latin tutoring – Page 2 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

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.

Off you go and learn it

Time and again I am struck by how little guidance some students are given about how to go about the process of learning. I’m not talking about school assemblies on “study skills”, which I guarantee you most teenagers will switch off from; the guidance needs to come directly from each individual classroom teacher, the subject expert, and it needs to be explicitly taught, modelled and demonstrated on a regular basis. Schools need to agree what methods they are going to recommend and this needs to be reflected right across the school in all subjects, tailored specifically to what works best in each academic discipline.

Too often, it seems to me, students are still being told: here is your Latin set text, now off you go and learn the first section. I was guilty of this in my first few years of teaching – rote-learning comes relatively easy to me and I didn’t really comprehend that students need to be shown how to go about engaging with the process. Furthermore, I was working in a very high-achieving grammar school, where we were not really encouraged to support students proactively with their learning; it was assumed that all the students in the school could cope well in academia without such support.

When it comes to the literature element of the Latin GCSE, whether or not a student knows the translation of the set text off by heart and whether they can relate that knowledge to the the Latin version in front of them is without doubt the single most important differentiator between a student’s success and failure in the exam. Despite this inescapable fact, few Latin teachers appear willing to dedicate classroom time to the learning process, so wedded are they to the conviction that students can manage the learning “in their own time”. Many of my tutees have been told time and again that they “don’t know the text” well enough, that they “need to learn” it, that they need to “spend more time” on it, that generally they need to do something to gain the knowledge required. Yet when I ask them, “what methods have you practised in class?” they stare at me blankly. I have come to realise that most students are not being taught how to learn things off by heart, beyond the most rudimentary of introductions.

I am not naive. Having taught in secondary schools for 21 years, 13 of those years in a comprehensive setting, I am more than well aware of students’ uncanny ability to claim that they have “never been taught” something that they in fact have been told on more than one occasion. However, the extreme cluelessness of so many of my clients when it comes to what to do and their apparent awe when they are taught some very basic methods such as colour-coding and the first-letter technique do leave me increasingly convinced that many classroom teachers are not dedicating enough (or in some extreme cases any) classroom time to learning methodologies. I’ll bet most of them are doing what I used to do in my first few years of teaching – giving students a few bullet points of advice on how to go about learning the texts, then assuming that those students will remember this going forward. But why do we believe that? We would not (I hope) present them with the endings of the 1st declension in one lesson then assume that they will remember those endings for the rest of time – so why should that be the case when it comes to study skills?

One possible reason is teachers’ anxiety about time. One of the greatest strains that GCSE Latin teachers are under is time pressure. Very schools offer enough space on the timetable for our subject and I am fully aware that making it through both set texts within the time available is a mammoth task. I rarely finished the second set text prior to the end of March – on the few occasions that I managed to do so it was real cause for celebration. Yet despite this, as my career progressed I allocated an ever-increasing amount of classroom time to teaching students how to go about the learning process and also to giving them short bursts of learning time to actually get on with it in silence. Any spare few minutes that I found myself in possession of at the end of a new section or a new concept, I would allow them to bow their heads and spend 10 minutes using the first-letter technique to get a few sentences of the text under their belts. I wonder whether classroom teachers are afraid of allowing students this time, as if it somehow undermines the important of our teaching role. I used to remind students that I was painfully aware how much pressure I was putting them under, asking them to rote-learn a new chunk of text almost every single week. So part of the deal I made with them was that – whenever I could – I would let them have a few minutes of classroom time to kick-start the process.

The benefits of allocating this time are twofold. Firstly, it literally does get the children started on the process and is an opportunity to remind them once again of the methods that have been recommended: I used to put them up on a summary slide, even when they could all recite the methods without hesitation. Secondly, while students are studying, a teacher can circulate the room and check whether they are actually using the methods – there will always be a few hardcore reluctants who claim that the recommended methods “don’t work for them”. This is when a teacher needs to be strong. The evidence for what works and what doesn’t work in terms of how we learn is overwhelming, and unless that child can perform perfectly in every test you give them then they need to get on board with the methods!

As for what the methods should be, I recommend a variety but one is definitely stand-out brilliant and so far has worked for every student I have ever met. So if you haven’t read my previous post on how to use the first-letter technique then do so straight away – you will never look back!

The value of forgetting

Many people undestimate the importance of forgetting time. I’m not talking about forgetting painful experiences here (although the ability to wipe those from one’s memory might also be considered rather useful); I’m talking about giving your brain time to “forget” what it has learned, purely so that you can force it to remember again. Think that sounds weird? Well, let me persuade you.

Memory, as cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham so famously defined it, is the residue of thought. Students will struggle to remember things which they have not thought deeply about and the best teachers use a combination of methods to get students to think actively about what they need to remember. There has been much welcome discussion in recent years about retrieval practice in the classroom, and alongside that the importance of spaced learning. Believe you me, this was not the focus during my teacher-training 21 years ago, indeed there was little to no interest shown by the lecturers in how memory works, little focus on the inescapable fact that a child’s success or failure in the education system is defined by their ability to use their memory effectively – both their working memory and their longterm memory.

In the simplest possible terms, a person’s working memory is what they use to process information and acts like a kind of holding pad. Memory expert Tracy Alloway describes the working memory as like a post-it note: capable of holding only a tiny amount of information temporarily, and not suitable as a system for longterm storage. For effective learning to take place in the classroom, it is crucial that a student’s working memory is not overloaded and a large part of that responsibility rests with the classroom teacher. However, students themselves (and those supporting them) can help too. The more a student can do to transfer knowledge into their longterm memory (which, unlike the working memory, is limitless) the better their capacity to learn will be. In my subject, this means that the student should endeavour to learn as much vocabulary as they can, as well as the important noun and verb endings; this will mean that they are not over-burdened in the classroom, enabling them to access more learning.

So there’s the rub. How exactly does one transfer knowledge reliably into one’s longterm memory? Well, the more I work one-to-one with students and advise their parents and guardians, the more I have come to understand that most of them really underestimate the importance of forgetting time.

Some students have been taught about spaced learning in school, as part of a drive towards empowering them with a knowledge of metacognition (which is thinking about thinking – a knowledge of how we learn – exactly what we’re talking about now). This is fantastic. In schools that are switched on to this, students are taught to repeat their self-testing processes regularly, leaving a gradually-increasing length of time between each revisit. Some schools teach a fixed process, helping students by advising them on exactly how long those varied gaps should be, but the truth is that it doesn’t necessarily matter. In principle, students should be regularly testing themselves on things they learnt that day, that week, that fortnight, that month, that year; the best and most effective kind of retrieval draws on a range of learning distances.

Students can actually exploit their brain’s capacity for forgetting and retrieval during very short spaces of time, and I make this happen within my 30-minute tutoring sessions. As one simple example, I might help a student commit the endings of the 1st declension to memory in the first few minutes of a session. I might then test them on a series of nouns which follow the first declension. I will then return to the endings of the 1st declension and test them on those again at the end of the session. That’s a typical 30-minute lesson arc and allows for “forgetting time”. However, even within that arc, I will further exploit the brain’s ability to switch from one focus to another and, as a result, to temporarily forget; during the process of testing a student on the 1st declension endings, once they reach a certain level of competence, I might suddenly ask them a couple of random questions to distract them from the table: do they know how many declenions there are? What gender are most nouns in the 1st declension? Can they think of any words that they know which follow the pattern of the 1st declension? Once their brain has been distracted for a minute or or so by this Q&A, I will then ask them to recall the endings of the 1st declension once again. The constant exploitation of forgetting time increases the impact of learning because it is forcing the brain to retrieve something which has briefly exited the working memory (i.e. the student has not spent the last minute actively thinking about it and holding it in their head).

Perhaps the most important thing that students need to know is that forgetting is crucial. Forgetting is therefore not the enemy; forgetting is part of the learning process. Once students gain confidence with this, what they begin to realise is that their brains take less and less time to recall what they have seemingly forgotten with each reboot. The process of recall in and of itself is what cements learning and is crucially important. I have written before about the dangers of the forgetting curve, as posited by psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, when it comes to memorisation; but what the forgetting curve actually shows is that forgetting is not just inevitable, it is an integral part of the memorisation process. We cannot learn a large amount of information without allowing ourselves time to “forget” it prior to forcing ourselves to recall it again.

It is therefore important to reassure students that retrieval can and indeed should feel a little uncomfortable – you are forcing yourself to try and remember, and in these days of Google that is not something we do very much. Many a happy evening was spent back in the day when a friend might say “who wrote that song?” and one would spend several minutes (or several hours!) trying to remember collectively. Now we can just look up the answer, we’re perhaps less trusting of the fact that if we wait long enough, the answer will pop into our heads. As Daniel T. Willingham puts it, “people usually believe that forgetting happens over time; if you don’t use a memory, you lose it. This may be hard to believe, but sometimes the memory isn’t gone—it’s just hard to get to.” This is the most remarkable thing demonstrated in the whole process – you might think you’ve forgotten something, but the memory is actually there, lurking deep inside your brain. Retrieval teaches you how to access it.

So let’s hear it for forgetting. Forgetting is important. Forgetting should be exploited as part of the learning process. And let’s face it, forgetting is unavoidable. All we can do is work with it.

“Just one more thing, Sir …” Peter Faulk as the unforgettable *Columbo*,
who made the art of seeming to forget his trademark

The puzzle of Latin word-order

Twice this week, working with two very different courses, I have been struck by an author’s decision to challenge students at a very early stage in their Latin with complex word-order.

“Traditional” Latin word order will have you believe that the subject (should there be one) will come at the beginning of the sentence and the verb at the end. Everything else, with a variety of rules within that, will come in the middle. Yet when it comes to studying real Latin literature, a student has to face up to the fact that this so-called tradition is – at best – a very simplified version of reality; if one were to be truly critical, one might say that the whole concept is a nonsense. Real Latin authors break away from the formalised shape of a Latin sentence – sometimes for effect, sometimes just because they felt like it.

With one small group of tutees I have just started the second booklet of Clarke’s Latin, an ab initio course aimed ostensibly at Common Entrance candidates, although you’d be hard-pushed to find a better introduction to Latin whatever your ultimate goal and indeed I am using it with an adult learner also. Students have been taught all of the cases and their meanings, but only in the 1st declension. Students have also been taught the endings of the present indicative active in the 1st conjugation, and we have just reached the point where the author has introduced the imperfect tense for the first time. Not surprisingly, things are starting to get a little trickier, but my students are rising magnificently to the task – a testament to the robustness of the course so far.

The author has challenged the students from the beginning when it comes to word order, forcing them to engage with both their verb endings and their case endings. But I was struck in particular by this sentence, in exercise 47:

poetas, ubi appropinquant, feminae agricolarum salutant.

Wow. Even the students were impressed.

After some discussion with my fearless group of three, they deciphered that poetas was accusative and therefore not the place to start. I then encouraged them to look at verb endings and to consider whether they could find a subject. With this relatively light-touch coaching, they were excited to deduce that the subject of the main clause was feminae and that the subordiate clause contained the subject in the verb ending but referred back to the poets. The genitive case gave them no trouble at all. With careful thought but relative ease, they came up with the perfect translation: the farmers’ wives greet the poets when they approach.

So far so unremarkable you might say – although personally, having taught Latin for 21 years, I think it is indeed remarkable the extent to which a robust course such as this one enables students to think like a true Latinist at this early stage. But what happened next was perhaps even more exciting. One of the group said, “why would an author put poetas at the beginning like that, instead of the subject?”

It then occurred to me that Clarke’s course is not only producing better results when it comes to the children’s understanding of the underlying grammatical principles; it is also preparing them for much more complex skills later down the line. Firstly, it is preparing them for literary criticism: why an author chooses to place a word in a particular place is exactly the kind of question that GCSE and A level candidates need to be able to answer in their study of literature. Furthermore, when Clarke uses challenging sentences such as these, he is opening children’s eyes to the challenge of translation at a higher level; as a result of this child’s question, we were able to discuss how a translator might attempt to render the sentence into a format that mimics the emphasis that is expressed in the Latin. I suggested something like “it is the poets that the farners’ wives are greeting, when they approach” and invited the children to critique my suggestion: does it stray too far from the original, or is it in fact more faithful to the text?

Clarke’s course offers some extraordinary opportunities for high-level thinking and dicusssion, even when students are at a very rudimentary level. These students have only met the 1st declension and the 1st conjugation in the present and the imperfect indicative active; beyond that, they’ve met a few adverbs and basic subordinate clauses using words such as ubi and antequam. Yet already they are asking questions that would not be out of place in an A level class. Already they are considering that word placement might be important or significant to a Latin author. Already they are pondering a variety of ways that the spirit of the Latin might rendered in translation, and beginning to realise that translation is not a simple or straightforward task in which you only follow a set of rules. This is, quite frankly, extraordinary.

On the very same day I had a session with a child whose school uses Suburani, a course which has gained popularity in many state schools. This course could not be more different from Clarke’s Latin and its authors are no doubt very happy about that – their philosophy is wildly different. The sentence that got me thinking was in chapter 8. By this point, students have met the present, imperfect and perfect indicative active. They have met only the nominative, accusative and ablative cases but they have seen them in three declensions, including neuter versions. Like with the Cambridge Latin Course, all three declensions and all five conjugations are used from the very beginning of the course due to the desire to create an interesting and varied storyline. Laudable as this might be, in my experience students who struggle with Latin have literally no idea what is going on by this stage.

My tutee was presented with the following sentence:

gentes Britannicas opprimunt Romani

It is not the only and not the first sentence where Suburani has used varied word order, and I like to think that this is a deliberate attempt on the part of the authors to encourage students to look at their verb and noun endings – just the same as Clarke’s course aims to do. However, this process is undermined in so many other ways by the course that my tutee was not able to parse the sentence above (which although it contains nouns and verbs from a wider variety of declensions and conjugations, is actually a good deal more simple than my example from Clarke’s Latin).

The translation that my tutee suggested came as no surprise: “the British tribes oppress the Romans”. This is due to a phenomenon I have written about before, the tendency for students to read from left to right, just as they have been trained to do in their own language. The trouble with Suburani is that it does nothing to break this habit. It might teach students their verb endings, but its constant and excessive use of pronouns in the nominative case encourages them to continue to read from left to right and guess the meaning of the sentence. It was this issue that I wrote about in my previous blog post criticising the course.

Now don’t get me wrong, the mistake made by my tutee is what I would expect any child to do; even my tutees using Clarke’s Latin have to be reminded on occasion not to read in this way – it’s a habit so deeply ingrained that it is nigh-on impossible to break. But students who have been taught using Suburani – when prompted to explain which noun is in the nominative or accusative case – usually find this really difficult. They have been shown too many declensions at once and as a result have found it bordering on impossible to memorise how the noun endings change as they decline. And they’ve only met three cases!

My issues with Suburani go beyond its grammatical faults – criticisms which could just as easily be aimed at the Cambridge Latin Course, for which I retain an undeniable fondness and used (albeit heavily adapted) throughout my career in classroom teaching. Suburani contains material presented in a manner that I consider to be quite frankly inappropriate for younger children, another thing I have written about before. Having reached chapter 8 and encountered a simplified version of Caesar’s account of the Druids’ wicker man, reproduced without critique and in graphic detail (with a nice firey background graphic to boot), I have to ask myself what on earth they thought they were doing. While the Cambridge Latin Course is currently undergoing a re-write and the team has agonised about how to present certain aspects of the ancient world faithfully yet sensitively, the authors at Suburani seem out to create shock and awe. I am disliking it more and more the further I get through it.

The first-letter technique

Yesterday I was reminded during one of my sessions that revisiting the best ideas and the best advice is important.

In today’s blog post I want to share the best and most effective methodology of learning a piece of text off by heart. The method is one used by many actors to learn their lines, and is certainly one that can be used if you or your child takes on a large part on stage. I teach the same method to my tutees as a means of learning the translation of their Latin set texts off by heart, the purpose of which is to make the literature element of the examination super-easy.

Let us take for example the first few lines of Sagae Thessalae, the most commonly-studied prose set text for the current OCR specification for GCSE Latin. Below is the first section of the Latin text, with a suggested translation underneath. It is the translation that your child will need to learn off by heart (not the Latin – that really would be a nightmare!)

iuvenis ego Mileto profectus ad spectaculum Olympicum, cumhaec etiam loca provinciae clarae visitare cuperem,peragrata tota Thessalia Larissam perveni. ac dum urbem pererrans tenuato viatico paupertati meae fomenta quaero.

“As a young man I set out from Miletus for the Olympic Games, since I also wanted to visit these areas of the famous province. Having travelled through the whole of Thessaly, I arrived at Larissa. And while wandering through the city, with my travelling allowance diminished, I was looking for remedies for my poverty.”

To go about learning a section like this, the best thing to do is to break it up into sections and learn it using the first-letter technique. The passage breaks up quite nicely into five short chunks as follows:

As a young man I set out from Miletus for the Olympic Games,

since I also wanted to visit these areas of the famous province.

Having travelled through the whole of Thessaly, I arrived at Larissa.

And while wandering through the city, with my travelling allowance diminished,

I was looking for remedies for my poverty.

Below is a representation of the first-letter technique for these lines. A student writes down the first letter of each word, spaced out in short chunks. Notice that I have used the punctuation – making use of capital letters, commas and full-stops acts as a further trigger for the memory:

While most people will struggle to learn these five sections of prose off by heart, the use of chunking combined with the first-letter technique enables most people to do so within a couple of minutes. Once a student has written out the first chunk in first letters, they should find that they are immediately able to recite the first chunk merely by looking at the letters. They should then repeat the process with the remaining chunks, then try to recite the whole thing, using the letters as a prompt. Within a couple of minutes, their ability to recall the entire passage will be notable. Students can then go on to repeat the process with the remaining text – not too much at once though!

Once a student has mastered the translation of a reasonable amount of text, that’s the time to turn to the Quizlet flashcards. It’s important not to wait too long to do this, as the rote-learning of the English translation will not be much use to a candidate without at least some grasp of how it relates to the Latin. A child who has learnt the translation off by heart should be able to use the flashcards to prompt themselves on each section as follows:

You will notice that I have divided the flashcards into smaller chunks – this is to assist the student in recognising which Latin words and phrases map onto which sections of the translation. There will be some hesitation as a student learns to map their rote-learned translation onto the Latin as represented on the flashcards – but that’s fine. Remember, the rote-learning is merely a prop to assist them in coping with the set text in an examination. It’s very important to move onto the flashcards swiftly, in order to begin the process of making the rote-learned translation do its job of supporting the student in recognising the Latin text.

A student should repeat the flashcards in chronological order until they are fully confident with the translation for each. Once confidence has been gained, it’s then time to hit the shuffle button and see if they can recognise and translate small chunks in isolation – that’s when they can really prove to themselves that they are recognising individual Latin words and phrases and can render them into English.

The whole process might seem arduous when a student first begins, but I have yet to find a student that is not converted to the the system once they realise how effective it is and how much power it gives them over the text. Knowing the text thoroughly is 80% of the battle – and I mean that sincerely. A student should be able to score a pretty good grade in the literature element of the examination simply on the basis of knowing the text really well; many of the questions are comprehension and ask for nothing more than for the student to explain what the text means. Once a student has gained mastery with a section of the text and can perform well on basic comprehension questions, then time can be spent on fine-tuning their response to the text and training them in how to answer the more complex questions, something which I have addressed in other posts.

Romanes eunt domus

Love it or loathe it, you’ve no doubt suffered for your Latin.

This suffering is parodied superbly in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, when the eponymous hero is caught trying to write “Romans, go home” on the walls of the governor’s palace. His encounter with the centurion, like so many of Python’s sketches, satirises the traditional English education system, which its writers and performers were privileged (or perhaps unfortunate) enough to have experienced.

Those of us that have been through the process of robustly traditional Latin teaching can recognise not only the threats and the pressure imposed by the “teacher” in this scene, but also the inescapable fact that traditional Gradgrindian Latin teaching involved the repetitive translation of numerous and apparently nonsensical sentences, with little to no acknowledgement of their actual meaning or indeed their cultural milieu; this is brilliantly parodied by the centurion’s apparent obliviousness to Brian’s purpose, his blind focus on the grammatical corrections and his final insistence that Brian re-write his insult a thousand times. The result, of course, is that the walls of Pontius Pilate’s palace end up covered in Brian’s challenge to Roman authority. At dawn, the centurion seems to realise this and Brian is chased from the scene.

So, to the Latin.

Brian writes Romanes eunt domus, by which he means “Romans, go home!” The centurion points out to him that it does not mean this, but rather something which equates to “people called ‘Romanes’, they go, the house.” So let’s examine the centurion’s corrections.

The Latin for Roman, Romanus, is a 2nd declension masculine noun. When the centurion demands to know what it “goes like” Brian comes up with annus, but you are more likely to have used the paradigm dominus or servus. This is Brian’s first correction, when he remembers that the nominative plural of Romanus is Romani, not Romanes (which would make it a 3rd declension noun). This is why the centurion translates Romanes as “people called ‘Romanes’” – it is a nonsense word in Latin, so is assumed to be an unfamiliar name of an unfamiliar group – something the Romans were quite used to, in fact, and they usually placed foreign words into the 3rd declension, a group in which nouns can end in anything at all in the nominative singular.

The centurion next challenges Brian on the verb eunt, from the horribly irregular ire. Brian is able to conjugate the verb correctly in the present tense and able to identify that eunt is therefore 3rd person plural present indicative. As the centurion points out, however, “Romans, go home!” is an order, so the imperative is required. Brian struggles but eventually comes up with the imperative (i) to which the centurion replies with my favourite line, “HOW MANY ROMANS?” Brian is thus forced to realise that the plural imperative is required: ite. Singular imperatives end with a vowel, plural imperatives with the suffix -te.

At last, we come to the noun domus, where the centurion actually makes a mistake. Brian is challenged to name the case that is used for “motion towards”, as in his statement the Romans are being instructed to go towards their home. He at first comes up with the dative, a common mistake made by students who understandably confuse the indirect object (I give water to the girl) with motion towards (I go to the shops). As so often, it is the English that is confusing, for we use the same word (“to”) for expressing these two very different concepts.

Threatened by the centurion’s sword at this point, Brian comes up with ad domum, which is more or less correct. However, domus is a noun which tends not to follow the preposition ad and is usually placed into the accusative case on its own to express motion towards. Some nouns just work like that. The mistake that the centurion then makes is to insist that Brian identify this case as the locative. While domus does indeed have a locative, this is actually domi and would mean “at home” – it would not be used to express the notion of heading towards home. So the Latin that Brian ends up with (Romani, ite domum) is correct, but the final piece of grammatical reasoning is wrong – domum is accusative, not locative.

I bet you wish you hadn’t asked now.

I have pondered many times whether the Pythons realised their mistake after filming or whether they remained in blissful ignorance. Some particularly ardent fans believe that the mistake was deliberate, as a final joke on the centurion, but I find this a little implausible. Whatever the reason for the error, it does not detract from a highly entertaining and unforgettable scene.