Memory – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Now you know it, now you don’t

“I’m fine with that.”

It is one of the most common phrases I hear as a tutor. Sometimes it’s true. Sometimes it’s not.

Most teachers and tutors will recognise the phenomenon immediately. A student looks at a piece of information and experiences a powerful feeling of familiarity. They’ve seen it before. They recognise the terminology. The explanation seems clear. The worked example makes perfect sense. Everything feels comfortable. Then they attempt a question on their own and discover that they have absolutely no idea what they are doing.

The experience is so common that educational psychologists have spent decades trying to understand it. Why do students so often believe they understand something when they do not? The answer is both fascinating and counter-intuitive.

One of the most important discoveries in modern cognitive science is that the feeling of learning and the reality of learning are not the same thing. This may sound obvious, yet it runs contrary to much of our intuition. We tend to assume that if something feels easy, we are learning it effectively. Conversely, if something feels difficult, we assume that learning is not taking place. In reality, the opposite is often true.

Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as an “illusion of competence”. Students mistake familiarity for understanding and fluency for mastery. Because information feels familiar, they assume it has been learned.

A classic example is rereading. Faced with an upcoming examination, many students return repeatedly to the same textbook chapter or revision guide. The first reading feels difficult. The second feels easier. By the third or fourth reading, the material begins to feel hugely familiar. At this point, many students conclude that they know the material. The problem is that recognising information is not the same thing as being able to retrieve it independently. The latter is what students need to practise.

Anyone who has ever found themselves singing along confidently to a song only to forget the next line when the music stops has experienced the distinction. Recognition is much easier than genuine recall. The textbook provides constant prompts and cues. An examination paper does not.

The distinction was explored extensively by the cognitive psychologists Robert and Elizabeth Bjork, whose work has profoundly influenced modern thinking about learning. They argued that students often confuse current performance with long-term learning. In other words, they judge their understanding based on how things feel in the moment rather than on what they will be able to remember later.

Highlighting provides another excellent example of something which students often over-estimate as a learning tool. I have nothing against highlighting per se, indeed I use it as a methodology in presenting set texts. Colour-coding is useful for organisation and can be an effective way to draw links. Yet the process of using a highlighter creates an illusion of productivity, when in actual fact the student is learning far less than they imagine. A page covered in fluorescent yellow marks certainly looks as though something important has happened. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that highlighting alone does virtually nothing to improve long-term retention.

Similarly, students frequently spend hours producing beautifully organised revision materials. Their notes are often immaculate. The handwriting is exemplary, different colours have been deployed with military precision and the result resembles a work of art. Yet, if the process has been done as a reference and copy exercise, very little useful learning will have taken place. Such activities feel productive and can even create a real sense of engagement: the brain remains busy and the student remains occupied. Yet much of the cognitive work required for durable learning is missing.

What, then, does effective learning feel like? This, I’m afraid, is where things become particularly inconvenient. According to a substantial body of research, some of the most effective learning strategies feel harder, not easier, than the methodologies reviewed above. Retrieving information from memory, answering questions without notes, explaining concepts in your own words and attempting problems independently all require considerably more effort than rereading or highlighting.

This idea was popularised by researchers such as Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, whose work on retrieval practice demonstrated that actively recalling information produces stronger long-term retention than repeatedly reviewing it. Put simply, testing yourself is more effective than studying.

Students rarely enjoy hearing this. If given the choice between reading notes for the fifth time and completing a challenging retrieval exercise, many will choose the former. It feels more successful and it does not put them in the deeply uncomfortable position of being forced to attempt to recall something they currently feel inadequately on top of. The problem is that such feelings are not reliable indicators of learning.

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman described two broad modes of thinking. One is fast, intuitive and effortless. The other is slower, more deliberate and more demanding. Effective learning often requires us to engage this second system, but unfortunately, the intense effort required can easily be mistaken for failure. I see this repeatedly when students begin using retrieval practice for the first time: they become frustrated by the failure rate, since they cannot remember everything immediately. Their conclusion is often that the method is not working when in fact it is the best and only route to success. The struggle is precisely the point. Every successful act of retrieval, however minor, strengthens the memory. Likewise, every failed attempt identifies a gap in knowledge. Both outcomes are useful. The process feels horrendously difficult at first, because the brain is being asked to do genuine cognitive work. And our brains are evolved to choose the path of least resistance, in the same way that we have evolved to take as many opportunities to rest and relax as possible. In the modern world we have built for ourselves, this evolutionary tendency works against us.

The educational psychologist Robert Bjork introduced the concept of “desirable difficulties” to describe this phenomenon. Certain challenges make learning feel harder in the short term while improving retention in the long term. Spacing out revision, mixing different topics together and retrieving information from memory all fall into this category. Once again, it can feel counter-intuitive to mix up revision topics. Won’t I get confused? Answer, no: by switching topics you are giving your brain time to forget what you’ve just learned, then challenging it to recall the same information again when you return to it. This is crucial to the learning process. The difficulty is desirable because it produces stronger learning.

Unfortunately, students are not the only people susceptible to the illusion that ease of process is a good proxy for learning. Teachers can fall victim to this hallucination as well. A lesson in which students nod enthusiastically, answer guided questions correctly and appear fully engaged can create a powerful impression of success for the teacher. Yet genuine understanding may not be demonstrated days or weeks later, when students attempt to apply their knowledge independently.

Parents are vulnerable too. Watching a child spend three hours revising comfortably and calmly can feel immensely reassuring. Yet the quantity of revision and the quality of revision are not necessarily the same thing. Effective studying often looks rather strange from the outside. Students engaged in genuine retrieval practice may spend long periods staring into space, scribbling incomplete answers, making mistakes and struggling to remember information. It looks less impressive than a beautifully highlighted revision guide or a perfectly copied set of notes. Yet it is far more effective.

Forgetting itself plays a role in the process. As I have explored in many previous posts, memory is not a camcorder. Learning requires us to retrieve and reconstruct information repeatedly over time. Some forgetting is inevitable and even useful, because it creates opportunities for the retrieval that strengthens memory.

Perhaps the most important lesson from cognitive science is that knowing something and feeling as though you know something are not the same thing. The human brain is remarkably good at creating an illusion of understanding. We mistake familiarity for mastery, recognition for recall and activity for progress. The challenge for teachers, tutors and students alike is learning to distrust those feelings. Real learning is often slower, messier and more uncomfortable than we would like.

The widening summer gap

Last week, I explored the surprisingly complex history of the long school summer holiday and explained why it owes much more to Victorian urbanisation and changing attitudes towards leisure than it does to children helping with the harvest. This week, I want to ask a more uncomfortable question. What if the six-week summer break is actually bad for learning?

Few aspects of the school calendar are as fiercely defended as the summer holiday. Mention the possibility of shortening it and you can practically hear the collective gasp from children, parents and teachers alike. The long break has become so deeply embedded within our culture that it feels almost untouchable. Yet educational researchers have spent decades examining its effects and their findings are not always reassuring.

The phenomenon has become known as “summer learning loss” or, more recently, “summer learning decay”. The idea is simple enough. During a lengthy period away from formal education, children inevitably forget some of what they have previously learned. Any teacher who has stood in front of a class in September will recognise the experience. Skills that seemed secure in July suddenly appear less robust. Knowledge that was readily accessible has become harder to retrieve. Time must be spent revisiting old material before new learning can begin.

For years, many teachers viewed this as little more than an anecdotal observation. More recently, however, researchers have attempted to measure the effect. The evidence suggests that some degree of forgetting is not only normal but essential. Human memory is not a filing cabinet in which information remains permanently preserved. Unless knowledge is revisited and used, some of it will inevitably fade; it’s part of the learning process and I have explored this in multiple posts previously.

The real question is not whether children forget things during the summer. Of course they do! The more important question is whether some children forget more than others and what impact this has upon social mobility. This is where the debate becomes particularly interesting and, perhaps, politically uncomfortable.

Research has repeatedly suggested that lengthy summer holidays can contribute to widening educational inequalities. While children from affluent families often continue to encounter enriching experiences throughout the summer, those from less advantaged backgrounds may have fewer opportunities to do so. The difference is not simply a matter of expensive foreign holidays, despite what the glossy brochures and people’s social media feeds might suggest. A child does not need a fortnight in sunnier climes to benefit educationally from the summer break. Reading books at home, visiting museums, engaging in conversations with adults, taking part in organised activities, attending sports clubs or simply having access to a rich variety of experiences will all contribute to learning. The issue is that these opportunities are not distributed equally.

The notion of a “summer learning loss” implies that all children are moving backwards at the same rate. In reality, some continue moving forwards while others stand still or drift backwards. As a result, the gap between them widens. When schools close, they temporarily suspend one of the few institutions in society that provides broadly equal access to educational experiences. During term time, children spend their days in classrooms following the same curriculum, guided by the same teachers and exposed to many of the same opportunities. The moment schools close, those shared experiences fragment. Some children return to homes filled with books, enrichment activities and educational experiences. Others do not.

Although private tuition is often perceived as the preserve of affluent families, I actually work with students from a remarkably wide range of circumstances. While some of my students return in September eager to discuss the novels they have read, the museums they have visited or the places they have travelled to, others return having spent six weeks trying to occupy themselves while their parents worked long hours and household budgets remained under pressure. The difference is not a matter of intelligence, effort or aspiration: it is entirely a matter of circumstance.

The issue of the summer break extends beyond academic challenge. Summer holidays can also expose wider inequalities relating to nutrition, childcare and wellbeing. During term time, schools provide structure and routine. They offer access to sports facilities, social opportunities and, for some children, reliable meals. The long summer break removes those supports for several weeks. It is no coincidence that many communities now operate holiday food programmes and summer activity schemes. Such initiatives exist because policymakers have recognised that the holiday period creates challenges for some families that simply do not exist for others.

None of this means that summer holidays are inherently harmful. It is important not to romanticise schooling to the point where children become educational battery hens, permanently confined to classrooms in pursuit of ever-higher examination results. Childhood should of course include freedom, exploration and opportunities for experiences that cannot be timetabled. The trouble is that for many children, such imaginings are exactly that.

Many of the strongest arguments in favour of the long summer holiday have little to do with academic attainment. Childhood memories are often formed during these extended periods away from school. Friendships deepen. Independence develops. Families spend time together. Children discover interests that may never appear on a curriculum document. Even from a purely educational perspective, there is something to be said for allowing young minds occasional periods of rest. The challenge, therefore, is not as straightforward as deciding whether summer holidays are good or bad. The evidence suggests that they may be both.

For some children, the summer holiday is a period of enormous enrichment. They read widely, travel, attend camps, develop hobbies and return to school refreshed and inspired. For others, it can represent six weeks during which educational progress stalls and social inequalities become more pronounced. The same institution can simultaneously be a source of joy and a mechanism through which disadvantage grows. This helps to explain why proposals to reform the school calendar have repeatedly resurfaced. Some countries spread holidays more evenly throughout the year. Advocates for this argue that shorter breaks reduce learning loss while providing families with regular opportunities for rest. Others favour targeted summer programmes designed to support students who are most vulnerable to falling behind.

Yet reform remains politically difficult. Parents organise childcare around existing arrangements and teachers (many of whom are also parents) value the opportunity for genuine recuperation after a demanding academic year. Entire sectors of the economy, from tourism to hospitality, depend upon the predictability of the summer season. The school calendar may have evolved by accident, but it is now supported by a vast network of social and economic interests.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that educational inequality does not disappear when schools close their doors in July. If anything, it becomes more visible. The six-week summer holiday acts rather like a magnifying glass, revealing differences in opportunity that are often less obvious during the school year. This does not mean that we should abolish the summer holiday, nor does it mean that children should spend August completing worksheets. It does, however, require us to think carefully about who benefits most from our current arrangements and who pays the price.

The summer holiday remains one of the most cherished features of childhood. For many families, it provides treasured memories that last a lifetime. Yet it is worth remembering that not all children experience those six weeks in the same way. While some return to school carrying souvenirs, stories and new experiences, others return with little more than the knowledge that another summer has passed. If educational inequality matters to us, then what happens outside the school gates may be just as important as what happens inside them.

Ghosts in the Machine

The last time I wrote about the professional use of generative AI was exactly a year ago. I had discovered that Chat GPT was surprisingly effective at constructing Latin sentences and was delighted that I could use it for such tasks as churning out examples of the ablative absolute. That’s about as far as I expected its capabilities to go and it already felt like a jolly useful gift.

Since then, I have made what I now realise is shamefully limited use of this quite remarkable tool. Only now am I just beginning to understand its full potential and the first epiphany has been that to experience those, one has to pay for it. Who knew? The fee is not huge, in fact I am currently working on the most affordable package which costs me £7 per month. With the work that it helped me to produce in just a couple of hours, it has already paid for itself one hundred times over.

Teachers, you must listen: if you have not already done so, make exploring the capacities of AI for resource-building a priority this summer. It will pay dividends. As this year’s GCSE Latin exams draw to a close and my attention is turned to the new set texts for the coming years, I promised myself that I would explore the possibility of using AI to generate materials. I have been blown away by what it can do.

Recently, I agreed with one of my lovely contacts that, during the summer holidays, he would give me some guidance on how to use AI to do this. Although I have started to have a go on my own, I still plan to meet with him, as the benefit of talking to someone who is much further down the road with something than you are is enormous. Simon Beasley, a fellow tutor and classroom teacher, has been using AI to generate resources, reduce workload and raise standards within his department for some time. I now understand how it is that the new generation of Classics teachers are pumping out such huge quantities of high-quality resources in their limited spare time. In my day (she says, waving her stick), I was doing so from scratch and I was pretty prolific in churning out stuff; these days, the sheer amount that my successors are able to produce is simply jaw-dropping. I had thought that they just had even less of a life than I did during my early years of teaching: I now appreciate that it is all thanks to AI.

So, what can it do and what are the pitfalls? Both questions are hugely important, because the use of AI is frankly dangerous unless you know what you’re doing. I don’t mean “know what you’re doing” when it comes to the AI itself — frankly, I haven’t got a clue what’s going on, how it does it and whether we are soon facing James Cameron’s rise of the machines. I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. What I mean is, you need to know what you’re doing in the subject you are asking it to help you with. Because, fellow humans, AI definitely can and does hallucinate. Ignore this at your peril.

Firstly, what it can do. I have been using Chat GPT to help me to prepare practice papers and revision questions for the new set texts. Rather wonderfully, it told me how to train it to do so. I asked it what to do and it told me that I need to give it as many examples as possible of past papers, which is no problem as I have them all: this in itself was the first revelation of being a paid user — you can upload a seemingly limitless number of files and it will read and analyse them in milliseconds. What then happens is you enter into an extended dialogue with it as you invite it to start generating what you want it to create for you. You critique its output and it learns as you do so. Even more wonderfully, it evidentially starts to develop its own instincts for what it is that you’re looking for and reflects this back to you. Furthermore, due to its capacity to “look” at multiple examples of past papers alongside each other in a way that the human brain struggles to do, it is able to point out patterns, quirks and minor changes in how the board have presented and structured the papers over the years, some of which I had never even noticed. The fact that it can do so in seconds is merely an added bonus. To be clear, it is actually generating the resources for you, right down to the fact that it can produce them as a Word document for you to download and edit. It’s unbelievable. I am still reeling from the excitement at what it can do.

Now, on to the pitfalls. There are three things that I think new users of AI need to be aware of in order to make safe and productive use of it. Firstly, Chat GPT is only as good as the instructions and the material that you provide it with. Computer scientists back in the 20th century had already developed the acronym GIGO, standing for “garbage in, garbage out”, summing up the principle that if flawed, incomplete or incorrect data is entered into a system, the resulting output will inevitably be just as flawed and useless, sometimes more so. If you’re not clear and explicit, and/or if you provide it with limited exemplars, you won’t get anything good out of your project. So far, so obvious.

Secondly, Chat GPT can and does hallucinate. I don’t know enough about how AI works to understand why, but it is the spookiest thing about it. In some ways, I guess it reflects how it is not merely a computer but a generative entity with the capacity to learn, one which mimics human thinking; humans go off at wild tangents and get things spectacularly wrong, and so does Chat GPT. Being of the capacity that it is, way beyond what a single human brain is capable of, it does so on a spectacular scale and you have to be aware of this.

For example, for my first project, I asked it to help me to develop some practice papers and questions for one of the new prose texts, which is an extract from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, the tale of Cupid and Psyche. I provided it with all the past papers from previous years on different texts, it analysed the board’s questioning style and created a style guide for how OCR formulates its exam papers. After a bit of back and forth with me pointing out what I felt it had got wrong, we were ready for it to start producing something for the new texts, so I provided it with the exact lines of the text that the board have prescribed. I anticipated no issue with this, having pasted the lines directly into the chat. Yet, when we were part way through the second paper, it told me that it thought “Juno’s speech” would be a good choice for the 8-mark style question. Now, I have prepared the new texts, but I do not yet know them well; despite this, I felt sure that to my memory there was no speech by Juno in the prescribed lines. I hunted through the published version of the prescribed text and then asked Chat GPT where it was getting what it called “Sections 14 and 15” from, since the board have divided the text into 13 sections only. It then cheerfully informed me that I was right: it had made up Sections 14 and 15.

This brings me to my third and final warning about my new best friend. It is remarkably charming and winsome. It is built to be agreeable and it rarely pushes back against you. It also presents its hallucinations as facts and, when you point out that it is talking out of its proverbial derrière, it cheerfully agrees with you. There is a danger here, perhaps in the same way that there is a danger when working with excessively amenable colleagues: you can end up in serious trouble, because there is nobody willing and able to tell you when you’re getting it wrong. To mitigate against this, I have learned is to poke it and challenge it robustly, to play devil’s advocate. Otherwise its capacity for people-pleasing could be quite catastrophic.

In my darker moments, I suspect that this is how it will take over the world. With a smile on its face.

Effective study

Examinations are looming on the horizon. This year’s GCSE candidates will no doubt be receiving revision advice, yet I fear that much of it will be inadequate. While there are some schools that are doing a great job on this, others are still behind the curve when it comes to their knowledge base: teaching is sadly a profession that has been historically prone to fads and unevidenced practice, something I witnessed during my training and throughout my career. In recent years, many individual teachers have gone out of their way to inform themselves about what cognitive science has to say about effective study, and this increasing knowledge and understanding about memory and learning is finally beginning to impact upon the advice that is given to students. This can be seen in the sheer number of teachers who choose to attend ResearchED conferences on a Saturday during their own time, to inform their understanding of good learning techniques. Despite this quiet, grassroots revolution, there is still a remarkable amount of misinformation out there, and I still occasionally reel in mortification at the sorts of things that are said to my tutees when it comes to revision advice.

Much of the problem stems from the very language that is used by teachers, students and parents when it comes to revision. It is hard to know where that language comes from, but much of it seems to be ingrained and on an infinite loop, like a scratched record. Students still frequently say to me that they need to “go over” something, which by its very nature implies revisiting the content to refresh their memory. In practical terms, the advice that a student needs to “go over” something encourages them to reread their notes. A student who is attempting to be proactive about their studies may highlight key information while they read. Yet cognitive science teaches us that reading and highlighting in this way are entirely ineffective practices, for they provide the learner with a feeling of familiarity without genuinely increasing or securing their knowledge-base. Reading and highlighting can feel genuinely productive, to the extent that the student believes that they are actively engaging with an effective learning process; in reality, they are giving themselves false reassurance and not practising the process of retrieval, which is essential both for learning outcomes and for examination practice.

Kate Jones, a teacher and an expert in sharing good practice for effective, evidence-based learning, has this week published a short blog on the Evidence Based Education website, highlighting the importance of what she calls responsive revision. In the blog she did what she does so well, which is to summarise and consolidate what we know from cognitive science into a practical and effective format that is easy for both classroom teachers and students to apply. Responsive revision, according to Kate Jones’ blog, is “a deliberate, structured method of independent study in which students use retrieval to generate evidence about what they know, what they can recall, and where gaps remain. They then respond to that evidence by directing their time and effort towards strengthening those gaps. It shifts revision from passive review to informed action. It also ensures students don’t keep going over their favourite or familiar topics but instead identify and tackle gaps in knowledge and understanding.”

One of the most important things for students to understand is the difference between what feels familiar (the process of recognition) and what is genuine recall (the process of retrieval). When a student rereads their notes or sits and listens to a concept being explained to them again, the material will feel familiar. This gives them the illusion that they can remember something when in fact, under pressure, they will not be able to recall it. The illusion can be so convincing that it can even cause the learner to fool themselves in the process: for example, research shows that many students have the tendency to use flashcards wrongly by turning over the card too soon, resulting in the phenomenon of them recognising the answer and then convincing themselves they did indeed know the answer. The trap is surprisingly easy to fall into. One simple way to guard against it is to work with someone else and to put them in charge of flipping the cards over. Because recognising information is so much easier and more comforting than the process of forcing yourself to recall it independently, students often cling to methods that allow them to experience the process of recognition, like a comfort blanket. They may even insist that the method is working for them, because it feels safe and encouraging and gives them the illusion that their knowledge base is strengthening. In reality, they are doing nothing to aid their recall under pressure.

In her blog, Kate Jones argues that revision should generate evidence, and by that she means evidence of absence as well as evidence of knowledge. Students need to test themselves in order to evidence the knowledge that they possess and to reveal the gaps in that knowledge, keeping themselves in a constant information loop of what they can retrieve successfully and confidently, what they can partially remember, and what they cannot yet call to mind. Armed with that information, the student can then take effective ation, a process which she explores in her blog.

If I could convince any learner of one thing that seems counter-intuitive, it would be that they should be testing themselves at every stage of their learning, including at the beginning. Students tend to resist this, for the process is challenging and uncomfortable (especially if they are not used to it in school) and the notion that they should be testing themselves on an area where they are aware that their knowledge-base is inadequate can feel rather daunting: perfectionists find it especially difficult to tolerate. Yet testing is essential to learning. When a student attempts to recall a piece of information from memory, they create the evidence base for what they do and do now know. Even more than this, not only does the process of retrieval make their knowledge (or lack of it) visible, it is also part of the learning process. For every time a student attempts to recall something and each time they manage to do so, they are working on the very thing that they will need to rely on in the examination; they are also strengthening the foundations of that knowledge base.

I cannot recommend Kate Jones’ blog highly enough for a simple, evidence-based explanation for how to go about the process of revision. Her ability to distil complex, research-informed ideas into a practical, workable guide is quite remarkable and as a result she is quite brilliant as a go-to advisory service for teachers. Her books on retrieval practice should be the benchmark for any classroom teacher. For advice directed at learners, regular readers of my blog will know that I am a huge fan of the psychologist Paul Penn’s advice on how to learn, which can be found both in his book on effective studying and on his YouTube channel.

A general lack of guidance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections on Inflection

One of the biggest challenges that confronts students of Latin is that it is a heavily inflected language, meaning that the endings of words carry a large portion of the grammatical information.

English, by contrast, tends to express meaning through word order or auxiliary words. In Latin, nouns, pronouns and adjectives change their endings to mark case, number and gender; this means that a single word can appear in numerous forms that look unfamiliar at first glance. Verbs also change their form extensively to indicate tense, mood, voice, person and number. As a result, learners cannot simply scan a sentence from left to right and piece together meaning based on the sequence of words in the way they might in modern English. Instead, they must train themselves to recognise patterns in the endings, identify which role each word plays in the sentence, and mentally reconstruct the basic structure before a translation can emerge. This process of analysis can feel especially daunting for the novice.

Likewise, when learning vocabulary, it is not enough to learn the basic word. If a student simply learns that ferre means “to carry” (it’s the origin of the word ferry in English) they then fail to recognise it in most other forms. In the perfect tense, the verb changes completely: “they carry” would be tulerunt. Likewise, it’s participle is different again: “carried” (or “having been carried”) is lati. These forms need to be learnt if the student is to stand any change of recognising the word in a translation.

To be clear, all languages do this to some extent. Whenever a student is despairing as to the myriad of ways in which a Latin verb can change, I like to point out to them that if they were learning English as a non-native speaker, then they would have to learn that the verb “to be” changes from is, to are, to were, to am, to has been and so on. They would have to learn that the comparative of good is better, that the superlative of bad is worst. All languages have such challenges and while there are always underlying patterns that one can work with, even these can seem overwhelming at the beginning.

It is an easy assumption for novices to make that they can do their vocabulary learning entirely on their own, without a subject expert. While it is true that such learning is something that can and should be done regularly as part of private study, it is in fact essential that a tutor get involved with it in order to support students with the process of learning how the words look in different forms. Much of what I spend time on is the process of showing students words (most especially verbs) in their different forms, especially those which occur most commonly in the examination. A student may have learnt the fact that cado means “I fall”, but does this mean that they will recognise ceciderunt as “they fell”? Without support, this is highly unlikely. One of the skills of what I do is to focus my support on such words and to advise students and those supporting them on the learning that they can do on their own: for example, adverbs do not conjugate or decline, so those are a really good area where students can invest the time at home.

Very few schools test their students on the vocabulary list in different forms, but the very best ones do. I can count on one hand the number of schools where this is done regularly and effectively, but the difference between a student drilled in this way and one that has been merely tested on the original form of the word is palpable. Some schools invite students to learn the principal parts of verbs but this is relatively unusual and most commonly treated as “a bonus” when the reality is that learning verbs without a knowledge of their inflected parts is actually a waste of time.

One of the biggest problems with all existing text books is their lack of focus on vocabulary acquisition. While modern languages tend to build units of learning around vocabulary and place the accretion of key words at the centre of students’ learning, Latinists continue to treat vocabulary learning as a bolt-on and place little to no emphasis on weaving it into the grammar teaching that goes on. This really is bizarre and with the advent of Chat GPT and other free platforms capable of generating simple Latin sentences there really is no excuse. Schools should be re-writing the curriculum and basing the sentences used for grammar practice exclusively around the GCSE word list. When it is now possible to dump a word list into your AI platform of choice and ask it to churn out as many sentences as you desire using that vocabulary and practising the grammar point you are working on, there really is no excuse whatsoever.

While schools continue to rely on text books such as the Cambridge Latin Course and Suburani, students will continue to be let down when it comes to vocabulary acquisition, never mind the grammar. As we await the inevitable changes to the GCSE course it is difficult not to feel somewhat depressed about what will happen next. A new vocabulary list will be issued, not dramatically different from the last one, but different enough to mean that all previous materials will require checking and editing. (Last time it happened, 25 words were removed from the prescribed list, and it took a couple of years and a lot of begging for the board to release the list of words that they had removed rather than leaving teachers to work it out: as I recall, it was produced on request at various INSET gatherings and was never in wide circulation). Current text books such as Taylor & Cullen’s Latin to GCSE will thus remain useful but not quite in line with the examinations on offer and most schools will continue to use already-published courses which bear little to no relation as to what’s on the GCSE list. When I start working with a student, I already know which words will be a problem for them. For example, every single student that has studied using the Cambridge Latin Course will think that the common word poena means “poet” when in fact it means “punishment”. This is because the CLC teaches them the word poeta early on and never introduces them to the word poena.

The waiting room

“How was school today?” I asked my young student at the start of her session.

She paused, considering her answer.

“Long,” she said, eventually.

“Oh really?” I enquired. “Did you have extra commitments before or after lessons, then?”

“Oh no,” she said. “It just felt long.”

“Ah,” I said. “I remember that. Time passes so slowly at your age. An hour can feel like an absolute eternity.”

“Oh my God,” she squealed, warming instantly to the subject. “We had double maths at the end of the day. I tried not to look at the clock as it’s the worst thing you can do, but I couldn’t resist it when I thought that surely it must have been at least half an hour gone, and we’d only done ten minutes!“

Oh, how I remember that feeling. For me, it was double geography. Poor Mrs Winslow’s descriptions of the savannah were so boring, I almost cried before each lesson, just at the thought of it. The time I had to spend listening to her stretching out ahead of me felt almost unbearable. I told my young student this and she nodded, fervently. For the young, time passes unbelievably slowly: it stretches into plains as wide as the savannah itself. Waiting for the end of the day feels like crossing a continent.

The immense sluggishness of time is perhaps our earliest companion, a constant presence, crouched in the corners of long afternoons, humming softly in the background. In good times, such as a long summer holiday, the seemingly endless stretches of the future to come are a welcome wonder; at the beginning of double maths, the lethargic passage of time feels like a yawning chasm, a charybdis that will swallow us whole. Each day feels both monumental and tedious. Each hour feels like an an arctic expedition.

Birthdays are essential, bright markers in that vast childhood abyss. To turn six, ten, thirteen — these are grand ascents and each new age feels like a gift. We count down the days, the weeks, the yawning months leading up to the celebration. The anticipation stretches out: slow and sweet but painfully long. It hangs in the air until it became almost unbearable. The day of arrival is luminous, the moment we finally get to unwrap the future we’ve been waiting for.

The way that the young perceive time can perhaps explain why so many of us remember those apocryphal long, hot summers. Lengthy school holidays feel truly colossal for children. Long mornings in pyjamas, drifting from cereal bowls to cartoons, then out into the world of bikes and sun-warmed pavements. Forts built out of sticks and blankets, bedroom kingdoms whose borders shift each day. Tadpoles in rivers, catching time in our hands. Summer inhabits a place where time is measured not by the clock or the calendar but by how many ice lollies we can melt along our wrists, how many bugs we can catch before dusk.

It is easy to forget how profoundly we once lived in these slow hours. As adults, we compress our days like folders, stashing them briskly into the cabinet of our memory. We hurry, we rush, we tick things off our to-do list. Children cannot constrict their days in this way. The agony of double maths is matched only by the ecstasy of free time, each day of which is immense and sprawling. Watching raindrops slide down a window feels like an event. Waiting in the car while a parent runs into the local shop is an adventure. Sitting at the dinner table, politely bored, feels like a vast eternity. We do not know that those minutes are brief and precious: we only feel that they are ours to endure.

Most of us forget, or remember only faintly, the extent to which childhood is a seemingly endless world of waiting. Waiting for the weekend, waiting for your turn, waiting for your parents to finish talking, waiting for the world to move on. Waiting, when you are young, is not the subtle impatience of adulthood: it is tangible, heavy, unbearable. Sat in a hot car seat, legs sticking to the leather. Time pools around you like syrup.

Then there comes a moment — unnoticed when it happens — when time begins to accelerate. Maybe it starts in late adolescence, when school is suddenly over. Or maybe it happens after we leave home, when greater responsibility claims our hours with a firm hand. The days fold in on themselves. A week becomes a blink. Summer vanishes before it begins. We look at the calendar and feel genuinely startled that entire months have passed. We ask where the time has gone, though the answer is always the same: somewhere unimportant, somewhere ordinary, somewhere we did not think to look. As John Lennon said, “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

Time speeding up is not merely a trick of perception; it is a change in how we function. With the familiarity of life, novelty fades and we no longer pause to savour each moment. Instead, we move efficiently, sliding from one experience to the next without pause or comment. We stop noticing the play of light on the wall, the smell of rain on the pavement. We stop counting down the days until our birthdays and start dreading them. We forget what it felt like to wait and we believe that things will always come soon enough. Too soon.

Being reminded by my young student of how time felt when I was younger makes me reflect upon how I spend it now. Perhaps, if we try, we can learn to cultivate that profound slowness again. We can take long walks, not to arrive anywhere, but to experience the act of moving through space. We can sit outside at dusk. We can allow an afternoon to lengthen lazily away. And sometimes, in such moments, time stretches like it used to. Not quite as far, but enough to remind us that it’s still there. Perhaps, if we pay attention to it, the slowness of childhood never truly leaves us. Perhaps it waits patiently, tucked into our memory like a pressed flower. Perhaps we carry it everywhere, even if we rarely take it out to admire it. Perhaps a scent, a song or a certain angle of sunlight can return us to that early, languid world. Perhaps we can find ourselves lying in thick summer grass once again, listening to the buzzing of invisible insects, watching clouds drift lazily overhead. Perhaps we can feel those hours stretch out, and feel ourselves stretched inside them.

Unknown Unknowns

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

Plato’s Socrates, Apologia, 399 BCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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