learning – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

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.

Results and Expectations

As GCSE results roll in today, I’ve been thinking about expectations and how they shape our response to students’ results. It’s a painful and undeniable fact that there are some students every year who will not only be disappointed but will have to deal with the disappointment of their own parents. In my experience, this usually happens with relatively high-achieving students, some of whom have families that expect nothing but the best. This can transfigure into the genuinely distressing situation in which a line of excellent grades will be met with disinterest.

I sometimes wonder whether this is a very modern phenomenon. I recall a family friend, whose daughter was a year or two older than I was and who therefore sat her GCSEs before I did. She achieved straight As and I remember my father (a man of excellent academic ability himself) being genuinely agog. He simply couldn’t believe that anyone could achieve the top grade in every single subject. I remember thinking the same. This, of course, was long before the existence of the A* and the starred grade was indeed brought in as an attempt to recognise the absolute top of the top – an elite class of those who achieved the A-grade and not originally envisaged as something that would be achieved in multiple subjects. Likewise, the current grade 9. As many of us predicted at the time, this philosophy was completely lost on everyone, and failed with immediate effect: the A* and the grade 9 became simply the top grade as far as everyone was concerned and as a result, we now have families who report “disappointment” with an A-grade at A level or a grade 8 at GCSE.

While I’ve never been one to shy away from setting high standards, I really do have to wonder what’s gone wrong for a person who isn’t happy with their child achieving an A-grade or an 8. What do they think the problem is? Exam results are undeniably important, but they do not define you as an academic. Want to know my GCSE grades? Okay. I sat nine GCSEs in 1990, relatively few by modern standards, but that’s how it was in those days. Some students sat nine, some sat only seven or eight. I achieved six grade As, one grade B and two grade Cs. To this day I swear they mixed up my biology paper with somebody else’s, as I was expecting a C grade (along with the C grades I did achieve in maths and chemistry) but that subject came out at a grade B. I was probably more knocked out by that grade than by any of my others, which overall were much better than I was expecting.

My line-up of grades would probably be considered pretty mediocre by some of the families I have worked with. They will perhaps be rather surprised (possibly even alarmed!) to learn that I did not achieve straight As in everything. But here’s the thing. Not only did I go on to achieve a 1st class honours degree, I achieved the highest degree mark in my whole year group (the Head of Department told me). After that, I achieved a Masters with Distinction and then went on to complete a PhD. My perfectly decent but perhaps unremarkable GCSE grades were no barrier to this, and while I don’t want to sound like Jeremy Clarkson rolling out his tedious yearly claim to a champagne-fuelled, Lamborghini-driving lifestyle on the back of two Us in his A levels, I would definitely suggest that everyone should keep their exam grades in perspective.

There are numerous reasons why I wasn’t one of the absolute top-performers at school. I wasn’t very good at studying when I was younger and it took me a while to learn the methods that worked best for me (there was no decent research or advice in that area in those days). As an adult, I am fascinated by the psychology of effective study, and it is a real focus in my tuition sessions. If you want to consult a genuine expert in the field, look up Dr. Paul Penn, who is a psychologist and researcher who specialises in how to study. You can visit his website here and he has a great YouTube channel. I interviewed him for Teachers Talk Radio in 2022, and you can listen to that episode here.

Other reasons for my relatively unremarkable performance in my GCSEs? Well, I didn’t enjoy school very much and if I’m brutally frank I found a lot of my teachers tiresome and dull. That’s no excuse for anything of course, but it may have been a factor in my distinctly average peformance in some subjects. Finally — and this one’s the killer — I know that a lot of teachers believed me to be significantly cleverer than I actually was. That might sound odd for someone who ended up with PhD, but quite honestly a doctorate is no indicator of brilliance. You wouldn’t believe the number of mediocre academics who manage to scrape together enough to qualify for that title. Making it through a PhD is actually a case of whether you can hack the process and apply the required amount of discipline rather than an indicator of genuine excellence. As I once heard someone say of the difference between those who make it in elite weight-lifting and those who do not, the main deciding factor is whether or not you have the tolerance to endure the sheer, unrelenting tedium of repeated effort.

So why did my teachers believe that I was so clever? I think it’s because I was very articulate and good at writing. As I came to realise when I read The Language Instinct by Steve Pinker, while this is not necessarily an indicator of high intelligence, it is assumed to be so by most people, even those who are supposed to be experts in the field of education. Thus, as a result of my linguistic fluency, all of my teachers laboured under the impression that I was seriously smart. My genuinely poor performance in mathematics and the sciences was put down to laziness, bloody-mindedness, wilful ignorance or just about any other character flaw you could imagine. (God forbid it could be down to their poor teaching). I tried many times to tell my maths and science teachers that I was genuinely struggling and needed help with basic concepts, but I was ignored. The only reason I passed maths was because they eventually realised that I was in serious danger of failing (due, in their view, to my sheer wilfulness) and — in a panic about their pass-rate — they made the correct call to enter me for the intermediate paper, which is designed to help candidates get over the threshold to achieve a C grade. The only reason I passed chemistry was because in Year 11 we gained a new teacher who was not particularly likeable but was actually rather good — a rarity indeed, for most of our teachers were truly terrible, as they could be in the 1980s. After a few weeks of observing my wild guesswork when it came to balancing chemical equations, he looked me straight in the eye and said, “you don’t even know what the valency table is, do you?” I enlightened him as to the fact that not only was this true, but I didn’t actually understand what the periodic table was either. Or indeed … anything. He nodded. He gave me some basic remedial help plus a few bluffing techniques and I made it through the exam thanks to him. As for biology, like I say … Lord knows. I swear to this day that it was an error and I wasn’t going to tell them that.

So, as results are announced today, I find myself thinking of those students and their families across the country who will be disappointed with excellent grades. How very sad that sounds. My grades were a source of celebration in my household and I recall not only that I was delighted with them but that my parents were too. While we all want to set high standards for ourselves and our children, let us not forget that a string of top grades in everything are not the be-all and end-all for a happy and successful life. Even Einstein didn’t get top grades in all of his subjects.

The thrilling anticipation of GCSE “reform”

In the last week or so, news has been trickling in from clients who sat the final GCSE Latin exam on June 3rd. Everyone seemed pleased with the content, with no nasty surprises reported. Once again, it was relatively easy to predict the kinds of questions that would come up, as the papers are – broadly speaking – quite formulaic and unsurprising. This is perhaps to balance the fact that the content is so extremely difficult for candidates at GCSE level to cope with. The content is tough to learn, the exam itself is straightforward for candidates who have taken on the challenge, which broadly amounts to one long game of memorisation.

Given that we have a new government, who are currently doing a curriculum review, teachers are braced once again for GCSE reform. I find it difficult not to be horribly cynical about the whole thing, largely because I have been in education long enough to know that these so-called reforms usually amount to change for the sake of it, particularly in my subject. Since I started teaching in 1999, there have been multiple changes to the curriculum, none of which have made any tangible difference to its aims and outcomes, all of which have generated a pointless avalanche of work. As I started work in schools during my training year, GCSE reform was taking place, the first changes to the GCSE syllabus since its introduction in 1988. Those exams in my subject lasted only until 2003, when the exam was changed again, followed by yet further changes in 2010 and then again in 2018. According to this pattern we are thus due for further changes, yet the government has outlined no concrete plans for syllabus reform as yet.

There has been much general discussion about reducing the number of subjects, accompanied by the inevitable Gove-bashing, which remains the favourite sport of most educationalists of a political bent. Everybody joins in the fun, to tedious applause from the stands. There have also been the usual rumblings about “modernising” the curriculum, with talk of essential topics such as “sustainability”, “climate science” and “media and digital literacy”. This was reported on in March, when the government released an interim report on its curriculum review. Given that there has to be notice to make changes from the beginning of when the new syllabus would potentially be taught and that the course lasts two years, it doesn’t look like the GCSE exams will be changing all that soon, but change they will.

To illustrate the monumental pointlessness of these reforms, let’s take what changes OCR made to the Latin GCSE in 2018. The biggest change they made was to switch from 4 exams to 3, which was something of a blessing. In place of the two language exams, they reduced this to one, making it 50% of the total marks instead of two exams worth 25%. In a quite remarkable display of collective inertia, they more or less took the two prior exams and turned them into one, which will explain to younger teachers why the exam is divided into Section A and Section B, with the two halves having absolutely no content linking them: the current exam is quite literally two exams glued together. Yes, it’s that pathetic. In the literature, they did little to nothing more than switching around the 8 and 10 mark questions: the 8-marker used to be the mini-essay, the 10-marker used to be the extended style question, whereas now it’s the other way around. That was pretty much it. One other thing they did was to make it possible to study both verse or both prose texts, which to this day I suspect was actually an error on their part: the examinations for these options are scheduled on the same day at the same time, and I don’t think the exam Board would have actually planned it like that. Most schools, I think, don’t even realise that it’s possible: as a classroom teacher, I certainly didn’t, until it was pointed out to me by David Carter when I interviewed him for my podcast.

So, we wait with bated breath for the latest “reforms”, curious as to whether they will actually reform anything or whether they will be the usual pointless jiggling that necessitates nothing more than teachers getting their heads around a new set of criteria and re-writing all their resources in line with the new plan. No doubt the board will tweak the vocabulary list, offering teachers the exciting opportunity to edit every single quiz and every single test they have written, as well as to check every single resource that they have created in order to verify whether it includes any of the words that have been removed or added. I hate to be that person, but in all honesty – what is the point? The changes to date have always been immaterial, resulting in nothing but more work for an already-beleaguered profession, which is losing its members in droves. I fail to see how any of the impending changes are likely to be any different.

I wrote it on my hand

Just occasionally, a student will say something so extraordinary that I am stopped in my tracks. This week, it was when a child I have been working with in the run-up to her GCSE examinations told me that she had to resort to writing on her hand during a lesson.

I was hesitant to write this piece, for it means going over ground I have covered before; but in the spirit in which this blog was started, I remain committed to writing about what is on my mind at the time, and this week I am haunted by the fact that a student was unable to write down a question during her lesson.

More and more schools in the private sector have moved to a digital model, in which lessons are conducted using tablets or – most commonly – Chromebooks. I am deeply suspicious that this is a money-saving exercise, since schools can access the equipment at a considerable discount when buying in bulk, and anyone who has seen the average photocopying budget for a busy department will come to realise that the potential saving is considerable, once the initial investment is made. Printing booklets is expensive, and this fact seems to be outweighing the fact that they are effective learning tools.

The young people I work with are – as one might expect – reasonably tech savvy, but they are universally scathing about their school’s digital approach. Without exception, they report that the technology is clumsy, unreliable and not fit for purpose. They will even volunteer the fact that it is distracting and hampers learning by offering up temptations that would otherwise not be present. Students report a quite extraordinary litany of what they get up to on their laptops when they are meant to be on task during a lesson: at best, they may be doing homework for another subject; at worst, they will be playing games or accessing chat applications. All of them agree that they cannot discern what tangible positives the technology brings to their learning. Moreover, as I discussed at greater length back in January, they lack the skills and the maturity to manage their learning through digital platforms. Organising, managing and accessing large files and using screen-splitting to make this viable is genuinely beyond a significant number of students: frankly, it’s beyond a lot of adults.

So far, so predictable. The student I spoke to this week has been one of the many who have expressed frustration with her school’s digital approach and has found it difficult to access her notes and prior learning. There are constructions she has no recollection of ever been taught, which is not uncommon, but what is concerning is the fact that she cannot find a way to revisit her own notes on the topic. Had the school been using a well-organised printed booklet, this would have been effortless. Once again, the technology is working against her, which pretty much undermines everything that technology is meant to stand for; technology should be a facilitator and an enabler, not a barrier to learning.

I really struggle to comprehend why so many schools have switched to a digital model, despite the overwhelming evidence that handwriting is better for cognition. Handwriting engages a broader network of brain regions and motor skills compared to typing, potentially leading to better memory formation and learning. Typing is faster and more efficient when it comes to output, but it involves less active cognitive engagement and thus fewer opportunities for memory consolidation. Typing is fantastic for fast communication – it is not so for learning. Writing by hand forces the brain to engage in a more active, sensory-motor experience; the process activates the regions in the brain responsible for motor control, visual processing, and sensory input – a much broader range than is required for typing. Studies have shown that handwriting leads to more elaborate and widespread brain connectivity patterns than typing, suggesting that the act of writing by hand is thus more effective for encoding new information and forming memories. This is why, when I am learning something off by heart, I don’t do it (exclusively) on the computer.

But aside from all of this, let’s just think of the practicalities. I am a huge fan of technology and I do pretty much everything through it. I use a digital calendar, as I find it more effective and efficient than a traditional one. All my tutoring is online, so all the resources I use with students are presentable on screen. However, when I send them resources, these are almost always designed to be printed out and held in their hands. In addition, and here’s what is most relevant to my post today, I have a lined pad beside my laptop for notes. When a student asks me to send them something after the session, I jot that down on the notepad. When a student warns me that they will be able to make the next session, I jot that down on the notepad. It is simply more efficient and quicker to do this than to open a file and make a note in a corner of my digital resources. The notepad sits beside me at all times and I cross off each note as I implement it. The page beside me as I type has the following written down and crossed through (names have been changed):

Billy – noun table

Olivia – YouTube vid. on 10-markers

Niall – 2021 paper + Rome qus

This is exactly the kind of thing that a notepad is needed for – quick notes to self that will be implemented immediately and ticked off. There is no need for a permanent record, just a requirement for an immediate visual reminder to action something at the end of my run of sessions. None of this is rocket science, or so I thought.

Yesterday, when my student reported that she had some questions arising from her first lesson back in school, she admitted that she was struggling to remember them because she had not been able to write them down. Not only has her school moved so entirely over to Chromebooks that students appear not to have any kind of papers, notebooks or diaries to hand, but get this: her teacher seems aware of the fact that the Chromebooks are causing distraction during the lesson, so has banned students from accessing them during the lesson. This would be fine if the students were given an alternative route to note-taking, but that’s presumably against whole-school policy, so instead the students are left with nothing to write on. “So, I wrote it on my hand,” she said, “but then I couldn’t make it out and it got washed off later in the day.”

So, there we have it. What a stunning victory for technology over common sense. You have a child left unable to access her notes, unable to write down a question for their teacher or tutor (the fact that she wanted to save a question for one-to-one time rather than interrupting the flow of the lesson should surely be applauded) and a piece of technology which undermines learning to such an extent that the teacher is forced to discontinue its use in lessons without a suitable replacement. Three cheers for our ability to make the world just a little bit more bonkers than it needs to be.

Hang in there, folks!

“Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.”

Peter Ustinov

This week, I have had a high volume of messages and phone calls from parents who are worried about their child’s progress. Witnessing your teenager navigate the pressures of impending exams can be a source of significant anxiety for parents and carers; balancing the desire to support them academically while managing your own concerns can be a delicate task, and never more so in this crucial period between Mock results and the final examinations, the proposed dates of which have just been announced. This year, both exam boards have elected to place all three of the Latin examinations prior to Half Term.

While all parents are anxious for their children to do well, the situation varies from client to client. Some have a child who is seemingly crippled by their own anxiety, struggling to study effectively because of the extreme pressure they put on themselves to succeed. Others report that their child is so laid back (or in denial) about the examination process that they’re doing little to nothing at all, blissfully convinced that the eleven weeks remaining between now and their first examination is an absolute eternity of time, during which they will – at some point – address what it is that they need to learn.

Parenting is like any relationship: it has a dynamic of its own and there are pressures from multiple angles. Every parent wants what’s best for their child and the anxiety stems from worrying whether we or they could be doing more. Yet parental anxiety can inadvertently influence a teenager’s stress levels and when parents exhibit high levels of concern, teens may internalise this stress, leading to increased pressure and potential performance issues. Recognising and managing our own anxiety is therefore crucial in fostering a calm and supportive atmosphere – but this is much easier said than done!

Children often mirror their parents’ emotional responses, so most psychologists advocate for modelling the kind of behaviour that you think your child would benefit from: demonstrating calmness and confidence can help your teen to adopt a similar mindset. This is not to say that you should not share your anxieties, indeed discussing your feelings openly, without projecting undue stress, can encourage your teen to share their concerns as well. Many parents I know find the car is a great place to encourage this kind of openness, because by necessity the discussion has to be had without eye contact; many people – especially teenagers – can find eye-contact really confronting when talking about difficult things, so opening up or encouraging your child to do so while your eyes are on the road can be useful. If you need to have a really difficult conversation, too difficult to be had while you’re driving, then doing so on a walk can have a similar effect: again, your gaze is facing forward and you’re walking side-by-side, which can dial down the intensity of what you’re saying and make it feel less threatening for both of you.

Many parents underestimate the amount of pressure that they are under while their child is preparing for exams, so it is important to focus on self-care when you can. Engaging in activities that reduce your own stress levels not only benefits you but also sets a positive example for your teen – remember, they learn from your role-modelling, so making time for yourself is not selfish: it is modelling for your child the best and healthiest way to handle their own stress, both now and in the future.

In terms of practical solutions when it comes to study, promoting efficient study techniques can reduce exam-related stress. Assist them in setting achievable goals for each study session to maintain motivation and a sense of accomplishment. Encourage evidence-informed methods such as summarising information, teaching you or someone else the material, or creating mind maps to enhance understanding and retention. Rather than reading and highlighting, encourage your child to read, set the book to one side and then try to summarise the information they have just read in their own words. This is by far the most effective aid to memory, as it forces the brain to reconstruct the information, which is essentially how memory works. Utilising past papers under timed conditions can build familiarity with exam formats and time management skills, so this is another essential tool in the process.

If you’re looking for detailed advice on how to go about studying effectively, I would highly recommend a book called The Psychology of Effective Studying by Dr. Paul Penn, who is a senior lecturer in Psychology at the University of East London. I interviewed him for Teachers Talk Radio a few years ago, and he is an absolute goldmine of evidence-based, practical advice. I would recommend the book for adults (it is aimed at undergraduates), but Paul also has a YouTube channel, which makes much of his advice really accessible for younger people. If you’re finding it difficult to persuade your teenager to try more effective methods of study, then Paul’s channel could be a great place to direct them towards.