latin tutoring – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Going in stealth

One of the things I love most about what I do now is the stealth and anonymity. As a frontline classroom teacher in a modern educational setting, you are constantly exposed. Teaching means being quite literally on display at the front of the classroom putting on a show for multiple classes, multiple times per day. You’re also putting on a show for management, who in turn are putting on a show for each other, for parents, for OfSted or for the ISI. Everything, frankly, is performative. The whole world’s a stage.

Even more stressful than this is the fact that your results are under scrutiny. The pressure of this will vary from setting to setting, but there are vanishingly few schools now which do not now make individual teachers directly accountable for the academic results of the students in their classes. At the high-achieving grammar school I first worked in, the Headteacher would meet with every academic department every year and go through A level results with a fine-toothed comb. Every member of the department had to prepare for the meeting and bring along their justifications as to why some students may not have made the grade. It was a toe-curling and sometimes genuinely upsetting experience.

These days, with the work that I do, I am very much behind the scenes. I’m the person you’re not supposed to see. Black leggings and a balaclava have replaced the vibrant costumes I had to wear for my classroom performances. While there are some students or parents who inform the classroom teacher of my existence, most do not. I hear reports of teachers that are amazed, delighted and genuinely mystified as to how a student has made such a marked improvement in a short period of time. Some of them must (surely?!) hazard a guess as to how this might have happened, but many seem to remain in the dark, along with my services. In terms of the results that my tutees achieve, those results go on the books of their regular classroom teacher and they are welcome to them. I know the truth, as does the tutee and their parents who paid for my work. There is something strangely satisfying about it. I genuinely love being the secret silver bullet, the hidden reason why a child makes the shift from the bottom of their class to the middle or even to the top. I cannot tell you how exciting and rewarding it is.

One student brought me up short this week when she described the situation in her classroom. In a high-achieving school, in which many of the students studied Latin from an early age in prep schools, she has always felt slightly behind the curve and I knew this already. What I did not know was the extent to which the classroom teacher relies on the fact that students have prior knowledge and thus doesn’t feel the need to teach new concepts in anything like enough depth for a novice.

“You’ve actually taught me this stuff,” my tutee said, as we celebrated her improved understanding of the uses of the subjunctive. As I listened while she elaborated, I became more and more horrified. She explained that the classroom teacher pitches the work in a manner that works for those to whom the material is not new. The overall assumption seems to be that the students already know the basic grammatical structures and thus the teacher’s job is simply to give them a quick reminder plus some further practice. The problem is so bad for those in the class that do not have the prior knowledge that several other students have also acquired a tutor over the last few months, since they too are struggling to keep up. “What I find really funny,” my tutee said, who is wryly perceptive for a young person of her age, “is that everyone who needs one always gets a private tutor, and then the school congratulates itself every year on amazing results.”

While I have never taught in the private sector, I have some experience of this phenomenon in the grammar school I used to teach in. We had a couple of teachers who were basically ticking off the days until retirement and quite frankly they were diabolical. As an A level student, if you were put into Mr Dudley’s German class, you knew that you would never get through the exam without external help. As a result, every single member of Mr Dudley’s class was given the benefit of support from a private tutor by their families. (Parents who have got their kids into a grammar school are usually well on board with the idea of private tuition: it’s how most of them got their kids into the school in the first place). So, Mr Dudley’s class would crash its way through an untaught syllabus, with lesson after lesson being provably and audibly chaotic. But guess what? Mr Dudley’s results were better than all of ours put together. And he got the credit for it, despite his palpably dreadful teaching. To be honest, it used to drive the rest of us wild.

Private tutors’ work is incredibly difficult to track because its behind-the-scenes nature means that is not systematically recorded. Without centralised data collection or mandatory reporting, it is impossible to measure how widespread private tuition is or indeed how significantly it affects educational attainment and inequality. But when a high-achieving school boasts consistently outstanding results on their website, I must admit I do find myself wondering just how many tutors there are behind the scenes to make them possible.

Reflections on Inflection

One of the biggest challenges that confronts students of Latin is that it is a heavily inflected language, meaning that the endings of words carry a large portion of the grammatical information.

English, by contrast, tends to express meaning through word order or auxiliary words. In Latin, nouns, pronouns and adjectives change their endings to mark case, number and gender; this means that a single word can appear in numerous forms that look unfamiliar at first glance. Verbs also change their form extensively to indicate tense, mood, voice, person and number. As a result, learners cannot simply scan a sentence from left to right and piece together meaning based on the sequence of words in the way they might in modern English. Instead, they must train themselves to recognise patterns in the endings, identify which role each word plays in the sentence, and mentally reconstruct the basic structure before a translation can emerge. This process of analysis can feel especially daunting for the novice.

Likewise, when learning vocabulary, it is not enough to learn the basic word. If a student simply learns that ferre means “to carry” (it’s the origin of the word ferry in English) they then fail to recognise it in most other forms. In the perfect tense, the verb changes completely: “they carry” would be tulerunt. Likewise, it’s participle is different again: “carried” (or “having been carried”) is lati. These forms need to be learnt if the student is to stand any change of recognising the word in a translation.

To be clear, all languages do this to some extent. Whenever a student is despairing as to the myriad of ways in which a Latin verb can change, I like to point out to them that if they were learning English as a non-native speaker, then they would have to learn that the verb “to be” changes from is, to are, to were, to am, to has been and so on. They would have to learn that the comparative of good is better, that the superlative of bad is worst. All languages have such challenges and while there are always underlying patterns that one can work with, even these can seem overwhelming at the beginning.

It is an easy assumption for novices to make that they can do their vocabulary learning entirely on their own, without a subject expert. While it is true that such learning is something that can and should be done regularly as part of private study, it is in fact essential that a tutor get involved with it in order to support students with the process of learning how the words look in different forms. Much of what I spend time on is the process of showing students words (most especially verbs) in their different forms, especially those which occur most commonly in the examination. A student may have learnt the fact that cado means “I fall”, but does this mean that they will recognise ceciderunt as “they fell”? Without support, this is highly unlikely. One of the skills of what I do is to focus my support on such words and to advise students and those supporting them on the learning that they can do on their own: for example, adverbs do not conjugate or decline, so those are a really good area where students can invest the time at home.

Very few schools test their students on the vocabulary list in different forms, but the very best ones do. I can count on one hand the number of schools where this is done regularly and effectively, but the difference between a student drilled in this way and one that has been merely tested on the original form of the word is palpable. Some schools invite students to learn the principal parts of verbs but this is relatively unusual and most commonly treated as “a bonus” when the reality is that learning verbs without a knowledge of their inflected parts is actually a waste of time.

One of the biggest problems with all existing text books is their lack of focus on vocabulary acquisition. While modern languages tend to build units of learning around vocabulary and place the accretion of key words at the centre of students’ learning, Latinists continue to treat vocabulary learning as a bolt-on and place little to no emphasis on weaving it into the grammar teaching that goes on. This really is bizarre and with the advent of Chat GPT and other free platforms capable of generating simple Latin sentences there really is no excuse. Schools should be re-writing the curriculum and basing the sentences used for grammar practice exclusively around the GCSE word list. When it is now possible to dump a word list into your AI platform of choice and ask it to churn out as many sentences as you desire using that vocabulary and practising the grammar point you are working on, there really is no excuse whatsoever.

While schools continue to rely on text books such as the Cambridge Latin Course and Suburani, students will continue to be let down when it comes to vocabulary acquisition, never mind the grammar. As we await the inevitable changes to the GCSE course it is difficult not to feel somewhat depressed about what will happen next. A new vocabulary list will be issued, not dramatically different from the last one, but different enough to mean that all previous materials will require checking and editing. (Last time it happened, 25 words were removed from the prescribed list, and it took a couple of years and a lot of begging for the board to release the list of words that they had removed rather than leaving teachers to work it out: as I recall, it was produced on request at various INSET gatherings and was never in wide circulation). Current text books such as Taylor & Cullen’s Latin to GCSE will thus remain useful but not quite in line with the examinations on offer and most schools will continue to use already-published courses which bear little to no relation as to what’s on the GCSE list. When I start working with a student, I already know which words will be a problem for them. For example, every single student that has studied using the Cambridge Latin Course will think that the common word poena means “poet” when in fact it means “punishment”. This is because the CLC teaches them the word poeta early on and never introduces them to the word poena.

When practice makes too perfect?

Every teacher wants their students to succeed. All teachers put in hours of effort to build the competence and confidence of their students. Yet across most schools in most subjects, there is a subtle but pervasive problem: teachers giving students tasks that directly contradict the conditions under which students will ultimately be assessed. Perhaps the most common way I see this manifested is when teachers set an exam question for homework but do not set a time limit. Students are encouraged to produce their best answer, without the contraints of timed conditions. On the surface, such a task may seem not only harmless but supportive: but what are the risks involved?

Teachers rarely encourage harmful practice out of sheer carelessness: quite the opposite. Such practice arises from good intentions. Teachers often want their students to slow down, to think carefully and to produce their best work. Removing time pressure feels like a way of fostering both their learning and their skills. Teachers are also conscious that timed tasks can cause stress and many, understandably, fear overwhelming their students; ironically, it is most often the already-anxious student that is most damaged by the practice of no time-limits, since the temptation to spend an excessive amount of time on a task in order to produce a perfect answer may be overwhelming for them. Likewise, such students are usually the most deeply affected by the looming prospect of time pressure in an exam. Thus, in their desire to reduce pressure on their students, teachers may unwittingly create more pain for the most anxious of students in both the short-term and the long-term.

Another reason why teachers may set a task without time parameters is that when students are given more time, they often produce more complete work. Completed work gives the teacher more to comment on and the student more to reflect on. Students are more likely to manage to write something at length if they are not under strict exam conditions and thus teachers have more to work with when it comes to marking and feedback. Again, however, we are faced with a painful irony as a result: not only are students practising the wrong skills, their teachers’ time is being wasted as it is being spent giving detailed feedback on irrelevant skills. To be frank, everybody loses.

What is thus most surprising about some teachers’ reluctance to impose time-limits on their students is that they fail to see how setting time-limits is a win-win situation for everyone. Not only will the student benefit from the fact that they are practising precisely what they will need to do in the examination, that student will benefit in the short-term from a homework task that is time-bound and manageable. Far too often, students are set open-ended tasks which can expand to fill the time they have available: for anxious and/or high-achieving students, this can be almost infinite. Likewise, the time that teachers have to spend on marking and feedback is minimal and needs to be tightly-managed, for the sake of their own workload and to ensure that the time they do spend on that task is valuable and effective. I will never forget Professor Paul Black (50% of the brains behind the now-ubiquitous educational concept of Assessment for Learning) stating to a roomful of teachers that we were all marking too much, too often, for too long and (here’s the really devastating bit) that we were all wasting our time. That was 25 years ago. And we’re still doing it.

Outside of workload, a further risk that arises from setting students exam-style questions with no time limit is the illusion of competence. Cognitive psychology has repeatedly demonstrated that students — and indeed their teachers — can be misled by what feels effective in the moment. When a student has unlimited time on a practice essay, their cognitive load is relatively low. There is no pressure to recall information quickly, organise ideas under time constraints or make strategic trade-offs between detail and speed. As a result, tasks feel more manageable and the final product looks polished. Students and teachers might both reasonably conclude that they are exam-ready on that topic, but this belief is built on a false foundation. What are they actually ready for? In real exams, time limits force rapid decision-making. Perhaps what is most important is that students must develop an understanding that examinations do not demand perfect, polished answers: to expect this under time pressure would be grossly unreasonable. Students must learn the importance of producing a sensible, structured response that is as well-crafted as can reasonably be expected in the time allowed. This is not the same thing as what one might produce given infinite preparation and review time, for example when drafting a manuscript for publication. When exam practice is performed without time constraints, students may master individual components of the task (knowledge, technique, structure) but they will fail to integrate them at speed during the exam. Students who have never practised in timed conditions may also experience extreme panic when they first encounter them, at a time when it is too late to build that resilience.

Research tells us that learning sticks when students are forced to retrieve information under conditions that mimic the challenge they will face. Slow, open-book, or time-unlimited tasks do not recreate the retrieval demands of an examination. They allow students to look things up, pause, think in a leisurely fashion or redraft their answers. Yet again, they are practising the wrong skills, as these behaviours are impossible in an exam room. For a skill to transfer from practice to final performance, the practice must include the key features of the performance context. Practising sections of a piano piece slowly can help with accuracy, but to perform at performance tempo, you must ultimately practise at performance tempo: you must also avoid repeating mistakes in your practice, lest they be embedded. The same principle applies to writing essays, solving equations and analysing sources.

Musical practice is not the only example of a process that academic teachers could learn from. The older and more experienced I get, the more I realise what an oversight it is that academic teachers do not listen to and learn from our sporting peers. Athletes understand the training process: they understand how to break challenges down into achievable goals and what is needed in order to practise for a final performance. More and more, I talk to my students about their studies in a way that draws on the processes used by competitive sports men and women.

With many students facing their Mock examinations at around this time, the extent to which they are prepared for those is very much on everyone’s mind. Without a doubt, most teachers understand all too well that students need to be familiar with the look and feel of assessment questions, and try to produce questions which mimic the phrasing and typical format of the questions that they will face. They also know that students need to practise retrieving their knowledge without notes, prompts, or textbook guidance. Yet the thing that is most commonly overlooked with exam-matched practice are realistic time constraints. I would argue that to encourage students to practise answering these without the additional parameter of time constraints is a dangerous and counter-productive waste of everyone’s time.

GCSE Latin set texts – why students struggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What GCSE students don’t know about the Aeneid

Since last week, when I wrote again about the power of one-to-one tutoring, I have had even further cause to reflect on its essential benefits.

It would come as shock, I suspect, to most classroom teachers, the extent to which students forget, misinterpret or loftily ignore what they have no doubt been taught in school. I say “no doubt” because I refuse to believe that students have never been taught the basic background to the texts that they are studying, despite their protestations.

What does happen, I believe, is that teachers over-estimate students’ ability to absorb and remember complex material. It certainly came as a shock to me when I started to read more about how memory works (a criminally overlooked field of study in my training) and came to realise just how much repetition is required for students to grasp the basics. In this blog post, I plan to outline the opening few lines of one of the current OCR set texts and explore the things that have puzzled, baffled and troubled the students I have worked with this year. I hope that this will enlighten readers as to the extent that some students struggle with complex material.

One of this year’s texts is taken from Virgil’s Aeneid Book 1. It starts at line 13, so as close to the beginning of the text as one could wish for. This potentially makes for a much easier life than the times when a set text has been taken from Book 10 or Book 12. One would have thought that it would be an easy task to get students to comprehend the basic facts of what the text is about and its core purpose. Well, one would have thought wrongly. With only one exception, the students requesting my help with the Virgil text this year have not been able to define what an epic is, nor were they able to say what Virgil’s purpose was in writing the Aeneid. Most of them swore blind that they’d never been taught the definition of an epic. Beyond this, they have all been baffled to the point of total and utter confusion as to who the Trojans were and what on earth they had to do with the Romans and their self-definition. So, let’s look at some extracts from the opening lines of the text and see in more detail what’s been troubling my charges.

urbs antiqua fuit, Tyrii tenuere coloni,
There was an ancient city, [which] Tyrian settlers inhabited,

Karthago, Italiam contra Tiberinaque longe
Carthage, opposite Italy and the far-distant mouth of the Tiber,

ostia, dives opum studiisque asperrima belli;
rich in resources and most formidable in the practices of war;

Out of those who have requested help with the Virgil, most of them were unable to tell me where Carthage was and why it’s described as a formidable stronghold. None of them – genuinely no exceptions – understood the historical fact that the Romans had destroyed Carthage over 100 years before Virgil was writing. While I would not for one moment expect any of them to have detailed knowledge of the three Punic Wars, I was a little surprised that none of them seemed to be conscious of the fact that Virgil was writing in a world in which this rival superpower had been razed to the ground decades earlier, and that this was a crucially important part of how the Romans defined themselves. Does it seem likely that this was never mentioned by any of their teachers? I think probably not. Is it likely, however, that this was perhaps mentioned once in the first lesson and then rarely – if ever – reiterated? That, I’m afraid, seems plausible. I think teachers need to think very hard about what’s happening in the first couple of lessons of set text work. When you present the students with the text, their minds are completely preoccupied with the length of it and how on earth they are going to cope with learning it; they are thus even less likely to absorb any background information you’re giving them.

Very few students were able to tell me what the Tiber is (a river in Rome, as iconic to the Romans as the Thames is to Londoners) and none of them seemed to understand how Carthage is “opposite” Italy. Carthage lay on the other side of the Mediterranean sea, located on the coast of north Africa, in what we now call Tunisia – indeed, it kind of bulges out into the sea and looks to be the bit of land mass in Africa that is closest to Italy. Perhaps it is because my own sense of direction and general geography is so embarrassingly poor that I always look all of these places and features up on a map and contextualise them for myself in detail. Do teachers assume that their students’ knowledge of geography is as sound as their own? Maybe so, and if so, I guess my advantage is that my own geography is so awful that I assume absolutely nothing! Anyway, the text and the description of Carthage continues:

quam Iuno fertur terris magis omnibus unam
[one] which Juno is said to have cherished more [than] all [other] lands,

posthabita coluisse Samo; hic illius arma,
valuing [even] Samos the less;

Now we’re getting on to the meat of the text and what Virgil is building up to in this opening section. He sets out to explain why Juno, the queen of the gods (most students didn’t know that, by the way), has a massive beef with the Trojans. Here, he highlights the fact that Juno values Carthage even more than Samos. What’s he on about? My students didn’t know. Samos, an island off the coast of modern-day Turkey, was the birthplace of Juno and a centre of her worship. The fact that she values it less than Carthage highlights the importance of Carthage to her and hence her overwhelming desire to protect it. This is why Virgil mentions Samos.

progeniem sed enim Troiano a sanguine duci
But indeed she had heard [that] a breed [would] arise from Trojan blood,

audierat, Tyrias olim quae verteret arces;
which would one day overturn the Tyrian stronghold;

hinc populum late regem belloque superbum
from this would come a nation, wide-ruling and superior in war,

venturum excidio Libyae: sic volvere Parcas.
for the destruction of Libya: thus were the Fates unrolling.

I have asked all of my students to tell me who “the breed that would arise from Trojan blood” are, which could absolutely come up as a one-mark question in the exam. Until I explained, very few of them understood that it was the Romans. They seemed genuinely unsure about the point of the Aeneid‘s opening, which is to highlight how difficult the goddess Juno made it for the Trojans to make it to Italy, which was their destiny. Why were they headed to Italy? Again, when asked, students had not grasped the fact that Aeneas and the rest of the Trojans were refugees, survivors of the Trojan War and in search of a new city now that theirs had been destroyed. It seems remarkable given current events in both Europe and beyond that students seem to find this resonant fact so easy to forget. Has the analogy with modern refugees setting sail across dangerous waters ever been drawn for them? I do hope that is has, but again, maybe that’s happened only once. Students had failed to grasp that the Trojans are trying to get to Italy and that Juno is trying to prevent this because she is trying to prevent the Roman empire from existing and thus to prevent the destruction of Carthage by the Romans. Now, here’s what’s really interesting: I have explained this multiple times and in multiple ways to several different students individually, and most of them have really struggled to grasp it. I suspect it’s partly because they are having to think about multiple timelines and this is difficult for younger people; I also think it might have something to do with the fact that some of what they are being told is historical fact and some of it is legend – they genuinely find it difficult to get a handle on what it all means and how it fits together. I am still thinking about how it could be better explained in the future, since it’s clearly a lot more difficult to understand than those of us who are subject experts realise.

necdum etiam causae irarum saevique dolores
not even now had the causes of [her] resentment and bitter griefs

exciderant animo: manet alta mente repostum
left [her] heart: deep in her mind remained the far-off

iudicium Paridis spretaeque iniuria formae,
judgement of Paris and the insult of her beauty scorned,

et genus invisum, et rapti Ganymedis honores.
and her enmity towards the tribe and the honours paid to the stolen Ganymede.

Here, Virgil lists the reasons that Juno has for hating the Trojans. It seems that students find this really difficult, too. This is perhaps because they must grasp two separate things: firstly, they must understand that Juno’s over-arching reason for hating the Trojans is that they are destined to give rise to the Romans, who will eventually destroy her beloved Carthage. They find this really difficult to grasp, as I explained above. In addition, they must also understand that Juno has some other more petty reasons for hating the Trojans, mentioned here by Virgil. She has a general enmity towards the tribe because it is descended from someone called Dardanus, who was the son of her husband Jupiter as a result of one of his numerous extra-marital affairs. Thus, the existence of the entire Trojan race was an insult to Juno. In addition (and this is the only story that most of the students seemed familiar with) there was the beauty contest between three goddesses that Paris, a Trojan prince, was given the dubious task of judging. His choice was ultimately the cause of the Trojan War, since the bribe he was offered by the winner (Venus) was the most beautiful woman in the world, which was Helen, who happened to be married to a Greek. Hence, when Paris claimed his prize, the Greek tribes waged war upon the Trojans. More importantly for our purposes, the fact that Juno was not selected as the winner of the contest was yet another slight against her by a Trojan. The third petty reason mentioned, the “honours paid to the stolen Ganymede” is all about Jupiter’s promiscuity again. Ganymede was a handsome Trojan that Jupiter took a fancy to and abducted, yet another insult to his wife. (Note: Ganymede was not, as one of my students was absolutely convinced of, a horse. Not that taking a fancy to a horse was beyond Jupiter, miind you, but that isn’t what happened in the story).

his accensa super, iactatos aequore toto
Inflamed further by these [things], she kept the Trojans [who were] left by the Danaans

Troas, reliquias Danaum atque immitis Achilli,
and by ruthless Achilles far-distant from Latium, storm-tossed in every corner of the sea;

arcebat longe Latio, multosque per annos
and for many years

errabant, acti fatis, maria omnia circum.
they wandered around all the oceans by an act of fate.

tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem!
Such a great undertaking it was to found the Roman race!

Here, Virgil sums up his overall point: that it is Juno’s hatred of the Trojans and her fear of their impending destiny, which causes her to work against their journey and to thus postpone their fulfilment of fate. One of the final things that I have noticed students really struggle to grasp is that fact that Juno knows full well that she won’t succeed: as a goddess, she can see the past, the present and the future, and she knows that the destruction of Carthage by the Romans is fated and inevitable. Still, she’s going to do everything in her power to prevent, or at least delay, the inevitable. I find it interesting that young people should struggle to understand this very human kind of motivation – that we might still strive for something that we already know is doomed to failure in the longterm. I guess they haven’t had experience of it yet.

Before teachers feel too dismal, I should point out that I do tend to specialise in working with students who really struggle with the subject. That said, what has been interesting this year is that almost all of my students have struggled with this text, even the high-fliers. I hope that this post has given some food for thought. It is so easy to assume that students have understood what we have told them, so easy to imagine they are following what we say. Until we delve a little deeper – one of the immense joys of working one-to-one as I do now – we can delude ourselves that they have understood the point of a text and are following its meaning.

The unbeatable value of one-to-one tutoring

Last week I wrote about how class size doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to outcomes for students. While it can have a notable effect on a teacher’s workload (and I believe that this is important), the evidence that smaller class sizes improve student performance simply isn’t there, certainly at secondary level.

You’d think, given both this and my commitment to being evidence-informed, that I would thus be in support of the idea that tutoring in small groups can be as effective as tutoring one-to-one. Quite the opposite. The very fact that research and my own experience tells me that the size of the group seems not to impact upon the outcomes for students only serves to reinforce my belief that there is something uniquely special about working in the one-to-one model. David Cameron once said that his support for equal marriage was not in spite of the fact that he was a conservative but because he was a conservative. By the same token, I don’t support the view that one-to-one tutoring has a greater impact than working with small groups in spite of the fact that there is no evidence that reducing class sizes improves outcomes; I support the view precisely because of this fact. It is my view that groups – however small – will never provide a child with the same level of intervention as working with an expert one-to-one.

During my last few years of teaching, I had the opportunity to teach a group of five students. The official line was that the small group was due to a timetabling glitch, but the full story was that the Headteacher had unwittingly made a promise to a small handful of parents, a promise which turned out to be impossible on the timetable. Because the mistake had been made by the Headteacher, she had the power to say “make it happen.” Thus, after a considerable amount of shuffling, the staff responsible for timetabling came up with a solution: we would create an extra group to accommodate the subject combination promise that had been made to those students and their parents. This left me – the only Latin teacher in the school – with three Year 9 groups instead of my usual two: one was the usual size of around 28 students, one was somewhat smaller at around 23, the third was the group of 5.

Initially, I was quite excited by the idea. As someone who had tutored one-to-one in my spare time, I felt quite certain that working with such a tiny number of students would feel more like tutoring than teaching. I would be able to offer them close supervision and thus, I presumed, their progress would be exponentially greater than that made by students in the other groups.

Certainly, I was able to pay those students more attention than I otherwise might have been able to do and certainly they all did well. Yet, so did the students in the other two groups. Over the two years I was not able to identify any measurably different outcomes for those students and the experience of teaching them was nothing like the experience of tutoring. Small class size or not, all the other variables were the same. They had the same teacher – me, like it or not – and they had to be marched through the same curriculum. Five students is still enough for there to be considerable diversity among the group, so the pace was still on the slow side for some, rather too pacey for others. While I was – of course – able to offer more individual support than in a larger classroom, it was genuinely surprising how limited the impact of this was overall. Had any of them chosen to engage a private tutor, they would have benefitted as much as any of the students in my group of 28.

As a result of the high expectations that are placed upon teachers, it is easy for them to feel threatened by the very existence of private tuition. I experienced this myself, when I watched a boy who was struggling in my subject transform his performance as a direct result of working with a local private tutor. It was a truly humbling process to witness, and I don’t deny that for a short while I felt rather dismal about my own apparent failure as his classroom teacher. But as a private tutor, I have seen the game from the other side of the fence. I know that what I can do with a child in a regular series of bespoke one-to-one sessions bears little or no resemblance to what I can achieve in the mainstream classroom. It is because I work one-to-one that I am able to do this.

As a private tutor, everything I do is in direct response to one individual’s needs. The key to outstanding private tuition is developing the ability to read each person closely; in a one-to-one session, I can watch for every tiny non-verbal cue that a child is giving: every shift in the chair, every bite of the lip, every furrow of the brow. Of course, I often noticed these signs in the classroom too, and I endeavoured to pay close attention to those individuals who were expressing some puzzlement. But how often must I have missed such nuances, due to the sheer number of faces in front of me? Every missed moment is another tiny chink in that student’s progress, another fissure in the delicate and ever-evolving construction of knowledge and understanding.

In a classroom, children must wait – an individual query may not be relevant to the whole class, and some students, especially in the younger years, seek to reassure themselves by querying what a teacher has said before the sentence is barely out of their mouth; this desire to ask questions at every stage of an explanation can ruin the flow of a lesson for the majority, and students must learn to save their questions for later, when a teacher is circulating the room. Teachers try then to address each individual query and pay personal attention to every child, indeed the importance of this is one of the things that makes teaching both challenging and rewarding. But the rules are reversed in private tutoring, when a tutor can actively encourage a child to interrupt as many times as they wish; as a result, the lesson is truly tailored to the individual and every potential misunderstanding is addressed – simply impossible in the mainstream classroom.

I am not unsympathetic to those educationalists who have concerns about private tutoring. In stark contrast to the case of my student whose progress was transformed as a result of tuition, I have also come across cases when a child has been thoroughly let down by a tutor with no professional experience. Many of those advertising at the more affordable end of the scale are university students – I would willingly have tutored for £10 an hour as an undergraduate – and some of them do an excellent job. However, such tutors have no experience of the ever-changing expectations that children are working towards; if you are simply looking for someone to de-mystify a subject then this kind of tutor can work very well, but if you are looking for your child to make progress towards a specific educational goal or to excel in a particular set of examinations, you’re taking quite a risk in paying someone who is not an expert in this process.

Yet the main objection against private tuition often raised is not a lack of professionalism on the part of some tutors; rather, it seems to touch on the wider issue of so-called “helicopter parenting” and a tendency to problem-solve on behalf of our children. In truth, no matter how much a parent might wish it to be so, private tutoring is not a magic solution; it is merely an opportunity, with which the student has to engage in order to progress. A few will rock up confidently with a myriad of questions, but the vast majority have spent so long hiding at the back or trying to bluff their way in a subject they are struggling to understand that it takes some time to strip away their defences and encourage them to participate without fear.

The tutees that come to me are often in a state of despair. More than one parent has described the dreadful bouts of gut-wrenching anxiety and floods of tears as a child finds themselves getting further and further behind their peers. My subject is obscure, and few parents are blessed with the knowledge to help their child through the quagmire of this difficult and unforgiving discipline; so, they can watch in despair while their child suffers, or they can find a compassionate and competent professional to provide the right kind of support for them. As one parent put it to me, “you have turned dislike and dismay into enjoyment and enthusiasm.” Sounds like something worth paying for.

Why is translation so difficult?

I recall being puzzled a few years ago, when the languages department I was attached to invited me to present to them on how I go about teaching the skill of translation. I had assumed that the process of translation was almost synonymous with language work, and would be embedded into the teaching of all languages. It was news to me that a change in syllabus meant that translation from the target language into English was a new and hitherto under-explored field for modern linguists, and this belies my background as someone who has specialised in Latin.

When it comes to ancient languages, translation is what we do. Without delving into the thorny issue of justifying the value of studying Latin per se (!), it is a simple truth that the ultimate goal of this kind of study remains to be able to read and decipher a text that was written down in Latin and to translate it into English. Despite this obvious truth, a huge number of children who study the subject struggle with the process of translation, and it is worth reflecting upon why that might be.

Broadly speaking, the clients who get in touch with me asking for help for their child fall into two camps, and those camps tend to be based on age-group. Most of the people who want help for a younger child (say in Years 7-8) will say that their child is “okay with translating” but “struggles with the grammar”. This is always a massive red flag for impending disaster, for it means that their child’s translations are based entirely on instinct and guesswork; the child may have appeared to manage okay so far, but as things get harder they will fall apart and the child will soon find that they can comprehend very little of what’s in front of them. It is a drastic misconception, in my opinion, that “grammar” is something separate from “translation”. This really gets to the heart of Latin as a subject and belies why so many children need help with it. Grammar is not an optional luxury for those most deeply versed in the language: it is the beating heart of how the language works.

Parents of older children (broadly speaking in Years 9-11) tend to be the ones who are already experiencing the fall-out of translation without the systematic application of grammar rules. Students by this time find that their previously-successful methodologies of translating on instinct have all but collapsed. Parents of students who have reached this stage will usually tell me that their child struggles with absolutely everything and is on the verge of giving up. A few will say that their child is “okay with the grammar” (which means they have rote-learned their endings) but cannot make it work in the context of a translation. This less common scenario is what tends to happen with a highly-motivated student, generally successful in their studies, who has been told to “learn their endings” and has dutifully done so, but has not had the opportunity to sit down with somebody in one-to-one sessions and have the process of translation – actually making use of those endings – modelled and unpicked for them. This is not to say that their classroom teacher has not used the method of modelling, nor that they have not tried to dedicate some one-to-one attention to such a child. But the reality remains that such processes are remarkably difficult to embed and often require repeated, intensive one-to-one work to make a tangible difference to outcomes. This is especially true for a child that has developed the habit of translating on instinct and has not been drilled from the beginning to analyse Latin sentences rigorously. I’m afraid to say that the most popular text books used in secondary schools (the Cambridge Latin Course and Suburani) tend to encourage and compound such an approach. These courses are nicknamed “reading courses” and aim to encourage fluid and instinctive reading from the outset, eschewing the process of analysis. My personal experience with such an approach is that it is disastrous for a child’s long-term grasp of the subject and results in an inability to translate when things get even remotely complicated. Lots of people disagree with me on this, and if you’d like to hear me interview one or two of them, then listen to my podcast; in Season 2 Episode 1, I interview Caroline Bristow (Director of the Cambridge Schools Classics Project) and in Episode 6 I talk to David Carter, who is an advocate for a methodology called comprehensible input. If you’d like to hear me interview someone who shares my views, listen to Season 2 Episode 2 with Ed Clarke.

Much of my time in one-to-one sessions is spent asking students to justify their translation. When they tell me that rex deorum means “the king of the gods” … was that an easy guess based on the fact that they know the vocabulary? Or can they identify the fact that deorum is genitive plural, which is why it translates as “of the gods”? If they can’t unpick their reasoning behind very simple sentences, then in my experience they will never be able to translate more complex ones. My focus is therefore to present students with a variety of sentences, using vocabulary that is familiar to them, then challenge them to identify and articulate the morphology and syntax which justifies and explains their translation.

It is also important from the very beginning to present students with sentences which cannot be translated successfully without some kind of analysis. Even at the most rudimentary level, this is easy to do. While reading courses such as Suburani tend to encourage students to follow their natural instinct to read from left to right by using pronouns at the start of a sentences like English does, I prefer to present students with sentences that lack a noun or a pronoun as the subject, so they are forced to look at the verb ending in order to find out who is doing the action. During lockdown, I basically re-wrote the Cambridge Latin Course for my students and one of the main things I did was to remove all those subject pronouns. This change made an immediate and tangible difference to outcomes with the beginners in my classroom. From very early on, students were forced to cope with sentences such as ad tabernas festinas (you are hurrying to the shops) when previously they had been shown tu ad tabernas festinas, which means exactly the same thing but provides them with the subject (you) as vocabulary at the front of the sentence and hence removes the need to look at the verb ending; take away the subject pronoun, and the learner is forced to develop the correct habit of parsing the verb ending (festina-s, as opposed to festin-o or festina-t). Initially, of course, this slows the learner down, but the ultimate gain is the right kind of rigour, which will pay dividends in the long-term. While it will initially appear to take students longer to be able to translate basic sentences with fluidity and skill, their translations when they come will be based upon real understanding, not the false appearance of success. It is this false early success – in my opinion – that makes the reading courses so popular; students feel brilliantly successful in the early stages, but they are living in a house of cards.

By far the most common scenario presented to me as a tutor who specialises in supporting struggling students is a child who has enjoyed and appeared to thrive in Latin in Years 7-8, who then experienced an enormous crisis in Year 9 or at the start of their GCSE studies. These students feel cheated and let down, and understandably so. A lot of them come to me saying that they regret selecting the subject for GCSE and are convinced that they cannot do it. Happily, I am usually able to convince them that they can do it, but this involves unpicking the habits they have formed in the early years and retraining them from scratch. While reading courses such as Suburani and the CLC continue to dominate the market in secondary schools, I don’t see this situation changing in a hurry.

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

Vocabulary acquisition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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