latin tutoring – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Nobody said it would be this hard

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

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

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

Furthermore, and at the risk of stating the obvious, Latin is an ancient lanaguage and a dead one. What does it mean that the language is dead? Quite simply, that nobody speaks it any more. As a result, the content of what children are asked to translate will often seem very obscure. The ancient world was very different from ours and much of what went on – even in the most mundane aspects of daily life – can seem unfamiliar or even bizarre. Add to this the fact that a lot of the time students will be looking at stories from ancient myths or founding legends and we’re then into a whole new world of weirdness. The thing is, children generally like the weirdness – and indeed the darkness – of these ancient tales; if you think that children don’t appreciate the darkness of the world then explain the thundering success of a children’s author such as Patrick Ness. Children are not necessarily put off by the puzzling nature of what they are translating, but it can certainly contribute to their belief that the material is obscure.

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

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

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

Due to its inflection, many Latin words become extremely difficult to recognise as they decline or conjugate. This brings us to what many students find the most disheartening thing about the subject, which is vocabulary learning. If a student has worked hard to learn the meaning of a list of words, imagine their disappointment and frustration when this effort bears no fruit for them when it comes to translating. A child may have learned that do means “give” but will they recognise dant, dabamus or dederunt, which are all versions of that same verb? Well, without explicit instruction, lots of practice and a huge amount of support, probably not. This can be really depressing for students and can lead to them wanting to give up altogether, which is where a tutor comes in.

Another consequence of the fact that Latin is inflected is that a Latin sentence has to be decoded – you can’t just read it from left to right. Breaking the habit of reading from left to right is one of the biggest challenges that we face when trying to teach students how to succeed in Latin. Even when a child has worked hard to learn all of their noun endings and all of their verb endings, they still need a huge amount of support and scaffolding to show them how to process these and map them onto the sentences in front of them. Most Latin teachers really underestimate the amount of time, effort and repetition that it takes to help them to break this habit. Once again, this is where one-to-one tuition can be really powerful: working with a child to model the process is key.

How long does tutoring take?

A friend asked me this question while we were out on a walk this week. How long does it take to make a concrete, observable difference to a child’s performance? The answer is not simple, but it is interesting.

Some students require or benefit from longterm support, others only need a short burst of intervention. This, however, does not always match with the child’s (or the parent’s) desires or expectations. I have tutees that, in terms of performance, would manage perfectly well without me but have gained so much confidence from the weekly sesssions that they elect to continue longterm and refine their performance; I am always at pains to make this clear to the person paying the bill, but as a rule they are desperate for me to continue in order to preserve their child’s newfound confidence and success. Many students are so blown away by the impact that tutoring intervention has upon them that they don’t want to let it go.

Others have a different response. Some students I have worked with are quite happy when their performance improves and decide that they no longer need the support of a tutor. Often these are students who hit a wall very suddenly and needed intervention to identify some misconceptions and resolve some misunderstandings. Once this has been done, many of them are happy to continue with the subject without one-to-one support.

For students who find the subject harder or take longer to grasp certain concepts, longterm support is definitely the anwer. I have worked with dyslexic students who have ended up with an extremely high grade in this challenging, heavily-inflected language. Dyslexia does not prevent children from succeeding in Latin, but it undeniably makes the subject infinitely more challenging. Dyslexic students can really benefit from longterm support and guidance with vocabulary learning. Due to heavy inflection, Latin words change their endings and often their root, making the words difficult to recognise in multiple forms; expert support in the process of vocabulary learning is therefore essential for students who find this more difficult to cope with.

One of the skills required in tutoring is the ability to assess and make the most of the time you have with a student, either in total or between one day and a particular event – a Mock exam, for example. This week, a student whom I supporting with the literature element of the exam requested one session on language prior to their Mock. While there is little that can be done in half an hour to assess, evaluate and intervene in a child’s overall performance in the language element of the exam, 10% of the exam is dedicated to short-answer grammar questions and the examiner is very repetitive. I therefore elected to show the student only the grammar questions from five specimen papers in quick succession, demonstrating how repetitive the examiner is and demystifying his expectations when it comes to the answers. By the end of the session, my student could confidently answer every single grammar question I showed to him. That will make a concrete, tangible difference to their performance in the exam by ensuring that he has a good chance of achieving full marks in the grammar section: 10% is more than a grade’s difference.

These are the kinds of decisions that tutors make (or should be making) constantly. Teachers do so as well, but they are not blessed with the opporunities for flexibility that we are – teachers how to plough through the curriculum come what may and they have to make decisions based on the requirements of the majority. It is all too easy, as a result, to leave some students behind. I am grateful every day for the sheer joy of being able to spend one-to-one time with a student and make a difference to their performance in ways that would be impossible in the mainstream classroom.

Last academic year I worked with several Year 11 students who only came to me in the final few weeks before their exam. While it is always impossible to know how things would have worked out for them without me, I was assured that their performance in the exams ended up being a minimum of two grades above where they were expected to be. Much of this was down to tactical decision-making as outlined above: in six to eight weeks it is impossible to unpick and restitch a child’s understanding of an entire subject. What can be done is tactical intervention in some key areas, and a tutor with an in-depth knowledge of both the curriculum and the examination can therefore make a tangible difference to how a child copes in the final papers. While it is always preferable to seek help from a tutor sooner rather than later, this only goes to prove that it’s never too late; we can’t work miracles, but we can make a noticeable difference.

The tutees that come to me are often in a state of despair. More than one parent has described terrible waves of anxiety and bouts of tears as a child finds themselves getting further and further behind their peers and their grades start slipping. This situation takes on a whole new level of pressure as the exams loom into view, and this why I tend to get a flurry of requests in April. As one parent put it to me: “He was predicated a 5. He achieved a 7!! You absolutely turned Latin around for him.” I have just checked my records and I had 9 sessions with this particular student. That’s four and a half hours. I’ll admit to being a little bit chuffed about that one.

Is it really too easy?

One of the many joys of tutoring is the time and space it affords you to check out whether a student understands basic concepts. This does not only mean basic academic concepts, such as the differnce between the subject and the object; it also means looking at some of the ostensibly simplest sorts of questions on the exam papers and making sure that they know how to go about them.

Teachers of Latin GCSE are under enormous pressure to get through the syllabus content in the time they have available. Latin classes – certainly in state schools – often start from a position of disadvantage, having already had a limited number of teaching hours at Key Stage 3; some GCSE classes even start ab initio. The exam board then demands that a huge amount of complex material is covered, including a ludicrous amount of real Latin literature. The reality of this means that class minutes are at a premium, and teachers will move rapidly over basic concepts and may even assume that simple questions are understood and do not require practice. Often, as a direct result of this, key marks are lost due to small misconceptions or a lack of clarity in a student’s mind when it comes to how to approach such questions.

This week I finally got around to reading the Examiners’ Report from 2023 and their comment on the derivatives question really leapt out at me. It said, “this question is designed to be accessible to candidates of all abilities, and most scored at least 2 marks.” Personally, I find this utterly delusional on the part of the examiners. How, pray tell, is a question accessible to all candidates when it relies on a breadth of literacy and general knowledge not covered in the syllabus itself? And how is a score by many of 50% on this question indicative that it was indeed accessible? The comment is simply astonishing and I’m afraid it betrays yet again how out of touch the world of Classics is with reality. I have worked with a variety of students who have been scuppered by the derivatives question and their struggle is due to one or more of the following reasons:

Students do not know their Latin vocabulary well enough to be able to access the question. You can’t come up with a viable derivative if you don’t know what the Latin word means. This is more complex than it perhaps sounds, as the word is often presented in a form that is different from the one they have learnt e.g. dabat from the verb do), meaning that candidates who find the subject challenging will probably struggle to recognise it.
Students are EAL (English as an Acquired Language) and lack the breadth of English necessary to succeed in this question. They may be performing outstandingly well in the subject, but they have not yet come across the word regal or sedentary.
Students do have English as their first language but are not widely read, meaning that they struggle to come up with derivatives; they might recognise one when it’s pointed out to them, but they find it difficult to reach for one. This means that students for whom reading is modelled and encouraged at home are at a huge advantage, which is one of the main reasons why the examiners’ assertion that this question is “accessible” really grinds my gears.
Students have simply not been taught how to approach this question, or if they have been shown how they have not practised it at length. Teachers rarely spend a significant amount of time doing so because they assume (like the examiners do) that the question is easy. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, it may be time they do not have. In my experience to date, the best schools practise deivations from the very beginning of Key Stage 3, and this is certainly the best way to embed the knowledge for GCSE.

Some students really do have no problem with the derivatives question, and when that’s the case I leave them to it. These students are always highly literate and usually well-read. Unlike them, many students need to be shown multiple examples of derivatives and time needs to be invested in guiding them through the vocabulary list looking for such derivatives – the examiners even recommend this in their notes, yet still cling to the delusion that this question is highly accessible. Believe me, any question that cannot be done without detailed, explicit, one-to-one guidance from an expert is not accessible; teachers do not have time on the curriculum to prep for this question adequately.

Another question that many teachers lack the time to focus on and tend to assume the students will cope with just fine is the 10-marker in the literature papers. Because the question is open-ended and requires no knowledge of the Latin, this question really is accessible in the sense that even students who have struggled with the material should be able to do it; I say “should” because once again there is some guidance required. Students tend to apply what they have been taught about answering other types of questions (even in other subjects) to the 10-marker and this can lead them down the wrong path; answers need to be full of quotations/references but not to the Latin, to the text in translation. There is also no requirement for detailed analysis. I have written about this in more detail here. The 10-mark question makes up 20% of each literature exam: that means it makes up 10% of a student’s entire result – way more than the difference between two grades. It’s definitely worth spending some time on!

It’s a real joy as a tutor to be able to dive into the basics and make sure that students are well-prepared for what they face when it comes to exam time. Questions that the examiners and teachers assume are easy usually are so once you know how to approach them, but it’s that assumed knowledge that I’m interested in. Once a student has been gifted with said knowledge, that’s when they can start to fly.

Back to School

It’s been impossible to ignore the start of the school year this September, even for those people with no children and with no connection to the education system. With the scandal of RAAC concrete rocking the country and all of us reeling once again at what can only be described as years of incompetence and underinvestment by government, whatever your political stripe, the start of the new school term and the new school year has been on everyone’s mind.

This academic year feels like a milestone for me. This time last year felt truly surreal, as for the first time I did not return to school as I had done for the previous 21 years. The start of last September was very strange and somehow I didn’t quite believe it was happening; I still had the familiar anxiety dreams, so convinced was my subconscious I would be returning to the chalkface as usual. This year, with some distance in place between myself and the school grounds, I forgot altogether which day my old school was returning (although old colleagues did keep me posted on the usual hilarities of INSET day).

I have enjoyed the summer holiday immensely, working to a different schedule (I only saw clients in the morning) and doing significantly fewer hours compared to my usual schedule. But it also feels great now to be settling back into the routine again and I am loving seeing the return of regular clients as they come back for their old slots and restart the academic year. There is also the excitement of starting to work with new students, especially the ones that I really feel I can help make a difference to; nothing in life is as rewarding as helping a student to turn their performance around.

This year I decided to reflect on what happens in schools at the start of the new academic year and to apply the best and most important aspects of this to my tutoring business. I have refreshed my safeguarding training, a legal requirement for teachers in schools but not something which is (yet) regulated for tutors. I have looked at my results and done some reflection, although one of the joys of one-to-one work is you do not face the surprises and disappointments that inevitably occur across a year group in a school. I have reflected on my own practice, decided what worked best last year and resolved to apply the most effective techniques to all clients. Over the last couple of weeks I have reshaped my daily timetable and applied some lessons learnt from last year about when I work most effectively as well as where demand is highest. FInally, I have reflected on how I can reduce unncessary administration and time-wasting, most especially the time spent on social media, which I have reduced to an absolute minimum; I have put systems in place to mean that I don’t have to engage at all with the platforms which do not bring me joy, namely Facebook and Instagram. That final decision has been rather well-assisted by me smashing up my iPhone (not deliberately, but there is a psychological school of thought that there are no real accidents …); this sparked some further reflection on just how much screen time is truly necessary for running a business like mine and how much of it was mindless, fruitless scrolling in the name of “visibility”, which so many business coaches seem to preach is essential to the success of my business. With a website that performs as well as mine does, I do not find this to be so.

Thus, as I settle in to my second year as a full time, independent, one-to-one tutor, I could not be happier with my role and with the balance I have managed to strike between meaningful employment and a better quality of life. I cannot wait to get on with helping my clients, old and new, and to see what the new academic year will bring.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Why all teachers should tutor

Many trained teachers try their hand at tutoring: demand is high and the money is useful. I tutored consistently throughout my first few years in teaching, then returned to it when my husband gave up work to re-train. As time went on, however, I found myself bound to it by more than just financial necessity; I came to realise that private tutoring has was having a profoundly positive impact on my work as a classroom teacher.

It may sound absurd, but it’s easy to lose sight of what you’re paid to do in the frenetic world of mainstream education; marking and administrative tasks – not to mention the ever-shifting sands of expectations – can overwhelm you to the point where you lose perspective on what’s actually important. Tutoring reignited my passion for teaching on a fundamental level; not only did it take me back to some essential skills, it made me question the value of some other things that were taking up too much of my time. It made me better at saying “no” to things that impacted upon my ability to perform my teaching role to the best of my ability and – as a direct result – I stepped aside from roles and responsibilities that were in danger of doing so.

Tutoring exposed me to a wider range of specifications and teaching methodologies that were outside of my range of experience. Habits inevitably become entrenched when you teach the same subject in the same system to the same age-group for a number of years: tutoring forced me to think again. When I started tutoring face-to-face in my area, local demand was highest for Common Entrance coaching, so – despite the fact that I was a secondary school teacher – this became a specialism. Finding out what some 10-year-olds were being exposed to and could cope with made me question where I was setting the bar in secondary school; it also made me ask myself some fundamental questions about what, when and why I was teaching the core principles to older students. All of this came at would could not have been a more useful time: a few years prior to OfSted’s new framework and the huge shift towards a focus on curriculum coherence. When all other departments were running around in a panic, asking themselves why they were teaching what they were teaching and in what order they were teaching it, I had already been through that process and had totally refreshed my curriculum from bottom to top.

Perhaps the biggest impact that tutoring had on me while I was still teaching was a powerful shift in mind-set that is hard to quantify. When I started working with some local prep school students, I took several of them from the bottom of their class to the top. What this felt like is hard to convey, but suffice to say it was emphatically empowering. This positivity then filtered into my classroom practice and somehow made me feel as if anything were possible. This is not to say that I was naïve about the fundamental differences between what can be achieved through one-to-one tutoring and what can be realised in the mainstream classroom; but experiencing the irreplaceable value of one-to-one attention forced me to think of ways in which I could provide more of that magic in the classroom, particularly for the school’s Pupil Premium students (those who are defined by the government as coming from disadvantaged backgrounds). Blessed with an excellent trainee teacher most years, I began to take every opportunity to act as an expert Teaching Assistant to our Pupil Premium students in the trainee’s classes, coaching and guiding them to make more progress than they otherwise could.

Tutoring also opened my eyes to the phenomenal value of spaced learning and retrieval practice, as well as to the stark truth about just how much information children will forget once they have been taught it – a topic I have written on many times. That harsh reality fed through into my classroom teaching and fundamentally changed my approach to the basics of whole-class tuition. I introduced some of the exercises that I had created for the one-to-one setting and incorporated them into my classroom practice; I never took for granted that the students would have remembered what I had taught them the day, the week or the month before – I tested them repeatedly on basic knowledge. Once again, this all happened shortly before there was an explosion of this kind of practice in schools. I feel hugely grateful that tutoring gave me a bit of a heads-up.

As a full-time tutor now, with my own business, it seems obvious to say that tutoring has been a major influence in my life. But I would recommend it to any classroom teacher, not necessarily as a potential career shift but as a way of gaining access to new ideas, new experiences and new ways of informing your current classroom practice. If my experience is anything to go by, your performance in the classroom will benefit enormously.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

What’s wrong with GCSE Latin?

Sometimes you have to step off the treadmill to reflect on what is wrong with the system. After 21 years of preparing cohorts of students for Latin at GCSE level, it has taken me a year or so off the hamster wheel to reflect upon what is wrong with it and how the examination at GCSE level is fundamentally flawed.

To understand how the Latin GCSE fails our students, we first of all need to reflect upon what the purpose is of studying Latin – without this, the decisions made by the exam boards will seem even more incomprehensible than they actually are. First and foremost, forgetting any wild claims to promote excellence, increase vocabulary or whatever else we tell ourselves about our subject, the purpose of studying Latin is to train students to be able to read real Roman texts. This is the end goal and everything else is broadly irrelevant. This inescapable reality is – I believe – why both exam boards and QCA are so irrevocably wedded to the notion that students must study a substantial proportion of “real” Latin texts in order to gain a basic qualification in the subject.

Let us reflect for a moment on what this actually means. Unless a child has attended prep school and studied Latin from Year 5 or 6 onwards, students will have started Latin as a beginners’ subject in Year 7 and will be unlikely to have had more than one hour’s tuition per week in the subject. This may increase margially in Years 8-9, but not by much. Within that space of time, the exam boards are expecting a student entering Year 10 to be prepared to study real Latin texts, a frankly laughable notion. Imagine expecting a student of French to read and understand Voltaire or Maupassant during their GCSE course, when they are still wrestling with the fundamentals of the language.

The argument is often trotted out that modern language students have more to contend with, because they have to work on a wider variety of skills: Latin – being a dead language – does not require students to be tested on speaking or listening. Agreed, these skills take up a huge amount of teaching time for modern linguists that we do not have to dedicate when it comes to an ancient language. Believe me, however, this is more than made up for by the linguistic content required. My first Head of Department once quipped, when I mentioned to him that one of my Year 10 students had suddenly asked when we would learn to tell the time in Latin, that I should have replied “when you have learnt the pluperfect passive subjunctive.” He had a point. (He was right, by the way: the pluperfect passive subjunctive is required at GCSE). Rod, who had only ever taught French and German, had seen the list of grammatical constructions required for GCSE Latin and it never failed to astonish him.

Now that I am on the outside of the school system, working with a large number of GCSE candidates from a variety of schools, I am being exposed to a broad range of approaches from each school. Most of them do what I did and plough through as much of the GCSE language content as they can during the first two terms of Year 10, then start tackling the literature texts in the final term of Year 10 and throughout Year 11. This is the best we can do. I have come across one school that takes longer over the language then expects students to have gained enough linguistic knowledge to tackle the set texts very quickly due to their broader knowledge-base; this is frankly nonsense, given that the language required for the texts goes way, way beyond that required at GCSE for the language paper. Some schools start the texts immediately and encourage students to work on them from the very beginning, but this is rare.

For the unintiated, let us be clear: GCSE candidates do not have anything like the linguistic knowledge required to study the real Latin texts that are prescribed for the GCSE. The only way they can cope with and even borderline understand the texts is to learn the English translation off by heart, a simply mammoth rote-learning task. This is what I spend much of my time supporting students with as many are not given the tools and the skill-set to do this on their own.

This year I had something of an epiphany when working with a handful of independent students. Why do we do it? The requirements for Latin GCSE are so unrealistic that I would go so far as to say that the qualification is wildly inappropriate. My belief that this is the case means that I no longer encourage students to take the qualification as a supplementary subject: it simply is way too much to cope with on top of their regular studies. I do not say this lightly, not least because it will mean I miss out on a significant amount of potential tutoring work. But the truth must be told, and parents of students who have a desire to study Latin independently need to think very long and hard about the reality of what that means and whether they are prepared for the sheer slog that it will entail.

So long as the texts required for GCSE go far beyond the students’ linguistic skills, the only way to prepare for the examination will continue to be to learn the texts off by heart. I shudder to think the number of wasted hours that has been spent on this. One of my skills as a tutor is in helping students with this process, because there are indeed ways in which it can be made less arduous and more manageable. I shall continue to do this, to assist students in their quest to attain top marks in the qualification for which they have been entered. But really – what are we doing it for? Is it really the best way to prepare students for a future in the subject? I do wish QCA and the examination boards would take a long, hard and realisitc look at what they are demanding from 16-year-olds and face up to the reality that their examination in its current form is not really fit for purpose.

We’ve always done it this way

A few years ago I had something of an epiphany about why so many students struggle to translate the indirect command correctly. This is the kind of epiphany I am blessed with – nothing earth-shattering that will change the future of humanity as we know it; just a little tweak when it comes to how Latin might be best taught – we all need some kind of claim to fame.

Now I work solely as a private tutor I have the privilege of insight into how students are taught in a myriad of different schools. One consistent pattern is that the uses of the subjunctive are always taught in a particular order and most notably, the indirect command is consistently taught after the purpose clause. I think I know why this is and it’s for the same reason I did this myself for several years: it’s how it’s done in the Cambridge Latin Course. Even Taylor & Cullen introduce ut + subjunctive in this way: purpose clause first, followed immediately by the indirect command. But after my epiphany, I started to switch this around.

I have yet to come across a single student who has been taught the indirect command prior to the purpose clause unless they have been taught by me, and this is fascinating. Is it really the all-pervasive, insidious influence of the Cambridge Latin Course? Given that my focus for this piece is entirely on secondary schools and given that the majority of those still use (or have used) the Cambridge Latin Course over the years, I suspect it is. But I suddenly realised what a huge mistake it is to teach the purpose clause first: I realised that this is why students are so wedded to translating ut as “in order to” whenever they see it: because that is how they first see it and after that they can’t let it go.

So let me explain the alternative approach, which I started to use when I was still teaching in school and the approach I use to help my tuteees now with huge success. First of all, when I introduce the subjunctive, I do continue to teach the use of cum + subjunctive first, followed by the indirect question. This follows the pattern used by the Cambridge Latin Course and I think it is a good one: these two constructions both require no complexity when it comes to translating the tense of the subjunctive verb and are hence a good introduction to the uses of the subjunctive. I believe that at GCSE it is important to emphasise that there is nothing special about the way in which subjunctive verbs are translated in subordinate clauses; as soon as we get onto the indirect command and purpose clause the students have to learn to move beyond translating the tense of the verb in its literal sense, so they need to gain a little confidence first.

After I have taught the endings of the subjunctive and the first two uses as above, I then within one lesson (or tutoring session) introduce two uses of ut + subjunctive and explain that they are difficult to tell apart – I also explain that being able to differentiate between them is important for the grammar questions in the GCSE examination. I then explain that their default translation for ut should be “to” and explain the indirect command in detail: that the definition of a command-word is broad: begging, persuading or even asking counts as a command, as it basically includes any verb which is trying to get somebody to do something. I emphasise that the ut should always be translated as “to”. I show a few examples and reassure them that it is correct not to translate the tense of the imperfect subunctive – just translate the meaning of the verb after “to”, just as if it were an infinitive.

I then introduce the purpose clause and point out how similar it is as the ut can still be translated as “to”. I then exlain that the test to see whether or not it is in fact a purpose clause is to try out whether one can also translate ut as “in order to” or “so that he/they could”. If that’s possible, then it’s a purpose clause. I then spend the remainder of the session showing them a series of mixed examples and asking them to identify whether each sentence is an indirect command or a purpose clause. I stick almost exclusively to vocabulary required for GCSE and also provide vocabulary support to lighten their cognitive load – this is essential no matter what you are teaching.

Screenshot from one of my numerous presentations on this topic

One of the worst reasons for doing something is solely because we’ve always done it this way. In teaching it is always important to keep asking yourself why: why this topic? Why those things in that order? Why this? Why this now? If you don’t stop and ask yourself these questions on a regular basis, you end up doing things solely for the sake of it, solely because that’s what you’re used to and solely because it needs to be done at some point. Given how embedded the problem is that students regularly fail to recognise and translate the indirect command correctly, it is actually rather worrying that more teachers don’t seem to have asked themselves why this is. Pretty much every single student I meet, without fail, when presented with a simple sentence such as dux militibus imperavit ut oppugnarent will immediately say, “the leader commanded the soldiers in order to attack”. Perhaps more worrying, a large number of those students seem puzzled when it is pointed out to them that this translation doesn’t actually make a whole lot of sense. As a tutor, I have to break down their wedded belief that ut means “in order to” and explain why – most of the time = it actually doesn’t mean that at all.

Obviously there is third use of ut + subjunctive required at GCSE, which is the result clause. I teach this next but in a different session to emphsise that it works quite differently from the other two.

Animated slide which I use multiple times to remind students how to spot each clause

I then do lots of work on how to spot the difference between each of the three types of ut-clauses and I always word the question in the manner that they will face in the GCSE exam: why is oppugnarent in the subjunctive mood? The more they get used to the teacher or their tutor asking them this question, the easier the grammar questions will be for them. Some students have to be reminded that “because it’s used after ut” is not an answer to this question, as the examiner wants them to differentiate between the three clauses.

It’s never too late when it comes to the grammar questions

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.