learning – Page 3 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Smart phones and the myth of multi-tasking

Has your teenager ever assured you that they are great at multitasking? Or have you heard it said that the younger generation, because they have grown up in a multi-media world, are great at multitasking? Well, I’ve got news for you and for your teenager: I’m afraid it isn’t true.

First of all, whatever people may tell you, research tells us that multitasking is a myth. What humans are doing when they multittask is – in fact – constantly switching their attention between two things. It is undeniable that some people seem to find this easier (or perhaps one should say that they find it less stressful or irritating) than others; but the idea that anyone can pay full attention to two different things at the same time is a fallacy – and yes, I’m afraid that goes for girls as well as boys! A study by the University of London found that participants who “multitasked” during cognitive tests underwent a decline in performance similar to participants who has stayed up all night; some of the adults participating in the test saw their IQ drop by 15 points, leaving them with the average IQ of an 8-year-old child.

The fact that multitasking is a myth has been known by cognitive scientists for some time, and is one of the main reasons why working in silence when concentrating on a difficult task is so important, both in school and in private study. Peripheral noise, including both chatter and music, is distracting to the brain and will impair cognitive performance. If our concentration is interrupted by noise the brain starts to become overloaded, with more senses being alerted and more thought patterns therefore fighting for our focus. For people working in busy environments, noise can put a real stress on the brain, affecting people’s ability to work at anything like their full capacity. While many people may feel they have adapted to working in noisy environments, the research indicates that this is far from ideal when it comes to congitive performance, and therefore far from ideal when studying. A study published in Psychological Science found that children exposed to excessive noise in their school environment are more likely to suffer from stress than children who are educated in quieter areas; the study indicated that students who attended schools located near airports had significantly higher levels of the stress hormones (adrenaline and cortisol) as well as markedly higher blood-pressure.

But it’s not just unpleasant or unwanted noise that can cause a problem. Has your teenager ever told you that they need to listen to music while they work? Well, Nick Perham, a senior lecturer at the department of applied psychology at Cardiff Metropolitan University, has done a meta-analysis on the effect that music can have on children’s concentration. His findings show that while some studies in the past may seem to indicate that certain people perform tasks better while listening to classical music, reading comprehension is definitely impaired by music that contains lyrics and/or speech; while he found that listening to instrumental music instead of music which contains lyrics reduces this impairment, his conclusion having looked at all the evidence is that a silent environment is best for concentration and academic performance.

I’ll be honest, I knew all of this and have known it for several years. But perhaps the most striking bit of research I have only heard of recently. This research is about smart phones and the ways in which they can distract us. Now, we all know that these little devices are weapons of mass distraction – I’m not sure even a teeanger would try to pretend otherwise with a straight face. But research carried out in the US came up with some fascinating findings about the extent to which this is the case. Did you know that just the very physical presence of your smart phone – even if face down and switched to silent – impairs your cognitive performance?

The study from America looked at the effect of smart phones on individuals’ cognitive performance. A large number of adults were asked to perform a series of cognitive tests. One group was instructed to leave their phone out in front of them on the desk while they did the tasks, but to place it face down and on silent. Another group was instructed to put their phone away in their bag. A third group was told to leave their phones in another room. And guess what? That’s right. Out of sight is out of mind, leaving your mind free to do the tasks without distraction – those whose phones were nowhere to be seen performed best in the tasks; by contrast, the very physical presence of the phone, even switched off, switched to silent and/or left face down on the desk, was enough to impair the cognitive performance of the candidates whose phones were visible in front of them.

On my regular canal walk the other day I heard one of the co-authors of this study, Dr. Adrian Ward from the University of Texas, interviewed by Dr. Michael Mosley on his podcast called “Just One Thing”. Ward hypothesised that the smart phone is such a powerful draw – with its lure of games, easy entertainment and social connection – that its very physical presence (even if switched off or on silent) is enough to be an unconscious distraction for the brain. So the physical presence of your phone, even though it is switched off and you have no intention of looking at it, is communicating to your brain that you could be doing something potentially rather more entertaining than what you’re currently meant to be focusing on.

So what can we take from all of this? Well, to me, it’s important that young people understand just what a powerful distraction their smart phone can be, and that they are on board with the idea that they should therefore be putting their devices away (ideally in another room) while they are studying. I am not suggesting that you race into your teeanger’s room right now and wrestle it from them; but if you can persaude them that handing it over for short bursts of time while they are studying is a good idea, then they will thank you in the long-run. Ideally, this conversation should take place and the principle established when children are first allowed access to these devices.

The puzzle of Latin word-order

Twice this week, working with two very different courses, I have been struck by an author’s decision to challenge students at a very early stage in their Latin with complex word-order.

“Traditional” Latin word order will have you believe that the subject (should there be one) will come at the beginning of the sentence and the verb at the end. Everything else, with a variety of rules within that, will come in the middle. Yet when it comes to studying real Latin literature, a student has to face up to the fact that this so-called tradition is – at best – a very simplified version of reality; if one were to be truly critical, one might say that the whole concept is a nonsense. Real Latin authors break away from the formalised shape of a Latin sentence – sometimes for effect, sometimes just because they felt like it.

With one small group of tutees I have just started the second booklet of Clarke’s Latin, an ab initio course aimed ostensibly at Common Entrance candidates, although you’d be hard-pushed to find a better introduction to Latin whatever your ultimate goal and indeed I am using it with an adult learner also. Students have been taught all of the cases and their meanings, but only in the 1st declension. Students have also been taught the endings of the present indicative active in the 1st conjugation, and we have just reached the point where the author has introduced the imperfect tense for the first time. Not surprisingly, things are starting to get a little trickier, but my students are rising magnificently to the task – a testament to the robustness of the course so far.

The author has challenged the students from the beginning when it comes to word order, forcing them to engage with both their verb endings and their case endings. But I was struck in particular by this sentence, in exercise 47:

poetas, ubi appropinquant, feminae agricolarum salutant.

Wow. Even the students were impressed.

After some discussion with my fearless group of three, they deciphered that poetas was accusative and therefore not the place to start. I then encouraged them to look at verb endings and to consider whether they could find a subject. With this relatively light-touch coaching, they were excited to deduce that the subject of the main clause was feminae and that the subordiate clause contained the subject in the verb ending but referred back to the poets. The genitive case gave them no trouble at all. With careful thought but relative ease, they came up with the perfect translation: the farmers’ wives greet the poets when they approach.

So far so unremarkable you might say – although personally, having taught Latin for 21 years, I think it is indeed remarkable the extent to which a robust course such as this one enables students to think like a true Latinist at this early stage. But what happened next was perhaps even more exciting. One of the group said, “why would an author put poetas at the beginning like that, instead of the subject?”

It then occurred to me that Clarke’s course is not only producing better results when it comes to the children’s understanding of the underlying grammatical principles; it is also preparing them for much more complex skills later down the line. Firstly, it is preparing them for literary criticism: why an author chooses to place a word in a particular place is exactly the kind of question that GCSE and A level candidates need to be able to answer in their study of literature. Furthermore, when Clarke uses challenging sentences such as these, he is opening children’s eyes to the challenge of translation at a higher level; as a result of this child’s question, we were able to discuss how a translator might attempt to render the sentence into a format that mimics the emphasis that is expressed in the Latin. I suggested something like “it is the poets that the farners’ wives are greeting, when they approach” and invited the children to critique my suggestion: does it stray too far from the original, or is it in fact more faithful to the text?

Clarke’s course offers some extraordinary opportunities for high-level thinking and dicusssion, even when students are at a very rudimentary level. These students have only met the 1st declension and the 1st conjugation in the present and the imperfect indicative active; beyond that, they’ve met a few adverbs and basic subordinate clauses using words such as ubi and antequam. Yet already they are asking questions that would not be out of place in an A level class. Already they are considering that word placement might be important or significant to a Latin author. Already they are pondering a variety of ways that the spirit of the Latin might rendered in translation, and beginning to realise that translation is not a simple or straightforward task in which you only follow a set of rules. This is, quite frankly, extraordinary.

On the very same day I had a session with a child whose school uses Suburani, a course which has gained popularity in many state schools. This course could not be more different from Clarke’s Latin and its authors are no doubt very happy about that – their philosophy is wildly different. The sentence that got me thinking was in chapter 8. By this point, students have met the present, imperfect and perfect indicative active. They have met only the nominative, accusative and ablative cases but they have seen them in three declensions, including neuter versions. Like with the Cambridge Latin Course, all three declensions and all five conjugations are used from the very beginning of the course due to the desire to create an interesting and varied storyline. Laudable as this might be, in my experience students who struggle with Latin have literally no idea what is going on by this stage.

My tutee was presented with the following sentence:

gentes Britannicas opprimunt Romani

It is not the only and not the first sentence where Suburani has used varied word order, and I like to think that this is a deliberate attempt on the part of the authors to encourage students to look at their verb and noun endings – just the same as Clarke’s course aims to do. However, this process is undermined in so many other ways by the course that my tutee was not able to parse the sentence above (which although it contains nouns and verbs from a wider variety of declensions and conjugations, is actually a good deal more simple than my example from Clarke’s Latin).

The translation that my tutee suggested came as no surprise: “the British tribes oppress the Romans”. This is due to a phenomenon I have written about before, the tendency for students to read from left to right, just as they have been trained to do in their own language. The trouble with Suburani is that it does nothing to break this habit. It might teach students their verb endings, but its constant and excessive use of pronouns in the nominative case encourages them to continue to read from left to right and guess the meaning of the sentence. It was this issue that I wrote about in my previous blog post criticising the course.

Now don’t get me wrong, the mistake made by my tutee is what I would expect any child to do; even my tutees using Clarke’s Latin have to be reminded on occasion not to read in this way – it’s a habit so deeply ingrained that it is nigh-on impossible to break. But students who have been taught using Suburani – when prompted to explain which noun is in the nominative or accusative case – usually find this really difficult. They have been shown too many declensions at once and as a result have found it bordering on impossible to memorise how the noun endings change as they decline. And they’ve only met three cases!

My issues with Suburani go beyond its grammatical faults – criticisms which could just as easily be aimed at the Cambridge Latin Course, for which I retain an undeniable fondness and used (albeit heavily adapted) throughout my career in classroom teaching. Suburani contains material presented in a manner that I consider to be quite frankly inappropriate for younger children, another thing I have written about before. Having reached chapter 8 and encountered a simplified version of Caesar’s account of the Druids’ wicker man, reproduced without critique and in graphic detail (with a nice firey background graphic to boot), I have to ask myself what on earth they thought they were doing. While the Cambridge Latin Course is currently undergoing a re-write and the team has agonised about how to present certain aspects of the ancient world faithfully yet sensitively, the authors at Suburani seem out to create shock and awe. I am disliking it more and more the further I get through it.

The first-letter technique

Yesterday I was reminded during one of my sessions that revisiting the best ideas and the best advice is important.

In today’s blog post I want to share the best and most effective methodology of learning a piece of text off by heart. The method is one used by many actors to learn their lines, and is certainly one that can be used if you or your child takes on a large part on stage. I teach the same method to my tutees as a means of learning the translation of their Latin set texts off by heart, the purpose of which is to make the literature element of the examination super-easy.

Let us take for example the first few lines of Sagae Thessalae, the most commonly-studied prose set text for the current OCR specification for GCSE Latin. Below is the first section of the Latin text, with a suggested translation underneath. It is the translation that your child will need to learn off by heart (not the Latin – that really would be a nightmare!)

iuvenis ego Mileto profectus ad spectaculum Olympicum, cumhaec etiam loca provinciae clarae visitare cuperem,peragrata tota Thessalia Larissam perveni. ac dum urbem pererrans tenuato viatico paupertati meae fomenta quaero.

“As a young man I set out from Miletus for the Olympic Games, since I also wanted to visit these areas of the famous province. Having travelled through the whole of Thessaly, I arrived at Larissa. And while wandering through the city, with my travelling allowance diminished, I was looking for remedies for my poverty.”

To go about learning a section like this, the best thing to do is to break it up into sections and learn it using the first-letter technique. The passage breaks up quite nicely into five short chunks as follows:

As a young man I set out from Miletus for the Olympic Games,

since I also wanted to visit these areas of the famous province.

Having travelled through the whole of Thessaly, I arrived at Larissa.

And while wandering through the city, with my travelling allowance diminished,

I was looking for remedies for my poverty.

Below is a representation of the first-letter technique for these lines. A student writes down the first letter of each word, spaced out in short chunks. Notice that I have used the punctuation – making use of capital letters, commas and full-stops acts as a further trigger for the memory:

While most people will struggle to learn these five sections of prose off by heart, the use of chunking combined with the first-letter technique enables most people to do so within a couple of minutes. Once a student has written out the first chunk in first letters, they should find that they are immediately able to recite the first chunk merely by looking at the letters. They should then repeat the process with the remaining chunks, then try to recite the whole thing, using the letters as a prompt. Within a couple of minutes, their ability to recall the entire passage will be notable. Students can then go on to repeat the process with the remaining text – not too much at once though!

Once a student has mastered the translation of a reasonable amount of text, that’s the time to turn to the Quizlet flashcards. It’s important not to wait too long to do this, as the rote-learning of the English translation will not be much use to a candidate without at least some grasp of how it relates to the Latin. A child who has learnt the translation off by heart should be able to use the flashcards to prompt themselves on each section as follows:

You will notice that I have divided the flashcards into smaller chunks – this is to assist the student in recognising which Latin words and phrases map onto which sections of the translation. There will be some hesitation as a student learns to map their rote-learned translation onto the Latin as represented on the flashcards – but that’s fine. Remember, the rote-learning is merely a prop to assist them in coping with the set text in an examination. It’s very important to move onto the flashcards swiftly, in order to begin the process of making the rote-learned translation do its job of supporting the student in recognising the Latin text.

A student should repeat the flashcards in chronological order until they are fully confident with the translation for each. Once confidence has been gained, it’s then time to hit the shuffle button and see if they can recognise and translate small chunks in isolation – that’s when they can really prove to themselves that they are recognising individual Latin words and phrases and can render them into English.

The whole process might seem arduous when a student first begins, but I have yet to find a student that is not converted to the the system once they realise how effective it is and how much power it gives them over the text. Knowing the text thoroughly is 80% of the battle – and I mean that sincerely. A student should be able to score a pretty good grade in the literature element of the examination simply on the basis of knowing the text really well; many of the questions are comprehension and ask for nothing more than for the student to explain what the text means. Once a student has gained mastery with a section of the text and can perform well on basic comprehension questions, then time can be spent on fine-tuning their response to the text and training them in how to answer the more complex questions, something which I have addressed in other posts.

In Praise of Cruciverbalism

A recent holiday freed up a great deal of my time to spend on some of my hobbies: reading, most particularly listening to audiobooks, and doing the cryptic crossword.

I do not come from a family of cruciverbalists, although my maternal grandather pretended to do the one in the Guardian on most days. My husband was taught the skill at school, believe it or not, by his Latin teacher. This man, who has assumed an almost legendary status among my husband’s old friends, claimed to teach “sailing, golf, bridge and Classics – in that order.” Like many Classicists, he clearly had a magpie brain, and this lends itself to the kind of thinking required to solve crossword puzzles. This particular teacher would usually begin most of his lessons with a crossword clue for students to solve and one of them even went on to become a professional crossword-setter. Not that it pays well, mind you, so don’t quit the day job for it just yet.

I always believed that there was some kind of special intelligence required to do cryptic crosswords and this meant that I avoided them entirely, flapping my hands and saying “oh, my brain just doesn’t work like that”. Like most things, this was learnt behaviour and also stemmed from a basic fear: fear of the unknown and fear of looking stupid. It was only when my husband decided to teach me the rules of the process that I realised that not only was I perfectly capable of tackling cryptic crosswords, I was actually rather good at them.

Some people, I think, do have a natural flair for them and do not require the level of direct instruction that I had to have in order to gain mastery. In a tribute to my husband’s old Classics master, I decided to use his idea of presenting students with the odd cryptic clue during form time. I gradually taught my students some of the rules, but it was striking how a couple of them took to it instinctively from the start. It was also striking how others were convinced they were incapable of it.

Cryptic crosswords require you not take things at face value and some people are indeed naturally good at this type of thinking. Most importantly, crosswords demand that you think deeply about all the possible different meanings of individual words. There are also regular tricks to watch out for that play on either the alternative meaning or an alternative pronunication of a word. Examples would be that “flower” often means “river” (i.e. something that flows) and “in the main” often refers to the sea. “Late” usually means “dead” and “retired” usually connotes a reference to bed, bedtime or sleep rather than turning 65.

On occasion, specialist knowledge of a particular field is required, but there is Google for that: heaven knows how people managed them in the past! Sometimes crossword clues reference Classical themes and I have developed a habit of sharing some of these on my Twitter feed. I have one infuriatingly clever Twitter friend who gets every single clue within 0.8 seconds – this can be particularly disheartening when it’s one that took me 24 hours to solve! But no matter, he is a genius and I am not.

If you’ve ever wondered just how crosswords work, here are a few Classically-themed examples explained below.

The Anglo-French concoction causes amnesia. (5)

For this clue you need to know that whenever a crossword setter says “the French” he usually means le or occasionally la – in other words, “the” in French. In this case, our setter hints that you need the definite article in both English and French. So, you have to combine “the” and “le”. The word “concoction” is a hint that you need to play around with the letters – crossword-setters use a frankly terrifying range of anagram hints which range from the obvious (like this one) to the downright obscure: anything that hints at something being varied, wrong or frankly anything the setter fancies can be an anagram hint. In this case, the anagram only requires you to swap around the words the and le to give you lethe: the name of the river that deceased souls drank from in the Underworld which caused them to forget their past lives. This fits with the definition, which is “amnesia” (forgetfulness).

Some verses provided by exiled poet. (4)

This kind of clue often catches me out. It’s a hidden word, and I have highlighted the answer in bold. Hidden words are most commonly hinted at by the word “some” (as here) but it can also be “in” or “part” or anything similar. Here the setter is hinting that you will find the word hidden somewhere within the words that follow. Ovid was famously exiled by the emperor Augustus for “a poem and a mistake” (we’re not sure what the mistake was!), so the definition is “exiled poet”.

What tourists see in Athens – a harvest on poor soil. (9)

This clue combines three important crossword hacks. Firstly, it’s important not to ignore the little words, especially the indefinite article “a” – in this case, it provides the first letter of the answer. Secondly, you often have to think of an alternative word or synonym for a word that’s given to you. In this case, the synonym for harvest is crop. So far, therefore, we have a-crop– and we’re assuming that the definition is “What tourists see in Athens.” To complete the construction, we have another anagram hint word, which is “poor” – mix up the letters of the word “soil” and you can complete the answer: a-crop-olis: what tourists see in Athens.

“Deploy more reps!” ruled the Romans (8)

My final example indicates just how broad the range of anagram hints can be. In this case, the anagram hint word is “deploy” – it’s telling you to mix up the letters of “more reps” to give you something which can be defined as “ruled the Romans”. Got it yet? E_P_R_R_

Clues in isolation (which is how my husband started to teach me) are actually much more difficult than working on a whole puzzle – once you break into a crossword, that gives you some letters to play with, as I did for you at the end of the previous paragraph. When I first started I would look up some key long answers to give me some letters so I could get going. Three years on, I still continue to look up every answer I can’t deduce to see if I can explain it. If I can’t work out why the answer is what it is, I ask my husband; if he can’t work it out I ask his friends! It is rare for me to find a clue that nobody in our circle can explain, although it does sometimes happen!

Don’t mock the afflicted

Something which has struck me this year is the huge variation between schools when it comes to handling their mock examinations. Some schools have set them in November, some in December, some in January. Some schools have provided infinite details and guidance as to what the examinations will contain, some have not. Some of my tutees didn’t even know how many examinations they were due to have in each subject and on which topics, although I am hyper-aware that teenagers are not always the most reliable of sources! It is always interesting to ponder just how accurate a reflection of reality I am receiving from the outside …

Mock examinations are important to schools for a number of reasons. As a general rule, they are considered to be an indicator as to whether a student is on target to achieve their predicted grade, although the jury is still very much out on the accuracy of this process. Most schools put their staff through an agony of results analysis, with students being flagged or colour-coded as to whether they are on, above or below target. Sometimes this coding is even passed on to the students. I have heard of schools that hand out the results on colour-coded paper: green for on/above target, amber for close to but below target, red for well below. Apparently it can make for some very interesting reactions, when students who might otherwise have been pleased or distressed at their results were shown them in the context of how they were performing against their targets.

Personally, I don’t like target grades, as I feel that they categorise children unfairly and set up a mindset that is not always helpful. Students with very high targets can feel overwhelmed by the pressure, students with lower ones can feel like the system doesn’t believe in them. So in my eutopia we wouldn’t have them at all. I once met a Headtacher who worked in an outstanding school with outstanding results. They gave every child the same target – to get as far above the pass grade as they could.

One disadvantage of mock examinations is the amount of curriculum time that is eaten up by the very process of examining, a factor which led directly to the demise of the AS/A2 system at Key Stage 5 – losing most of the summer of Year 12 to an examination period was considered simply too costly. In Year 11, however, the mock examination period is mercifully short, with most schools cramming all of their examinations into a two-week or three-week window. The price is paid by the students and by the staff, who face a very intense time during that period.

But, despite the gruelling nature of the winter exam-sprint, mock examinations are truly essential for Year 11 students. In many schools this is the one and only time that students experience a practice run of what it will be like to sit their final papers in the summer; many schools don’t have the physical space to facilitate formal examinations for all year groups, so it’s really important for Year 11 to get this one real chance at experiencing what it is like to line up as a year group according to a designated seating plan, file into the room in examination conditions and sit a series of examinations, one after the other. Students experience what it’s like to receive formal instructions from the Examinations Officer, to be told to hand in their mobile phones and check their pockets for banned materials (pretty much everything), to have to have their equipment in an appropriate clear container and to surrender any equipment that is more modern than an analogue timepiece.

All of the above can create tension for students, but it is hugely important for them to experience the process so that they know what to expect in the summer. It can be a real balancing act for schools to create the right atmosphere – just the right amount of gravitas so that students experience the seriousness of the real thing, without sending the entire year group into a state of controlled (or, even worse, uncontrolled) panic.

One of the things which students struggle the most with when it comes to their first experience of examinations is timing, and this is indeed one of the many reasons why mocks are so important. There’s nothing like the full experience of being in a large exam hall and having to work to timed conditions to make you realise that this is something that you need to practise, practise and practise again. There is no point in working on exam-style questions if you are not doing so in timed conditions – in fact, I would argue that doing so could potentially be damaging in the long-run; if a student gets used to tackling a question over a longer period of time, they’re going to struggle to adjust their performance to what is required in the final paper. This is why it’s important to practise things under time pressure from the very beginning.

But mock examinations are more than just an opportunity to experience “the real thing”. They are (or should be) an opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. Teachers expect some students to read the paper wrong, to answer the wrong section, to tackle too many questions or not enough. The point is that they get to experience the impact of this and learn how important it is to approach each paper in the right way. Beyond that, they also get to dissect their performance in detail and (in an ideal world) receive thorough, individualised feedback from their teacher. The mock examinations should highlight areas of weakness and shine a light on the skills which need honing and improvement.

So what of the worst case scenario? A student totally bombs in the mocks? Well, even that’s not a disaster. I have seen students turn things around in a manner that I might not have believed possible had I not seen it with my own eyes. A real stinker of a performance in an examination can even be the catalyst that some students need to get them focused – if no amount of their teachers or their parents telling them to buck their ideas up has worked, then sometimes totally crashing down to earth with truly disastrous grade can be the ticket.

So do not despair. We have around six months until the final examinations in the summer. That’s more than a quarter of the curriculum time remaining. Time to re-group and time to focus. Success may be closer than you think.

Reinventing the wheel?

This week I’ve been thinking about resources. On my never-ending list of Things To Do has been the project of sourcing or creating some more GCSE-style language practice papers that won’t risk wrecking a school’s assessment process. It is crucially important to me not to use actual past papers from the current specification, unless I know for a fact that the child I am working with has already been exposed to that particular paper in examination conditions. The risk of me inadvertantly showing them a paper that will then be used for in-class assessment or – even worse – for their Mock examination, is simply too high. Much as my students would I am sure be delighted to have an advance stab at their Mock paper with a tutor’s guidance, this would be unforgiveable and would entirely undermine the purpose of the Mock.

As a result of this personal rule, I use a bank of papers that I created from the old legacy GCSE to give my students more practice. Prior to the specification change in 2018, dozens of examination papers existed that could be made to fit the new specification with some relatively minor tweaks. I have around 10 or 12 of these already, which I made several years ago, but I have always wanted more.

As so often happens, once I put my mind to it, I found that I had a folder of stuff I had sourced from heaven knows where and saved into my “look at this at some point when you’ve got time” folder – a folder which is pretty enormous, as I never seemed to find said time. One folder in a folder in a sub-folder turned out to have a set of practice papers created by another teacher, all of them recognisably from papers from the dim and distant past or from relevant text books. So someone else had the same idea as me but used different sources to create them, and I’ve managed to get my hands on their work. Halle-blinking-lujah.

But this got me thinking. Something that friends and family find it hard to understand is that even though a huge amount of my time is spent working on resources, none of these can be monetised. I am grateful for my background in academia, a period during which a paranoia about plagiarism was drummed into me – and rightly so. There have been numerous cases of teachers monetising resources that have then turned out to be based on the work of others. Much of the time, I honestly believe that this may not even have been entirely deliberate. The way that we work means that it can become genuinely difficult to remember where your work ends and that of another begins. Teachers tend to be the curators of an ever-evolving bank of resources that many others have influenced in different ways over the years. I am acutely aware that pretty much everything I produce as a working resource for students started its life somewhere else – as a passage in an old text book, from a bank of files kindly shared by a colleague, on a dim and distant exam paper from days gone by. Very little of what I produce, therefore, can be claimed as entirely original and monetised. If you’re still not convinced, take a look at what happened on The Classics Library website, where resources being shared entirely for free fell foul of copyright laws and had to be taken down as requested by Cambridge University Press: anything which even relies on the ideas and concepts created by others is not entirely your own work.

Given how many times this issue has been raised in relation to the monetised resources on the TES website, I do worry about the number of teachers and tutors who are now monetising vast quantities of resources. I do hope that every single one of them can truthfully claim that every single word of what they have written is original to them and didn’t start life as part of a set of departmental resources or as a piece created by a colleague or a trainee. Personally, I can lay claim to very little that is entirely original to me, because I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel unless I have to. Much of my time is spent hunting for useful resources, then reimagining them in a format that I find most useful or compelling. To use a rather sickening phrase, I take a resource and “make it my own”. But it is not my own, in the sense that I can lay claim to its birth and monetise it as my own work. It simply isn’t. Even if it is barely recognisable from its original, it is still not mine to claim. And certainly not to sell.

A regular occurence for me throughout my career has been that I manage to get my hands on a bank of departmental resources only to find that they are using something that I wrote 15 years ago. There are numerous advantages to taking on a trainee teacher, and one very useful one is harvesting what they have brought from other schools; the number of times I have opened up a file with great excitement only to go … hang on … this looks familiar … oh yeah, I think I wrote that. Or did I just adapt it? Who knows?

So, while my resources are all available to the students I work with and I share them gladly, they are not something that I can actually charge for because they are the result of my work combined with that of others – sometimes another person that is known to me, sometimes a whole list of people whom I have never met. I’ve always known this and have always found it to be in stark contrast to how things work in academia, a world in which you have to footnote every giant’s shoulders on whom you stand. The trend of teachers and tutors monetising resources does give me pause for this reason; I only hope that they are aware of the rules, and can hand-on-heart swear that everything they are selling started life in their own head and came to fruition by their hand alone. If they can, then wow – they’re definitely a hell of a lot more original than I am.

INSETs I wish I’d walked out of

When I reflect on the hundreds, possibly thousands of hours I have spent sat on a plastic chair designed for children, listening to half-baked, poorly-researched, unevidenced clichés and banalities, it’s actually quite difficult not to be angry.

Like anything in life, you have to be detached from something to get it into perspective: and more perspective makes me more cross rather than less so. How much of my time was wasted at tax-payers’ expense? Even worse, how many children continue to be taught badly while undiscerning leaders pump out empty platitudes instead of making themselves aware of and sharing the wealth of information that we do have about how humans learn?

I wish I’d been braver. I wish I’d voted with my feet and walked out of some sessions, rather than saving my disapproval for the anonymous staff surveys. It’s easy to say now, I realise that, and when your salary is being paid by those presenting at INSET, it might seem a little foolhardy to make your feelings so apparent. But the SLT in the school in which I spent the last 13 years of my career were pretty good at taking things on board. They weren’t tyrants; they were humane, benevolent and willing to be challenged. Maybe if I’d been a little bolder I could have helped to drive them towards evidence-informed pedagogy a little sooner. As it was, I had to wait for some personnel changes at the top and for some of the figures at leadership level to start reading the right material. It took years. It was infuriating.

Even more than this, I regret not following my instincts in the early days of my career. In particular, the instinct that if something sounds, feels and smells like unscientific hokum … then that’s exactly what it is. I knew that “Brain Gym” was an unrelenting stream of hogwash. And yet I sat there and listened to it (eyebrows in my hairline, but still I sat there). Now I feel dirty and used. Fortunately for all of us exposed to this achingly bad presentation back in around 2006, on the next day, another colleague – one of the scientists, I suspect – pinned an article by Ben Goldacre onto the staff room noticeboard; the piece was a precursor to Goldacre’s book Bad Science, which I later read, exposing “Brain Gym” and its ilk as pseudo-scientific snake-oil. Thanks to that article, and to the teacher who anonymously shared it, the use of “Brain Gym” was quietly shelved by anyone in the school who was even borderline capable of critical evaluation.

“Brain Gym” wasn’t the only bad science that I had to endure. Within the last decade the school where I worked invited in an outside speaker (at I know not what grotesque expense) to tell us all that mind maps were the only way for children to learn because they look a bit like your brain does under a microscope. I kid you not, he showed us an image of neurons and pointed out how similar mind-maps look, like it was some kind of gotcha. He also espoused the “left-brain/right-brain” hypothesis, admitted that “neurologists think it’s a little bit more complicated than this” (they do?! It is?!) but then declared breezily that “for our purposes” it was “a good working model”. Right. Presumably his definition of “a good working model” was the fact that it enabled him to keep rolling out his useless PowerPoint rather than telling us anything that was actually true about the brain. The only thing that got me through that particular session was another colleague: every time this fraudulent salesman made a statement of about the brain, the biologist sitting next to me muttered “no, it doesn’t”. And thank heaven for her.

Bad science aside, the number of INSETs I wish I’d walked out of simply as a statement that SLT were wasting my time remain alarmingly high. Here are some further examples of some of what I have been made to endure and/or partake in over the years:

VAKing, now fortunately condemned to the bonfire by anyone who knows anything. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t agonising sitting through this claptrap at the time, then being made to interview children about what they felt their preferred “learning style” was (some schools put a sticker on the front of children’s exercise books, naming their “preferred style”. We got them to colour it in). The very concept of preferred learning styles is unscientific hogwash; unfortunately is still being peddled in some places, especially in the US.
It’s all about growth mindset. No it isn’t, nor was it ever, and now we have the evidence to prove that its impact in schools amounts to net zero. Next?
Drumming. Ah what an INSET that was. We each had to choose our own percussion instrument, and this in itself was made out to be some kind of personality test. We then all “learned” to perform a short percussive work. I believe that the message was something about working as a team for the greater good. Inspirational.
Juggling. Here the message was that it’s difficult to learn a new skill and we should remember that when we’re teaching. I am unclear as to why it took two hours of me attempting to catch small bean bags to drive this message home.
Guess what’s in the trainer’s head. I have a genuine issue with someone standing up at the front of the hall and asking me to guess the correct answer to a question they are then going to give me the answer to. How many cases of child neglect were reported in the Surrey area during the last academic year? I have no idea – why would anyone who hasn’t just checked the figures have any idea? I assume you’re planning to tell me, so can we just move on to the bit where you provide me with the actual information, rather than ask me to guess?
Death by PowerPoint. The trainer reads everything that’s on every slide then assures you that it will be on the shared drive for you to access, which begs the question why on earth you had to sit and listen to him reading it aloud.
Death by Ted Talk. No. Just no. If anyone is still in some kind of idealistic bubble in which they think that any Ted Talk is profound and worth hearing, then de-program yourself by watching this. “Let’s look at a picture of the planet for no reason” is I think my favourite moment.
Look at me and my big book. This was a recent lethal mutation from the welcome move towards schools becoming more research-informed. In this genre of INSET, a manager that you know full well rarely if ever opens a book puts the image of the front cover of one he’s been told to read on a projected slide so he can demonstrate how research-informed he is.
Mindfulness. Again, I’m afraid that the research on the impact of this in schools simply isn’t there. Until it is, I don’t want to hear about it and I certainly don’t want to do it with colleagues. Asking me to lie on the drama-room floor (seriously?!) while someone talks in a soothing voice is also a big no.
Bad quotations. Even if correctly attributed, there is nothing more cringe-worthy than an “inspiring” quotation on a PowerPoint slide. And I don’t know a single manager who hasn’t used a falsely-attibuted one at some point or another.

As Abraham Lincoln famously said, the trouble with quotes on the internet is you never really know whether they’re genuine.

Why is Latin difficult?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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