Memory – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

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.

Radical traditionalism

It is easy to forget, sometimes, how far we have come. In a social milieu that is changing so fast it makes your head spin, it can be tempting to hark back to simpler times, when teachers ruled the classroom and when students did as they were told. The trouble is, as a Professor of Greek once said to me, the good old days were never really that good. “In the good old days,” he mused, “with my background, I wouldn’t have been a Professor and a Head of Department. I’d have been ram-rodding the drains.”

One of the most frustrating things about politicians is they all seem to believe that they understand education. In fact, it’s not just politicians: it’s everyone. Everyone has been to school and so everyone can and does have a supposedly valid opinion on how schools should be run and how children should be taught. But as Katharine Birbalsingh observed this week, the “government team saying the Education Secretary doesn’t need lectures from successful school leaders because the Education Secretary went to school herself would be like the Health Secretary saying he doesn’t want to hear from doctors because he once went to hospital.”

Birbalsingh was frustrated by a recent (and extremely brief) audience that she and other extraordinary Headteachers had been given with the Education Secretary, who by all accounts was distinctly uninterested in finding out how a school with a socially disadvantaged intake such as Michaela’s can achieve results which rival those of Eton College. The Education Secretary was not in the least bit curious to explore how Michaela had reached such heights of attainment. I’d like to say that I find this extraordinary, unbelievable and shocking, but I don’t. Until people let go of their passionate political affiliations – and I find it highly unlikely that an elected Member of Parliament is capable of doing so – then education will continue to remain a bruised and punctured political football.

One of the most depressing things about modern times is how unwilling people seem to learn from the past. We have seen a plethora of radical experiments and we now have a wealth of evidence about which environments work best for the majority of students. With the opening up of academia and a terrific movement towards making the most useful discoveries in cognitive science accessible to the average classroom teacher, we also know a huge amount about how children learn and remember. Despite all of this, huge swathes of educationalists remain unshakably wedded to outmoded ideas. The infuriating thing is, they consider themselves to be the progressives, kicking against what they call “the traditional methods”. But surely, if you’re hanging on to so-called “progressive” ideas that were first mooted more than 50 years ago, then you’re anything but a radical. You’re a dyed-in-the-wool conservative.

I find it indescribably irksome that my stance on learning and education – which has changed radically over the years along with my own experience, with the reading I have done and with my willingness to change my mind – is labelled as “traditionalist”. If you want to know about “traditional” in its very worst sense then you could have sat through one of the Divinity lessons I was forced to attend at school. Oh yes. Divinity. Imagine that. The lessons were led by a Reverend and the man seemed determined to spread and perpetuate ignorance to the best of his deeply limited ability. He lived in a fantasy world, in which children were still drilled in their Bible studies at home, thoroughly steeped in an understanding of chapter and verse. Our so-called “lessons” consisted of him selecting a passage for one of us to read from the Bible, after which he would pontificate circuitously for the rest of the hour. The worst thing was, due to his unmitigated fantasy about our Bible knowledge, he offered no education as to the shape and structure of the Bible, he simply barked a reference followed by a name and waited for the girl to start reading. Any girl who found herself floundering to locate “Mark, chapter 15, verses 32-38” or whatever reference he had pronounced, was left to flounder. If she started reading from the wrong section he would simply shout “NOOOOOOO!” and wait for her to try again. On occasion, this happened multiple times until the girl managed to stumble upon the correct lines. I don’t think it even occurred to him that most children in the room wouldn’t even have understood what “chapter and verse” actually meant.

What indescribable apathy in the face of a golden opportunity. This man had no exam to prepare us for, no dull syllabus to force his hand. (The school, it may interest you to know, did not allow us to sit a GCSE in Religious Studies, because it objected to the fact that to do so would require studying “other religions”.) With such total freedom, the Reverend could have given us an immensely useful grounding in a text that has arguably shaped western values and western literature in more significant ways than any other written work in history. But no, he couldn’t be bothered. He was just waiting for retirement.

So, I smile to myself when I am reminded that I am supposedly in the “traditionalist” camp when it comes to education. Personally, I think that those of us in this camp should identify as something with a bit more of a rallying cry. How about “radical traditionalist”? A radical traditionalist believes that knowledge is not only important but the right of every child. A radical traditionalist takes on board the overwhelming body of evidence that direct instruction is more effective than discovery learning when working with novices. A radical traditionalist refuses to accept the soft bigotry of low expectations, the heinous and insulting prejudice that kids from ordinary backgrounds aren’t capable of academic rigour. I find it indescribably depressing how many people who consider themselves to be genuine liberals cheer on the pursuit of mediocrity for our most disadvantaged and vulnerable members of society, whilst patting themselves on the back for being progressive. Quite honestly, I don’t know how they sleep at night.

Routines and comfort zones

As I write this, I’m in absolute agony. I can barely move without yelping. Rolling over in bed has been a challenge and I am getting up out of my chair like a 70-year-old. There’s me thinking that I normally make myself work hard on my twice-weekly visits to the gym. Turns out that – for quite some time – I’ve just been playing at it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been making progress. On several of the machines, I can now select a heavier option than I have been able to previously, and my strength has definitely continued to improve incrementally. But if I’m honest, that progress has been very, very slow and has quite possibly reached a plateau over the last few weeks.

This week, in place of the deep-tissue massage and advice-session I normally get from my physical therapist, we met at the gym and he coached me in my usual routines. Flipping heck. I truly had not realised just how much I was staying in my comfort zone and what a difference it would make to me, having someone to push me beyond it. While Greg is anything but a Sargeant Major type, it’s amazing what a great motivator it is to have someone beside you, telling you to add more weight, stretch a bit further, try a bit harder.

“What weights should we use for walking lunges?” he asked. “Um … 4s or 5s?” I said, hopefully, knowing full well that he would push me up to working with 6s. Off he jogged to the weight store and returned, brimming with mischief. “They didn’t have any 6s,” he said, nonchalantly. “Try with these 8s.”

Ignoring this transparent deceit and weighed down by an extra 16 kilos on top of my body weight of 47, I waggled my way through a series of walking lunges. Greg did the same beside me, holding more than double the weight and chatting all the time about his son and his daughter. I’ve taught both of them, of course, because, as an ex-teacher in the village comprehensive, it is a local by-law that I must have taught the children of every single community service-provider: the personal trainer, the Sainsbury’s delivery guy, the gardener, the builder, the roofer, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. While Greg chatted, I puffed and panted and my glutei maximi made it more than apparent to me that there would be trouble ahead. Yesterday and today, that trouble became manifest.

Over the last 48 hours I have felt almost as bad as I did on the very first occasion I tried this new-fangled business of resistance training. Ouch. It’s been a serious wake up call, the sudden realisation that – while habits and routines are essential and the stuff of a (healthy) life – they carry with them the risk of complacency and comfort. Things have been way too easy at the gym recently, because I have let them be so. I cannot remember the last time that I experienced serious delayed-onset muscle soreness after a visit, and that’s something to work on from here.

This week, I also met a new client, one who is struggling when it comes to committing her work to memory. Whether it be the set text, noun endings or vocabulary, there is a serious amount of rote-learning required in the subject of Latin, and many students struggle with the sheer volume of what they need to commit to long-term memory. Supposedly, she has been doing all the right things and has made regular use of flashcards, but the fact that the process is not working is most likely because it’s been too comfortable.

So, I encouraged her to work proactively on selecting the cards that she is struggling with and focus on those. Flashcards are for the words you don’t know, not the ones you do. I also warned against the well-known risk attached to using the flashcards alone, rather than getting somebody else to test you – the temptation to turn the card over too quickly and allow yourself to recognise the answer rather than to hold off until you retrieve it can be great; indeed it can be something that students do unconsciously, without even realising it. Putting somebody else in charge of the cards is a great way to mitigate against this risk. “It should feel uncomfortable,” I preached. “If you’re finding the flashcards too easy, you’re doing it wrong.” Huh. Physician, heal thyself, I thought ruefully this morning, as my muscles caterwauled their protest against Monday’s new and unusual routines.

What has this taught me? Well, it’s been a bit of a jolt. It has reminded me that we are all susceptible to the almost inevitable tendency to settle into a comfort zone, to keep patting ourselves on the back for a job well done when in reality we’ve done very little. It has also reminded me that going it alone is inherently flawed. I really understand why people hire personal trainers on a long-term basis – not because any of the exercises that they are doing are particularly complex or dangerous or requiring an expert, but because it’s just too easy not to push yourself. Paying someone to motivate you can be hugely valuable, and this has given me pause for thought. While I’m not sure it’s necessary for me to hire someone to train with twice a week every week, I can totally see the value in an occasional booster session to question my habits, to shake up my routine and to remind me to push myself harder. That’s something that I shall be investing in from this point forward.

Digital snake-oil

Picture the scene. You’re in a posh restaurant. The sort with linen napkins, thick carpets and snooty waiters. Everyone is dressed smartly and all the subliminal messaging is telling you that – whatever the food is like – you are expected to behave in a certain way.

The couple next to you are hunched over, staring at their smart phones. So are the couple behind them. Your partner is also staring at his phone. When your gaze returns to the table, your own phone awaits. No, this is not an indictment of society’s mass phone addiction, it is an unfortunate situation rendered necessary by the fact that your holiday-provider has decided that Going Digital is A Good Idea. As part of your eye-wateringly expensive holiday package you might be entitled to eat in this restaurant, but apparently you’re not entitled to a menu that you can actually hold in your hands. No, you must access the menu by “following the QR code” using the camera on your phone. Each table has a glass ornament displaying the code, so you whip your smartphone out and away you go.

It was not just the fact that seeing people scrolling on their phones in a restaurant was depressing – which it was. It was also the fact that accessing the menu in this way afforded no tangible gains whatsoever: it was, in fact, a substantially sub-optimal way of looking at a menu. The very need for scrolling was an irritation, when real menus are arranged in a way that allows you to scan the whole offering in one. A traditional menu would have been- quite simply – a hundred times better. Even my husband heartily agreed, a man who had a career in software engineering and is a natural lover of all things digital.

This spectacularly pointless switch to digital puzzled me for the rest of the holiday. With the best will in the world, why would somebody do this? Have we actually hit the point where some people believe that things are made definitively better purely for the reason that they are sprinkled with digital fairy dust? The quite extraordinary stupidity of the whole thing was rendered even more ludicrous by the fact that the holiday company did not even have the imagination to exploit the (albeit slim) advantages that “going digital” could bring to the party. For example, if they were so determined to go the digital route, then why not share the QR code with customers ahead of time and encourage them to start choosing their menu options in advance? This would at least have added a whiff of anticipation, although I still would argue that a traditional menu would have been infinitely preferable once we were sat in the restaurant itself. Easy advance-sharing was literally the only potential advantage I could imagine arising from the digital model, and they didn’t even bother to do that. So, the gormless march towards everything going digital advances, it seems, with no thought applied either to the potential consequences or to how to actually reap the potential advantages it might afford.

Increasingly, secondary school students are provided with “everything they need” online. While digital tools will have meant some investment on the school’s part, I am suspicious that a lot of what happens now is actually about reducing their photocopying budget, an undeniable thorn in the side of every HoD who has responsibility for their department’s costs. Honestly, what schools spend on technology generally pales into insignificance when compared to their yearly photocopying budget. While really successful schools who are getting fantastic results and impressive Progress 8 scores have broadly shifted towards the use of printed booklets for the students and moved away from digital presentations on the part of the teacher, vast swathes of schools (including in the private sector) have shifted towards a digital model, where everything is presented to the students electronically and nothing is printed out. Ker-ching.

I have worked with dozens of students in this position and have seen the disastrous fallout of what this digital model does for students’ learning and understanding. Inevitably, like anything inherently flawed, it is the already-disadvantaged that it leaves behind. People seem to assume that being “disadvantaged” means a lack of access to expensive technology and it is true that there can be glaring differences between what an affluent child has access to by comparison with one who is eligible for free school meals. But this is not the only way that students can be disadvantaged and it is vastly outweighed by other, more serious handicaps. Think prior attainment, think organisational skills, think access to an ever-increasing range of vocabulary, think time and space. Students who are already struggling in class for a myriad of reasons – some of which may or may not relate to poverty – are demonstrably left behind when adults demand that they manage both their time and their resources in such an abstract way, often without guidance.

There is so much nonsense talked about the younger generation being fully au fait with the full range of digital technology on offer, as if being born in the digital age bestows young people with an innate knowledge and understanding of the skills and mindset required to navigate towards progress in the modern age. The reality is that most kids are completely clueless when it comes to managing their learning remotely. Of course they are! Just because a child has been pressing icons on the screen of an iPad since they were a toddler, this does not imbue them with the organisational skills required to manage their learning online. To assume so would be like assuming that a toddler who has mastered the fun that can be had from a pop-up reading book is thus fortified with the skills and knowledge required to negotiate a library full of journals, encyclopaedias and reference manuals.

An increasing number of students that I work with are studying the WJEC/Eduqas GCSE syllabus, the creators of which produce a simply baffling array of resources that even I took a while to get my head around. Some of them are aimed at teachers, some of them in theory designed to be student-friendly. Most schools dump all of these resources into an area where students can access them, a collection of ponderous PDF files that are long and academically challenging. The one file which is explicitly aimed at students is designed as a student booklet, with space in which students can write their translation and notes. Most schools don’t even bother print this one out, instructing the students to work electronically. I have tutees who have not held a pen in class for years, so wedded is their school to the use of tablets or Chromebooks. I could honestly weep for their basic skills and feel outraged that so many schools are so blatantly ignoring the research that we have on the link between the use of a pen and memory. These students come to me with simply no idea what they have supposedly studied, what materials are in their possession and what they are supposed to do with them. They are completely overwhelmed and can’t even articulate the basic content that they have theoretically covered in class.

Technology is an absolute wonder. In the last few years, I have embraced online learning to the extent that I have made a career out of it, I have embraced the time-saving advantages of AI and I am always open to the advantages that technical advances can bring. As someone in possession of the world’s worst sense of direction, I find the smartphone genuinely liberating and life-changing, as it enables me to negotiate my way confidently. It even knows all the local pathways! As someone with poor eyesight, I love the fact that there has been an explosion in the availability of audiobooks, and that I can now access most books and articles in a format that allows me to manipulate the size and shape of the font as well as the colour of the background. This is all wonderful! Believe me, I love technology! But I am heartily sick of two things that the digital snake-oil salesmen seem to have successfully convinced society of: firstly, the blind assumption that digital is always better, when in fact people should be asking themselves whether it is better and if so why – what other advantages might the technology bring and what are the potential pitfalls? Secondly, I am tired of the assumption that children born in the current epoch are all miraculously imbued with innate digital skills and knowledge, a bizarre fantasy which seems thoroughly ingrained, despite the ever-increasing pile of evidence to the contrary.

Delayed gratification

This week I have found myself having a very stern conversation with one of my cats. Her name is Piglet. Piglet by name, piglet by nature. The animal simply cannot help herself when it comes to food. If she had her way, she’d be the size of a house, hauling her enormous belly around like a competitor in the World’s Strongest Man. Fortunately – or unfortunately, as far as she is concerned – she has mean old me controlling her food intake.

So, Piglet and I had to have a very serious conversation about her life choices. This is a cat that was in line to receive some small pieces of chicken as a treat. See, I’m not always mean: I had even taken the pieces out of the fridge, to bring them up to room temperature. Piglet, however, elected that evening to wolf down the remaining supper of our other cat, who is currently being rather delicate about her food intake. The second cat is in the early stages of renal failure and so is on a specialist prescription diet. When my back was turned for a nano-second, I failed to register that Dolly had walked away from her food and so I turned around to find Piglet urgently inhaling the last scraps of Dolly’s prescription dinner.

“You could have had some chicken pieces this evening!” I admonished her. “As it is, you’ve made the choice to eat the prescription cat food, so now you’re not getting anything else.” She stared at me, unmoved and unimpressed, still cleaning her whiskers after the extra feed she had claimed for herself.

In reality, of course, the cat’s brain is not capable of understanding the point. She’s a very smart cat, but she has not yet mastered English, nor has she worked out that stealing the prescription cat food means missing out on her chicken treats. She is also – being a cat – not capable of making the fundamental decision of delayed gratification, something which human psychologists and the world in general like to cite as a crucial indicator of our future success as adults. Or is it?

I am quite a fan of The Studies Show, a podcast hosted by two science writers called Stuart Richie and Tom Chivers. In each episode, they debunk various stubborn myths that persist either as a result of poor science or as a result of the science being poorly reported or interpreted (or both). They investigate how science is at the mercy of human bias like any other subject, and explain things such as confounding, publication bias and collider bias (I am still struggling to grasp the last one in full). In one particular episode, they explore the experiment nicknamed “the marshmallow test”, which was hailed as a groundbreaking study into impulse control in very young children, with some quite extraordinary claims made about how the findings were linked to future success in several walks of life – in education, in financial stability, in relationships and in health.

In various tests, performed on a group of 4-year-olds in Stanford University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, psychologists offered several hundred children a choice between either one or two sweet treats. The children were offered the choice of either taking one treat which they could have immediately, or if they waited for an unspecified amount of time, during which the psychologist left the room, they would then be allowed two treats. Times that the children were left to wait varied but could be up to 20 minutes. One point, made hilariously by Tom Chivers during the discussion, is to question whether some smart four-year-olds might already have a sound understanding of the value of their own time. “You know what, one marshmallow isn’t worth 20 minutes of my time, mate!” he imagines them saying. Stuart Richie then ponders whether marshmallows were a significantly bigger deal in the 1970s compared to now – what kid in the mid-2020s is going to wait 15 or 20 minutes just for one extra marshmallow?

The issues with the study are many, but the most dubious are the claims that were extrapolated from two follow-up questionnaires, which were responded to by only around 100 of the original 653 participants – meaning that more than 80% of the candidates were not included in the two follow-up studies, which looked at the children in later life. Chivers and Richie also raise the query that the original test was confounded by the fact that different children were given different coping strategies to assist with the waiting time – for example, some were encouraged to use distraction techniques, others to focus on the end reward. This is because the original purpose of the research at Stanford was to try to find out which of the coping strategies would help children most with delaying gratification – the idea of following them up to see which children became more successful in later life came some time afterwards, which may explain why Stanford lost touch with so many of the participants. However, it is the later follow-up studies that caused all the excitement, as they supposedly found a quite remarkably strong correlation between later success and the period of time that the younger children had managed to wait before receiving their reward. The claim – of course – turns out to be nonsense. The correlation only worked with children who had not been offered any coping strategies to help to delay the gratification, which somewhat begs the question why the primary author of the study believed so strongly in the teaching of delayed gratification as a life-strategy. Far more importantly, however, the correlation all but disappeared in replication studies, when controls were introduced for socio-economic background and previous academic success, both of which are far more obvious likely predictors of future academic attainment and overall success.

Chivers and Richie link the wild extrapolations taken from this particular study to similar attempts to introduce the concept of “growth mindset” in schools, another topic of academic research that they take a sledgehammer to in a previous episode. I remember this particular fad very well, as at the time in my school we had one particular Senior Manager who had read Carol Dweck’s book The Psychology of Success and was a shiny, happy acolyte for the concept that the tiniest shift in rhetoric – basically, praising kids for working hard rather than for their smarts – would somehow revolutionise their success in the classroom. It may not surprise you to know that it didn’t, and that the studies in this area have since been shown to prove nothing of the sort.

This is not to say that delaying gratification is not an important skill. It is, of course, an important part of growing up and becoming a successful adult that one learns to some extent to place tasks in an order of importance and/or urgency, rather than focusing entirely on what you would most like to do in the moment. Studying for an exam, preparing for a competition or an interview, exercising and eating the right things for the benefit of your longterm health are all simple goals shared by many which require this skill. In my experience, children acquire the ability to delay their gratification at different rates and while some teenagers have fully mastered the process others are still grappling with their motivation and find it really hard to set aside the things that they enjoy the most to focus on something important but less interesting. One of the greatest things that schools can do is thus to focus on assisting children in their ability to concentrate, as a lack of attention in class remains by far the biggest barrier to academic success for many of our most vulnerable students.

In the meantime, Piglet remains at the mercy of her desires and will no doubt continue to make a lunge for every tasty morsel she can find in her path. I have often said that one of the joys of keeping a cat is that they teach you how to live your life and speaking as someone who doesn’t always remember to reward myself just for the hell of it, Piglet serves as a feline reminder that sometimes making a dive for the thing you crave the most is to be recommended.

Piglet, who can only delay her gratification while sleeping

Vocabulary acquisition

An essential challenge faced by students and teachers alike is the acquisition of vocabulary. I have written before on the best methods that students can employ when tackling vocabulary learning, so I do not plan to reiterate those here. What follows are rather some observations and musings about what we’re getting wrong in the Latin classroom when it comes to vocabulary acquisition, especially when compared to our counterparts in modern languages.

In my experience to date, supporting students in the accretion of vocabulary is a responsibility undertaken more effectively and proactively by modern language teachers than by those of us who specialise in Latin. It is possible that Latinists are under more time pressure in the curriculum and thus have no choice but to place the responsibility for vocabulary learning onto our students, but I think it more likely that we are simply less well trained in how to go about it than our colleagues in MFL. Classicists suffer from the fact that our training is somewhat broad – a qualified Classics teacher will necessarily have spread their training time across Ancient History and Classical Civilisation subjects, dramatically reducing the time that they spend focused purely on the teaching of the Latin language. I have little to no recollection of being given any significant guidance on how to help my students to develop their knowledge of vocabulary, so all my knowledge in this area has come later – through experience and through reading.

One of the many differences between the manner in which ancient languages are taught compared to modern ones is in the presentation of vocabulary to students. While modern linguists favour grouping words into themes or topics (e.g. “going to the shops” or “hobbies”), Latin teachers tend to present vocabulary in the following ways:

By chapters in a text book (e.g. Cambridge Latin Course, Suburani, De Romanis or Taylor & Cullen). Sometimes these may have a loose theme, but it’s generally pretty tenuous.
As one long alphabetical list (e.g. OCR GCSE or Eduqas GCSE).
In parts of speech. Some teachers invite students to learn the GCSE list in types of words, e.g. 1^st declension nouns, 2^nd declension nouns etc.

Each of these approaches has its drawbacks, so let’s consider those one by one. First of all, let us consider the approach of learning vocabulary by text book chapter. If one were to use Taylor & Cullen for this purpose, one would at least be learning the set vocabulary for OCR and thus there is some longterm justification for the approach. The vocabulary also reflects what is being introduced in each chapter and therefore there is some pedagogical justification for students learning it as they go. All of that said, you wouldn’t believe how few schools are actually doing this and to date I’m not sure I have met a single student that is working systematically through the chapters of Taylor & Cullen and learning the vocabulary as they go: some students are being tested on the chapters retrospectively, but I have not worked with any who are using the text book as it was designed. This is most likely because Taylor & Cullen is an ab initio course and thus the early chapters are not suitable for use with Year 10s who have studied Latin in Years 7-9. Why don’t schools use it during those years? Well, I’m assuming that its somewhat sombre presentation and lack of colour pictures puts teachers off the idea of using it a basis for KS3, when (to be frank) they are under pressure to recruit bums onto seats for KS4 or else find themselves out of a job. This means that there is no text book explicitly aimed at preparing students for a specific GCSE exam board being made wide use of in schools.

None of the text books commonly used in schools at KS3 build vocabulary that is explicitly and exclusively aimed at a particular GCSE course. While Suburani is supposedly linked to the Eduqas course, it diverts from using the vocabulary that is relevant to this in favour of what suits its own narrative. For example, students of Suburani will be deeply familiar with the word popina as meaning “bar” (not on the GCSE list for either OCR or Eduqas but used widely throughout the first few chapters), yet they are not introduced to the word taberna meaning “tavern” or “shop” (on the GCSE list for both boards) until chapter 12. Similar problems occur in terms of the thematic focus of Suburani: because it focuses on the life of the poor in Rome, students are taught that insula means “block of flats”. While it does mean this, I have never seen it used in this way on a GCSE paper – the word is used exclusively by both boards in a context in which the only sensible translation is “island”. I shall say more about the problem of words with multiple meanings later on.

Presenting words in an alphabetical list seems to be the practice used by most schools when students reach Years 10 and 11 and are embarking on their GCSE studies. Most students that I have worked with are told to learn a certain number of words from the alphabetical list and are thus tested on multiple words that have nothing in common, either in terms of their meaning or their grammatical form. One advantage of this is that students are forced to look at words with similar appearance but different meaning. However, multiple and in my opinion worse problems arise from this method. Students learning the vocabulary in alphabetical order give little thought to what type of word they are looking at (e.g. whether it is a noun or a verb) or to its morphology. This means that students do not learn the principal parts of their verbs, nor do they learn the stem changes of nouns and adjectives. This can cause considerable frustration and demotivation when students struggle to recognise the words that they have supposedly learnt when those words appear in different forms. Teachers could mitigate against this by testing students on those forms, but most seem reluctant to do so. Do they think it’s too hard?

The method I used was to present the GCSE list in parts of speech and invite students to learn different types of words in groups: all the 1^st declension nouns, all the 2^nd declension nouns etc. The advantage of this method is that it allows for the opportunity to link the vocabulary to the grammar. For example, the first vocabulary learning task I used to set my Year 10s in September was to learn/revise all the 1^st declension nouns (in theory they knew most of them already from KS3) and to revise the endings of the 1^st declension. In the test, they were expected to be able to give the meaning of the nouns I selected for testing and they were expected to be able to write out their endings also. I felt (and still feel, on the whole) that this was the best approach, but that does not mean that it does not have its own disadvantages. Firstly, it made some learning tasks excessively onerous and others too easy: for example, that task of learning the 1^st declension nouns was very easy (because most of the words were already familiar and the forms of the nouns are very simple) but the task of learning 3^rd conjugation verbs was much harder (fewer of them were previously known and their principal parts are a nightmare). This meant that students were often hit with homework that turned out to be extremely difficult at what might not have been the ideal time for them. A second disadvantage was that it was impossible to give students a translation test, because one could not create sentences out of a set of words which all belong to one category. Thirdly, and related to that point, testing according to parts of speech made it very difficult to link vocabulary learning to classroom teaching in any meaningful way: in class, we might be studying the uses of the subjunctive, and that could not necessarily be linked to the homework task that was next on the list. This is something that I have been thinking about more and more in recent years as a massive problem in Latin teaching – a disconnect between what students are learning in the classroom and the vocabulary they are invited to learn for homework. The more I think about it, the more I believe this is a fundamental problem which requires a complete curriculum re-think.

The difficulty of linking vocabulary learning to explicit classroom teaching is something that modern language teachers would probably be very puzzled by. Modern linguists are way ahead when it comes to tying vocabulary learning to what’s happening in their classroom and to the relevant grammar. Given this, imagine my excitement when one of my tutees shared with me that she has been presented with the OCR vocabulary list in themes! I was full of anticipation as to how her school was planning to test their students on those themes. For example, one theme might be “fighting and military language”, within which students learn nouns such as “battle” and “war” alongside verbs such as “fight” and attack”. Call me daft, but I hoped and expected that she would be tested using some simple sentences, which would afford teachers the opportunity to observe students’ (hopefully) increasing understanding of grammar and morphology alongside the acquisition of the relevant vocabulary. Surely no teacher would have gone to the trouble of dividing up 450 words into a set of themes unless they were going to make use of some innovative testing methodologies? No? Well … actually, no. The school are testing the students on a list of words, with no link made between the meanings of those words and the learning that is going on in classroom. I have absolutely no idea what the point of this is. Maybe somebody in the department has read somewhere that “themes” is a good way to classify vocabulary and I am sure it is – but I’d place a hefty bet that there is no tangible pedagogical gain unless that learning is linked to the use of those words in sentence-structures, the kind of approach favoured by Gianfranco Conti.

I said that I would come back to the issue of words with multiple meanings, and that is something I have noted with interest from my tutee’s themed list. Words with multiple meanings appear more than once on the different lists, with their meanings edited to suit the theme of that list. This is an interesting idea and I am still pondering whether or not I think it is a good one. Multiple meanings are a real menace, particularly when the most obvious meaning (i.e. the one which is a derivative) is the least essential. For example, on the GCSE list for both boards is the word imperium, which can mean “empire” and all students immediately plump for that meaning as it is an obvious derivative. However, the word is more commonly used on language papers to mean “command” or “power” – it is therefore those meanings that must be prioritised when a student is learning the word. Similarly, all students need to be drilled on the fact that while imperator does come to mean “emperor” in time, it originally meant “general” and is usually used in that way on exam papers. Even worse is a nightmare word such as peto, which is listed on both boards as meaning anything from “make for”, “head for”, “seek” and “attack”. Students really struggle with learning all of its multiple possible meanings and it is important to show them multiple sentences with the verb being used in lots of different contexts so that they can grasp all of the possibilities.

As so often, I reach the end of my musings having criticised much and resolved little. I am thankful to be working in a one-to-one setting, in which I can support students with vocabulary learning in a proactive and detailed way, one which goes way beyond what is possible in the mainstream classroom and supports their learning in a way that simply cannot be expected of a classroom teacher. I shall continue to ponder what I would do were I in a position to re-shape the curriculum all over again, but I fear that this would entail writing an entire text book from scratch. Many have tried to do this, and even those who have made it to publication remain flawed: I have no conviction that I could do any better.

Reading their minds?

Classroom teachers are expected to be psychics. According to the Teachers’ Standards, which are many and complex, every classroom teacher must not only understand how children think and learn but must know when and how to differentiate appropriately, using approaches which enable pupils to be taught effectively; they must have a secure understanding of how a range of factors can inhibit pupils’ ability to learn and how best to overcome these; they must have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with special educational needs, those of high ability, those with English as an additional language and those with disabilities; they must be able to use and evaluate distinctive teaching approaches to engage and support all of these different young people … and all of this must happen while there are 30 of these diverse learners in the same room.

Much of what is demanded of the average classroom teacher is impossible. I say this not to be a doom-monger or to preach the acceptance of mediocrity – far from it. Throughout my career I strived to be the best teacher I could possibly be. Yet in reality, we cannot be all things to all men and we cannot possibly fathom the inner workings of every single one of the minds that are sat in front of us.

I have written numerous times on the differences between classroom teaching and tutoring but this week something hit me that had not occurred to me before. While I have always been aware that one-to-one sessions give me an insight into the misconceptions each child may have and thus the ability to address those, it has not previously dawned on me that tutoring a large number of students in the way that I do has given me a broader insight into how children think and learn in a way that I could not have experienced as a classroom teacher. Working one-to-one means that I get to listen to how my students think and reason in real time.

It is often said by modern cognitive scientists that education has placed too much focus on the diversity of learners in the past. While every parent likes to think that their child has a unique set of needs that can only be met in a unique way, the reality is that there is far more that unites young learners than divides them. We now know a great deal about how memory works and how best to support students with the learning process: this is not to say that some will not find it harder than others and require more time and effort than others, but broadly speaking the approaches that work for those with special educational needs in fact work well for the mainstream classroom as a whole. If you tailor your classroom towards providing the best learning support for your neediest learners, everyone benefits as a whole.

Working one-to-one with the huge number of students that I do has furnished me with a real insight into how students tackle the process of translating and what the common pitfalls are when they are doing so. It has also provided some perhaps surprising insights into which constructions that children tend to be able to translate on instinct, without a full grasp of understanding. This information is actually gold dust and links to what I blogged about last week – the necessity of designing a curriculum around the learners sat in front of you and in relation to the time you have available as well as the end goal when it comes to examinations. I have realised in the last year or two that there are some complex constructions which many classroom teachers tend to focus too much time on, to the detriment of the basics, when in fact many students could translate those constructions without difficulty so long as they had a grasp of their verb and noun forms and their vocabulary.

Working one-to-one has given me more of an insight into what doesn’t need to be taught as well as what does. While most of my students have gaping holes in their basic knowledge, many of them have spent an unnecessary amount of time being taught things that they do not need to understand in detail. Sometimes, a construction has been so over-taught that a child has been left in complete confusion; their natural grasp of it, one which they would in all likelihood have stumbled upon if given the right basic tools and a decent dose of confidence, has been lost forever.

I am still pondering what to do with these insights as it occurs to me that they could quite honestly be of enormous use to any classroom teacher who is willing to listen. For now, my understanding of how children go about acquiring the skills that they need to do well in Latin is ever-increasing and remains endlessly fascinating to me.

The best use of curriculum time

“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.”

Theophrastus.

On Wednesday, I had my regular fortnightly meeting with the new teacher who has taken over the teaching of Latin in the school where I used to work. This teacher is an ECT (in her first year of teaching) and while she will of course have a professional, in-house mentor to oversee her development within the school, the Head was conscious of and rightly concerned about the fact that she will have no subject expert in the building to offer her support. That’s where I come in. This week, I found my young protégé in a bit of a flap about one particular part of the language curriculum and since reflecting on our time together I realise that I was less helpful than I could have been. Rather than letting our conversation continue when it comes to the grammar at a granular level, what I needed to do was to get her to reflect on which aspects of the curriculum actually require the most time spent on them. Next time I see her, I shall do so.

One of the most frustrating things about leaving teaching is at last having the time to see and understand how one could completely re-write the curriculum to reflect more accurately the way that the exam papers are written. What those outside the profession will find difficult to understand is that it is left in the hands of often new and experienced teachers to design an entire curriculum to prepare for an exam they did not write. No real guidance is shared by the exam boards (and on the odd occasion when some guidance is offered, it is usually either unrealistic or unworkable in some or most settings). What we really need is for exam-setters to work alongside schools to build an appropriate curriculum, but that’s never going to happen.

As we talked, my instincts were telling me that this teacher was becoming unnecessarily bogged down by her worries about a particular construction and was planning to spend a huge amount of time on it. I need to make sure that she does not do this. The reason? Well, I have just reviewed the 8 separate past and specimen papers that we have from the exam she is entering her students for, and this particular construction appears either once or twice in each language paper. Around half of the time, its appearance is supported by comprehension questions, which guide the candidate towards the correct interpretation. The rest of the time, the examples used are almost exclusively ones which most students would be able to translate on instinct, even if they had never been taught the existence of this particular construction. Compare that to another kind of construction, which most teachers skim over very briefly, but which in fact appears multiple times in every single exam paper. Which would you focus on? Sounds obvious now, doesn’t it? But you wouldn’t believe how few teachers go through this thought-process when designing their curriculum and planning their lesson time.

Having made the switch from the classroom to private tutoring, I am in contact with dozens of students from multiple different types of schools. Something I have come to realise is that almost all teachers over-teach the aspects of the curriculum that they believe to be difficult. It is not that their beliefs are incorrect, but what they get wrong is the amount of curriculum time that they dedicate to these concepts as a result of their relative complexity. It’s a common assumption in education that one must spend more time on something because it is difficult. In fact, this must be weighed up against three crucial realities: firstly, the nature, knowledge and curriculum history of the students that we have in front of us; secondly, the amount of time that we actually have with them; thirdly – and perhaps most crucially – the relative weighting that this difficult concept carries when it comes to final outcomes. This requires an understanding of how much, how often and with how much depth that difficult concept is tested, as well as how many marks that testing carries. Once you start trying to balance this equation, it can lead to some surprising conclusions, which might not seem obvious to anyone but the most experienced in curriculum design.

If a concept or construction is so difficult that its full understanding will require multiple hours of curriculum time, yet that very construction is only likely to add up to three marks on one paper, which converts to 1.5% of the student’s overall score … is that concept actually worth teaching at all? It’s something to think about, at least. Perhaps one could teach it in a very condensed form, teach some broad strategies that work in the majority of cases and leave it at that. Certainly, what one should not do, is spend hours and hours of precious curriculum time trying to bring students to the point of full understanding whilst neglecting other concepts which we might consider simpler but appear multiple times on the paper and are thus integral to success. It simply isn’t the sensible approach, given the huge constraints that all schools face when it comes to curriculum time.

The tendency for teachers to labour what’s difficult is something which I share openly with my tutees. I am very careful not to criticise or undermine the school’s curriculum, but I simply explain that it is natural for teachers to spend lots of time on the things that they know are difficult as they are setting the bar high for their students. Children of the age that I work with are perfectly capable of understanding that this might be a noble and understandable approach, but is perhaps not the best strategy to help them if they are struggling with the basics. Even the most able students, who are aiming at the highest grades, can still be reassured by the knowledge that the most challenging aspects of the curriculum are of less importance than perhaps they thought they were; it actually frees them up to grapple with them, once they have been released from the anxiety that their full understanding of this concept is absolutely essential for success. Knowing that you’re working on something that might gain you an extra mark or two is very freeing, and it enables the students who are aiming high to make sensible decisions about how to spend their own time, which is often very stretched.

In Latin, it is not only the language paper that requires this frankness of approach and a realistic analysis of where one’s time should be directed. I have written before about the extent to which teachers over-teach the stylistic analysis of literature texts, when the overwhelming majority of marks are gained in the exam through students simply knowing the text off by heart. I emphasise this over and again to the students I am working with, many of whom come to me because they are scoring very low marks in this aspect of the examination. Students can score at least 80% by simply knowing the text like the back of their hand, so this should be the overwhelming focus of the lesson: despite this, I have so far come across only one school where I would say this is happening – where the focus is on drilling and making it clear to students that they must be learning the text in detail. I shall not name the school, but one thing I will say is that it is a very high-achieving school, where the Latin department produces results of almost exclusively 8s and 9s in the GCSE every single year: this goes to show that the school is not avoiding the trickiest concepts – there is no way a student could score a Grade 9 without getting a decent score in the style questions – but it shows that they understand how to balance their curriculum and focus their efforts on what gains students the biggest advantage. The emphasis must be on knowledge, with the complex skills being supplementary to that. The final clincher, which again I share with my students, is that the high-level questions become infinitely easier and more doable once you know the text. Thus, a student who has already gained a solid knowledge of the text that is in front of them has a much better chance of being able to understand and apply the ideas he/she is being taught to gain those elusive extra marks.