Despite my many years in this subject and the hundreds or even thousands of times I have been asked this question, I am always surprised by it. On the one hand people know that Latin is considered worthy of study by the most prestigious and elite schools in the country; on the other, they don’t see the point of it. Why on earth would institutions such as Eton College waste their time on a subject with little to no inherent value? It would seem surprising.
The worthiness of one’s subject is not something that a maths or an English tutor usually has to defend. Most people accept the need for these subjects, but most people – it seems to me – fail to ask themselves why. When pushed, they will usually respond that numeracy and literacy are essential life skills. They are right, of course. Yet still, I would argue, this affords no justification for the current state of affairs, which is that those subjects must be taken to GCSE level. When – assuming you’re not an architect or an engineer – was the last time you made use of your geometry? What about algebra? Have you recently been asked to compare and contrast two 20th century poems? No? I thought not.
The truth is that most subjects are “useless” to most of us, beyond the most basic of levels. Unless we enter a sphere in which a knowledge of those subjects is required – and most of us don’t – the knowledge we learn beyond the most rudimentary of functional skills is all of the higher order, not essential for survival in “the modern world” or indeed the ancient one. Yet these subjects are of immense value. The same goes for Latin.
Studying Latin helps with so many other languages. As the root of all Romance languages, it can help you find cognates when there appear to be none in the English language. For example:
Latin
English
French
Italian
Spanish
arbor
tree
arbre
albero
arbol
pes
foot
pied
piede
pie
Ah, I hear you cry – so what of it? Why study the dead language and not just its living derivations, noting the similarities between those languages as one acquires them? Well, the study of Latin is of value precisely becauseit’s a dead language – this means that it is taught to be read, not spoken, taught entirely through its grammatical rules, not conversational usage. Learning Latin promotes an understanding of the mechanics and structure of language. Someone who has studied Latin can use it to grasp the rudiments of any language – not just the “Romance” languages which have their origins in Latin but also others such as German and Polish, which have complex inflection like Latin does.
Latin also improves and enriches your English vocabulary. If your job is a sinecure, should you quit? If something is indubitable, what is it? What exactly is juxtaposition? (Most trained English teachers get this one wrong). What is an expatriate? Would you consider yourself to be audacious? These words are all easy to deduce if you know your Latin.
Modern sciences began their development about 500 years ago, when all (yes, all) scholars studied Latin and Greek, so the technical terms in biology, chemistry, physics and astronomy therefore derive from Latin and/or ancient Greek. To take one example: trees that lose their leaves in winter are described as deciduous — not an easy word, unless you know your Latin. A Latinist also understands why the plural of fungus is fungi and the singular of bacteria is bacterium.
Beyond the sciences, Latin is also the language of law and government — all legal and many political terms are lifted straight from the Latin. Here are just a few examples that you may have heard of … referendum; veto; habeas corpus; subpoena (pronounced suppeener); in loco parentis; de facto; de iure; caveat emptor; pro bono; quorum; quid pro quo; ad hominem; non sequitur.
Still not convinced? Well, learning Latin enables you to read the great Roman writers, from Virgil to Cicero. These men lie at the head of the western tradition in writing from Chaucer to Shakespeare, from Milton to Keats and beyond. When it comes to understanding English, Irish and American literature, a knowledge of Roman literature puts you at an incalculable advantage over other students; I genuinely struggle to comprehend how anyone can study Western literature at a high level without this knowledge. If you think you understand Milton and you haven’t read Virgil in the original Latin … then I’m afraid you don’t really understand Milton.
There is a reason why Latin is highly respected by the top universities and has one of the strongest recruitment rates in business and commerce as well as in the law and in politics. Latin teaches you to think precisely and analytically and develops your intellectual rigour. This, combined with the fact that no one can even begin to understand the purposes and merits of Western culture without a grasp of its Classical origins, makes the study of Latin a sine qua non.
Online tuition is potentially life-changing; transcending geographical barriers, it can connect your child to the perfect provider. Since the experiences that we all endured during lockdown in 2020 and at the beginning of 2021, I have found that everyone is suddenly on board with online tuition. I rarely meet a new client who doesn’t think that it’s a viable option, this is dramatic contrast to what I found even as recently as 2019.
I am a cautious technophile, who places high demands on technology to work pretty much “by magic” – I don’t like wrestling with equipment and I get mightily exasperated when I have to. Yet with the kind of apparatus and software that so many of us have access to these days, I have been delighted to find that the technical hassles are minimal.
However … (you knew there was a “however” coming, right?) … there are certain pitfalls to online tuition, some downsides compared to face-to-face tutoring, which parents and guardians should be aware of. Happily, they are largely avoidable with a little bit of planning. Never forget: you’re paying for a service, and tuition with an experienced, qualified teacher doesn’t come cheaply. Don’t let the fact that you access online tuition in the comfort of your own home lull you into taking it that little bit too casually, or you may well find you get a poor return on your investment.
Is your equipment up to the job? For online tutoring, there’s no escaping the fact that you will need reliable, fast internet access: this is a must. Whatever software your tutor chooses to use, they will be talking to your child in real time on the web – this is very demanding on whatever service you are using, so a poor WiFi connection or painfully slow broadband will scupper the session. Use this speed test to check whether your service is up to the job: click “Go” and wait for it to measure the speed. If your either your download or your upload speed is less than 5-10 Mbps then you might have problems: remember that online tutoring is a conversation, two people talking over the internet in real time, so the speed simply has to be there in both directions. If a clients is experiencing a temporary slow-down (it happens to a client I have in Cornwall on occasion) I suggest turning cameras off, which although not ideal does usually enable the conversation to continue.
You need to think about how your child will communicate with the tutor. Integral cameras, microphones and speakers are usually fine, but experiment with supplementary equipment if your child struggles to concentrate – students wearing headphones, for example, often find it easier to avoid distraction and focus on the session. Speaking of focus …
Session location: is your child in the right place? Aren’t iPads wonderful? Many of my tutees access tuition via an iPad or similar tablet, and the advantages are obvious. However, don’t let the freedom that an iPad offers you detract from the fact that your child needs a quiet place to concentrate. If you’re having a conversation, cooking or hoovering in the background, not only are you distracting your child but you may cause noise interference to the extent that the tutor will really struggle to hear them. If your child is wearing headphones, that will help them to zone out the sounds around them but the same will not be true for the tutor – most microphones will pick up a great deal of extraneous sound, and the effect can become close to unbearable for the tutor if people are talking or using household appliances in the background during a session.
Ideally, your child should be in a quiet room where they won’t be interrupted by noise or curious siblings. You may wish to be present while your child is being tutored for safeguarding reasons; this is fine, but you should prepare to do something quiet such as reading book. Alternatively, and if the only reason you wish to be present is for monitoring, you could consider recording the sessions – many of the platforms used by online tutors allows for this option.
There has been some recent anxiety on social media re. the safety of Zoom and similar platforms. The package works on closed meetings and the only way that an unsolicited third party could join a meeting is if the link to a meeting is shared online. If your tutor shares the link for each session with you and you alone, there should be nothing to worry about, but you should talk to your tutor about their safeguarding policy. Personally, I only use the “recurring meeting” function with adults; with minors, I schedule a unique Zoom link afresh for every single session with every single child. While this creates a little extra admin at my end every week, I believe that it is worth it in order to mitigate against the risk of a reusable link being accidentally shared with third parties.
Session timings: is your child ready? If your child finds it difficult to get out of bed, you will need to think carefully about how to manage a morning session. I have tutored students on a mid-morning that have clearly just rolled out of bed; dazed and groggy, they are not even close to being fully awake and this means (of course) that their focus is poor. So, even if your child is entering that inevitable phase when wake-up time becomes something of a battle, do try to peel them out of bed well before the session is due to start, allowing time for them to have a shower and something to eat. They then have a fighting chance of their mind being on the tuition session ahead, not still under the duvet.
One of the great joys of online tuition is the time that it can save you. Some clients that are near enough to me to come for home tuition have still opted to go online; I am based in a heavily-populated area of Surrey and the reality of rush-hour traffic can turn even a 5-mile round trip into a potential nightmare. Online tutoring can open up a wider range of possibilities when it comes to time: take advantage of this and make it work for your child.
One final thing … Your child is smart! They know that an online tutor’s field of vision is significantly limited compared to a tutor that’s in the room with them. So what do you know? They may well try to use their phone during the session, or to access other apps or websites on the machine they are using. So, especially if your child is currently preoccupied with a particular game or social networking app, do make sure that they leave their phone with you for the duration of the session and do check that they have closed down all their other apps and messaging services.
What is the benefit of working one-to-one with a student, and why does it trump group work every time? This is a question I have been pondering this week, as I listened to two podcasts aimed at private tutors, both released on the same day, both making the case for tutors like me to make the shift into setting up groups for online tuition. The podcasts were great. The group tuition model? I’m not so sure.
With the explosion of online tutoring into what amounts to one of the fastest-growing corners of the gig economy, I find myself and my recent career-change somewhat on trend. As usual, however, I also discover that I am swimming steadfastly against the tide. Well, thank goodness for that; being in the zeitgeist is definitely not something I’m used to and I’m more of a heckler than a celebrity.
Many online tutors are expanding their businesses into groupwork, to the extent that some are abandoning the one-to-one tuition model altogether. The reason seems obvious; as one parent pointed out to me when they first got in touch to seek help for their daughter, I could make a lot more money if I worked with several students in each slot. This does, of course, rely on there being a high-enough demand for a certain kind of tuition at a particular level: to be frank, in my rather niche subject – taught in only around 2.5% of state schools – I am not sure that’s ever going to be the case. I do have one group of three, which arose because a parent contacted me directly with the request that I work with three children of the same age who were all ab initio and wanted to learn together: in that circumstance, with three friends at the same level who are all keen to start a new project together, the model works very well and I’m enjoying it. But with remedial tutoring (by which I mean the process of supporting a student who has come to you because they are struggling), I have serious doubts. Firstly, I doubt that demand is high enough in my subject but secondly – and I am still idealistic enough to say more importantly – I do not believe that group tuition is a good model when it comes to making that kind of difference to an individual child’s progress.
One of the absolute joys in switching from classroom teaching to one-to-one tutoring is the incredible privilege of taking a child from the bottom of their class to the top. Taking a child who is failing and turning them into one who can achieve the highest of grades. Taking a child who hates your subject and turning them into a GCSE candidate. Taking a child who has been hiding at the back of their classroom for so long that they need a huge amount of coaching and coaxing before they find their feet. One parent told me that their child was coming home in tears after their Latin lessons because they simply had no idea what was going on in the class and had no idea how to access the learning; after working with me, that child went on to choose the subject at GCSE and achieve a very good grade. One of the client reviews I am proudest of reads “you have turned despair and dismay into enjoyment and enthusiasm”. Another says simply “your lessons were transformational.” None of this could be achieved without the one-to-one model. I stand by that. I simply cannot accept that you can take a child who is failing dismally in a subject and get them a top grade without working with them closely as an individual. It’s what tutoring is all about.
I have written before about the power of tuition and the overwhelming benefit which comes from the opportunity to delve in and unpick a student’s understanding – or rather their lack of it. A good tutor will uncover a whole raft of small misconceptions or gaps in a student’s knowledge within the first session. I likened a student’s developing knowledge of a subject to a wall; students who come to a tutor for help have often got bricks throughout that wall that are either misshapen or missing altogether, causing the whole structure to be at risk of collapse. One-to-one tutoring diagnoses the problems, finds the missing bricks and provides the repointing, replacement and reinforcement required. No amount of rhetoric will ever convince me that the same can be done in a small group. Of course, small group-work is great and you can achieve much more than can be achieved with a class of 30; but it still can’t beat the one-to-one model.
Quiet students can often suffer the most in the mainstream classroom – they can fall behind without being noticed or can have enormous potential in a subject – again, without being noticed. A good tutor (and indeed a good classroom teacher) is an excellent reader of body language. I’ve thought a lot in my work about non-verbal cues, those tiny indications that an individual student can give off when they’re not following something – a twitch of the mouth, a furrow of the brow. In a one-to-one session, that’s my cue to pause and rewind and it’s an absolute joy to be able to do so. In the classroom, not only did I not have the time to respond to every non-verbal cue but the reality of a large class meant that I more than likely missed the majority of them. Due to a quirk of timetabling which I won’t bore you with, I once ended up with an extra Year 9 class of 5 students. Yep. Five. I had another group of 24 and yet another of 28 and one of 5. Ask the previous Head why that ridiculous situation arose. Of course, the children in the group of five progressed – on average – better than those in the two larger groups. But it still wasn’t one-to-one tuition and they still didn’t progress as well as they would have done had each of them – in some kind of fantasy parallel universe – had a good private tutor as well.
I have no desire to stand in the way of progress and if enough online tutors are finding that there is enough demand for small-group tuition in their subject and can get decent results with that model then good luck to them. For me – and this is perhaps because I have spent far longer at the chalkface than any other professional tutor I have met so far, I do not believe my heart will ever be in it. I came into tutoring in the sure and certain belief that the one-to-one model is absolutely unbeatable when it comes to building a child’s confidence, tackling misconceptions, breaking down the mindset that they “can’t do it” and launching them onto a new path of success.
For me, nothing else will ever be as rewarding as that.
Regular readers of my blog will know that I have various issues with the new(ish) Latin reading course entitled Suburani. I’m not a fan of the way it approaches the grammar and the clients I have had from schools who have adopted it have all come to me in a state of bewilderment – they have little to no understanding of what they have been learning and their grasp of morphology is woeful.
One aspect of the course that I have found worthwhile – and what is attracting schools to it – is its portrayal of Roman suburban life. There is no idealism and no “whitewashing” here, no triumphalist focus on the easy lives of the wealthy Roman elite. Life is harsh and often desperate; the insulae offer filthy and dangerous accommodation to vulnerable families, a racket run by corrupt landlords on the take, men who are themselves frequently in debt to a wider system of corruption; some appear to be battling with a gambling addiction. There are beggars on the street. Most powerfully of all, we see the reality of how wonders of the ancient world such as the public baths were built and maintained: by slaves under the ground, soot-covered and scorched from the heat of the furnace, contaminated by their time spent in close contact with the sewerage system. Bravo, I thought.
And yet …
During my preparations for working with one client I found myself taking a closer look at chapter 6. The final story in this chapter is a continuation of one called fuga (“flight” or “the escape”), in which two slaves unfortunate enough to be working the fires underneath the baths make a desperate bolt for freedom, slipping out through the sewerage system by night. They are spotted and chased by dogs, which the guards send after them. One of them (named Gallio) is caught immediately and questioned; the other is caught a few days later. Below is a screenshot from the online version of the text book, followed by my suggested translation:
Screenshot from Suburani, fuga, pars secunda, at the end of chapter 6
The guards torture the slave for two hours. At the third hour, the guards take a branding iron out of the furnace. They bring the branding iron towards Gallio and mark his head. The pain is unbearable. There are three letters on his head.
For three days and three nights, Thellus runs. On the fourth day the slave sleeps in a field. At the first hour, two farmers see him. The farmers capture Thellus and take him to the guards. The guards smile. Thellus is terrified.”
Suburani, fuga, pars secunda, pg. 98
I have never been one to romanticise the ancient world, indeed many students have found my endless attempts to remind them of its disappointing realities somewhat irksome. It is not acceptable – I believe – to let them stare in wide-eyed wonder at Roman feats of engineering, without taking a moment to remind them exactly who did the back-breaking, life threatening, life-shortening work which made these structures a reality. I think it’s hugely important and I have done this throughout my career.
The fate of Gallio and Thellus is entirely authentic. Slaves of this type were of little monetary value and – another thing I like to point out to students – monetary value was a reasonable barometer of how a slave would be treated in the ancient world. Slaves used for unskilled manual labour were worth the equivalent of a few pence and were bought and sold in bulk. Pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap. That’s the grim reality, I’m afraid. The recapturing and surrendering of Thellus by farmers also illustrates yet another thing that I like to emphasise: slavery was not an illicit trade exploited by an extremely wealthy minority who considered themselves above the law; it was the establishment, an integral part of the machinery of daily life, accepted and sustained by everyone, questioned by no one. Some of the most brilliant minds that sprung up in the ancient world, when they turned their philosophical skills to the question of slavery, overwhelmingly spent their time arguing in favour of it: some people are born to be slaves, said Aristotle, the father of the scientific method. In the ancient world, if you found a slave, you caught him, you handed him in and you pocketed the reward should there be one. Everybody – and I mean everybody – was complicit. The branding on the face? Standard punishment for runaways, so that everyone could watch out for them in the future. Barbaric? You bet. Never let anyone tell you that the Romans were civilised. Have I told children all of this in the past? Yes, I have.
Yet the story of Gallio and Thellus worried me, due to the very fact that empathy is so deliberately and so successfully invoked. I was shocked by it, even though I knew that this kind of thing happened to slaves with horrifying frequency. Would I want a child of mine to read and understand this story at the age of 11? I’m honestly not sure that I would. The stories in Suburani invite very young children to empathise with characters which are then subjected to lengthy torture. There is a fine line in teaching between asking students to acknowledge brutality and expecting them to process it on an emotional level. In our eagerness to break through the natural cynicism of modern youth, we should not forget that we are dealing with children; children who are indeed subjected to a 24-hour rolling backdrop of horror across the globe, thanks to modern systems of mass communication. It seems undeniable that we are facing a crisis of mental-health issues in teenagers, and I’m not sure that we should be quite so gung-ho when it comes to provoking their emotions in this way.
There will be many Classics teachers out there who disagree with me and I am keen to hear from those using Suburani in the classroom. Perhaps I will change my mind. But as things stand I am disquieted by its content and concerned that some children will be disturbed and distressed by this no-holds-barred approach. I believe that the truth can and should be told about the ancient world without what I see as a genuine risk of harm. Trauma is such an over-used word in modern education that I hesitate to suggest it, but I feel it’s appropriate here. Let’s not forget that our children are entitled to just a little bit of innocence before the world truly reveals itself in all its barbarity; we certainly shouldn’t underestimate their ability to grasp it, and I for one am not entirely sure I want them feeling the full weight of its horror at the age of 11.
Latin is a heavily inflected language. Inflection is a process of word formation by which the word is modified according to its grammatical category. For verbs, inflection (called conjugation), means that the ending (and in some instances the stem) of the verb will change according to tense (e.g. present or future), voice (active or passive), person (1st, 2nd or 3rd) or number (singular or plural).
English is different. English relies heavily on pronouns to identify who is performing the action of a verb. For example, let’s take the verb “to warn” in the present tense. To conjugate this English verb, I need to use a series of different pronouns to express whoever is the subject of the verb – there is only one small change (in the 3rd person) to the ending of the verb itself:
1st person singular: I warn 2nd person singular: You (sg) warn 3rd person singular: He/she/it warns 1st person plural: We warn 2nd person plural: You (pl) warn 3rd person plural: They warn
Latin is completely different. Latin has no need of a personal pronoun to express whoever is doing the action of the verb. The same verb in Latin will conjugate as follows:
1st person singular: moneo 2nd person singular: mones 3rd person singular: monet 1st person plural: monemus 2nd person plural: monetis 3rd person plural: monent
One of the most important things for new students of Latin to grasp is this fundamental difference, for it has varied and complex effects upon their ability to read and translate the language competently. To become a confident Latinist, a student must break the habit of reading from left to right and learn to prioritise finding the verb (usually, although not always, at the end of the sentence).
The habit of reading from left to right is extraordinarily difficult to break and students will usually revert to it when under pressure, despite “knowing” their verb endings. For example, a novice will naturally tend to translate the sentence “puellam monemus” as “the girl warns”. But the -mus ending on the verb tells us that it actually means “we warn”, therefore the sentence translates as “we warn the girl”: the fact that the girl is the object, not the subject of the verb, is also something that can be deduced from its case ending, but that too tends to go out of the window when a novice is faced with a sentence such as this – and that’s precisely because we naturally read from left to right. No other reason, really.
It seems to me that the authors of virtually all the Latin reading courses that have made it through the traditional publishing process are either in complete denial about this fundamental difference between English and Latin, or they are utterly deluded in their apparent belief that it really isn’t that difficult for children to let go of the habit of reading from left to right – even though it’s a routine they have been trained into doing habitually from the age of 4 or 5 and is therefore deeply ingrained. Reading from left to right is, for every child – however hesitant a reader – a custom which will have slipped entirely into their unconscious mind; no child picks up a book and starts reading a sentence from the middle or the end.
In my criticism of published reading courses I am thinking in particular of courses such as The Cambridge Latin Course and the much more recently published Suburani, which is so markedly CLC 2.0 that I’m surprised its creators haven’t been sued by Cambridge for plagiarism. Both courses use subject pronouns from the outset (and throughout) as a prop for students to hang their understanding upon. Since pronouns – when used as the subject – appear at the beginning of the sentence, students are actively encouraged to continue with their natural instinct of reading from left to right. This, to be brutally frank, is simply disastrous for their potential as future Latinists.
Here are just a couple of examples from the very first few pages of Suburani (and therefore part of students’ early introduction to reading Latin stories):
ego multum cibum habeo (“I have a lot of food”): what is ego doing there? Why not force students to look at the ending of habeo instead?
tu psitaccum habes (“you have a parrot”): what is tu doing there? Don’t get me started on why the students are learning the Latin for “parrot” in their first few lessons. It may not surprise you to know that it doesn’t come up very often and it’s certainly not a word they will need at GCSE or are likely to need at A level.
ego cibum vendo (“I am selling food”): sigh.
tu amicum habes(“you have a friend”): etc etc. You get the idea.
In all of the above sentences both ego and tu could be removed in order to force students to look at the verb ending. So what are they doing there? It seems to me that they serve no purpose other than to encourage students to read from left to right – excactly the opposite of what they should be doing. This more than anything is my fundamental objection to how courses such as these are designed; I have plenty of other objections too, but this is the one that irks me the most. The authors of these courses are so determined to prove their misguided belief that students will learn how to read Latin via some kind of process of osmosis that they are prepared to lull them into a false sense of security by guiding them to approach Latin sentences in entirely the wrong way. From day one.
In my final few years at the chalkface and as we hurtled into lockdown, I was faced with the prospect of converting all my Latin lessons for online learning and the need to put work on screen. On our return to school I did not have enough text books to go around and was told that they could not be shared between bubbles. Since I had to get all of the stories up onto the screen, this, I decided, was the time to grasp the bull by the horns and edit all the cartoons and the stories in the Cambridge Latin Course to remove all the pronouns and therefore force students to look at the verb endings. I made other fundamental changes too, but this was the one (I believe) which has had the most tangible impact on students’ understanding. One of the most exciting things was the moment when I realised that students were so well-drilled in the process of finding the verb and translating the inflected ending that a strange consequence arose: when first introduced to sentences that had a noun for a subject like “puellae monent” (“the girls warn”), students often translated it as “the girls, they warn” then looked puzzled. Hallelujah. Once it was explained to them (and reiterated several times) that when a sentence contains a subject such as “the girls”, this replaces the pronoun (they) in their translation, there was no problem.
The habit of reading from left to right is so ingrained that it remains something which students need to be reminded of constantly. Once drilled in inflection, however, I find that even with the weakest students, all I need to do is point at the verb ending and they immediately adjust their translation to reflect the verb ending. This gentle process must be repeated again and again. It comes after weeks, months, years of drilling them on their verb endings. All of my students, even the weakest in the class, were able to write down their verb endings from memory and could tell me what they meant. The biggest chaellenge remained breaking that reading habit, but at least my refusal to let them rely on the subject pronoun has given them a fighting chance. By the time students reached the end of Year 8 and the start of Year 9, the habit was all but broken.
That’s how long it takes and that’s how important it is.
Last week I examined style questions in the set text examination, including the 8-mark question. Such questions are without doubt the most challenging element of the literature exam. The 10-marker, by contrast is remarkably easy, yet students – if not given specific guidance and a good deal of practice – tend not to score as highly as they could.
It took me a while to realise that students needed a good deal more preparation for this element of the exam than I had been giving them. At first I assumed that because the question seemed so straightforward, I only had to tell students what to do and they’d smash it out of the park. The reality, of course, is that students actually need a great deal of modelling as well as practice before they can achieve top marks in any extended answer. The process is definitely worth it, not least because this question is worth a whopping 20% of the student’s performance in that paper.
A key thing to remember about the 10-mark question is that the examiner is using it to test the student’s knowledge of the whole prescription, going beyond the small handful of passages that can be included on the paper. This means that – in order to score highly – students must reference the whole prescription. Students should quote the text in English translation (not in Latin – this will only waste their time and risk errors). Students do not (of course) have to quote the translation word for word – how would this be possible when the examiner will not be privy to the particular translation that they or their teacher has produced? Rather, a clear reference to the text is enough: the rule of thumb is that if the examiner can recognise the line or lines of the text being referred to then it counts as a reference. For example, from Sagae Thessalae I might mention the moment when the weasel appears and stares Thelyphron straight in the eye; this is not a quotation from the text but it will be very clear to the examiner which section of the text I am referring to.
Students need to make as many such references to the text as they can for their answer to qualify as “wide-ranging” enough for a high mark. They should make sure to quote from the beginning, the middle and the end of the text for the same reason – answers that focus on just one part of the text will be capped. Other than that, so long as they write in paragraphs and address the question, the process is very simple.
Below is a video from my YouTube channel in which I explore the 10-mark question in detail:
It is crucial to get students to practise this style of question from early on and the process of doing so can be a really useful way of reminding them that they should be revisiting sections of the text that they have already learned. My methodology in recent years has been to include a question of this style at the end of every test I give them; in the early stages, when they have only learned one or two sections, I might make it worth fewer marks, but I still train them in the process of how to approach this kind of question. As they progress further through the text the questions can become full 10-markers. This method has worked really well and has enabled students to practise until they find the process as straightforward as it should be – there really is nothing difficult about this kind of question, but it’s amazing how many good students miss out on the marks because they’re not sure what’s required of them.
Like with the style questions, it will be necessary to remind students not to use the same approach as they have been prepared for in their English literature examinations; they are not expected to explore individual quotations in detail (arguably, what would be the point of doing this in translation anyway?) and they should remember that the examiner’s goal is to check their knowledge and understanding of the text as a whole. In addition, it is also crucial to keep reminding them that the examiner is looking for volume – he cannot reward an answer that gives only three or four textual references that are explored in detail, no matter how well-argued the answer is: he needs evidence that the student knows the whole of the text and knows it really well.
More than one examiner has expressed frustration that they are sometimes presented with highly intelligent and extremely well-argued answers that they cannot reward with a top-band mark because the student’s answer does not fit the mark scheme. This is, of course, the eternal problem with examinations at this level, and the only way to give our students the best fighting chance of success is to inform ourselves by reading the examiners’ reports and attending the training sessions put on by OCR or by Keynote, whose courses are run by examiners – sometimes the Chief Examiner – and which I have found invaluable in the past. I would also highly recommend to any teacher that they apply at least once to be a professional marker, as the best way to have a mark scheme properly demystified for you is to attend the training laid on for the examiners themselves.
The questions that students struggle with the most in the OCR literature examinations are the style questions. In each literature examination, students will face a variety of short-answer questions that focus on style. Most challengingly, they will need to answer an 8-mark question on one selected passage, which will direct them to “refer to the Latin and discuss a range of stylistic features such as choice, sound and position of words.” By “refer to the Latin” the examiner means that they must quote it in their answer – it might seem strange to labour that point but students don’t always understand that this is actually what it means. In addition, it is important for the examiner to have evidence that the student understands the meaning of the word or words that they have quoted, so including a translation in brackets afterwards is a useful habit for them to develop.
One of the reasons that students struggle with style questions is – in my opinion – an excessive reluctance to develop their own response to the text and an over-zealous reliance on style notes provided by the teacher. For this reason, I radically changed my approach. In recent years, I have resisted all pleas to provide printed, written style notes to students. There are many reasons for this and none of them relate to workload; style notes are actually pretty easy to churn out and many teachers (including myself in the past) have always used them as a simple solution to ensuring that students have everything they need to prepare for the examination. Printed style notes can form a kind of security blanket both for us and for them – we feel we’ve given them every possible detail, they feel like they’ve got the information at their fingertips. But have they really got what they need?
In my experience, printed style notes are used poorly and students can often have a very limited understanding of the contents within them. Furthermore, they are nigh-on impossible to learn off by heart. This statement may surprise followers who are aware of my recommendation that GCSE students do learn the translation of the set text off by heart and it is true to say that I am a huge fan of learning by rote in the right context. Learning things off by heart – so long as you use the right techniques – is something any student can do, and it can provide them with a huge sense of advantage in the examination. However, whilst this process is easily done for the translation of a text using the first-letter technique and electronic flashcards (for advice on this see a previous blog post), it is a Sisyphean task to learn all the style notes. Whilst it’s what students say they want to do, in reality I’ve never had a student manage it successfully; there is simply too much material of too abstract a nature, so I do not believe that rote-learning is the best approach in this instance.
So what do I do instead? Well, I model the process of looking at a passage of Latin (one which they have already learned) and finding something to say off the top of my head. I then make students do this themselves on a regular basis, to mimic the kind of situation in which they will find themselves in the examination. Not only does this put the onus on them to be taking notes as they prepare and practise, it makes them much better prepared for the same process at A level.
It is worth remembering that students at GCSE level do not need to know a single piece of stylistic terminology in order to get top marks in the literature examination. Personally, I quite like technical terms, but a lot of students are put off by words like metonymy and polyptoton. I do teach them the terms as I go but I reassure them again and again that recalling the definitions of those terms and regurgitating them in the examination is not necessary – for this reason, again, I have stopped printing off a lexicon of stylistic terms, which some students find nothing but intimidating. Instead of this, I teach them some basic principles of things to look out for, using a ludicrously straightforward acronym: MRS VP:
Meaning Repetition Sound Vivid (historic) present Position
Below is a video from my YouTube channel detailing what I mean by these different terms and how they can be applied to the 8-mark question in the OCR examination:
The advice in the video is based on more than one training course I have been to, at which examiners explained how the 8-mark questions are judged. Equally challenging are the shorter-answer style questions, which often demand the same kind of quality points; however, these do specify clearly how many points are required and much of a student’s answer can be based on the meaning of the Latin in front of them, so long as they say something insightful about it.
Teaching students the MRS VP acronym is the first step. You then need to model the process for them by putting a passage of the text up onto the board using a projector or a visualiser and showing them how to use those basic principles to find things to say. I usually make it clear to students that I have not “prepared” the passage beforehand, i.e. that I am relying on my skills to think of things to say on the spot – this is, after all, what they will have to do in the examination. Likewise, I teach them other simple tricks such as running their finger down the first word in every line of a piece of verse and considering whether they could say something about it – an immediate guaranteed style point because it will focus on the position of words.
I have found these kinds of methods much more effective in the long-term and I cling to the fact that this part of the examination requires students to have developed some skills rather than acquired lots of knowledge: let’s face it, there is quite enough content in the literature examination that relies on rote-learning and we really don’t need to add to it.
A final point that few teachers realise is that it is extremely important to acknowledge to students that the way they must write about literature in their Latin examination will differ from how they are being trained to write about it in their English lessons. I am at a slight advantage here having taught English up to GCSE level for several years during my career. In my experience, it is important to teach them explicitly not to mention punctuation, which they will be in the habit of remarking upon in their English literature, especially in the process of studying modern poetry. However, this is not the only area of caution. In English literature, students are taught to “say a lot about a little” – in other words, to unpack and explore each individual quotation in enormous detail before moving on to the next one. In the Latin examination, by contrast, the examiner is looking for volume, so students really don’t need to explore the quotation in anything like as much depth: quote the Latin, tell the examiner what it means, say something reasonably intelligent about it (e.g. the verb is promoted to the beginning of the line and in the historic present, making its meaning vivid) then move on. Latin examiners may believe that they are asking students to write “in depth” but the reality is that they are not required to develop their ideas in the same level of detail as they need to in order to gain top marks in an English literature examination; this seems only right and fair given that they are being tested on similar skills but applying them to a text in an ancient language rather than their own.
Like most difficult questions, there is no straightforward answer to this. The variety of books now available to support and supplement the learning of Latin is quite remarkable, but very few of them are suitable for independent learners; many of the text books available are designed for use in schools, which makes them somewhat challenging for an independent learner to follow. But do not despair, there are courses out there and support is available for those studying alone or working with a Latin tutor.
The more traditional grammar and translation methodologies used by Latin teachers have been attacked for decades since the progressive movement in education decided that everything that smacked of The Old Days was A Bad Idea. However, if the main goal of learning Latin is to be able to translate the texts that the Romans wrote (and I fail to see why else one would bother!) then I’m afraid you need to learn how to do it. I’m sorry if that comes as a shock to anybody. For this reason I am not a big fan of the so-called “reading courses” which, far from being a course in anything, rather expect grammar to be learned through some kind of magical osmotic process. If you want a Latin tutor that pretends the grammar doesn’t exist in the interests of making the subject somehow more appealing in unspecified ways, then I’m not the one for you! Latin is hard, and shying away from the grammar is doing children a grave disservice in my opinion; you may fool them into thinking that it’s nothing but colourful stories for a while, but if that’s your only plan for winning them over then they’re going to be seriously upset with you when they get to the ablative absolute. Plus, I’ll let you into a little secret: children aren’t only motivated by fun: they are also motivated by challenge, so long as they are given the tools to succeed. I have taken numerous students from loathing to love, simply by demystifying the grammar for them. Give them the tools and they will fly.
Anyway, I digress. Below I take an (admittedly irreverent) look at the Latin text books most commonly used as core text books for Latin teaching in schools, including the most recent additions to the canon; but for our review to be complete, we need to start right back in the 1970s …
The oldest of the “new style” progressive Latin text books and the one that everyone’s heard of. If I had a £1 for everyone who has asked me whether Caecilius is still in horto I’d be a wealthy woman. Why is it so popular? There is something magical about the first book and even I can’t quite explain it. For some reason, the students just love Caecilius. Who knew that a middle-aged white banker could inspire such joy amongst the youth of today? But somehow he does, and there is the problem (or one of them at least); the students never really get over the loss of Caecilius at the end of Book 1 and they lose interest and heart from the second book onwards.
In the latter half of my career as a Latin teacher in schools I tackled this head-on, writing more stories about Quintus, the son who survives the eruption and carries the narrative forward; this approach meant that students were more invested in the character of Quintus and felt the loss of Caecilius less keenly. In the original version of Book 1, Quintus plays a very limited role and in one famous scene, which I decided to delete, he punches a dog! (Yes, really! Not the way to win the kids over, in my experience). So I invented a whole new storyline in which Quintus falls in love and tries to elope with the household slave-girl Melissa, but then loses her in the chaos during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. I then spun out the story of Quintus grieving her loss and ultimately finding her again as a replacement to the thoroughly tiresome stories in Book 2, all of which I ditched.
Aside from the fact that the books decline in their ability to hold students’ interest, the Cambridge Latin Course also falls down on the grammar, as pretty much everyone who isn’t invested in the publications will now admit. All Latin teachers who use this course supplement the grammatical content to a greater or lesser extent, and who hasn’t been frustrated by the fact that many of the chapters introduce a new grammatical concept and then give a load of exercises about something completely different? It truly is weird. I took my grammarisation campaign much further in later years, re-writing the stories I still used to remove all the personal pronouns (which forced students to focus on the verb ending, an essential skill in Latin translation) and replacing some of the more bizarre vocabulary choices with selections from the OCR GCSE list. By the time I’d finished with the course it was something completely different: a grammar course with the characters of the Cambridge Latin Course as a backdrop.
While the Cambridge Latin Course has started so many students off on their love-affair with Latin, it was never enough to carry them all the way to GCSE and beyond without some serious supplementation on the part of the teacher. If I were starting my career again as a classroom teacher, I’m not sure I would choose it. The much-awaited 5th edition is being launched as we speak, in which the authors have addressed the lack of strong female characters (Quintus gains a sister) and also the pervasive narrative of the “contented slave”, which without question dates the series, as does the fact that all the female characters tend to fall into the stereotypes observable in 1970s situation comedy: pretty girls and nagging wives.
It seems that vanishingly few schools use this series now, although it appears to have some popularity as a homeschooling text in the US. Ecce Romani was another reading course designed in the 1970s but just like the Cambridge Latin Course it has been updated in terms of appearance (less so in terms of content). I have tutored only one boy whose school is still working with this series and he hated it (although I suspect he would have hated it whatever the teacher had chosen!) One thing to be said for Ecce Romani is that – unlike its rival – it did a much better job of portraying female characters with prominence from the beginning, something that the Cambrigde Latin Course is only just addressing now in its 5th edition: this is pretty poor given that the 4th edition came out in 1998: not exactly the #metoo era, but not exactly the dark ages either.
The Oxford Latin Course was published, I am told, as a direct answer to the problems with the Cambridge Latin Course, yet I fail to see how it addressed any of them. Do any Latin teachers use this course any more? Genuine question, as I have not heard of a Classics department that does so for some time. I did my second training placement at Brentwood School in Essex and that was my sole exposure to the text book, which they used with their KS3 and KS4 students. The Oxford Latin Course was at the time (and we’re talking more than 20 years ago now) the less commonly-used but well-respected alternative to theCambridge seriesas a Latin reading course. Generally it was considered to be a little more challenging and robust on the grammar and certainly it introduced concepts such as 3rd person verbs without a subject much sooner than the Cambridge Latin Course; it also included some mythological stories, which the students enjoyed. Yet as an “answer” to the problems in the CLC? No. There is still too much expected on the part of the student, no clarity of exposition and very, very little repetition: this is the main problem with all the so-called “modern” reading courses – they consistently fail to grasp that the only route to full understanding is repetitive practice.
Still, it might seem a little puzzling why the Oxford Latin Course never really took off to the same extent; my suspicion is that it simply wasn’t as obviously engaging as the first book of the Cambridge Latin Course, and – for better or for worse – engaging is what teachers were looking for in the 1980s. As the CLC surged in dominance throughout the 1980s and 1990s, schools that had invested in the OLC must have felt like they’d been the ones to buy a Betamax instead of a VHS.
Suburani was heralded as the Cambridge Latin Course for the 21st century and it certainly continues in the fine tradition of the CLC in making the grammar thoroughly obscure. My heart sank when I first opened the book and found it repeated exactly the same mistakes, not least the immediate introduction of a plethora of declensions and conjugations right from the outest, sending all students into guaranteed cognitive overload when it comes to morphology. Likewise the introduction of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd person but with no grammatical terminology used (why not?) plus the consistent use of the pronouns ego, tu, nos and vos in translation passages, meaning that students will fail to focus on the verb ending and will never develop the habit of examining the verb first. Talk about setting them up to fail. Add to this the constant use of prepositional phrases, with the ablative case completely unexplained and ignored, and this is simply the CLC with all its mistakes on auto-repeat. So why have some schools bought into it with alacrity? Well …
Suburani was a brave attempt at producing a Latin text book that would satisfy teachers who crave a richer and more diverse reflection of Roman society, with women working (not just sitting in the atrium), the realities of urban life (dangerous yet expensive rooms in insulae, beggars in the street, chatting in the latrina) and society as a whole being a little bit less middle-aged white banker territory. I applaud the sentiment and there is much that I think is genuinely laudable, for example the focus on the slaves who worked in the heat and the dark below ground to run the public baths; the slave labour that produced and maintained the apparent “wonders” of Roman invention is something I have always endeavoured to remind students of.
Yet one quick search for reviews of Suburani throws up plenty of people keen to tell them that they’ve got it all shockingly and offensively wrong again; such is the issue with marketing yourself as the go-to choice for people who crave diversity and universal representation in all things – they’re pretty hard to please. (This blog is my personal favourite of all the reviews that address how apparently “problematic” Suburani remains).
My reaction to Suburani is I like it as an attempt to reflect Roman society more honestly. I have no personal experience of using it as a classroom text book but have worked with several tutees who are using it in their schools: they’re all at sea with the grammar, which is why they need my help. Quod erat demonstrandum.
There was much to recommend this Latin text book when it came out and I seriously considered switching to it as a classroom teacher. Latin grammar is tackled in methodical detail and the text book is supplemented with a far more comprehensive range of grammatical exercises, reducing teacher workload for sure and certainly going some way to address the lack of repetition, which is a consistent fault in all of the courses above. Translation is promoted from the outset and students are explicitly taught dictionary skills. When it comes to engagement, there is considerable focus on gods and goddesses, a subject hugely popular with youngsters and strangely not exploited in full by other modern courses. The layout is also much less cluttered than that of Suburani, which has come under fire for its chaotic appearance.
However (I bet you knew there was a however coming) there are a couple of reasons why this much-heralded new text book with a more robust approach to grammar didn’t quite win me over. I felt that the decision to introduce the perfect tense before anything else was a mistake in a book that claimed to have grammar at its heart and I really couldn’t get past that. In addition, I don’t know if every single Year 9 class in every school other than mine has children that are infinitely more mature than the ones I have taught over the last 21 years, but for me the “willy count” was simply way too high for my Year 9 students to cope with: yes, yes I know that most classical representations of the male form were full-frontal, but really: I simply couldn’t bear the thought of the inevitable sniggering, I’m afraid.
Latin to GCSE (by Henry Cullen and John Taylor) (first published 2016)
Now this is a serious tome and my goodness me the tutees I have worked with that are using this course at KS3 are challenged. In terms of its focus on grammar and detailed unpicking of morphology and syntax, this course is by far the most robust that I have found that is aimed at the secondary sector. It is also the first of its kind in that this text book is co-written by the Chief Examiner for GCSE (John Taylor) and ratified by OCR. It focuses on the vocabulary contained on the OCR vocabulary list and forms a guide to the grammar that students need to know at GCSE level. It is followed up by the equally excellent Latin Beyond GCSE by John Taylor, designed to take students onto AS and then level.
The Taylor and Cullen books are suitable for independent Latin learners as the authors provide extensive explanations as well as vast amounts of practice. Furthermore, you can create a login to the Bloomsbury website and obtain access to the authors’ own translations and answers, which makes it entirely suitable for independent learners and homeschooled students. I have found numerous errors in the ones posted for the Latin Beyond GCSE – unfortunately, I had got too far through before I realised that there were enough that I should have been writing them down to let the author know, and then I simply couldn’t face going back to find them all again – maybe I’ll find the energy in the summer.
The Taylor and Cullen books are used by schools with the curriculum time to take students through the morphology of Latin in rigorous detail (and boy do I envy them that!) They also have the advantage of being tailored specifically to the examinations (whereas other courses encourage students to waste a considerable amount of time learning vocabulary that will not be relevant at GCSE or A level). The very fact that this is so unusual indicates the disadvantage that our subject has been placed in compared to others – can you imagine teaching a mainstream subject without access to text books that are ratified by the examination board? Advantages aside, the only markers against these text books is that they are pretty weighty and unforgiving monsters and I can understand why students used to big glossy pictures in their text books might find them a little daunting.
I have recommended this series of books by NNR Oulton to students in the past who want a user-friendly way to revise the basics. Okay, the jokes are a little cheesy but the author voice coming through is quite nice when you’re working alone, as you feel he is cheering you on. The author also drops in little snippets of useful “did you knows” that can demystify some of the Latin phrases that most people are vaguely aware of. The author’s style may not appeal to all as he is robustly open about his desire to tackle “properly difficult grammar”, so the books may not be reassuring to a student who is already anxious or struggling; for an adult, or for a confident child who wants to develop their understanding, the tone is ideal.
Although ostensibly aimed at prep-school students and hence dominated by the vocabulary used at Levels 1-3 and Scholarship, the course makes some strange decisions about what grammar to prioritise in the early stages, for example introducing students to the historic present quite early on; that said, the historic present is pretty common in Latin, so well done to him for not letting a syllabus totally dominate his methodology, I guess. Again, access to the answers is made available, another advantage for independent learners and making it entirely more suitable for those purposes than the course books commonly used in secondary schools. The series is also supported by the author’s own YouTube channel.
Other prep school courses
My shift into private tutoring has been an education in terms of text book usage as well as a revelation in discovering what prep schools were demanding of the youngest of students. Having worked in the state sector all my life, I was used to teaching students who were ab initio at the age of 11. My teaching of the grammar has also been hampered at the state comprehensive I worked in by limited time and a two-week timetable; there were times when, due to poor timetabling and a Bank Holiday Monday, I might not see my Year 7 students for almost a month. Working with prep school students who were already being asked to tackle grammar concepts I was not teaching to my students until year 10 made me question everything I was doing and encouraged me to rip up the rule book. It also exposed me to the variety of course books used in prep schools – far from being stagnant, this is another area where things are changing fast.
The text books by RC Bass have formed the backbone for prep school teaching for years and the majority of students I have tutored in the prep school system come to me waving a copy of this course, in one of its many manifestations. The course has been revamped and republished several times and, like any good course in the modern era, comes with answer keys to support the independent learner. Bass switches regularly between Latin to English and English to Latin and his books contain meticulous detail and explanation. He approaches the grammar far more methodically than any of the courses aimed at secondary schools, introducing students to the morphology as well as the grammatical constructs. Some find his approach old-fashioned and bemoan the lack of pictures but frankly I was a convert from my first exposure. Yet Bass is not the only option available to teachers in the prep school system.
These workbooks were created by a teacher who says she wanted to combine the rigour of traditional prep school grammar teaching with the engagement brought by story-based reading courses such as the Cambridge Latin Course. Students follow the stories through the eyes of some fictional fellow classmates who are transported back in time (but who also need to keep up their Latin studies – of course!) The course is produced as a series of workbooks, which is something being trialled in state secondary schools all over the country. I moved towards a booklet format for my Year 10s at GCSE level and I would never go back; the format provides students with a comprehensive learning guide that they can look back on and it is also outstanding for homework and cover work, a fundamental practicality that always needs to be considered; it must have been a godsend in lockdown too. The course has much to recommend it, with a good deal of practice exercises on morphology. I particularly like the way it frequently switches between translating from English-Latin to Latin-English.
The author offers an “express” course for schools that are more pressed for time. She does not, however, offer an answer key, so the course could not be used by independent learners or home-schoolers without the regular support of a tutor. She says that this remains a project for the future, so watch this space!
Written explicitly for the recently-refreshed Common Entrance course by one of its creators and examiners, Clarke’s Latin is quite frankly a revelation. My overriding criticism that applies to every single one of the courses above is that there simply isn’t enough practice included at each stage for students to achieve mastery or indeed anything like it. The funny thing is that all the authors must know this – they’re all teachers themselves, so they all understand that mastery is only achieved by repetition; in the classrom, they’re all no doubt supplementing their own courses all the time, a process replicated ad infinitum by every single Latin teacher across the country. When you think about it, it’s madness. But Clarke’s Latin is different.
Clarke has made use of modern technology to produce a course that almost overwhelms you with exercises – never before have I been blessed with the option of saying to a student, “okay, I think you’ve completely grasped this, let’s skip the next couple of pages”. But now, when working one-to-one with a particularly gifted student, I am saying it a lot. In the classroom, it would allow a teacher to differentiate by outcome and enable students to work at their own pace – even the terrifyingly clever ones, who for once will not clean you out of material within 5 minutes.
Clarke has exploited the power of Excel to generate morphological exercises and short practice sentences at a fraction of the speed it would take a Latin teacher to produce them manually; this has enabled him to provide the classroom teacher with a bumper-pack of resources that will never, ever run out. I mean seriously. Imagine it. No more resource-writing. Just a series of course books containing everything you need. More than you need. I’m still slightly in shock! Then I find myself wondering why on earth this hasn’t been thought of before. Latin is famously a structured language and we are in the business of teaching its rules. Of course it was possible to harness technology to assist us in the process of resource-generation. What on earth have we all been doing since 1985?! Well, while we were fiddling about, Clarke has come up with the method and the result is golden.
Like Who Says Latin’s Dead, the new Clarke’s Latin is presented in booklet format, a real boon for classroom teachers and a methodology that’s working in the state sector. Clarke also provides an answer key and extensive written explanations, making the course ideal for independent learners. Personally I am using the electronic licence as I am an online tutor and it is working very well in that format. My guinea pig ab initio student, the first I have tried out the new course with, is loving the rigour: and that rigour is second to none.
Conclusion
In my 21 years as a teacher I have worked with numerous text books and indeed made use of works that are much older and less user-friendly than the modern courses explored above. My shelves are weighed down with text books from the past, all of which have their uses (especially when desperate to provide a gifted student with something he or she has never seen before and might find in some way challenging!) Never have we been so blessed with choice and the latest additions to the canon are in some cases revolutionary.
