latin – Page 5 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Why is Latin difficult?

Latin has something of a reputation. Everyone thinks it’s difficult and indeed it is. But so is mathematics and so is any language once you get beyond “bonjour, je m’appelle Alain”. Grammar is difficult and still not explicitly taught in our own language to the degree that it is in many other countries.

So why do some children struggle with Latin over and above anything else?

One reason is the unfamiliar territory that the language presents to family and friends. Many parents and guardians feel able to offer some kind of support to their children in the majority of subjects, certainly in the early years. I work with many families who are thoroughly involved when it comes to the children’s homework and it’s true that many children benefit from adult support in their studies at home – during lockdown, this took on a whole new importance. Lots of families employ me because they care about their children’s studies and feel ill-equipped to support them due to their own lack of knowledge, and with only around two and a half percent of state schools currently offering Latin on their timetable, I don’t anticipate the situation changing in a hurry. As a result of the fact that so few people have any experience of Latin as a subject, it maintains a certain mystique, all feeding into its reputation for being inaccessible and challenging.

Furthermore, and at the risk of stating the obvious, Latin is an ancient language – and a dead one. What that means quite simply is that nobody speaks it any more. As a result, the content of what you are translating will often seem obscure to you, due to the fact that the world has changed rather a lot. The ancient world was very different from ours and much of what went on even in the most mundane aspects of daily life can seem unfamiliar or even bizarre. Add to this the fact that a lot of the time students will be looking at stories from ancient myths or founding legends and we’re in a whole new world of weirdness. This inescapable fact is captured rather brilliantly in this little meme, which has been circulating the internet for as long as I can remember:

The thing is, children generally like the weirdness and indeed the darkness. If you think that youngsters don’t like dark stories then explain the thundering success of an author such as Patrick Ness. Generally, children are not put off by the puzzling nature of what they are translating; but it certainly can contribute to their belief that the material is obscure.

So, we’ve dealt with Latin’s reputation and we’ve established that the inherent fact of it being an ancient, dead language may make it potentially difficult to access. On top of that lies the inesecapable fact that Latin as a language is very different from our own. The most important thing to understand about Latin is that it is a heavily inflected language. This means that word formation matters, but we’re not just talking about spelling here: we’re talking about the fact that the very meaning of a word is adjusted by its formation. In inflected languages, words are modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, voice, number, gender and mood. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation and this will be familiar to students of all languages. However, in Latin (and in other heavily inflected languages such as German) nouns are inflected too, as are adjectives, participles, pronouns and some numerals. The inflection of nouns is called declension.

What blows students’ minds the most, in my experience, is how this inflection translates into English and how the rendering of that translation can be confusing. For example ad feminam means “to the woman” but in the sense of “going towards”. I might use it in a sentence such as “the boy ran over to the woman”. However, feminae can also mean “to the woman”, but this time in the sense of giving something to: so I might use it in a sentence such as “I gave a gift to the woman”. And that’s before we’ve even explored the fact that we also use the word “to” when forming our infinitive “e.g. “the woman likes to run”). Trying to unpick why grammatically different concepts sound the same in English is just one tiny example of a myriad of misconceptions that children can be carrying around in their own head.

Misunderstandings can arise everywhere. Imagine I’m in front of a class and I say “the dative case can be translated as “to” or “for” in English. Pretty clear, right? But if you were hearing a teacher say this rather than reading it, I wonder if you might have heard “the dative case can be translated as “two” or “four” in English.” I discovered this misconception once and it exemplifies perfectly why dual coding (providing a visual representation of what you are explaining, ideally formed in real time) is essential when it comes to grammatical explanations. What’s great about one-to-one tutoring is these kinds of misconceptions can be uncovered and rectified.

Due to its inflection, many Latin words can be difficult to recognise as they decline or conjugate, and this brings us to what many students can find the most disheartening aspect of the subject: vocabulary learning. If a student has worked hard to learn the meaning of a list of words, imagine their disappointment and frustration when this effort bears no fruit for them. A child may have learnt that “do” means “give”. Yet will they recognise “dant”, “dabamus” or “dederunt” as parts of the same verb? Without explicit instruction and support, probably not. This can be really depressing for students and can result in them giving up altogether. It’s also why parental support with vocabulary learning can only take a student so far. That’s where a tutor can help.

Furthermore, due to the inflection of the language, a Latin sentence has to be “decoded” rather than read from left to right – breaking the habit of reading from left to right is something I have written about before and it is without a doubt one of the biggest barriers to students’ progress in my experience. Working on this and supporting students with their ability to tackle each Latin sentence in the right way forms much of what I do as a tutor. Even when a child has worked hard to learn all of their noun endings and all of their verb endings, they still need a huge amount of support and scaffolding to show them how to process these and map them onto what they are translating.

I remain unsure whether Latin really is any harder than any other subject. I believe that its reputation is mainly to do with the fact of its obscurity and how few people have the ability to access it. While this remains the case, however, the demand for support and tutoring will always be high.

Why study Latin?

Despite my many years in this subject and the hundreds or even thousands of times I have been asked this question, I am always surprised by it. On the one hand people know that Latin is considered worthy of study by the most prestigious and elite schools in the country; on the other, they don’t see the point of it. Why on earth would institutions such as Eton College waste their time on a subject with little to no inherent value? It would seem surprising.

The worthiness of one’s subject is not something that a maths or an English tutor usually has to defend. Most people accept the need for these subjects, but most people – it seems to me – fail to ask themselves why. When pushed, they will usually respond that numeracy and literacy are essential life skills. They are right, of course. Yet still, I would argue, this affords no justification for the current state of affairs, which is that those subjects must be taken to GCSE level. When – assuming you’re not an architect or an engineer – was the last time you made use of your geometry? What about algebra? Have you recently been asked to compare and contrast two 20th century poems? No? I thought not.

The truth is that most subjects are “useless” to most of us, beyond the most basic of levels. Unless we enter a sphere in which a knowledge of those subjects is required – and most of us don’t – the knowledge we learn beyond the most rudimentary of functional skills is all of the higher order, not essential for survival in “the modern world” or indeed the ancient one. Yet these subjects are of immense value. The same goes for Latin.

Studying Latin helps with so many other languages. As the root of all Romance languages, it can help you find cognates when there appear to be none in the English language. For example:

Latin	English	French	Italian	Spanish
arbor	tree	arbre	albero	arbol
pes	foot	pied	piede	pie

Ah, I hear you cry – so what of it? Why study the dead language and not just its living derivations, noting the similarities between those languages as one acquires them? Well, the study of Latin is of value precisely because it’s a dead language – this means that it is taught to be read, not spoken, taught entirely through its grammatical rules, not conversational usage. Learning Latin promotes an understanding of the mechanics and structure of language. Someone who has studied Latin can use it to grasp the rudiments of any language – not just the “Romance” languages which have their origins in Latin but also others such as German and Polish, which have complex inflection like Latin does.

Latin also improves and enriches your English vocabulary. If your job is a sinecure, should you quit? If something is indubitable, what is it? What exactly is juxtaposition? (Most trained English teachers get this one wrong). What is an expatriate? Would you consider yourself to be audacious? These words are all easy to deduce if you know your Latin.

Modern sciences began their development about 500 years ago, when all (yes, all) scholars studied Latin and Greek, so the technical terms in biology, chemistry, physics and astronomy therefore derive from Latin and/or ancient Greek. To take one example: trees that lose their leaves in winter are described as deciduous — not an easy word, unless you know your Latin. A Latinist also understands why the plural of fungus is fungi and the singular of bacteria is bacterium.

Beyond the sciences, Latin is also the language of law and government — all legal and many political terms are lifted straight from the Latin. Here are just a few examples that you may have heard of … referendum; veto; habeas corpus; subpoena (pronounced suppeener); in loco parentis; de facto; de iure; caveat emptor; pro bono; quorum; quid pro quo; ad hominem; non sequitur.

Still not convinced? Well, learning Latin enables you to read the great Roman writers, from Virgil to Cicero. These men lie at the head of the western tradition in writing from Chaucer to Shakespeare, from Milton to Keats and beyond. When it comes to understanding English, Irish and American literature, a knowledge of Roman literature puts you at an incalculable advantage over other students; I genuinely struggle to comprehend how anyone can study Western literature at a high level without this knowledge. If you think you understand Milton and you haven’t read Virgil in the original Latin … then I’m afraid you don’t really understand Milton.

There is a reason why Latin is highly respected by the top universities and has one of the strongest recruitment rates in business and commerce as well as in the law and in politics. Latin teaches you to think precisely and analytically and develops your intellectual rigour. This, combined with the fact that no one can even begin to understand the purposes and merits of Western culture without a grasp of its Classical origins, makes the study of Latin a sine qua non.

How to get the most out of your online tutor

Online tuition is potentially life-changing; transcending geographical barriers, it can connect your child to the perfect provider. Since the experiences that we all endured during lockdown in 2020 and at the beginning of 2021, I have found that everyone is suddenly on board with online tuition. I rarely meet a new client who doesn’t think that it’s a viable option, this is dramatic contrast to what I found even as recently as 2019.

I am a cautious technophile, who places high demands on technology to work pretty much “by magic” – I don’t like wrestling with equipment and I get mightily exasperated when I have to. Yet with the kind of apparatus and software that so many of us have access to these days, I have been delighted to find that the technical hassles are minimal.

However … (you knew there was a “however” coming, right?) … there are certain pitfalls to online tuition, some downsides compared to face-to-face tutoring, which parents and guardians should be aware of. Happily, they are largely avoidable with a little bit of planning. Never forget: you’re paying for a service, and tuition with an experienced, qualified teacher doesn’t come cheaply. Don’t let the fact that you access online tuition in the comfort of your own home lull you into taking it that little bit too casually, or you may well find you get a poor return on your investment.

Is your equipment up to the job?
For online tutoring, there’s no escaping the fact that you will need reliable, fast internet access: this is a must. Whatever software your tutor chooses to use, they will be talking to your child in real time on the web – this is very demanding on whatever service you are using, so a poor WiFi connection or painfully slow broadband will scupper the session. Use this speed test to check whether your service is up to the job: click “Go” and wait for it to measure the speed. If your either your download or your upload speed is less than 5-10 Mbps then you might have problems: remember that online tutoring is a conversation, two people talking over the internet in real time, so the speed simply has to be there in both directions. If a clients is experiencing a temporary slow-down (it happens to a client I have in Cornwall on occasion) I suggest turning cameras off, which although not ideal does usually enable the conversation to continue.

You need to think about how your child will communicate with the tutor. Integral cameras, microphones and speakers are usually fine, but experiment with supplementary equipment if your child struggles to concentrate – students wearing headphones, for example, often find it easier to avoid distraction and focus on the session. Speaking of focus …

Session location: is your child in the right place?
Aren’t iPads wonderful? Many of my tutees access tuition via an iPad or similar tablet, and the advantages are obvious. However, don’t let the freedom that an iPad offers you detract from the fact that your child needs a quiet place to concentrate. If you’re having a conversation, cooking or hoovering in the background, not only are you distracting your child but you may cause noise interference to the extent that the tutor will really struggle to hear them. If your child is wearing headphones, that will help them to zone out the sounds around them but the same will not be true for the tutor – most microphones will pick up a great deal of extraneous sound, and the effect can become close to unbearable for the tutor if people are talking or using household appliances in the background during a session.

Ideally, your child should be in a quiet room where they won’t be interrupted by noise or curious siblings. You may wish to be present while your child is being tutored for safeguarding reasons; this is fine, but you should prepare to do something quiet such as reading book. Alternatively, and if the only reason you wish to be present is for monitoring, you could consider recording the sessions – many of the platforms used by online tutors allows for this option.

There has been some recent anxiety on social media re. the safety of Zoom and similar platforms. The package works on closed meetings and the only way that an unsolicited third party could join a meeting is if the link to a meeting is shared online. If your tutor shares the link for each session with you and you alone, there should be nothing to worry about, but you should talk to your tutor about their safeguarding policy. Personally, I only use the “recurring meeting” function with adults; with minors, I schedule a unique Zoom link afresh for every single session with every single child. While this creates a little extra admin at my end every week, I believe that it is worth it in order to mitigate against the risk of a reusable link being accidentally shared with third parties.

Session timings: is your child ready?
If your child finds it difficult to get out of bed, you will need to think carefully about how to manage a morning session. I have tutored students on a mid-morning that have clearly just rolled out of bed; dazed and groggy, they are not even close to being fully awake and this means (of course) that their focus is poor. So, even if your child is entering that inevitable phase when wake-up time becomes something of a battle, do try to peel them out of bed well before the session is due to start, allowing time for them to have a shower and something to eat. They then have a fighting chance of their mind being on the tuition session ahead, not still under the duvet.

One of the great joys of online tuition is the time that it can save you. Some clients that are near enough to me to come for home tuition have still opted to go online; I am based in a heavily-populated area of Surrey and the reality of rush-hour traffic can turn even a 5-mile round trip into a potential nightmare. Online tutoring can open up a wider range of possibilities when it comes to time: take advantage of this and make it work for your child.

One final thing …
Your child is smart! They know that an online tutor’s field of vision is significantly limited compared to a tutor that’s in the room with them. So what do you know? They may well try to use their phone during the session, or to access other apps or websites on the machine they are using. So, especially if your child is currently preoccupied with a particular game or social networking app, do make sure that they leave their phone with you for the duration of the session and do check that they have closed down all their other apps and messaging services.

felis cattus

From rat-catcher to prized pet?

Clients and followers of mine cannot help but be aware of my two cats, who make regular unscheduled appearances on a whim. These two characters are not the first cats I have owned and I strongly suspect they will not be the last. I am a huge fan of all animals, including dogs, and understand the benefits of dog ownership. But for me, the effort versus reward ratio when it comes to owning a pet really peaks with a cat. They let themselves in and out (it’s okay, they’ve got their own keys). Broadly speaking, they look after themselves and they certainly do what they fancy. They hang out with you if they want to but not if they don’t. In many ways, they show us all how life should be done: on your own terms, with no stress and no angst.

The Epicureans were a group of ancient philosophers who argued that the purpose of life was not so much the pursuit of pleasure (they weren’t hedonists in the true sense) but rather the avoidance of distress; one of their many radical philosophical positions was that the gods exist purely as a model for how to live – they exert no influence over human life and take no interest in it, since their existence served no purpose other than to demonstrate how “the good life” is lived. For me, this model is embodied in the domestic cat. And yes, we do worship them don’t we?

The familiar domestic cat, or felis cattus to give its official Latin name, is descended from the wild cats that went through a gradual process of taming, first in the ancient Near East and then later – and perhaps most famously – in Egypt. It is believed that a mutually beneficial relationship between humans and cats started to develop in the near East around 9,000 years ago, when wildcats began frequenting farm buildings to prey on the rodents that were attracted to grain stores. However, cats did not undergo anything like the level of human intereference that we see in dogs, meaning that their breeding was not as selective and the varieties of cat nothing like as broad. I sometimes look at a Great Dane meeting a small terrier when out on a walk and genuinely wonder whether they recognise each other as the same species. But your kitty is not much different from its ancestors. Researchers have extracted mitochondrial DNA (passed down the maternal line) from feline remains that came from Viking graves, Egyptian mummies and Stone Age sites. We can trace our domestic cat all the way back through the line.

A second wave of domestication happened in ancient Egypt around 4,000 years ago. Cats then spread to Europe during the Roman era so, as I never tire of reminding my students, we have the Romans to thank for bringing us cats (along with apples, pears, grapes, turnips, carrots, peas, cabbages, chickens, wine … etc etc etc). The Vikings then spread cats even further, with Egyptian cat DNA being found in a Viking port, suggesting cats were carried on maritime trading routes to northern Europe. But why?

Well, cats were probably taken on ships to help protect the supplies against rodents. While it is thought that some cats may have been moved around as a result of lucky (or unlucky?) raftings, most academics believe that evidence is strong for the deliberate use of cats as a means of pest control. They certainly weren’t taken as pets.

The Romans in particular liked cats for their efficiency at catching rodents. Cats were indeed so good at it that the Roman army took cats along with them on campaigns to safeguard their food supplies. Rats also chew on wood and leather, which made them a threat to Roman armour and equipment, so to prevent loss of food, damage to crucial apparatus and to combat the spread of disease, cats were a secret weapon for the Roman army. I like to think that they were also appreciated as companions for the soldiers, but I’ll place a bet that this is a fantasy.

The Romans did also regard cats as worthy of mythical symbolism, not least as a result of their admiration of all things Egyptian. Cats were the only animals allowed inside Roman temples (I mean … have you tried stopping one? The Romans were a pragmatic bunch, if nothing else). Cats were thought to embody independence and freedom and the Roman goddess Libertas is often depicted with a cat. There are several tales of goddesses, most notably Diana, transforming themselves into cats, a divine ability that I envy immensely.

Interestingly, at Pompeii, the number of cat bones from excavated deposits is relatively low, and no cats are among the casts of creatures discovered in the town. It has been suggested that in this provincial town, destroyed in AD 79, there was perhaps not yet a fashion for keeping cats as pets, though it had already taken off in Rome. Despite the relatively small number of remains, there are depictions of cats that survive in the remains at Pompeii, including two mosaics in the House of the Faun, which are pictured within this blog post.

Much greater numbers of cat bones are found in later archaeological deposits in Roman Naples and by the mid to late 4th century AD, the presence of cat bones from excavated sites throughout the empire shows that cats had become a common feature of Roman domestic life.

A final amusing snippet that I have unearthed just goes to show what a right royal fool the Elder Pliny was. Apologies if I am offending any Pliny fans here, but honestly: for a man who supposedly spent his time making observations, he really was phenomenally dense. In his Natural Histories, Pliny has the following suggestion for how to use cats to protect your grain supplies: “mice are kept away by the ashes of a cat being steeped in water and then thrown upon the seed, or alternatively use the water in which the body of a cat has been boiled.” Okay, Pliny. Ever thought about making use of the cat while it’s still alive to catch the little blighters?

No? Okay, then. Go ahead and boil it.

One-to-one tuition

What is the benefit of working one-to-one with a student, and why does it trump group work every time? This is a question I have been pondering this week, as I listened to two podcasts aimed at private tutors, both released on the same day, both making the case for tutors like me to make the shift into setting up groups for online tuition. The podcasts were great. The group tuition model? I’m not so sure.

With the explosion of online tutoring into what amounts to one of the fastest-growing corners of the gig economy, I find myself and my recent career-change somewhat on trend. As usual, however, I also discover that I am swimming steadfastly against the tide. Well, thank goodness for that; being in the zeitgeist is definitely not something I’m used to and I’m more of a heckler than a celebrity.

Many online tutors are expanding their businesses into groupwork, to the extent that some are abandoning the one-to-one tuition model altogether. The reason seems obvious; as one parent pointed out to me when they first got in touch to seek help for their daughter, I could make a lot more money if I worked with several students in each slot. This does, of course, rely on there being a high-enough demand for a certain kind of tuition at a particular level: to be frank, in my rather niche subject – taught in only around 2.5% of state schools – I am not sure that’s ever going to be the case. I do have one group of three, which arose because a parent contacted me directly with the request that I work with three children of the same age who were all ab initio and wanted to learn together: in that circumstance, with three friends at the same level who are all keen to start a new project together, the model works very well and I’m enjoying it. But with remedial tutoring (by which I mean the process of supporting a student who has come to you because they are struggling), I have serious doubts. Firstly, I doubt that demand is high enough in my subject but secondly – and I am still idealistic enough to say more importantly – I do not believe that group tuition is a good model when it comes to making that kind of difference to an individual child’s progress.

One of the absolute joys in switching from classroom teaching to one-to-one tutoring is the incredible privilege of taking a child from the bottom of their class to the top. Taking a child who is failing and turning them into one who can achieve the highest of grades. Taking a child who hates your subject and turning them into a GCSE candidate. Taking a child who has been hiding at the back of their classroom for so long that they need a huge amount of coaching and coaxing before they find their feet. One parent told me that their child was coming home in tears after their Latin lessons because they simply had no idea what was going on in the class and had no idea how to access the learning; after working with me, that child went on to choose the subject at GCSE and achieve a very good grade. One of the client reviews I am proudest of reads “you have turned despair and dismay into enjoyment and enthusiasm”. Another says simply “your lessons were transformational.” None of this could be achieved without the one-to-one model. I stand by that. I simply cannot accept that you can take a child who is failing dismally in a subject and get them a top grade without working with them closely as an individual. It’s what tutoring is all about.

I have written before about the power of tuition and the overwhelming benefit which comes from the opportunity to delve in and unpick a student’s understanding – or rather their lack of it. A good tutor will uncover a whole raft of small misconceptions or gaps in a student’s knowledge within the first session. I likened a student’s developing knowledge of a subject to a wall; students who come to a tutor for help have often got bricks throughout that wall that are either misshapen or missing altogether, causing the whole structure to be at risk of collapse. One-to-one tutoring diagnoses the problems, finds the missing bricks and provides the repointing, replacement and reinforcement required. No amount of rhetoric will ever convince me that the same can be done in a small group. Of course, small group-work is great and you can achieve much more than can be achieved with a class of 30; but it still can’t beat the one-to-one model.

Quiet students can often suffer the most in the mainstream classroom – they can fall behind without being noticed or can have enormous potential in a subject – again, without being noticed. A good tutor (and indeed a good classroom teacher) is an excellent reader of body language. I’ve thought a lot in my work about non-verbal cues, those tiny indications that an individual student can give off when they’re not following something – a twitch of the mouth, a furrow of the brow. In a one-to-one session, that’s my cue to pause and rewind and it’s an absolute joy to be able to do so. In the classroom, not only did I not have the time to respond to every non-verbal cue but the reality of a large class meant that I more than likely missed the majority of them. Due to a quirk of timetabling which I won’t bore you with, I once ended up with an extra Year 9 class of 5 students. Yep. Five. I had another group of 24 and yet another of 28 and one of 5. Ask the previous Head why that ridiculous situation arose. Of course, the children in the group of five progressed – on average – better than those in the two larger groups. But it still wasn’t one-to-one tuition and they still didn’t progress as well as they would have done had each of them – in some kind of fantasy parallel universe – had a good private tutor as well.

I have no desire to stand in the way of progress and if enough online tutors are finding that there is enough demand for small-group tuition in their subject and can get decent results with that model then good luck to them. For me – and this is perhaps because I have spent far longer at the chalkface than any other professional tutor I have met so far, I do not believe my heart will ever be in it. I came into tutoring in the sure and certain belief that the one-to-one model is absolutely unbeatable when it comes to building a child’s confidence, tackling misconceptions, breaking down the mindset that they “can’t do it” and launching them onto a new path of success.

For me, nothing else will ever be as rewarding as that.

WJEC or OCR GCSE specifications?

As a career-long devotee of the OCR specification, for various reasons it is time for me to get to grips with the Eduqas (WJEC) specification. I am aware that my successor at the large comprehensive I used to work in is going to switch to WJEC and given that A level Latin is no longer available in our area (unless you go private) I fully support his decision and would have taken it myself. For my own part I’d like to be able to offer support to students taking both specifications, plus a home-schooled boy I am working with now will – I believe – respond much better to the WJEC course.

Given my need to concentrate on the finer details of the differences between a specification that is new to me and one which I know like the back of my hand, I decided to focus my mind by writing up my findings in a blog post. There’s nothing like having to explain something in your own words to make one concentrate. This is, by the way, a recognised truth when it comes to learning: simply reading something or even taking notes from a source is unlikely to aid your understanding. Putting your source to one side and then trying to explain it in your own words has been proven to be a much more powerful way to ensure that you will remember what you are studying. This is because our memory is reconstructive rather than reproductive; memory works (and therefore improves) by continuously regenerating what it remembers, so forcing yourself to reproduce in your own words something you’ve read about is a challenging but effective way to ensure that your newfound knowledge will stick.

So, here are my findings. If you’re interested in the full range of qualifications available in all Classical subjects at all levels in the UK, Steven Hunt provides a really useful overview in a 2020 article for the CUCD, which is publicly available. He discusses the specifications available for A level, the IB and beyond.

General overview

A GCSE qualification in Latin and accredited by OfQual for use in English state schools is offered by OCR and by Eduqas, which is the examining body of WJEC accredited for use in England. AQA used to offer a GCSE in Latin but this was discontinued before the new GCSEs were launched in 2018. Both OCR and WJEC have shared criteria, which are dictated to them by OfQual: the number of examination papers (three) and the length of those papers, the minimum length of the literature that must be studied in the original Latin (around 200 lines), plus a choice between an element of prose composition or questions on grammar and syntax. There is no coursework or controlled assessment and the examination must be linear, not modular – in other words, it must be sat as a series of final examinations at the end of the course. Despite these prescriptions, the two examination boards still provide some considerable variation, which I examine below.

Compulsory language paper

The language paper, compulsory in both specifications, lasts for an hour and a half and makes up 50% of both qualfications. Both specifications have a set vocabulary list and both of them state that students will be tested through translation and comprehension, plus a choice between some grammar questiona and some short prose-composition sentences (for which there is a restricted vocabulary list and a restricted grammar list). Both boards test students’ knowledge of the accidence and syntax laid out in their specifications and this is where the differences lie: the demands placed on students by the WJEC language specification are notably lighter than those expected by OCR.

Both specifications call for a knowledge of all five declensions – in reality, this means a focus on declensions 1-3, as the words from the defined vocabulary list in the 4th and 5th declension are vanishingly few. Similarly, both specifications expect a knowledge of all forms of adjectives, including their comparatives and superlatives. However, there is considerable difference between the two boards when it comes to a knowledge of verbs and all their derivative forms: OCR theoretically demands the indicative forms of regular and deponent verbs in all voices and tenses except for the future perfect; in the subjunctive it requires the impefect and the pluperfect. WJEC, when it comes to the passive voice and deponents, demands only the present, imperfect and perfect passive and deponent verbs in the 3rd person indicative! I had to read this several times to make sure I was reading it right. So, no pluperfect passive and no passives of any kind in the subjunctive and they will only need to recognise passive and deponent verbs in the 3rd person. When it comes to the syntax, the basic uses of the subjunctive seem to be identical with the expectations of OCR.

Participles? OCR expect the lot, whereas WJEC do not list the future participle as an expectation. They also state – and brace yourself here, if you’re an advocate of the OCR syllabus – that the ablative absolute is not required. I am still reeling from this. No ablative absolute. I mean … wow. It goes on. Another shock came when I realised that WJEC only expect students to recognise the present active infinitive – no others. This means that their testing of the indirect statement will be very basic and the relevant rules for the sequence of tenses will be very easy to teach.

Other smaller differences in the expectations for the language paper remain, such as WJEC does not include malo in its list of irregular verbs, unlike OCR. Likewise, the verbs sum and possum are only required in the present and imperfect indicative, present infinitive and imperfect subjunctive for WJEC. These differences may seem minor but in reality it means that there is a massive stack of knowledge not required by WJEC. The fact that students end up with the same qualification does give me pause, and were I teaching with the aim of preparing students for A level then I would stick with OCR. However, with the removal of A level as an option in my local area then my successor’s decision to switch to WJEC is entirely correct: it would almost be madness to do otherwise.

Literature and culture: with options:

The boards differ further in the way they lay out their literature and culture papers. For OCR, candidates must be prepared for two out of the following three options, each worth 25%: prose set text, verse set text or Roman literature and culture in translation. This means that all candidates must study one text of around 200 lines in the original language, and many will study two. Personally, I always taught both set texts as I hated the vagaries of “just teach them some stuff about slavery/daily life”.

WJEC lays things out a little differently. Their “Latin literature: themes and sources” paper is compulsory and worth 20%. Teachers have a choice of theme but whichever they choose consists of a mix of both prose and verse texts in the original language. There is also some supporting material, which is designed to place the texts in their cultural context. For the final paper, worth 30%, teachers can choose to prepare their students for “Latin literature narratives”(basically more set text work, mostly in the original with some sections in translation), or they can choose the “Roman civilisation” element, in which students study some general themes and sources all in translation. Personally, I will be avoiding that for the same reasons as I avoided the cultural background paper with OCR.

A key difference in approach to the literature between the two boards is that OCR literature examinations are closed book, which means that the students need to know the texts really well – frankly, they need to know them off by heart. WJEC take a rather different approach by making their examinations open book, meaning that students are provided with a clean copy of the Latin text plus the vocabulary list. In terms of teacher preparation and school investment, the very fact that WJEC provide the the texts and the vocabulary online as a PDF download is in itself quite a revelation – OCR leave you to get on with it all by yourself. That said, there is no set translation provided, so teachers will still need to prepare their own working translation and/or one for their students.

I am keen to reach out to teachers who are more experienced in preparing their students for the WJEC literature as I am as yet unsure how much they feel their students should rely on the texts in the examination. Something I recall from doing open-book examinations back when I sat my A levels is that you really don’t have time to be looking too many things up, so in reality you still needed to know the text like the back of your hand. I am also not sure how much advantage it will give students when the text is all in Latin; surely they still need to know a translation really well, since none of them will be truly capable of translating real Latin on sight (especially if they haven’t studied the OCR language specification!)

So, my mission now is to do so and start making as many friends as I can with the WJEC advocates. I am looking forward to the process. I am also excited about the prospect of working with different texts and I like WJEC’s decision to include supporting material, which forces teachers to contenxtualise the texts for their students; OCR’s approach encourages robotic rote-learning, which always felt like something of a shame. So, calling all teachers of WJEC – where are you? I’d love to learn from you.

Roman brutality

How much is too much for Year 7?

Regular readers of my blog will know that I have various issues with the new(ish) Latin reading course entitled Suburani. I’m not a fan of the way it approaches the grammar and the clients I have had from schools who have adopted it have all come to me in a state of bewilderment – they have little to no understanding of what they have been learning and their grasp of morphology is woeful.

One aspect of the course that I have found worthwhile – and what is attracting schools to it – is its portrayal of Roman suburban life. There is no idealism and no “whitewashing” here, no triumphalist focus on the easy lives of the wealthy Roman elite. Life is harsh and often desperate; the insulae offer filthy and dangerous accommodation to vulnerable families, a racket run by corrupt landlords on the take, men who are themselves frequently in debt to a wider system of corruption; some appear to be battling with a gambling addiction. There are beggars on the street. Most powerfully of all, we see the reality of how wonders of the ancient world such as the public baths were built and maintained: by slaves under the ground, soot-covered and scorched from the heat of the furnace, contaminated by their time spent in close contact with the sewerage system. Bravo, I thought.

And yet …

During my preparations for working with one client I found myself taking a closer look at chapter 6. The final story in this chapter is a continuation of one called fuga (“flight” or “the escape”), in which two slaves unfortunate enough to be working the fires underneath the baths make a desperate bolt for freedom, slipping out through the sewerage system by night. They are spotted and chased by dogs, which the guards send after them. One of them (named Gallio) is caught immediately and questioned; the other is caught a few days later. Below is a screenshot from the online version of the text book, followed by my suggested translation:

Screenshot from *Suburani*, *fuga, pars secunda*, at the end of chapter 6

The guards torture the slave for two hours. At the third hour, the guards take a branding iron out of the furnace. They bring the branding iron towards Gallio and mark his head. The pain is unbearable. There are three letters on his head.
For three days and three nights, Thellus runs. On the fourth day the slave sleeps in a field. At the first hour, two farmers see him. The farmers capture Thellus and take him to the guards. The guards smile. Thellus is terrified.”
Suburani, fuga, pars secunda, pg. 98

I have never been one to romanticise the ancient world, indeed many students have found my endless attempts to remind them of its disappointing realities somewhat irksome. It is not acceptable – I believe – to let them stare in wide-eyed wonder at Roman feats of engineering, without taking a moment to remind them exactly who did the back-breaking, life threatening, life-shortening work which made these structures a reality. I think it’s hugely important and I have done this throughout my career.

The fate of Gallio and Thellus is entirely authentic. Slaves of this type were of little monetary value and – another thing I like to point out to students – monetary value was a reasonable barometer of how a slave would be treated in the ancient world. Slaves used for unskilled manual labour were worth the equivalent of a few pence and were bought and sold in bulk. Pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap. That’s the grim reality, I’m afraid. The recapturing and surrendering of Thellus by farmers also illustrates yet another thing that I like to emphasise: slavery was not an illicit trade exploited by an extremely wealthy minority who considered themselves above the law; it was the establishment, an integral part of the machinery of daily life, accepted and sustained by everyone, questioned by no one. Some of the most brilliant minds that sprung up in the ancient world, when they turned their philosophical skills to the question of slavery, overwhelmingly spent their time arguing in favour of it: some people are born to be slaves, said Aristotle, the father of the scientific method. In the ancient world, if you found a slave, you caught him, you handed him in and you pocketed the reward should there be one. Everybody – and I mean everybody – was complicit. The branding on the face? Standard punishment for runaways, so that everyone could watch out for them in the future. Barbaric? You bet. Never let anyone tell you that the Romans were civilised. Have I told children all of this in the past? Yes, I have.

Yet the story of Gallio and Thellus worried me, due to the very fact that empathy is so deliberately and so successfully invoked. I was shocked by it, even though I knew that this kind of thing happened to slaves with horrifying frequency. Would I want a child of mine to read and understand this story at the age of 11? I’m honestly not sure that I would. The stories in Suburani invite very young children to empathise with characters which are then subjected to lengthy torture. There is a fine line in teaching between asking students to acknowledge brutality and expecting them to process it on an emotional level. In our eagerness to break through the natural cynicism of modern youth, we should not forget that we are dealing with children; children who are indeed subjected to a 24-hour rolling backdrop of horror across the globe, thanks to modern systems of mass communication. It seems undeniable that we are facing a crisis of mental-health issues in teenagers, and I’m not sure that we should be quite so gung-ho when it comes to provoking their emotions in this way.

There will be many Classics teachers out there who disagree with me and I am keen to hear from those using Suburani in the classroom. Perhaps I will change my mind. But as things stand I am disquieted by its content and concerned that some children will be disturbed and distressed by this no-holds-barred approach. I believe that the truth can and should be told about the ancient world without what I see as a genuine risk of harm. Trauma is such an over-used word in modern education that I hesitate to suggest it, but I feel it’s appropriate here. Let’s not forget that our children are entitled to just a little bit of innocence before the world truly reveals itself in all its barbarity; we certainly shouldn’t underestimate their ability to grasp it, and I for one am not entirely sure I want them feeling the full weight of its horror at the age of 11.

The problem with pronouns in Latin

Latin is a heavily inflected language. Inflection is a process of word formation by which the word is modified according to its grammatical category. For verbs, inflection (called conjugation), means that the ending (and in some instances the stem) of the verb will change according to tense (e.g. present or future), voice (active or passive), person (1st, 2nd or 3rd) or number (singular or plural).

English is different. English relies heavily on pronouns to identify who is performing the action of a verb. For example, let’s take the verb “to warn” in the present tense. To conjugate this English verb, I need to use a series of different pronouns to express whoever is the subject of the verb – there is only one small change (in the 3rd person) to the ending of the verb itself:

1st person singular: I warn
2nd person singular: You (sg) warn
3rd person singular: He/she/it warns
1st person plural: We warn
2nd person plural: You (pl) warn
3rd person plural: They warn

Latin is completely different. Latin has no need of a personal pronoun to express whoever is doing the action of the verb. The same verb in Latin will conjugate as follows:

1st person singular: moneo
2nd person singular: mones
3rd person singular: monet
1st person plural: monemus
2nd person plural: monetis
3rd person plural: monent

One of the most important things for new students of Latin to grasp is this fundamental difference, for it has varied and complex effects upon their ability to read and translate the language competently. To become a confident Latinist, a student must break the habit of reading from left to right and learn to prioritise finding the verb (usually, although not always, at the end of the sentence).

The habit of reading from left to right is extraordinarily difficult to break and students will usually revert to it when under pressure, despite “knowing” their verb endings. For example, a novice will naturally tend to translate the sentence “puellam monemus” as “the girl warns”. But the -mus ending on the verb tells us that it actually means “we warn”, therefore the sentence translates as “we warn the girl”: the fact that the girl is the object, not the subject of the verb, is also something that can be deduced from its case ending, but that too tends to go out of the window when a novice is faced with a sentence such as this – and that’s precisely because we naturally read from left to right. No other reason, really.

It seems to me that the authors of virtually all the Latin reading courses that have made it through the traditional publishing process are either in complete denial about this fundamental difference between English and Latin, or they are utterly deluded in their apparent belief that it really isn’t that difficult for children to let go of the habit of reading from left to right – even though it’s a routine they have been trained into doing habitually from the age of 4 or 5 and is therefore deeply ingrained. Reading from left to right is, for every child – however hesitant a reader – a custom which will have slipped entirely into their unconscious mind; no child picks up a book and starts reading a sentence from the middle or the end.

In my criticism of published reading courses I am thinking in particular of courses such as The Cambridge Latin Course and the much more recently published Suburani, which is so markedly CLC 2.0 that I’m surprised its creators haven’t been sued by Cambridge for plagiarism. Both courses use subject pronouns from the outset (and throughout) as a prop for students to hang their understanding upon. Since pronouns – when used as the subject – appear at the beginning of the sentence, students are actively encouraged to continue with their natural instinct of reading from left to right. This, to be brutally frank, is simply disastrous for their potential as future Latinists.

Here are just a couple of examples from the very first few pages of Suburani (and therefore part of students’ early introduction to reading Latin stories):

ego multum cibum habeo (“I have a lot of food”): what is ego doing there? Why not force students to look at the ending of habeo instead?

tu psitaccum habes (“you have a parrot”): what is tu doing there? Don’t get me started on why the students are learning the Latin for “parrot” in their first few lessons. It may not surprise you to know that it doesn’t come up very often and it’s certainly not a word they will need at GCSE or are likely to need at A level.

ego cibum vendo (“I am selling food”): sigh.

tu amicum habes (“you have a friend”): etc etc. You get the idea.

In all of the above sentences both ego and tu could be removed in order to force students to look at the verb ending. So what are they doing there? It seems to me that they serve no purpose other than to encourage students to read from left to right – excactly the opposite of what they should be doing. This more than anything is my fundamental objection to how courses such as these are designed; I have plenty of other objections too, but this is the one that irks me the most. The authors of these courses are so determined to prove their misguided belief that students will learn how to read Latin via some kind of process of osmosis that they are prepared to lull them into a false sense of security by guiding them to approach Latin sentences in entirely the wrong way. From day one.

In my final few years at the chalkface and as we hurtled into lockdown, I was faced with the prospect of converting all my Latin lessons for online learning and the need to put work on screen. On our return to school I did not have enough text books to go around and was told that they could not be shared between bubbles. Since I had to get all of the stories up onto the screen, this, I decided, was the time to grasp the bull by the horns and edit all the cartoons and the stories in the Cambridge Latin Course to remove all the pronouns and therefore force students to look at the verb endings. I made other fundamental changes too, but this was the one (I believe) which has had the most tangible impact on students’ understanding. One of the most exciting things was the moment when I realised that students were so well-drilled in the process of finding the verb and translating the inflected ending that a strange consequence arose: when first introduced to sentences that had a noun for a subject like “puellae monent” (“the girls warn”), students often translated it as “the girls, they warn” then looked puzzled. Hallelujah. Once it was explained to them (and reiterated several times) that when a sentence contains a subject such as “the girls”, this replaces the pronoun (they) in their translation, there was no problem.

The habit of reading from left to right is so ingrained that it remains something which students need to be reminded of constantly. Once drilled in inflection, however, I find that even with the weakest students, all I need to do is point at the verb ending and they immediately adjust their translation to reflect the verb ending. This gentle process must be repeated again and again. It comes after weeks, months, years of drilling them on their verb endings. All of my students, even the weakest in the class, were able to write down their verb endings from memory and could tell me what they meant. The biggest chaellenge remained breaking that reading habit, but at least my refusal to let them rely on the subject pronoun has given them a fighting chance. By the time students reached the end of Year 8 and the start of Year 9, the habit was all but broken.

That’s how long it takes and that’s how important it is.