Memory – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

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.

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

The road less travelled — pathways and how we learn new things

A few months ago, my husband and I discovered a local group of walkers in our village. The group meets informally every Wednesday morning and has grown over the years to around 50 people. There are a handful of committed types who turn up every week, plus dozens of others (ourselves now included) who show up regularly although not infallibly. We’ve met a variety of interesting people as a result, not least the couple behind the whole thing, both of whom appear to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the local area and its footpaths.

So many of the local footpaths were unknown to us before we joined the group and some, it turns out, were unknown to everyone. The aforementioned couple are both of the “can-do” and “why not us?” mindset, and over the years they have taken it upon themselves to take responsibility for opening up more than one village pathway that had fallen into disuse. And as Geoff put it to me, “once you open up the pathway, people start using it and then it more or less maintains itself.” The very frequency of use is what helps to keep a pathway established.

Imagine a field of grass that people often cross to get from one side of the field to the other. Over time, a pathway forms, along which most people walk: the grass becomes trampled, the soil compacted and the green fades to brown. This becomes an established pathway and will remain so just for as long as it’s used.

Now, suppose something changes: perhaps a new gate opens, a puddle forms on the old path, or people simply find a slightly shorter or more convenient route. Gradually, walkers begin taking this new line across the field instead of the old one. At first, only a few people use the new route. The grass along it begins to show faint signs of wear — blades are bent and bruised, and a pale strip starts to appear. As the weeks go by, the new route becomes more and more popular: the flattened grass eventually dies back, leaving a firm, visible track.

Meanwhile, the old path, now seeing fewer footsteps, starts to recover. Without constant trampling, the soil loosens a little, rainwater seeps in again, and new shoots begin to grow up through the bare patches. Mosses, wildflowers, and taller grasses reclaim it, softening its edges until it blends again into the rest of the field. Within a season or two, only someone who remembers where it used to run might notice a faint difference in the undergrowth or a subtle dip in the ground. The new track has become the main path — firm and easy to follow — while the old one has disappeared back into the living fabric of the field.

This is an illustration of how habits can change: the places where we pass most often grow clearer, and those we abandon are slowly forgotten, healed over by time and growth. It is also an excellent illustration of how our brains work.

Learning is a physical process, in which the brain changes in response to experience: the brain rewires itself as we practise, think and experience. At its core, it involves the strengthening and formation of neural pathways, networks of neurons (nerve cells) which communicate through chemical signals. Every thought, every memory, every skill we acquire is encoded within these connections. Our brain is quite literally rewiring itself day by day.

Each new connection represents not only new knowledge but also the remarkable ability of the human brain to change and grow throughout life. When we first encounter new information or attempt a new skill, specific groups of neurons are activated together. If this process happens repeatedly and is done proactively, the connections between those neurons will become stronger and more efficient. This is learning. Pathways that are rarely used may weaken through a process called synaptic pruning, a process which has evolved to make the brain more efficient by eliminating redundant connections. This balance between strengthening and pruning allows the brain to adapt continuously to new experiences and environments. Being aware of this is essential to an understanding of how we learn.

The brain’s remarkable ability to adapt and change is known as neuro-plasticity. As Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb said as early as 1949, “neurons that fire together, wire together”. Each time a pathway is used, the brain reinforces it, making it easier to activate in the future. Over time, this repetition transforms a once-effortful action into an automatic one. This, fundamentally, is why we get into habits – both good and bad. The really great news is that bad habits can be replaced with new ones: you simply have to start following the paths less travelled and keep treading upon them until they turn into the new, preferred pathway. The road less travelled may be difficult to start upon, but will become an established thoroughfare with repeated use.

GCSE Latin set texts – why students struggle

Few things risk being so damning as the insight of a one-to-one tutor. As an ex-classroom teacher myself, I am painfully aware just what a difficult job teaching is, and how it is entirely possible to leave some students behind, despite your best efforts. It is from this perspective that I come to this topic.

It is obvious and undeniable that many of the students I work with have been well-taught: they have simply lost their way or misunderstood for a variety of complex reasons. Others, I must confess, I do wonder what’s been happening in their classroom. Whatever the truth of the situation, once a student has indeed lost their way with their studies, it can be a Sisyphean endeavour for them to rejoin the road to success without support. As I write these reflections on what the students I am paid to help have missed and misunderstood about set text work, it is in the full consciousness that there will have been some members of my own classes over the years that became lost by the wayside. A classroom teacher who can claim otherwise is a rare creature indeed.

Set text work remains one of the biggest challenges that students face when they reach GCSE level in their Latin studies. Suddenly, there’s a whole new world of real, unedited Latin in front of you, some of it in verse. The expectation we place upon students to cope with this is frankly mind-boggling. Imagine asking a student of French to study Molière, Maupassant or Descartes at GCSE level: this is what we are asking students to do in Latin. The whole thing is frankly ridiculous, and I have written before about what a pointless exercise the whole business is, but given that the exam boards resolutely refuse to change their approach, we’re stuck with it. What follows are some observations about students who struggle with this element of the exam.

Perhaps the most striking thing I notice about some students’ understanding of the literature is the fact that those who are struggling with the set texts cannot articulate the very basics of what they are about. Teachers are often under enormous time pressure when it comes to the huge swathes of literature they must plough through, and – as a result – they often dive straight in to working through the text line by line, and do not find the time to ensure that their students understand the basic meaning and purpose of the text.

Currently, this is manifesting itself most strikingly with the Virgil text prescribed last year and this year for OCR (selections from the opening of Aeneid 1) and the Love & Marriage texts for Eduqas. For one student studying the latter, it took me more than one session with her to establish which texts she was studying, so non-existent was her grasp of what had been covered. With the Virgil, teachers have a particularly difficult task: how much to tell students who may have little to no knowledge of epic and/or mythological stories in general? Aside from this, however, is notable that not one single student that I have worked with during the last 18 months has had even the slightest inkling of an idea that Carthage had significance for a Roman audience. I find this genuinely sad. I cannot think of anything more important than explaining to them that the Carthaginian empire was a rival superpower that the Romans had overturned some 150 years before Virgil was writing. In a series of three conflicts between Rome and Carthage, Rome was ultimately victorious and utterly destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE. While the wars themselves were history to someone writing in Virgil’s time (the 1^st century AD), the experience and trauma of these conflicts, especially the long and harrowing campaigns of Hannibal, were a central and formative part of Roman collective memory and crucial to their self-definition. The Carthaginian Wars quite literally defined them as indefatigable warriors and the global superpower of their age.

Beyond this surely fundamental understanding of why Virgil is banging on about Carthage at the start of his epic work, no student that I have worked with understands or can define what an epic work is. I cling to the notion that they must have been taught this, but I can only assume that they are given this information in lesson one and that their teachers then assume that it has stuck. Such things are crying out to be used as a regular Do Now or similar quick retrieval task: what is an epic? Who was Homer? How is Virgil imitating him? A student should be able to tell us that an epic is a lengthy poem, written to be publicly performed, and focusing traditionally on tales of battle and self-definition; they should also understand that the gods and destiny play an important role in epic and that epic is a genre that evolved through the Greek oral tradition and that Virgil is doing something rather special by canonising this into a definitive Roman origin story in Latin. These basic notions really need to be revisited regularly to ensure that students remember them.

Beyond the fundamentals, the biggest mistake made by classroom teachers in my experience is their excessive focus on style, over and above teaching students how to learn the text. At this point, we come to the crushing reality and the reason why I believe that set text work is such a monumentally pointless waste of students’ time: the Latin is too hard for GCSE-level students to grasp in full, meaning that their only option is to rote-learn the text in English. Few classroom teachers labour under the illusion that this is not the case, but few also realise just how much guidance students need in order to do this necessary and time-consuming task successfully. When I was teaching, I learned to drill students on the best methodology for rote-learning, modelled it for them and then gave them short bursts of classroom time to start doing so, while I monitored them. It was essential, in my view, for me to see it demonstrated that students had understood the methods I had shown them and were trying them out. Students can be remarkably stubborn when it comes to study skills, and unless it is literally demonstrated to them that a method works, they will ignore your advice and go it alone. As a result, they will fail. Students who have been shown how to learn the text successfully come to realise that the demonstrated methods work and will stick with them.

The final issue with classroom set-text teaching arises out of a combination of two issues I have already raised: teachers being under time pressure to push ahead with the text line by line, combined with an excessive focus on stylistic features. What this means is that teachers generally introduce a new bit of text and talk about its stylistic features at the same time. The reality for novices is that this will be impossible to follow. My advice to students is always to attempt to get ahead of the class with the rote-learning, so that they are looking at a section of the text that they understand when their teacher starts talking about style. This gives them a better chance of following what the teacher is saying. When I was in the classroom, I would take the students through the meaning of the text and set them to learn it before I said anything about its stylistic features. It worked infinitely better than expecting them to follow what I was saying when working through a new bit of text.

Fundamentally, classroom teachers must remind themselves that students can achieve around 80% in the exam with only the haziest of grasps when it comes to the stylistic features of the text. The vast majority of their marks come from knowing the text, and yet this aspect of their studies is given the least amount of focus in the classroom. In their anxiety to help students with the most difficult aspects of the examination, many classroom teachers overlook the low-hanging fruit: how to help them to achieve the bulk of their marks.

The thrilling anticipation of GCSE “reform”

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

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

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

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

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

What GCSE students don’t know about the Aeneid

Since last week, when I wrote again about the power of one-to-one tutoring, I have had even further cause to reflect on its essential benefits.

It would come as shock, I suspect, to most classroom teachers, the extent to which students forget, misinterpret or loftily ignore what they have no doubt been taught in school. I say “no doubt” because I refuse to believe that students have never been taught the basic background to the texts that they are studying, despite their protestations.

What does happen, I believe, is that teachers over-estimate students’ ability to absorb and remember complex material. It certainly came as a shock to me when I started to read more about how memory works (a criminally overlooked field of study in my training) and came to realise just how much repetition is required for students to grasp the basics. In this blog post, I plan to outline the opening few lines of one of the current OCR set texts and explore the things that have puzzled, baffled and troubled the students I have worked with this year. I hope that this will enlighten readers as to the extent that some students struggle with complex material.

One of this year’s texts is taken from Virgil’s Aeneid Book 1. It starts at line 13, so as close to the beginning of the text as one could wish for. This potentially makes for a much easier life than the times when a set text has been taken from Book 10 or Book 12. One would have thought that it would be an easy task to get students to comprehend the basic facts of what the text is about and its core purpose. Well, one would have thought wrongly. With only one exception, the students requesting my help with the Virgil text this year have not been able to define what an epic is, nor were they able to say what Virgil’s purpose was in writing the Aeneid. Most of them swore blind that they’d never been taught the definition of an epic. Beyond this, they have all been baffled to the point of total and utter confusion as to who the Trojans were and what on earth they had to do with the Romans and their self-definition. So, let’s look at some extracts from the opening lines of the text and see in more detail what’s been troubling my charges.

urbs antiqua fuit, Tyrii tenuere coloni,
There was an ancient city, [which] Tyrian settlers inhabited,

Karthago, Italiam contra Tiberinaque longe
Carthage, opposite Italy and the far-distant mouth of the Tiber,

ostia, dives opum studiisque asperrima belli;
rich in resources and most formidable in the practices of war;

Out of those who have requested help with the Virgil, most of them were unable to tell me where Carthage was and why it’s described as a formidable stronghold. None of them – genuinely no exceptions – understood the historical fact that the Romans had destroyed Carthage over 100 years before Virgil was writing. While I would not for one moment expect any of them to have detailed knowledge of the three Punic Wars, I was a little surprised that none of them seemed to be conscious of the fact that Virgil was writing in a world in which this rival superpower had been razed to the ground decades earlier, and that this was a crucially important part of how the Romans defined themselves. Does it seem likely that this was never mentioned by any of their teachers? I think probably not. Is it likely, however, that this was perhaps mentioned once in the first lesson and then rarely – if ever – reiterated? That, I’m afraid, seems plausible. I think teachers need to think very hard about what’s happening in the first couple of lessons of set text work. When you present the students with the text, their minds are completely preoccupied with the length of it and how on earth they are going to cope with learning it; they are thus even less likely to absorb any background information you’re giving them.

Very few students were able to tell me what the Tiber is (a river in Rome, as iconic to the Romans as the Thames is to Londoners) and none of them seemed to understand how Carthage is “opposite” Italy. Carthage lay on the other side of the Mediterranean sea, located on the coast of north Africa, in what we now call Tunisia – indeed, it kind of bulges out into the sea and looks to be the bit of land mass in Africa that is closest to Italy. Perhaps it is because my own sense of direction and general geography is so embarrassingly poor that I always look all of these places and features up on a map and contextualise them for myself in detail. Do teachers assume that their students’ knowledge of geography is as sound as their own? Maybe so, and if so, I guess my advantage is that my own geography is so awful that I assume absolutely nothing! Anyway, the text and the description of Carthage continues:

quam Iuno fertur terris magis omnibus unam
[one] which Juno is said to have cherished more [than] all [other] lands,

posthabita coluisse Samo; hic illius arma,
valuing [even] Samos the less;

Now we’re getting on to the meat of the text and what Virgil is building up to in this opening section. He sets out to explain why Juno, the queen of the gods (most students didn’t know that, by the way), has a massive beef with the Trojans. Here, he highlights the fact that Juno values Carthage even more than Samos. What’s he on about? My students didn’t know. Samos, an island off the coast of modern-day Turkey, was the birthplace of Juno and a centre of her worship. The fact that she values it less than Carthage highlights the importance of Carthage to her and hence her overwhelming desire to protect it. This is why Virgil mentions Samos.

progeniem sed enim Troiano a sanguine duci
But indeed she had heard [that] a breed [would] arise from Trojan blood,

audierat, Tyrias olim quae verteret arces;
which would one day overturn the Tyrian stronghold;

hinc populum late regem belloque superbum
from this would come a nation, wide-ruling and superior in war,

venturum excidio Libyae: sic volvere Parcas.
for the destruction of Libya: thus were the Fates unrolling.

I have asked all of my students to tell me who “the breed that would arise from Trojan blood” are, which could absolutely come up as a one-mark question in the exam. Until I explained, very few of them understood that it was the Romans. They seemed genuinely unsure about the point of the Aeneid‘s opening, which is to highlight how difficult the goddess Juno made it for the Trojans to make it to Italy, which was their destiny. Why were they headed to Italy? Again, when asked, students had not grasped the fact that Aeneas and the rest of the Trojans were refugees, survivors of the Trojan War and in search of a new city now that theirs had been destroyed. It seems remarkable given current events in both Europe and beyond that students seem to find this resonant fact so easy to forget. Has the analogy with modern refugees setting sail across dangerous waters ever been drawn for them? I do hope that is has, but again, maybe that’s happened only once. Students had failed to grasp that the Trojans are trying to get to Italy and that Juno is trying to prevent this because she is trying to prevent the Roman empire from existing and thus to prevent the destruction of Carthage by the Romans. Now, here’s what’s really interesting: I have explained this multiple times and in multiple ways to several different students individually, and most of them have really struggled to grasp it. I suspect it’s partly because they are having to think about multiple timelines and this is difficult for younger people; I also think it might have something to do with the fact that some of what they are being told is historical fact and some of it is legend – they genuinely find it difficult to get a handle on what it all means and how it fits together. I am still thinking about how it could be better explained in the future, since it’s clearly a lot more difficult to understand than those of us who are subject experts realise.

necdum etiam causae irarum saevique dolores
not even now had the causes of [her] resentment and bitter griefs

exciderant animo: manet alta mente repostum
left [her] heart: deep in her mind remained the far-off

iudicium Paridis spretaeque iniuria formae,
judgement of Paris and the insult of her beauty scorned,

et genus invisum, et rapti Ganymedis honores.
and her enmity towards the tribe and the honours paid to the stolen Ganymede.

Here, Virgil lists the reasons that Juno has for hating the Trojans. It seems that students find this really difficult, too. This is perhaps because they must grasp two separate things: firstly, they must understand that Juno’s over-arching reason for hating the Trojans is that they are destined to give rise to the Romans, who will eventually destroy her beloved Carthage. They find this really difficult to grasp, as I explained above. In addition, they must also understand that Juno has some other more petty reasons for hating the Trojans, mentioned here by Virgil. She has a general enmity towards the tribe because it is descended from someone called Dardanus, who was the son of her husband Jupiter as a result of one of his numerous extra-marital affairs. Thus, the existence of the entire Trojan race was an insult to Juno. In addition (and this is the only story that most of the students seemed familiar with) there was the beauty contest between three goddesses that Paris, a Trojan prince, was given the dubious task of judging. His choice was ultimately the cause of the Trojan War, since the bribe he was offered by the winner (Venus) was the most beautiful woman in the world, which was Helen, who happened to be married to a Greek. Hence, when Paris claimed his prize, the Greek tribes waged war upon the Trojans. More importantly for our purposes, the fact that Juno was not selected as the winner of the contest was yet another slight against her by a Trojan. The third petty reason mentioned, the “honours paid to the stolen Ganymede” is all about Jupiter’s promiscuity again. Ganymede was a handsome Trojan that Jupiter took a fancy to and abducted, yet another insult to his wife. (Note: Ganymede was not, as one of my students was absolutely convinced of, a horse. Not that taking a fancy to a horse was beyond Jupiter, miind you, but that isn’t what happened in the story).

his accensa super, iactatos aequore toto
Inflamed further by these [things], she kept the Trojans [who were] left by the Danaans

Troas, reliquias Danaum atque immitis Achilli,
and by ruthless Achilles far-distant from Latium, storm-tossed in every corner of the sea;

arcebat longe Latio, multosque per annos
and for many years

errabant, acti fatis, maria omnia circum.
they wandered around all the oceans by an act of fate.

tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem!
Such a great undertaking it was to found the Roman race!

Here, Virgil sums up his overall point: that it is Juno’s hatred of the Trojans and her fear of their impending destiny, which causes her to work against their journey and to thus postpone their fulfilment of fate. One of the final things that I have noticed students really struggle to grasp is that fact that Juno knows full well that she won’t succeed: as a goddess, she can see the past, the present and the future, and she knows that the destruction of Carthage by the Romans is fated and inevitable. Still, she’s going to do everything in her power to prevent, or at least delay, the inevitable. I find it interesting that young people should struggle to understand this very human kind of motivation – that we might still strive for something that we already know is doomed to failure in the longterm. I guess they haven’t had experience of it yet.

Before teachers feel too dismal, I should point out that I do tend to specialise in working with students who really struggle with the subject. That said, what has been interesting this year is that almost all of my students have struggled with this text, even the high-fliers. I hope that this post has given some food for thought. It is so easy to assume that students have understood what we have told them, so easy to imagine they are following what we say. Until we delve a little deeper – one of the immense joys of working one-to-one as I do now – we can delude ourselves that they have understood the point of a text and are following its meaning.