learning – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Reluctant Learners

One of the things I find most fascinating about teaching is how much better people are at giving advice about learning than they are at actually learning. We tell children to listen carefully, pay attention, practise, ask questions, accept correction, learn from their mistakes and not give up when something is difficult. All perfectly sensible advice. We then spend our adult lives doing almost exactly the opposite.

None of us like being corrected: we don’t enjoy discovering that we don’t understand something and we can become irritated when we can’t do something immediately. Given the opportunity, we will frequently find a way of blaming the person who is trying to teach us. I know this because I do it myself. We all do it. It is spectacularly difficult to avoid.

There is something peculiarly uncomfortable about being a beginner. You are, by definition, not very good at whatever you are attempting to learn and, worse still, you are having to demonstrate this incompetence in front of somebody who knows more than you do. It is not a comfortable position to be in. Most of us would much rather be the person who already knows what they are doing, which is presumably why so many of us find it easier to give advice than to receive it. There is a considerable difference between being interested in knowing something and being prepared to admit that you don’t know it.

Children, of course, have an advantage here, as they are beginners at almost everything. Nobody expects a five-year-old to be able to read fluently on their first attempt, or a six-year-old to produce a perfect drawing, or a child learning to ride a bicycle to glide elegantly down the road without falling off. Being bad at things is simply a part of childhood. As we get older, however, we become gradually less tolerant of our own incompetence. We also acquire identities: I am good at English; I am hopeless at maths; I am a languages person; I can’t draw; I’m not musical; I’m useless with technology. Such statements can sound like harmless descriptions of ability, but they can also become excuses that enable us to avoid the uncomfortable experience of being a beginner. If I have decided that I am simply “not a maths person”, then struggling with algebra is no longer an unpleasant stage in learning; it is confirmation of something I already believe about myself.

There is another problem, too, and that is that we don’t particularly like being corrected. Being told that you are wrong is not a particularly pleasurable experience, especially if you thought that you were right. Some children are remarkably sensitive to it, but adults aren’t necessarily much better. Watch somebody being taught to use a new piece of technology and you will see this in action. They press the wrong button, the person helping them says, “No, you need to do this,” and there is an almost irresistible temptation to reply, “Yes, that’s exactly what I was trying to do!” I have spent enough time teaching to recognise this phenomenon in myself as well as in my pupils. There is a difference between wanting to know something and being willing to learn it. The first is easy: the second is the bit that requires some effort.

Learning requires us to expose the gap between knowing and not knowing. A pupil who answers a question incorrectly has just demonstrated something useful: there is a gap in their understanding, and the teacher now knows where it is. A student who refuses to answer because they don’t want to get it wrong is protecting their fragile dignity at the expense of their learning. This is just one reason why a classroom where pupils are genuinely allowed and encouraged to make mistakes is so important. If getting something wrong is treated as a catastrophe (or mocked by others), children quite reasonably learn to avoid situations in which they might be wrong, which is disastrous for the learning process.

But there is an even more subtle problem. Sometimes we don’t want to be taught because we believe we already understand. This is one of the reasons students can be so attached to rereading their notes. The material looks familiar, the words make sense and everything feels reassuringly comprehensible. Then they are asked to explain it without looking and suddenly the knowledge has mysteriously disappeared. It hadn’t disappeared, of course. It had never been as securely learned as they thought. Recognition is seductive, whereas retrieval is considerably less comfortable, and yet that uncomfortable business of having to drag something out of your own memory is often precisely what strengthens the learning.

Good teaching can be something of a paradox. A good teacher is supposed to make things understandable, but making something understandable is not the same as making it effortless. Sometimes the most useful thing a teacher can do is to allow a student to struggle for a little while: not endlessly, and certainly not pointlessly, but long enough for them to have a chance to work something out for themselves. This is particularly powerful in one-to-one teaching, when a tutor can focus their attention entirely on one student, without the pressure to move on with the rest of the class. This is also one of the reasons why one-to-one tutoring can be so intensive (and thus why I work in shorter sessions): the student is put under the gentle pressure to figure things out, they cannot pass the baton on to the next learner in the room.

There is a particular moment when you can see a pupil wrestling with a problem and you have to resist the urge to rescue them. You can almost watch the thought process happening. A student who is struggling does not necessarily need rescuing, nor should they be left to flounder indefinitely. Sometimes they need a carefully constructed question or a small suggestion, and sometimes all they need is another minute to think. Getting that balance right is one of the more difficult and hence rewarding parts of teaching. There is a world of difference between a teacher who refuses to help and a teacher who knows that sometimes the most helpful thing they can do is wait; knowing when to step in and when to hold back is the one of the most nuanced parts of teaching, and it is surprisingly difficult to get right.

Good teaching is not simply about explaining things clearly. Of course, explanations matter enormously and a teacher who cannot explain something clearly is not doing their job. But explanation is only a part of teaching. At some point, the pupil has to do something with the explanation, and that usually means attempting something that they cannot yet do perfectly. There is a slightly uncomfortable gap between understanding an explanation when somebody else is talking and being able to apply that understanding when left to your own devices. Good teaching has to cross that gap rather than simply making the explanation increasingly thorough.

It is a peculiar modern tendency to interpret difficulty as evidence of failure. A child finds something hard and we immediately ask what went wrong. We ask whether the teacher is not engaging enough, when all the evidence shows that engagement is a poor proxy for learning. We ask ourselves whether the explanation was insufficiently clear, rather than considering the fact that the student may just need a little more time to wrestle with it. Worst of all, we ask whether the work needs to be simplified or brought down a notch. But learning something difficult is, by definition, difficult; it’s not a problem to be solved.

I suspect that adults find this particularly hard because we have forgotten what it feels like to learn from the beginning. We have become accustomed to competence. The accumulated knowledge and skills of adulthood make an enormous amount of life feel automatic. Then, when somebody asks us to learn something genuinely new, we discover that we are not nearly as clever as we had become accustomed to feeling. It is humbling, and perhaps this is why adults can sometimes be so remarkably defensive when somebody tries to teach them something new.

The best teachers should be enthusiastic learners, cheerleaders for the process of acquiring knowledge. They should remember what it feels like to be confused, particularly when something that ought to be easy suddenly isn’t. They ought to know that horrible moment when everyone else appears to understand and you are still trying to work out what on earth is going on. A teacher who has recently been a beginner at something can have a rather different attitude to a struggling student, because they understand that learning does not feel like a smooth progression from ignorance to mastery. It involves wrong turns, false starts, frustration and the occasional exhilarating moment when something that made no sense five minutes ago suddenly does.

Learning requires a certain amount of intellectual humility. You have to be prepared to admit that you don’t know something and to accept that being bad at something is an unavoidable part of eventually becoming good at it. None of this is comfortable, but it is crucially important. We want children to become confident, independent and capable of coping with difficulty, but the route to all three involves an unavoidable period in which you are none of those things. Before we can become good at something, we have to be prepared to be bad at it.

Perhaps the most important thing we can teach children, therefore, is not simply how to learn but how to be taught. Being teachable is not the same as being passive. It means being willing to look slightly foolish from time to time, to allow somebody else to point out what you have missed, and then to have another go. It is not particularly glamorous, but it is a remarkably useful skill, and one that doesn’t become less important simply because we have left school.

On Being Smart

There is a peculiar kind of misery that belongs almost exclusively to children who are accustomed to getting things right. It is not the sadness of failing an examination after months of hard work, nor the disappointment of discovering that a coveted place on a sports team has gone to somebody else. It is the unsettling discombobulation of the first time you encounter something that you cannot do, despite having always assumed that you could do pretty much anything if you tried. For a child whose experience of school has consisted largely of praise, good marks and the reassuring knowledge that they are one of the clever ones, genuine difficulty or sudden failure can come as something of a shock.

This is one of the great misconceptions about high-achieving children. We tend to assume that bright children are the lucky ones, and of course, in many respects they are. Academic ability undoubtedly makes school easier. It can open doors, generate opportunities and bring the considerable satisfaction of discovering that you are good at something. Yet being academically capable is not an unqualified advantage. In some circumstances, being accustomed to success can make failure harder to bear.

As a tutor, I see this particularly clearly when students reach the point at which their natural aptitude stops being sufficient. There is usually a stage in a child’s education when things have to change. Perhaps the subject becomes more demanding, perhaps the examination requires a greater depth of understanding, or perhaps the student has simply reached the limits of what can be achieved without putting in some serious effort. For a child who has always found schoolwork straightforward, this can be profoundly unsettling. They have never needed to learn how to struggle.

Struggling, in fact, is a skill. That may sound absurd, but I genuinely believe it is one of the most important things that children can learn at school. We spend a great deal of time teaching young people how to succeed and considerably less time teaching them how to fail. Yet anybody can enjoy learning when everything goes well; the more useful skill is learning how to keep going when it doesn’t.

Children who have struggled academically from an early age have, at least in one respect, an advantage over those who have always sailed through. They have had opportunities to discover that failure is survivable. They have made mistakes, received disappointing marks, gone back and tried again. They may have become accustomed to asking for help. They may have learned, sometimes painfully, that not understanding something immediately does not mean that they will never understand it.

A child who has always been successful may have had very little reason to develop true resilience. I vividly remember the highly successful older brother of a school-friend, who had secured a scholarship to Eton College and was wildly successful at everything he did. He cried when he failed his driving test.

I am always more concerned when a student tells me that they have “never had to revise” than when they tell me that they have always struggled. The former sounds like an advantage, until you consider what happens when revision becomes necessary (which it inevitably will). If a student has reached their late teens having achieved excellent results simply by turning up, listening and possessing a reasonably good memory, they may have absolutely no idea how to study when the material becomes too extensive to absorb by osmosis. Suddenly, they are expected to retrieve, practise, organise, plan and persevere, and nobody has ever taught them how.

There is also a psychological problem. Children are extraordinarily sensitive to the identities that adults construct around them, and “clever” can become a particularly powerful one. A child who is repeatedly praised for being clever may begin to understand that cleverness is not simply something they possess but something they must demonstrate. Success becomes evidence that they are clever; failure therefore becomes evidence of the opposite. The stakes of getting something wrong are suddenly much higher than the mark on the piece of paper would suggest. Perfectionism is sometimes presented as though it were simply an admirable character trait taken to excess. After all, what could be wrong with wanting to do things well? The problem arises when “I want to do this well” becomes “I must not get this wrong”. The former encourages care and ambition. The latter can become utterly paralysing.

I have encountered students who would rather spend twenty minutes staring at a question than write down an answer they suspect might be wrong. They are not lazy and they are certainly not unintelligent. Quite the opposite. They have become so accustomed to being right that the prospect of being wrong feels intolerable. The irony is that their fear of making mistakes prevents them from doing the very thing that would make them better.

There is an enormous difference between high standards and perfectionism. High standards allow for imperfection along the way. Perfectionism does not. One says, “I want to produce something excellent.” The other says, “Anything less than excellent proves that I am not good enough.” That distinction becomes particularly important during adolescence, when academic performance can become tangled up with a young person’s increasingly complicated sense of identity.

The pressure does not always come from parents. Sometimes, it comes from the children themselves. Parents may be perfectly supportive and genuinely uninterested in whether their child achieves the highest possible grade, while the child is quietly placing enormous expectations upon themselves. They have spent years being told that they are clever and they have internalised the message. Being clever has become part of who they are, and losing that status can feel like losing something fundamental.

There is another peculiar phenomenon that can affect bright children: boredom. A child who understands new material quickly may spend considerable periods of time waiting for everybody else to catch up. If this happens repeatedly, they may develop the unfortunate habit of associating school with effortless achievement rather than intellectual challenge. They learn to expect that understanding should arrive quickly and that being confused is a sign that something has gone wrong.

This is one reason why genuinely challenging work matters, even for students who appear to need very little help. Bright children need opportunities to discover that there are things they do not yet know. They need to encounter problems for which the answer is not immediately apparent. They need to experience the slightly disconcerting sensation of being the least knowledgeable person in the room. They need to discover that other people can know things they do not know without this diminishing them in any way. They need an education rather than a succession of confirmations that they are clever.

This is one of the reasons I am rather suspicious of the tendency to praise children exclusively for their intelligence. It seems harmless enough, and nobody is going to object to being told that their child is bright, but there is a difference between saying “you are very clever” and “you worked that out beautifully”. The first describes an attribute. The second draws attention to what the child actually did. It is a small distinction, but over many years these messages accumulate.

There is, of course, a danger in taking this too far. Bright children should not be deliberately made to struggle merely to teach them a lesson. There is nothing virtuous about making education unnecessarily difficult, and a child who is capable of achieving highly should be allowed to enjoy that achievement. Nor should we romanticise academic struggle or pretend that every child who finds school difficult is therefore developing superior resilience. Struggling without adequate support is not character-building; sometimes it is simply miserable. The point is rather that children need a mixture of success and challenge. They need to know what competence feels like, but they also need to know what it feels like not to be competent yet. The “yet” matters. It introduces the possibility of change.

This is a particularly important lesson for bright children because, sooner or later, life will provide them with something that school has not. There will be a subject they cannot master immediately, a job they cannot do perfectly, a relationship they cannot control, a decision for which there is no obviously correct answer. Nobody is naturally good at adulthood. We are all improvising. The real curse of being bright is therefore not being intelligent. It is being allowed to believe that intelligence will always be enough.

A child who learns that mistakes are tolerable, that effort is worthwhile and that competence can be developed has been given something considerably more valuable than a string of excellent marks. They have learned how to learn. And when the day eventually comes when something does not come easily, they will be much less likely to interpret that difficulty as evidence that they have stopped being clever and much more likely to see it for what it actually is: the beginning of learning something new.

The Dangerous Myth of the “Natural” Student

“She’s just not a languages person.”

If I had a pound for every time a parent has said these words to me, I could probably have retired by now.

Every now and then somebody announces, with complete conviction, that their child simply “doesn’t have a languages brain”. They might say the same about the sciences. Whatever the subject, the sentiment is always the same: somewhere along the line, often years before they arrived in front of me, students have absorbed a mythology about what kind of learner they are. More importantly, they have already reached a conclusion about what kind of learner they are not.

The extraordinary thing is the certainty with which the students themselves then make those pronouncements. They are delivered not as opinions but as established facts, rather like informing me that they have blue eyes or are left-handed. “I’m just not academic.” “I’ve never been any good at languages.” “My sister got the brains.” There is no discussion to be had. The case, apparently, is closed. In many cases, they have reached this conclusion after spending no more than two or three hours a fortnight studying the subject.

Imagine hearing a fourteen-year-old say, “I’m just not a driving person.” Or, “I’m not really a mortgage sort of individual.” We would laugh, because those are things they have never seriously attempted. Yet children routinely write themselves off in academic subjects before they have even finished compulsory education. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, they have somehow become convinced that their intellectual destiny has already been mapped out.

I suspect that adults bear some responsibility for this. We are extraordinarily fond of describing children with labels. One child is “sporty”. Another is “creative”. Somebody else is “musical”. We speak warmly of “natural mathematicians” and “born linguists”. Children who succeed with apparent ease are praised for being clever, while those who struggle are reassured that “not everybody is academic.” All of this is done with kindness. None of it is intended to do harm. Yet, perhaps contrary to popular belief, children tend to believe what adults tell them.

The educational psychologist Carol Dweck became famous for distinguishing between what she called a “fixed” mindset and a “growth” mindset. Like all psychological theories, it has been over-simplified to the point of parody, and there is now a healthy academic debate about precisely how powerful those effects are. (Spoiler alert: not very, if you try to replicate them artificially). Nevertheless, the central idea has always struck me as reasonable and worthwhile. Children who believe that ability can develop through hard work generally respond to difficulty very differently from those who believe that intelligence is something fixed at birth. One group tends to interpret failure as evidence that they have more to learn. The other is far more likely to interpret it as evidence that they were never capable in the first place. The question is whether it is possible to actively encourage a growth mindset and the answer to date appears to be “no”. Like most important learning, the development of a growth mindset comes subliminally, from watching your parents and your peers, not from being told to get one. If your family lives and breathes it as their approach to life, then you are far more likely to develop one yourself. Like so many things in childhood, our earliest attitudes towards learning owe a great deal to simple good fortune.

Once you become aware that some students have more of a growth mindset than others, you begin to realise just how important it is. One student translates a difficult Latin sentence incorrectly and says, “Can you explain where I went wrong?” Another translates the same sentence incorrectly and sighs, “I told you I wasn’t any good at this.” The first student has made a mistake. The second has made a judgement about themselves. They are not remotely the same thing.

But there is another side to this story that is discussed rather less often. People assume that being labelled “clever” is entirely beneficial, yet I have taught plenty of students for whom this has become something of a burden. If a child grows up believing that success ought to come naturally, what happens when they finally encounter something genuinely difficult? Very often, they panic. Suddenly, they are no longer the child who always gets things right and that, when you think about it, is terrifying: it shatters their very sense of self. Rather than seeing challenge as an inevitable stage in learning, students whose identity has become bound up with being clever can begin to wonder whether they have somehow ceased to be so. It is one of the reasons why some exceptionally bright students develop a horror of making mistakes. Their identity has become entangled with effortless success. Yet genuine learning is rarely effortless.

As I explored a few weeks ago, one of the most important findings to emerge from cognitive science is that learning often feels considerably less successful than students imagine it ought to. Retrieval practice is frustrating. Spaced revision feels inefficient. Difficult questions expose weaknesses that many students would rather not confront. In other words, the very strategies that produce the strongest long-term learning are often the ones that make students feel least intelligent while they are doing them. Education has an awkward habit of rewarding perseverance rather more reliably than immediate brilliance.

One of the great privileges of tutoring is that I get to watch children change their minds about themselves. Contrary to what television dramas would have us believe, this does not happen in a single inspirational lesson accompanied by soaring orchestral music. It usually happens so gradually that neither the student nor I notices it at first. A child who once apologised before answering begins having a go without prompting. Somebody who announced in September that they “couldn’t do Latin” quietly translates a difficult passage by Easter. Nothing miraculous has happened. They have simply accumulated enough evidence to make their old story about themselves increasingly difficult to sustain.

This is why I have become rather wary of the word “gifted”. Of course, natural aptitude exists: anyone who has taught for more than about five minutes knows that children differ enormously in the speed with which they grasp new ideas. To pretend otherwise would be absurd. Yet, education is not a horse race in which the order established after the first furlong determines the final result. Children develop at different rates and excellent teaching can transform performance. So can hard work. So can discovering, perhaps for the first time, that making mistakes is not a catastrophe.

Perhaps the greatest danger posed by the myth of the “natural” student is that it persuades children to mistake who they are today for who they will always be. It encourages them to believe that ability is something to be discovered rather than something to be developed. Once that idea takes hold, challenge becomes threatening rather than exciting, because every struggle feels like confirmation of an identity that has already been decided.

I would much rather children left school believing something altogether different. By all means recognise talent when you see it, celebrate achievement and admire those who make difficult things look easy. But never allow a child to conclude that the boundaries of their ability have already been fixed. Childhood is surely far too early to decide what sort of learner you are going to be for the rest of your life.

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.