learning – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Proud to be a Scout

Last week, there was something of a debate amongst my now quite elderly parents and me. I remarked that I genuinely struggle to understand why so many people are so reluctant to change their minds. What on earth was so frightening about it? My father, a trained scientist, seemed to get where I was coming from. My mother, a trained counsellor, was less impressed. She sees everything through the matrix of people’s emotional responses and finds it easy to comprehend the ways in which people’s fears and hang-ups are their most powerful driving forces. But I genuinely struggle to understand why people are so fixed in their ways of thinking.

While I’ve never considered myself to be much of a scientist (a glance at my GCSE grades will confirm this for anyone in doubt), I do like to think that I am a rationalist and that I base my responses to most things on the evidence in front of me. I am also, I think on balance, quite emotionally robust. Given these two character traits, I will confess that I genuinely struggle to comprehend why changing one’s mind about something is considered to be such a terrifying prospect; but the older I get, the more I am forced to acknowledge that for many it seems to be so.

In the same week, I met a friend who filled me in on some local gossip and remarked, in passing, that living in our village had been good for her, since she had been exposed to a range of people with different political views and discovered (in a manner that she reported with some surprise) that Conservative voters did not all possess the horns of Beelzebub. She reflected on the limitations of being brought up in a home in which one political viewpoint was presented (a household that she summed up as “Guardian-reading”). I reflected on the fact that I felt there had been a variety of political standpoints within my close family and that these had been openly (and sometimes quite heatedly!) debated, perhaps leaving me open to the notion that there can be well thought-out (and indeed extremely badly thought-out) views on all sides. She said that she envied this experience. It was genuinely fascinating and gave me further pause for thought. Might this exposure to conflicting politics within one family be another reason why I am interested in rather than threatened by alternative viewpoints?

Also this week, whilst listening to a podcast, I heard a reference to an analogy used in human psychology that I had not come across before, and it chimed with all the thoughts I had been having about tribal thinking versus the ability to change one’s mind. I looked up the reference and was fascinated to discover someone called Julia Galef, an author and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality. Galef argues that some people act like “soldiers”, while others act like “scouts”. “Soldiers” in her analogy tend to approach a discussion from the sole position of defending their beliefs, attempting to discredit or dismiss conflicting information and seeing the alternative viewpoints as the enemy to be shot down. “Scouts”, by contrast, are motivated more by the desire to find the truth regardless, of their starting point.

But before we “scouts” get too smug about our Stoic capacity for reason, according to Galef, our tendencies towards being either a “soldier” or a “scout” are both rooted in our emotional responses and learned behaviour. The “soldier” mindset tends to be held by someone who is motivated by connection and community (which can lead to tribalism), whereas someone with a “scout” mindset is more likely to enjoy the process of discovering new things (which can lead to innovative or creative thinking, but carries with it the threat of isolation). For a “soldier”, the process of changing your mind feels like a weakness or even a defeat. For a “scout”, it as something positive and exciting. This is exactly how I feel. To me, the process of changing my mind isn’t simply non-threatening: it is genuinely thrilling and wonderful. I love discovering that I have been wrong about something, or that my understanding of a topic has been flawed. I find it genuinely mind-boggling that people can hold the same views that they have always held, and borderline distressing to imagine that they find the process of change a net negative.

In a quest for further knowledge, I will delve into Galef’s book, The Scout Mindset, and find out if her analogy resonates once I’ve read it in full. For now, I feel genuinely happy to be a “scout” and can highly recommend it. It might not make you the most popular person at the party, but it does make you the one who will point out that the emperor is stark, staring naked.

Surprise, surprise?

No matter how long I have been working with young people, they never fail to surprise me. By the same token, no matter how long I have been teaching, I am still learning and adjusting my methods and assumptions. This is one of the many things that makes the process so rewarding and exciting.

There are a couple of students that have been working with me for a considerable period of time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they have both made outstanding progress. This is not to blow my own trumpet, it is simply to highlight the power of one-to-one tutoring and the genuinely spectacular impact that it has when utilised for the longterm. There is lots that one can do with a short-term emergency intervention, and I have indeed worked with students to boost their grade shortly before the examinations, but in such a situation there is only so far you can go. When a parent employs you well in advance of the examinations, it undoubtedly gives their child the best possible chance not only of a better grade but also of an improved understanding of the subject they are struggling in. This is the kind of work that is the most rewarding.

The two students I have in mind were both finding the subject very difficult but both highly ambitious and high-achievers in other subjects. They are now both working at a Grade 9 level and I have high hopes for their performance in the final examinations, all being well. Yet both of them still have their moments that surprise me: for example, they will both make significant blunders in a very simple grammar question, revealing what seems to be a fissure in their knowledge when I thought it was solid. These sorts of students are genuinely fascinating and benefit from tutoring the most, for in a one-to-one session you can pivot and adjust what you’re doing to isolate that unexpected sign of trouble and work on it.

Likewise, there are students that appear to have no solid knowledge base and approach the grammar as if it were an optional extra. These students can also surprise you, for they sometimes will smash a translation out of the park, leaving you open-mouthed and wondering what the hell just happened. The issue with such students is, of course, you never know what’s going to happen on the day of the exam: of course, this is true for all students, but it is especially true for them. They will oscillate from sheer brilliance to unmitigated disaster and you never quite know which version of events you will be presented with.

As for my own learning, I am still discovering what students do and don’t know and the sands are ever-shifting. Part of teaching and particularly tutoring is endless challenge to your own theory of mind: endless reminders that other people’s human brains, especially ones that have not been on this earth so long as your own brain, are not filled with the same knowledge, thoughts and ideas as yours. Teaching in secondary schools is particularly challenging from this point of view, as you rotate between classes of various ages: one hour you can be teaching a room full of 11-year-olds, the next you will be faced with a small group of near-adults. The frequent adjustments that secondary school teachers have to make during the day in terms of knowledge, expectations and vocabulary usage can be quite dizzying.

I have been pondering in particular this week the question of how much each of my individual students understand about sailing. This might seem bizarre, but the section of the Aeneid that most of them have been set for studying this year involves a storm that wrecks the ships that are carrying the hopeful Trojan refugees from their war-torn city to a new homeland. One of my students spends half the year at the family’s second home in Cornwall, sailing with her twin brother. As a result, she knows infinitely more about sailing than I will ever do and thus, when Virgil describes “the groaning of the rigging” (stridor rudentum) and uses phrases like “the prow swings off” (prora avertit) she knows exactly what is going on. For most of my students, this has to be explained: they don’t know that “rigging” refers to the system of ropes employed to support a ship’s mast and to control the sails, nor do they know that the prow is the front of the ship. My sailing student has a good grasp of Virgil’s more poetic descriptions of the power of the sea, for she has experience of it: she knows knows what it means when Virgil describes how the winds seem to lift the waves to the stars (fluctus ad sidera tollit) and how the sea momentarily appears to be like a sheer mountain in front of the sailors (praeruptus aquae mons). Hopefully she’s never been in a ship with this happening, but she will understand the concept well enough, and will have watched the sea and understood when is and is not a good time to sail. Most of my students none of this knowledge.

Given the obvious fact that most of my students are not sailors, this week it occurred to me that I needed to unpack what was going on in the Virgil text in much more detail for them, in case they were struggling to comprehend what was happening. Most kids (and indeed most adults) have never experienced what sailing is like, so will have limited capacity to imagine the extent of the damage and disaster that is being described. I suddenly realised that it was important to remind them that just moments before, the Trojans had been described as joyfully turning their sails for the open sea (in altum vela dabant laeti) and heading for the mainland, their new home of Italy within their sights. Crucially, they were in full sail when Aeolus, god of the winds, releases the squalls and tempests across the ocean. None of my students had considered this fact until I pointed it out to them. They were then able to comprehend, even from the most rudimentary grasp of forces, that being in full sail when a storm strikes is game over for a ship and its crew. This is why the storm is such a disaster for the men on board.

One of the things that every teacher and every tutor has to remind themselves of is to constantly test knowledge and understanding, and this goes for every assmuption that you might be making about vocabulary. It is crucial to consider the fact that the student(s) in front of you may not know the meaning of the words that you are using or they are reading. The word “rigging” was a good example for me — not one of my students, with the exception of the girl who sails, knew what the word meant. I had a similar reminder with the other verse text selections for 2026, in which one of the Catullus poems refers to his “purse”. I was brought up short by the fact that several of my students did not know what a purse was: in this modern day of digital money, in addition to the fact that we are flooded with Americanisms so many people now refer to a “purse” as a “wallet”, it is in fact not surprising at all that they did not know the word.

Vocabulary is an important foundation for learning and unfamiliar terminology can quickly become a barrier to understanding key concepts. When students hear and repeat terms without a solid grasp of their meaning, they may appear confident whilst holding misconceptions that affect their progress. Only by explicitly teaching vocabulary, checking for understanding and exploring students’ understanding of words without making assumptions can we ensure that the learners in front of us can access the curriculum and build deeper, more secure knowledge.

A general lack of guidance

I struggle to understand why so little guidance is given in many schools about how students should go about the process of learning. To be clear, I’m not talking about school assemblies on “study skills”, which I realise that most teenagers will zone out during. No, guidance needs to come directly from each individual classroom teacher, the subject expert; it also needs to be explicitly taught, modelled and demonstrated on a regular basis. Schools need to agree what methods they are going to recommend and this needs to be reflected right across the school in all subjects, tailored specifically to what works best in each academic discipline.

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

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

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

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

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

As for what the methods should be, I recommend a variety but one is definitely stand-out brilliant and so far has worked for every student I have ever met. So if you haven’t read my old post on how to use the first-letter technique then do so straight away — you will never look back! For broader guidance on effective study I would recommend looking at the work of Dr. Paul Penn, Professor of Psychology and author of The Psychology of Effective Studying. His book is fantastic, as is his YouTube channel.

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.

Unknown Unknowns

“I am wiser than this man: for while neither of us appears to know anything … I do not assume that I know what I do not know.”

Plato’s Socrates, Apologia, 399 BCE

As they commence their tutoring, most students who come to me report that they are struggling in Latin. This, of course, is no surprise. Yet, when asked to explain why they are struggling, their answers are frequently vague. Some students may attribute their failure to what they believe is a lack of innate ability (“I’m just no good at this”), while others have simply no idea. Very few are able to reflect upon the likely causes or to pinpoint when things started to fall apart.

Research in cognitive psychology has consistently shown that students’ own perceptions of their learning are not accurate. This is true even among high-performing learners. My own anecdotal experience informs me that students rarely have any real idea of why they are struggling. As a general rule, most students cannot identify the areas in which they lack knowledge, and some overestimate their grasp of the basics. It may surprise people to know that the easiest students to help tend to be those who come to me in a state of despair: those are, in fact, the students who really know that there is a deep-seated problem and they are only too keen for any solutions that might be offered to them.

Students who come to me convinced that they have a reasonably good grasp of the basics are sometimes reluctant to engage with initial investigations into their knowledge of the fundamentals. This is because they tend to come to me with the fixed idea that, since they started to struggle only as the subject became more difficult, it is therefore the difficult topics that are the problem. In almost every single case (there are — of course — rare exceptions), what they do not realise is that they started to struggle when things got difficult precisely because their grasp of certain fundamentals was hazy in the first place. With students like this, the first thing I have to do, unfortunately, is to rock their world a little: the only way to help them is for them to realise that their basic grasp of the subject is not as secure as they assumed it was. Once they understand this, everything can be resolved.

As human beings, we generally assume that we have privileged access to our own mental processes. However, cognitive science has repeatedly demonstrated that self-knowledge — particularly knowledge about one’s own cognitive performance — is limited and often inaccurate. This insight is foundational for understanding why students misjudge their learning difficulties. Learners experience their cognitive effort subjectively, but subjective feelings of fluency or difficulty are poor indicators of genuine understanding or mastery. For instance, when studying a text, a student may feel that they “know” the material because re-reading it feels smooth and familiar; in reality, their fluency results from familiarity rather than durable comprehension or a solid knowledge base. While learning requires active self-monitoring and regulation, our introspective access to the mechanisms of learning is highly fallible, and a student’s subjective experience of learning is not necessarily a reliable guide to their actual competence.

A further barrier to students’ insight into their own struggles is the prevalence of misconceptions about how learning and memory work. Studies consistently show that learners hold naïve beliefs about the process of learning — for instance, that re-reading and highlighting are effective strategies, or that one can “multitask” while studying without cost to comprehension; if your son or daughter insists that they can listen to music while studying, this regretably false conviction will be familiar to you. Such beliefs can then shape a student’s behaviour and self-assessment. For example, when students fail after employing such strategies, they may conclude that they are “bad at the subject,” as this feels safer than questioning the strategies themselves. Cognitive research has shown that effective learning requires active engagement (such as retrieval, elaboration and connection-making) rather than passive exposure (such as re-reading and highlighting). However, because active engagement is much more cognitively taxing, students tend to avoid it. This failure to recognise the cognitive mechanisms which underpin successful learning can lead students to misinterpret their failures. For example, a GCSE Latin student who does nothing but re-read the vocabulary list multiple times and then cannot recall the meaning of the words in a translation test may conclude that they have a poor memory; in reality, the issue is inadequate and ineffective retrieval practice.

Students do not necessarily know why they are struggling in the subjects they study, not because they lack intelligence or motivation, but because the human mind is poorly equipped to reflect on its own cognitive processes. Research proves this. Learners often rely on misleading cues such as fluency and effort and may exhibit systematic overconfidence with the basics due to familiarity. Emotional and motivational factors can further distort self-assessment, compounding the inevitable fact that the novice status of most students deprives them of the structured knowledge needed for accurate self-diagnosis. A student anxious about mathematics may perceive problems as more complex than they are, reinforcing the belief that they are “not a maths person.” This self-perception can become self-fulfilling, as avoidance prevents improvement and reinforces failure. When students fear failure, they may prefer to attribute difficulties to uncontrollable causes (e.g. “the exam was impossible”) rather than to confront any deficiencies in their methodology. Conversely, overconfidence and fixed mindsets about ability can lead students to dismiss feedback and persist with ineffective strategies. Ever tried to convince your teen to try a different method of study and been knocked back? You are not alone. Convincing learners to try different strategies is notoriously difficult.

Cognitive research thus reveals a fundamental irony of education: those who most need insight into their learning difficulties are sometimes the least able to confront it. This means that teachers and tutors must never assume that students understand the reasons behind their struggles. Instead, support for all students should include explicit instruction in metacognitive skills (the methods of study) — we must assume that they don’t know how to go about it. Only by learning how learning works can students begin to see why they struggle and, ultimately, how to overcome those struggles. Despite all of this research, it is simply mind-boggling how little of this is still going on in most schools.

All of these thoughts have been triggered by a frankly bizarre discussion I had online with a couple of tutors this week. One remained absolutely convinced that the best way to tutor was to ask the student what they are struggling with and to start there. I must say I find this phenomenally foolish. While I do always ask students what it is that they are struggling with, this is largely with the purpose of gaining an insight into how they are feeling about the subject. Their response to the question gives me enormous insight into their emotional relationship with Latin and with their studies in general. To take their self-reporting at face value, on the other hand, would be monumentally daft and would betray my experience as a professional. Students rarely comprehend what it is that they need help with, and why should they? They are not the expert! That is what they have come to me for. I listen, I take note of their anxieties and fears and then I go back to basics. Every. Single. Time. If (as does happen in vanishingly rare cases) their grasp of the basics is cast-iron and Teflon-coated, then we can move onto the complex stuff at pace. More often than not, however, a student who claims to be struggling only with the more complex grammatical niceties of the subject, will in fact lack a few blocks in the foundations of their core subject knowledge. Finding these holes and fixing them is what I specialise in.

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

The road less travelled — pathways and how we learn new things

A few months ago, my husband and I discovered a local group of walkers in our village. The group meets informally every Wednesday morning and has grown over the years to around 50 people. There are a handful of committed types who turn up every week, plus dozens of others (ourselves now included) who show up regularly although not infallibly. We’ve met a variety of interesting people as a result, not least the couple behind the whole thing, both of whom appear to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the local area and its footpaths.

So many of the local footpaths were unknown to us before we joined the group and some, it turns out, were unknown to everyone. The aforementioned couple are both of the “can-do” and “why not us?” mindset, and over the years they have taken it upon themselves to take responsibility for opening up more than one village pathway that had fallen into disuse. And as Geoff put it to me, “once you open up the pathway, people start using it and then it more or less maintains itself.” The very frequency of use is what helps to keep a pathway established.

Imagine a field of grass that people often cross to get from one side of the field to the other. Over time, a pathway forms, along which most people walk: the grass becomes trampled, the soil compacted and the green fades to brown. This becomes an established pathway and will remain so just for as long as it’s used.

Now, suppose something changes: perhaps a new gate opens, a puddle forms on the old path, or people simply find a slightly shorter or more convenient route. Gradually, walkers begin taking this new line across the field instead of the old one. At first, only a few people use the new route. The grass along it begins to show faint signs of wear — blades are bent and bruised, and a pale strip starts to appear. As the weeks go by, the new route becomes more and more popular: the flattened grass eventually dies back, leaving a firm, visible track.

Meanwhile, the old path, now seeing fewer footsteps, starts to recover. Without constant trampling, the soil loosens a little, rainwater seeps in again, and new shoots begin to grow up through the bare patches. Mosses, wildflowers, and taller grasses reclaim it, softening its edges until it blends again into the rest of the field. Within a season or two, only someone who remembers where it used to run might notice a faint difference in the undergrowth or a subtle dip in the ground. The new track has become the main path — firm and easy to follow — while the old one has disappeared back into the living fabric of the field.

This is an illustration of how habits can change: the places where we pass most often grow clearer, and those we abandon are slowly forgotten, healed over by time and growth. It is also an excellent illustration of how our brains work.

Learning is a physical process, in which the brain changes in response to experience: the brain rewires itself as we practise, think and experience. At its core, it involves the strengthening and formation of neural pathways, networks of neurons (nerve cells) which communicate through chemical signals. Every thought, every memory, every skill we acquire is encoded within these connections. Our brain is quite literally rewiring itself day by day.

Each new connection represents not only new knowledge but also the remarkable ability of the human brain to change and grow throughout life. When we first encounter new information or attempt a new skill, specific groups of neurons are activated together. If this process happens repeatedly and is done proactively, the connections between those neurons will become stronger and more efficient. This is learning. Pathways that are rarely used may weaken through a process called synaptic pruning, a process which has evolved to make the brain more efficient by eliminating redundant connections. This balance between strengthening and pruning allows the brain to adapt continuously to new experiences and environments. Being aware of this is essential to an understanding of how we learn.

The brain’s remarkable ability to adapt and change is known as neuro-plasticity. As Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb said as early as 1949, “neurons that fire together, wire together”. Each time a pathway is used, the brain reinforces it, making it easier to activate in the future. Over time, this repetition transforms a once-effortful action into an automatic one. This, fundamentally, is why we get into habits – both good and bad. The really great news is that bad habits can be replaced with new ones: you simply have to start following the paths less travelled and keep treading upon them until they turn into the new, preferred pathway. The road less travelled may be difficult to start upon, but will become an established thoroughfare with repeated use.

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.

Psychology matters

Most people understand that resilience is important. I’m not sure there is anyone from any walk of life who would argue that resilience is overrated and/or an unnecessary life-skill. What people tend to disagree on is the level of challenge. How much resilience should we demand of ourselves and our children? How much pressure is too much? If we could answer this question, we could probably find the answer to much of life, and we could certainly write the text book on parenting.

I’m a reasonably strong believer in the fact that most things that are worth doing are hard work, including the process of study. The fact that study is hard is rarely denied by students or by their parents, but what’s interesting is what you find when you unpack these beliefs a little further. I often refer clients to a book by the university lecturer and psychologist Dr. Paul Penn, who has written an outstanding book on the psychology of effective study. He argues that most students avoid more effective methods because they are actually under the false impression that the process of studying should come easily to them. In a recent post on LinkedIn, Paul wrote the following: “I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to convey to students that their intuition about what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to studying is often wrong. This is why the entire first chapter of my book is dedicated to metacognition and specifically how a raft of metacognitive errors can compel students to persist with ineffective studying methods because they “feel good or right”. Chief among these errors is the conflation of ease with effectiveness and short-term performance with longer-term learning. The notion that learning is supposed to be an effortful and difficult process is often revelatory to students (in a good way), because they tend to assume that finding studying challenging is a negative indictment on them and therefore gravitate towards ineffective methods such as re-reading, that generate illusory impressions of progress. Once they realise that failure is an integral part of learning, difficulty is often desirable and short-term performance should not be confused with longer-term learning, they are much more amenable to implementing advice on effective studying.“

The emphasis is mine, as I feel the final words in this quote are absolutely crucial. In recent months I have started using more and more analogies to explain this phenomenon to the young learners that I work with. Many youngsters in their mid to late teens play sport or work out at the gym, indeed there is a significant trend in that generation for weight and resistance training (when I was at school the trend was all aerobics and feeling the burn). While not every student works out, a notable number of them either do so or at least have a vague grasp of the concept. It can be really useful to their understanding of study to liken their efforts to a workout in the gym. Weight-lifting is a process which should be done to the point of failure, or near-failure. Just because you have found it impossible to lift an 8 kilo weight for the eighth time, that does not render your workout worthless: quite the opposite, in fact. The very fact that you have worked on those muscles to the point of failure or near-failure is the very same process that builds muscle and will make the lifting easier in the long-run. So short-term “failures” lead to long-term gains.

This is all well and good, and it’s important to explain this underlying truth to those who are new to the process of study (or, indeed, to working out). But I think there are other things that we can always do to support ourselves through such challenges, whatever they may be, and these come down to the fact that we need to forgive ourselves for the inescapable fact that the vast majority of us are naturally reluctant to leave our comfort zones. We’ve all met the odd exceptional person who runs endurance marathons across the arctic or the desert or both in the same week. These people are not useful models. The overwhelming majority of us find it hard to motivate ourselves to stick with things that are difficult and, to take inspiration from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, we need to accept that fact and to help ourselves out by removing as many barriers as possible. It is not productive or effective to tell ourselves we’re useless when we feel like giving up: it is much more useful to investigate whether we could be doing something slightly differently in order to mitigate against the likelihood of giving up. This is something that many teenagers fall foul of, especially those with a perfectionist streak: they set themselves up for inevitable long-term failure by failing to forgive themselves for short-term defeats.

As regular readers will know, I am currently in the process of learning to run on a regular basis. I experimented with the Couch to 5K programme and then switched to using music instead. Try as I might, I hit a wall when it came to running for anything longer than three to four minutes and I was becoming frustrated and upset by my lack of progress. I wasn’t enjoying the runs I was doing, in fact I was starting to dread them, and a little voice in my head was starting to say: you’re not going to stick with this.

Rather than beating myself up, I addressed the fact that I was at risk of giving up and faced it head-on. Let’s be honest, for every person on social media announcing their incredible progress at a feat such as running, there are at least ten, possibly twenty others, who have quietly given up on the whole thing. I don’t want to be in that group. To quote Marie Murphy, Professor of exercise and health at Ulster university, “the best form of exercise is the one you will do. That trumps everything else.” While fitness experts can argue about the minutiae of marginal gains and optimal exercise programmes, the general population is getting less and less fit because they’re not doing any of it. Sure, it would be optimal if I could stick with pushing myself to run for more than four minutes: but if I find this so miserable that I give up altogether, the end result will be entirely negative. So, I’ve completely switched the process and am now using the walk-run method, starting with 30 seconds of each. It is utterly blissful and I am enjoying the process again. This week, I cut the walk break by five seconds, so running for 30 seconds and then walking for 25 and it was absolutely fine. I will continue to reduce the walk breaks marginally, and see how that goes.

Somewhat anxiously, I shared my decision with a friend. This friend, by the way, can run 10K without stopping or taking a walk break. She told me I’d made absolutely the right decision and reinforced the mantra that sticking with the process was more important than anything else. We chatted about the psychology of cutting the walk times rather than increasing the run-times. Ultimately, the result will (hopefully) be the same, but for me there is something about the psychology of “I only have to run for 30 seconds!” that really works for me. She related a conversation that she had overheard at a swimming pool, where one woman was saying that she preferred 50m to 25m pools (“30 lengths feels so much easier than 60!”) whilst the other preferred 25m (“but each 50m length is sooooo long!”). As my friend pointed out, each of those swimmers is ultimately doing the same workout, but they feel differently about the two different approaches, and that’s what matters. Whatever happens, the trick is to adjust your challenges so that they remain challenges but are not so insurmountable that you risk calling it a day.

If there is a magic formula for that and someone discovers it, they’ll make a fortune.