latin – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Curriculum Matters

Why do children study geography but not architecture? Why do they learn algebra but not tax returns? Why is Shakespeare considered essential while countless other writers are ignored? And why have I spent my career sharing knowledge of a language that nobody speaks any more?

The more time one spends in education, the stranger the school syllabus begins to appear. Most of us can remember questioning at least one subject during our own school days. We all sat wondering when exactly we might ever need trigonometry, struggled through poetry we did not understand or questioned the value of learning about oxbow lakes and the savannah. Yet beneath these familiar complaints lies a more interesting question. Why do schools teach the subjects that they teach? The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is history.

It is easy to assume that the modern curriculum is the result of careful planning by education experts. While it contents certainly are debated endlessly and frequently revised, many of the subjects that dominate the school timetable owe their current existence less to educational theory and more to historical accident, social change and centuries-old ideas about what an educated person ought to know. Few examples illustrate this better than Latin.

For much of British history, Latin was not a niche subject on the curriculum of a handful of schools. It was the curriculum in all schools. From the medieval period through to the 19th century, grammar schools existed primarily to teach Latin. The clue is hidden in the name. The “grammar” being taught was not English grammar but Latin grammar. Boys — and it was, overwhelmingly, boys — spent years memorising declensions, translating texts and mastering the language of scholarship, religion, law and government. Ancient Greek followed for the most academically successful.

By modern standards, this is downright peculiar. Why on earth did the system devote so much time to a language that was no longer spoken? Yet for centuries, Latin functioned as the language of educated Europe. Universities taught through it. Scholars published in it. Lawyers, clergymen and statesmen were expected to understand it. Mastering Latin was not an intellectual luxury; it was an essential qualification for participation in educated society.

Even after Latin began to lose its practical utility, it retained cultural prestige. Throughout the 19th century, proficiency in Latin and Greek remained one of the principal gateways to higher education and many professions. Even to this day, I meet people who remain firmly convinced that Latin is compulsory for entry into medicine or the law, when in fact this has not been the case for many, many decades. Classical education has retained its association with intellectual rigour, social status and membership of the elite, but in terms of its universality, the 20th century changed everything.

As education expanded beyond a relatively small privileged class, questions began to emerge about what schools were for. Were they intended to preserve the traditional academic culture? Or were they there to prepare young people for life in a rapidly changing industrial society? The answer increasingly favoured the latter. Science grew in importance, modern languages expanded, technical and vocational subjects gained ground. Latin was in retreat. This period of change is illustrated beautifully in The Browning Version, a play written in the late 1940s and turned into a film starring Michael Redgrave in 1951. In 1994, it was remade again in a version starring Albert Finney as the unpopular Latin teacher of ever-diminishing relevance. It is a deeply, quite agonisingly moving portrayal of a man reflecting upon a life of failure.

Today, Classics as a subject remains highly respected in the schools that teach it, yet only around 2% of state schools offer Latin and still fewer offer ancient Greek. What was once the backbone of the curriculum has become a rare specialist subject, offered to a vanishingly small minority of students. Whether one celebrates or laments that transformation largely depends upon one’s view of what education is for. Most people expect me to wax lyrical about the benefits of my subject, but I feel no need to do so. Instead, I would merely say this: no subject is taught merely for its utility. Most students will not use their mathematics beyond what they are taught in primary school, yet we still consider the acquiring of a mathematics GCSE as essential for all. The vast majority of students will not require a knowledge of the English language beyond the very basics of communication, yet no one would argue that this subject should be discontinued at the secondary level. All subjects lack a practical utility for most of us, yet all of us deserve the opportunity to be exposed to them.

The story of Latin is merely one chapter in a much larger curriculum story. Almost every subject in the modern programme of study arrived there for historical reasons that are far from obvious. Take geography. Today, it is regarded as one of the standard academic disciplines, and is included on the Russell group’s traditional list of facilitating subjects. Yet its prominence owes much to Britain’s history as a maritime and imperial power. Understanding maps, trade routes, resources and distant territories was considered valuable knowledge for a nation whose influence extended across much of the globe. In the 19th century, geography was not merely a subject about rivers and mountains; it was used to teach children about the British Empire and colonial administration. It was about understanding Britain’s place in the world. History followed a similar trajectory. For generations, the subject was often taught as a largely national story, designed in part to foster a sense of shared identity. Modern history teaching has become far broader and more critical (too critical for some), but its origins reveal how closely curriculum design is linked to wider social and political goals. The modern concern to teach our children about the sins of our forefathers is merely the latest iteration of this fact.

English literature offers another fascinating example., for the notion that all educated people should study literary works written in English is surprisingly recent. For centuries, the cultural prestige enjoyed by Latin texts far exceeded that granted to English authors. Shakespeare himself would probably be astonished to discover that generations of schoolchildren now analyse his plays in examination halls, something that we take as a given. The rise of English literature as an academic subject reflected the growing modernist belief that the nation’s culture could be explored through its own language and writers rather than exclusively through Classics.

Modern societies depend upon scientific knowledge and technological innovation, so the scientific curriculum has undergone profound changes in the classroom. Victorian students would scarcely recognise some aspects of today’s programmes of study, while many scientific ideas that were once regarded as essential have long since disappeared from classrooms. The same is true of mathematics. Although few school subjects seem more timeless, the mathematics taught in schools has changed repeatedly according to social and economic needs. Different eras have emphasised arithmetic, geometry, algebra, statistics and problem-solving in varying proportions. The question has never simply been how much mathematics children should learn but which mathematics they should learn.

Perhaps the most dramatic changes, however, can be found among practical subjects. Many readers will remember a time when boys and girls were routinely taught entirely different skills. Boys attended woodwork, metalwork or technical drawing. Girls learned needlework and “domestic science”. Such arrangements reflected assumptions about the adult life that these boys and girls would go on to lead, and now appear grotesquely segregated. When it came to teaching practical skills, schools were preparing children for highly gendered futures. The gradual disappearance of these distinctions, a process that was beginning even when I was at school, tells us a great deal about how society has changed. “Domestic science” evolved into “food technology” (an equally laughable title, in my humble opinion. Can’t we just call it cookery?) Craft subjects expanded into design and technology and children of both sexes learn technical drawing and draughtsmanship. Increasingly, schools have moved away from preparing boys and girls for separate roles and towards providing all students with access to a broader range of knowledge and skills. Hurrah for that.

Even so, debates about practical subjects have never truly disappeared. Every few years somebody asks why schools teach Shakespeare but not personal finance, or why students learn about chemical equations but not mortgages. Such arguments usually generate considerable public support because they appeal to a common-sense view of education. Surely schools should teach things that people will actually use?

This question quickly becomes more complicated than it first appears. The purpose of education has never been simply to provide immediate practical utility. If that were the case, subjects such as history, literature, philosophy, music and art would be impossible to justify, leaving our curriculum grossly impoverished. Schools do not exist merely to prepare children for their first job or their first mortgage application. How depressing would that be? Schools are tasked with introducing the next generation to the accumulated knowledge, culture and intellectual achievements of human civilisation. Hurrah for that also.

The modern curriculum remains the product of countless historical decisions and is currently undergoing yet another review courtesy of our (relatively) new government. At whatever time you look at history, the school curriculum reflects the priorities, anxieties and aspirations of previous generations as much as it reflects the needs of the present one. By the same token, subjects that seem permanent today may not appear nearly so permanent in another hundred years. Perhaps that is the strangest thing about school subjects. We tend to treat them as though they emerged naturally, like mountains or rivers. In reality, every school timetable is a historical document. Every subject occupies its place because somebody, at some point, argued successfully that it mattered.

Byzantine Matters – a tribute to Averil Cameron

Averil Cameron, who died earlier this month, was one of the most transformative figures in the study of the ancient world. Tributes have been paid across multiple publications and her obituary has appeared this week in both The Times and The Guardian.

Not only did Cameron’s scholarship reshape how we understand Byzantium, her very presence in academia was quite remarkable at the time. Born into a modest family in Leek in Staffordshire, the daughter of two factory workers, she did not inherit the cultural capital that usually smoothed the way into Classics at Britain’s most prestigious universities. But Cameron’s parents were supportive and valued education, and she was entered for the 11+ examinations and gained a place at the local grammar school. More than one teacher seems to have spotted her potential and her parents were encouraged by the school to consider preparing her for university. At a time when academia still felt like a closed shop run by the male elite, particularly in fields such as Classics, Cameron found her way in not through entitlement but through sheer intellectual excellence. Mary Beard, a friend of Cameron’s as well as a colleague in the field, has paid tribute to her and credits Cameron’s influence on her own access to the field: her first academic position was granted to her by Cameron.

At a time when women were still wildly under-represented in senior academic roles, indeed a world in which women were regularly taken off academic shortlists to make way for men, Cameron rose to positions of leadership. To give you an idea of the world we are talking about, she was appointed as an assistant lecturer at King’s College, London in the mid 1960s, when the faculty dining room did not admit women. She maintained a steady focus on the work itself rather than the politics and indeed remarked in 2024 that she felt she had published too much, citing an inability to say “no” to any publishing opportunity that came her way. Cameron’s copious output has helped to normalise the centrality of women in spaces and on shelves where their presence had once been the exception. In an era when conversations about access and indeed the very purpose of higher education continue to evolve, Cameron’s contribution offers a truly inspirational model. Furthermore, she was not interested in guarding disciplinary boundaries, but drew on history, theology, literature and cultural studies, long before such an interdisciplinary approach became the norm. In doing so, she helped to broaden the scope of what it meant to study the ancient world, inviting others to see connections that had previously been overlooked.

Cameron’s perspective as a new and fresh pair of eyes on the scene would prove to be one of her strengths as an academe. Rather than simply reproducing the traditional narratives or, as Peter Brown put it, the “debased images of Byzantium” that she inherited, she questioned them. Cameron approached the late antique and Byzantine worlds not as declining remnants of classical greatness (the general approach taken by scholars since Gibbon’s definitive Decline and Fall), but as vibrant, evolving cultures that defined the world to follow. This shift in perspective helped to reshape entire fields of study: where earlier scholars had often dismissed Byzantium as a derivative world in decline, Cameron — along with Peter Brown and a handful of others — helped to reveal its richness and complexity as well as its centrality to understanding the evolution from antiquity to the medieval world. She had a profound influence on me and helped to foster what would become my research focus. The publication of two of her works, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity and The Later Roman Empire, both in around 1993, coincided exactly with my first exposure to this period during my second year of study at university. The rest, as they say, is history.

This tribute would not be complete and I would not be any kind of (albeit ex) academe were I not to ensure that my acknowledgement of Cameron’s academic achievements reflect on me in some way. So here we go. Well, I only met her once, when she interviewed me for a potential place to do a Master’s degree at King’s College, London, when I was still considering which path to take and where to study after my first degree. It was the toughest interview I have ever had: way, way more difficult than the viva I had to undergo to be awarded my PhD, which was barely more than a nice chat. Cameron was absolutely brutal. She considered my record to date with languages woefully inadequate and told me that as things stood I would be ill-equipped to cope with research. She advised me to change the selections I had tentatively made for the next year and focus on building up my language skills if I wanted to stand any kind of chance at furthering my career in academia. I came away pretty upset but with the sneaking and uncomfortable feeling that she was right. In the end, I took her advice and I opted for further training in both Latin and Greek. To this day, I am immensely grateful to her that she told me how things were, not how I would have wanted them to be. Not only was she right about my need for further training, she was proved more and more right the further I travelled down that path. By the time I was half way through my PhD I realised that not only were my Latin and Greek barely sufficient for work at the level demanded, I was also going to struggle due to my lack of French and German; a significant proportion of the scholarship in Classics is published in those languages, which nobody tells you until you get a considerable way down the rabbit hole. Long story short, languages (both ancient and modern) are momumentally important if you’re going to study Classics with any level of seriousness. Aspiring scholars, take heed.

Cameron’s death leaves a gap that will be felt across many fields, but her influence endures in the questions scholars continue to ask themselves, in the frameworks that they use and in the more enlightened vision of academia that she helped to advance. Her journey from modest beginnings to the forefront of intellectual life was not just a personal triumph; it serves as a reminder of what becomes possible when talent is allowed to flourish. Her contribution to scholarship is simply immense.

Cambridge hangovers

The Cambridge Latin Course: love it or hate it, you can’t ignore it. Longterm readers of my blog and listeners of my podcast will be aware that I have been quite critical of the CLC in the past, despite the fact that it did form the backdrop to my classroom teaching for most of my career. While I continued to use the stories (albeit adjusted) and the characters from the course, I moved further and further away from its approach to grammar during my time at the chalkface and rejected its underlying principles (show, don’t tell) pretty early on. Towards the end I had completely re-written the curriculum and had stopped using the text books altogether.

Now, as a full-time tutor, I am increasingly aware of the legacy that the CLC has left Latin teaching and I am genuinely curious to know how long this legacy will last. Whilst many schools have ostensibly stopped using the CLC, its influence on teachers’ approach remains apparent in ways that many of them are perhaps not even aware of. In this blog post I hope to reveal some of the habitual oversights that classroom teachers of Latin are making as a result of what I believe is a hangover from the CLC curriculum.

One key blind spot for classroom teachers aiming to prepare their students for the OCR examination is a failure to teach the verb malo at the same time as they teach volo and nolo. I cannot explain this, other than a legacy of the fact that malo is not taught in the CLC when volo and nolo are taught. Taylor & Cullen introduce malo at the same time (in chapter 7 of their text book), but the overwhelming majority of students that I teach are reasonably well-drilled on volo and nolo but have never been taught the verb malo. Students following the WJEC/Eduqas syllabus do not need to know malo, but those aiming at the OCR examination need to know it, so to miss this tricky verb out of one’s teaching is a major oversight. I believe that this is purely and simply because schools are following curricula that were originally built around the CLC, which makes a big deal out of volo and nolo in Book 2, but never mentions malo.

Another legacy from the CLC which I have written about before is the decision to teach the purpose clause before the indirect command. It was many years ago now when it suddenly hit me what a massive mistake this was. I asked myself why students were so wedded to the habit of translating ut as “in order to” whenever they see it and realised that it is because this is how they first see it and after that they can’t let it go. I have yet to meet 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 genuinely fascinating. Every single Latin teacher seems to assume that it is a good idea to teach the purpose clause first, and I believe that the all-pervasive influence of the Cambridge Latin Course is partly to blame. Even Taylor & Cullen do in Latin to GCSE: despite mixing up the approach taken by the CLC (they teach ut clauses first, leaving cum clauses and the indirect question until later), they still take the decision to teach purpose clauses first. In my experience, this is a massive error, and leaves students convinced that ut always means “in order to” when in fact it only means this when it’s used in a purpose clause.

My final grammar-based concern when it comes to school curricula being based around the legacy of the CLC is that teachers are still teaching the perfect active participle as if it is a broad grammar feature. This is done in the CLC, which for some extraordinary reason introduces PAPs towards the beginning of Book 3, long before deponent verbs are even mentioned in Book 4. Students really struggle as a result, since they form the understandable belief that the perfect active participle is a grammar feature that is common to all verbs. They thus struggle with the concept that most verbs have a perfect passive participle because they have not been taught that perfect active participles only exist because of deponent verbs. I have to spend a great deal of time unpicking students’ misapprehensions and misconceptions about this, teaching them in detail about deponent verbs and their features and then mapping this onto their participle. It takes so much time to dispel these misunderstandings, which would never be there in the first place were schools to adjust the curriculum to introduce the perfect active participle solely as a feature of deponent verbs.

It is genuinely fascinating to observe the fallout from text book use and to be able to identify where students’ misconceptions are coming from as a direct result of the curriculum that many schools are adhering to. I do find it worrying that so few schools are asking themselves why they are using text books that are not built around the examination that their students are aiming at, not least because the vocabulary in those text books is quite often a monumental waste of time. While the 5th edition of the CLC goes some way towards addressing this, it doesn’t solve the problem entirely and too much of its old stucture and principles remains for the problem to be solved in its entirety.

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.

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.

Who needs decent resources?

It is an absolute miracle. For the first time in the history of the subject, a publisher has produced a complete Anthology, containing all of the OCR GCSE Latin set texts for examination in 2027 and 2028. In an unprecedented move, someone has had the ground-breaking idea of actually publishing the resources that OCR wish teachers to teach and children to study. Such radical thinking can only be attributed to a stroke of genius.

Previously, it may surprise non-specialists to know, only some of the GCSE Latin literature texts were published in a modern format and only some of those publications were formally ratified by OCR. What an incredible leap of imagination it must have taken for the intelligentsia behind the wheel at OCR to think of the idea of a published Anthology of all the texts that they have selected, in the fancy modern format of a book! To be fair, they have been very busy coming up with their dramatic new rebrand, an imminent name switch from “OCR” to “Cambridge OCR”, billed in an email they sent me this week as “an exciting change”. Fundamentally, it means that a group currently called OCR, which stands for “Oxford, Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts” will now become “Cambridge Oxford, Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts”. I hope that’s clear.

Anyway, back to the majestic leap of imagination that is the new Latin Anthology. Not only has someone printed the texts out, they have even glued the pages together! It really is quite the thing. And get this. You can buy it through the publisher, you can buy it through bookstores, you can even buy it on Amazon! Did you know that you can purchase books on Amazon? Imagine my excitement. What relief and joy this publication will bring! Obviously, it will be aimed at students, will it not? Or perhaps aimed rather at teachers, as a complete preparation tool? I was breathless with anticipation. However, within five minutes of glancing through my much-anticipated purchase, it became apparent that this Anthology was an attempt at both of these things and a success at neither.

The first thing to note about the publication is the distinctly bizarre “endorsement statement” from OCR (soon to be Cambridge OCR) at the beginning. It states that while “the teaching content of this resource is endorsed by OCR” (for which I read that they’ve managed to select the correct bits of the text) we are told that “all references to assessment, including assessment preparation and practice questions of any format/style, are the publisher’s interpretation of the specification and are not endorsed by OCR.” Erm, okay. There follows some further language of accountability avoidance that goes on for quite some time, but the general gist is a clear and rather anxiety-inducing attempt by the board to distance themselves from the statement printed on the front cover, which is that the book is “endorsed by OCR”. Does this even happen in other subjects?! Maybe it does, but it seems distinctly odd. Either the book is endorsed or it isn’t, surely?

Things then get worse. The preface and “how to use this book” both seem to slide and shift constantly between the implication that the resource is aimed at teachers for preparation purposes and that it is aimed at students as a workbook. The result of this apparent attempt at dual purpose (or perhaps confusion/indecision as to the purpose at all), is unsurprising: the Anthology fails in its attempt to achieve either of these things. Whether this is the fault of the publisher or the authors is impossible to tell, but it really is a tangible fail.

So far, I have only worked through the Virgil text (extracts from Book II of the Aeneid), and I am already half way to despair. Firstly, despite its promise in the preface to students and non-specialist teachers that the book “aims primarily to help readers understand what the Latin means” there is one rather glaring omission. The authors do not provide an English translation of the texts. For the love of God, why not?! As a friend and fellow tutor put it to me in a message last week, “If [OCR are] going to be so picky as to what they allow … they might as well provide [a translation] and put everyone out of their misery.” Exactly this. In mark schemes over the years I have frequently seen phrases such as “do not accept [perfectly legitimate translation of the word in my reasonably well-informed opinion]”. So, teachers are still expected to somehow divine what it is that examiners will and will not consider to be an acceptable translation of every single word and phrase in every single text. It is genuinely exhausting and I simply do not understand why we have to play this game every single year. Just give us the translation that you approve of, for crying out loud.

The authors’ (or perhaps OCR’s) decision not to provide a translation causes further, compounding inadequacies in their notes, since they frequently fail to give sufficient thought to their suggestions for the translation of individual words. For example, they suggest the translation “waves” for both undas and fluctus, when those two words occur very close together and surely need differing translations to avoid confusion and to mimic the original Latin; in the same lines, the authors provide “raised” for the participle arrecta, then “rise above” for superant, which comes very soon after it. Following their instructions, this would render the lines:

pectora quorum inter fluctus arrecta iubaeque
Their chests raised above the waves and their blood-red crests

sanguinae superant undas.
rising above the waves.

Not only does this fail to do Virgil any kind of justice, it lacks clarity for the novice reader. The authors’ failure to sit down and decide how they would render a full and competent translation of the lines in their entirety (a task which will be asked of the 16-year-old novices who will be examined on this text) leads inevitably to some thoroughly confusing suggestions on their part for the translation of individual words. This is merely one example, but I found multiple cases throughout the Anthology which evidenced this lack of coordinated thinking.

In addition to the conspicuous omission of an approved translation and the knock-on effect that this has on the notes, the notes are disappointing in other ways. While some of them provide useful textual support, there have been times when I have wanted to wail in frustration. My exasperation stems from the authors’ palpable lack of clarity about the purpose of this Anthology, their inability to decide their target audience. Here is just one example of what I mean: at the end of the first section of the Virgil text, Aeneas claims reluctance to recount the painful story of how the Greeks sacked Troy. He says, quamquam animus meminisse horret luctuque refugit, incipiam: “although my mind shudders to remember and recoils in grief, I shall begin.” I would love someone to explain to me the purpose of the facing note in the Anthology, which relates to the final word of this section: it says, “what tense is incipiam?” Ugh. Obviously, I can tell you what tense incipiam is, because I am a Latin teacher: I do not need help with recognising the future tense. But if I were needing help with this (for example, if I were a student, or if I were a non-specialist who was wrestling with the material), then what is the point of asking me a question to which I may not know the correct answer? This is exactly the kind of infuriatingly pointless annotation that is useful to precisely nobody. For a subject expert, it is superfluous; for a novice, it is maddeningly unhelpful.

I am honestly quite a cheerful person, with a positive outlook. Yet, with so many people in institutions that have power and influence over my own working life so unrelentingly mediocre at what they do, it is becoming increasingly difficult to remain sanguine.

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.

Latin language GCSE

Tomorrow the several thousand students studying Latin across the UK will sit their language examination. The Boards clearly collaborate when it comes to exam timetabling, so both OCR and Eduqas/WJEC have their Latin language examinations on the timetable tomorrow, both of them setting a paper that lasts and hour and a half.

Having worked with both Boards for three years now and having worked proactively through the existing past papers for both Boards in somewhat obsessive detail, I consider myself something of an expert on the quirks of each. Broadly, the Boards take a markedly different approach to examination, although they have a couple of interesting quirks in common. For example, both Boards seem somewhat obsessed with candidates noticing whether or not an adjective is in the superlative, including when that superlative is irregular. Personally, I don’t really understand why it is so crucially important that candidates translate plurimi as “very many” rather than just “many”, but for whatever reason, both Boards are very keen on it. Neither Board lists the irregular comparatives and superlatives as separate vocabulary, which given their obsession with their accurate translation seems a drastic oversight to me.

The language exam for OCR has a much longer history than Eduqas, which is the relatively new kid on the block for Latin. Those who taught the subject prior to the examination reforms in 2018 will understand why the OCR paper is divided into two sections, which bear no relation to each other: Section A represents what used to be Paper 1 and Section B what used to be Paper 2: the Board have simply merged what used to be two language papers into one, which I remember thinking at the time was quite extraordinarily lazy and has made for the current exam seeming bizarrely disjointed. Section A, worth 30 marks, consists of a 16-mark comprehension, a 4-mark derivatives question and then a choice between some grammar questions based on the comprehension passage or three English to Latin sentences. I always advise candidates to attempt the grammar questions as these are relatively straightforward (although considerably harder than the ones on the Eduqas paper). The grammar questions are quite ridiculously predictable and it is easy to drill even the weakest candidates to get full marks or close to full marks on this section. Section B of the OCR paper starts with a completely new story and contains a longer comprehension followed by a translation, which is worth 50% of the candidates’ overall marks. Section B is considerably harder than Section A and candidates do need to be aware that 50% of their overall mark is represented by that final translation passage.

Eduqas takes a completely different approach, one which followed the spirit of traditional “momentum” tests of old: the same storyline is maintained throughout most of the paper (which seems much more sensible), and what is labelled “Section A” is 90% of the paper: it consists of a short passage for comprehension, two short passages for translation and then a longer comprehension at the end; because the story is continuous, candidates benefit from completing the paper in order. Section B is worth only 10% and consists of a choice between some English into Latin sentences or some quite remarkably simple grammar questions, based on a very short and very simple passage of Latin, which is not even close to the complexity of the rest of the paper. As for OCR, the grammar questions are repetitive and predictable, thus it is easy once again to drill candidates to gain full marks on this section.

One notable quirk of Eduqas, and it is one I dislike, is that they seem particularly keen on candidates being able to follow the story. The reason I dislike this is I feel it advantages students who come from a background of traditional schooling, who may know the story involved. Candidates are often asked to infer things that are not actually contained in the passage and I find this unfair as those who have spent time in the prep school system or know the ancient stories from general interest may well find themselves better off. Another thing I dislike about the way that Eduqas examines candidates is that it uses a huge number of multiple choice questions, many of which seem specifically designed to trick candidates. They will, for example, encourage candidates to select the wrong meaning of words that are easy to mix up. That said, their approach to derivatives is much more benevolent: OCR seem ludicrously wedded to the idea of forcing candidates to define the meaning of the derivative they select, which I simply do not understand. I generally dislike questions about derivatives as again I feel they disadvantage candidates from certain backgrounds; they certainly disadvantage those for whom English is their second language, especially if that language is not European.

I am reaching the point where I know the vocabulary lists pretty well for both Boards, and there is roughly a 90% crossover. If anything, Eduqas has more words that are easy to mix up due to its inclusion of adiuvo (often confused with audio) and pareo (often confused with paro). That said, OCR included the word liber (book) as well as liberi (children), whereas Eduqas only has the latter. Both Boards have both iacio and iaceo, a nightmare to distinguish, and they also both have puto as well as peto, neco as well as nescio. All of these are regular traps that candidates fall into. When it comes to irregular verbs, OCR has more of these and includes the particularly awkward verb malo, which in my experience is massively undertaught in schools, which all focus on volo and nolo (as per the Cambridge Latin Course) and do not appear to teach malo discretely at all. Eduqas do not included it on their list.

As candidates make their final preparations for the exam one can only hope, as ever, that we have prepared them for the relevant pitfalls to the best of our ability. Michael Gove once said that he wanted to eliminate teachers’ ability to teach to the test but I’m afraid he has failed dismally in that department. While results continue to matter, teachers will continue to prepare candidates for the specific exam that they are facing. Not to do so would be sheer negligence.