae and that the subordiate clause contained the subject in the verb ending but referred back to the poets. The genitive case gave them no trouble at all. With careful thought but relative ease, they came up with the perfect translation: the farmers’ wives greet the poets when they approach.
So far so unremarkable you might say – although personally, having taught Latin for 21 years, I think it is indeed remarkable the extent to which a robust course such as this one enables students to think like a true Latinist at this early stage. But what happened next was perhaps even more exciting. One of the group said, “why would an author put poetas at the beginning like that, instead of the subject?”
It then occurred to me that Clarke’s course is not only producing better results when it comes to the children’s understanding of the underlying grammatical principles; it is also preparing them for much more complex skills later down the line. Firstly, it is preparing them for literary criticism: why an author chooses to place a word in a particular place is exactly the kind of question that GCSE and A level candidates need to be able to answer in their study of literature. Furthermore, when Clarke uses challenging sentences such as these, he is opening children’s eyes to the challenge of translation at a higher level; as a result of this child’s question, we were able to discuss how a translator might attempt to render the sentence into a format that mimics the emphasis that is expressed in the Latin. I suggested something like “it is the poets that the farners’ wives are greeting, when they approach” and invited the children to critique my suggestion: does it stray too far from the original, or is it in fact more faithful to the text?
Clarke’s course offers some extraordinary opportunities for high-level thinking and dicusssion, even when students are at a very rudimentary level. These students have only met the 1st declension and the 1st conjugation in the present and the imperfect indicative active; beyond that, they’ve met a few adverbs and basic subordinate clauses using words such as ubi and antequam. Yet already they are asking questions that would not be out of place in an A level class. Already they are considering that word placement might be important or significant to a Latin author. Already they are pondering a variety of ways that the spirit of the Latin might rendered in translation, and beginning to realise that translation is not a simple or straightforward task in which you only follow a set of rules. This is, quite frankly, extraordinary.
On the very same day I had a session with a child whose school uses Suburani, a course which has gained popularity in many state schools. This course could not be more different from Clarke’s Latin and its authors are no doubt very happy about that – their philosophy is wildly different. The sentence that got me thinking was in chapter 8. By this point, students have met the present, imperfect and perfect indicative active. They have met only the nominative, accusative and ablative cases but they have seen them in three declensions, including neuter versions. Like with the Cambridge Latin Course, all three declensions and all five conjugations are used from the very beginning of the course due to the desire to create an interesting and varied storyline. Laudable as this might be, in my experience students who struggle with Latin have literally no idea what is going on by this stage.
My tutee was presented with the following sentence:
gentes Britannicas opprimunt Romani
It is not the only and not the first sentence where Suburani has used varied word order, and I like to think that this is a deliberate attempt on the part of the authors to encourage students to look at their verb and noun endings – just the same as Clarke’s course aims to do. However, this process is undermined in so many other ways by the course that my tutee was not able to parse the sentence above (which although it contains nouns and verbs from a wider variety of declensions and conjugations, is actually a good deal more simple than my example from Clarke’s Latin).
The translation that my tutee suggested came as no surprise: “the British tribes oppress the Romans”. This is due to a phenomenon I have written about before, the tendency for students to read from left to right, just as they have been trained to do in their own language. The trouble with Suburani is that it does nothing to break this habit. It might teach students their verb endings, but its constant and excessive use of pronouns in the nominative case encourages them to continue to read from left to right and guess the meaning of the sentence. It was this issue that I wrote about in my previous blog post criticising the course.
Now don’t get me wrong, the mistake made by my tutee is what I would expect any child to do; even my tutees using Clarke’s Latin have to be reminded on occasion not to read in this way – it’s a habit so deeply ingrained that it is nigh-on impossible to break. But students who have been taught using Suburani – when prompted to explain which noun is in the nominative or accusative case – usually find this really difficult. They have been shown too many declensions at once and as a result have found it bordering on impossible to memorise how the noun endings change as they decline. And they’ve only met three cases!
My issues with Suburani go beyond its grammatical faults – criticisms which could just as easily be aimed at the Cambridge Latin Course, for which I retain an undeniable fondness and used (albeit heavily adapted) throughout my career in classroom teaching. Suburani contains material presented in a manner that I consider to be quite frankly inappropriate for younger children, another thing I have written about before. Having reached chapter 8 and encountered a simplified version of Caesar’s account of the Druids’ wicker man, reproduced without critique and in graphic detail (with a nice firey background graphic to boot), I have to ask myself what on earth they thought they were doing. While the Cambridge Latin Course is currently undergoing a re-write and the team has agonised about how to present certain aspects of the ancient world faithfully yet sensitively, the authors at Suburani seem out to create shock and awe. I am disliking it more and more the further I get through it.
Yesterday I was reminded during one of my sessions that revisiting the best ideas and the best advice is important.
In today’s blog post I want to share the best and most effective methodology of learning a piece of text off by heart. The method is one used by many actors to learn their lines, and is certainly one that can be used if you or your child takes on a large part on stage. I teach the same method to my tutees as a means of learning the translation of their Latin set texts off by heart, the purpose of which is to make the literature element of the examination super-easy.
Let us take for example the first few lines of Sagae Thessalae, the most commonly-studied prose set text for the current OCR specification for GCSE Latin. Below is the first section of the Latin text, with a suggested translation underneath. It is the translation that your child will need to learn off by heart (not the Latin – that really would be a nightmare!)
iuvenis ego Mileto profectus ad spectaculum Olympicum, cumhaec etiam loca provinciae clarae visitare cuperem,peragrata tota Thessalia Larissam perveni. ac dum urbem pererrans tenuato viatico paupertati meae fomenta quaero.
“As a young man I set out from Miletus for the Olympic Games, since I also wanted to visit these areas of the famous province. Having travelled through the whole of Thessaly, I arrived at Larissa. And while wandering through the city, with my travelling allowance diminished, I was looking for remedies for my poverty.”
To go about learning a section like this, the best thing to do is to break it up into sections and learn it using the first-letter technique. The passage breaks up quite nicely into five short chunks as follows:
As a young man I set out from Miletus for the Olympic Games,
since I also wanted to visit these areas of the famous province.
Having travelled through the whole of Thessaly, I arrived at Larissa.
And while wandering through the city, with my travelling allowance diminished,
I was looking for remedies for my poverty.
Below is a representation of the first-letter technique for these lines. A student writes down the first letter of each word, spaced out in short chunks. Notice that I have used the punctuation – making use of capital letters, commas and full-stops acts as a further trigger for the memory:
While most people will struggle to learn these five sections of prose off by heart, the use of chunking combined with the first-letter technique enables most people to do so within a couple of minutes. Once a student has written out the first chunk in first letters, they should find that they are immediately able to recite the first chunk merely by looking at the letters. They should then repeat the process with the remaining chunks, then try to recite the whole thing, using the letters as a prompt. Within a couple of minutes, their ability to recall the entire passage will be notable. Students can then go on to repeat the process with the remaining text – not too much at once though!
Once a student has mastered the translation of a reasonable amount of text, that’s the time to turn to the Quizlet flashcards. It’s important not to wait too long to do this, as the rote-learning of the English translation will not be much use to a candidate without at least some grasp of how it relates to the Latin. A child who has learnt the translation off by heart should be able to use the flashcards to prompt themselves on each section as follows:
You will notice that I have divided the flashcards into smaller chunks – this is to assist the student in recognising which Latin words and phrases map onto which sections of the translation. There will be some hesitation as a student learns to map their rote-learned translation onto the Latin as represented on the flashcards – but that’s fine. Remember, the rote-learning is merely a prop to assist them in coping with the set text in an examination. It’s very important to move onto the flashcards swiftly, in order to begin the process of making the rote-learned translation do its job of supporting the student in recognising the Latin text.
A student should repeat the flashcards in chronological order until they are fully confident with the translation for each. Once confidence has been gained, it’s then time to hit the shuffle button and see if they can recognise and translate small chunks in isolation – that’s when they can really prove to themselves that they are recognising individual Latin words and phrases and can render them into English.
The whole process might seem arduous when a student first begins, but I have yet to find a student that is not converted to the the system once they realise how effective it is and how much power it gives them over the text. Knowing the text thoroughly is 80% of the battle – and I mean that sincerely. A student should be able to score a pretty good grade in the literature element of the examination simply on the basis of knowing the text really well; many of the questions are comprehension and ask for nothing more than for the student to explain what the text means. Once a student has gained mastery with a section of the text and can perform well on basic comprehension questions, then time can be spent on fine-tuning their response to the text and training them in how to answer the more complex questions, something which I have addressed in other posts.
