teaching – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Radical traditionalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revelations

One of the strangest things about humans is what they reveal about themselves. Never is this more apparent than at a school Consultation Evening, when the parents or guardians of a child sit opposite their child’s teachers to discuss their child’s progress or – at times – to reveal in glorious technicolour their warped sense of reality and chaotic lives to the person sitting opposite them.

Recently, The Huffington Post invited readers in the teaching profession to reveal the most remarkable things that parents have said to them over the years. “When teachers go into their profession, they do so with the expectation that they will have to deal with some student misbehaviour. … But when you speak with teachers about the behaviours that cause them the most distress, it’s not the students who are to blame, it’s their parents — some of whom seem to badly need a lesson in courtesy, respect and common sense.”

“I had a parent tell me that their child … was a genius and I just wasn’t smart enough to comprehend that” said one. “I had a parent tell me that they didn’t need to teach their child morals, as that is what school should be teaching them,” reported another. Over the years, I also experienced some quite remarkable condescension from some of the adults I had to deal with, although nothing quite this bad: “I once had a parent tell me, ‘I worked in daycare too, then I decided to get a career’,” reported one pre-school teacher with 17 years’ experience. This comment is particularly revealing of a fact that became apparent during the pandemic- how some people see schools as there to provide day care for their children, not an education.

Generally speaking, such people are so rare and so jaw-droppingly ridiculous that I have wiped the recollection of most such comments from my memory. The majority of parents are respectful and only too supportive of their child’s teachers. One memory I do maintain, however, is not of a child’s parents setting out to undermine me, but rather seeming to reveal such malfunction in their own lives that I have never forgotten it. This happened in my very first year of teaching, which is now 25 years ago, so I feel pretty safe telling the story. It was my very first Consultation Evening, one of hundreds that I would attend, and it remains the one I have never forgotten. It was also the time when I truly learnt the definition of passive-aggressive behaviour, or what in modern parlance is often referred to as gas-lighting.

The parents of this particular child were divorcing but were attending the Consultation Evening together with their child. There is nothing unusual about this and most manage to do so with only the faintest whiff of awkwardness in the air. I remain convinced that the overwhelming majority of parents want the best for their children and that includes protecting them from the worst of the fall-out when it comes to a separation. These parents, however, appeared to be going through a particularly acrimonious separation and there had been some confusion (possibly confounded by at least one of the people involved) about to whom communications regarding their child’s progress should be sent. This was made clear to me the moment that the family sat down – the child deposited like a military buffer zone between the individuals at war – and informed me that this was the case. Not a great start.

Neither parent would look at or speak to the other parent, so it was close to impossible to have a normal conversation that would include their child in the process without extreme awkwardness. Nevertheless, I pressed on as best I could, taking the opportunity to explain how well their child had been doing recently (remarkably well, given the family situation in which they found themselves). Just as I was beginning to round up my report, I was interrupted by the child’s mother, who appeared agitated and unable to contain herself any longer.

“I wish to make one thing absolutely crystal clear,” she barked, pointing her finger at me. “I wish to clarify the fact that I have not – nor have I ever – been suffering from any kind of mental illness. There is nothing wrong with me!”

There was a long, mortifying pause.

“Um. Okay,” I said, unsure where this was going but very sure that I didn’t like it or have any idea of how to handle it.

“So whatever has been said about me – and I mean by anyone – is not true. I want it wiped from your records!”

Personally, I was unaware of anything on anyone’s record about mental health issues, and I was genuinely at a loss as to what to say. Now, with more experience, I realise that I should have said something like “you clearly have some concerns, so can I suggest that you speak to …” and pass the buck onto someone considerably higher up the pay grade than I was (which, at that time, was pretty much everybody; I suspect the assistant caretaker earned significantly more than I did). From my recollection, however, I was incapable of anything other than opening and closing my mouth like a dying fish.

“I hope I’ve made myself clear,” snapped the mother, at which point her soon-to-be-very-ex-husband piped up.

“As I was saying,” he remarked, smoothly, “I’m keen to be kept informed of any ways in which I can help with vocabulary learning. Do you have any particular suggestions?”

There was another silence, while I stared at him, then at his trembling wife. It was as if she had not spoken. She did not exist. Her presence was not merely irrelevant, it was a non-fact. He had not heard her, for she was not there.

He continued.

“Just keep me in the loop with regards to anything I can do to help in that department.”

So, that was my stark introduction to the psychological concept of passive aggressive behaviour. I could immediately begin to see where this woman’s apparent neurosis was coming from. When you have someone who quite literally acts as if you have been expunged from the universe, where do you go other than the path of frustration, protestation and rage? What choice do you have other than to act out? I tried to imagine a lifetime of being ignored, of being talked over, of being erased and expunged. I’m not sure I would have handled it with any more dignity or diplomacy than she was managing.

To this day I will never know the full truth behind what was going on in that family, but I do know that the acrimonious divorce took them down a path of heart-breaking consequences for their child. Since they were unable to agree on custody and access and since the child was old enough for the courts to take their individual preferences into account, the child was forced to testify in open court about which parent they would prefer to live with and why. Quite how a couple who once made vows to each other and chose to bring a child into this world can end up so horribly broken I struggle to imagine, but the consequences for all concerned were devastating. So, more than any ignorant insults hurled at me and the profession I represent over the years – and there have been a few – it is this early experience that I recall with genuine regret.

France is bacon and other misconceptions

When I was young, my father said to me: “Knowledge is power, France is bacon.” For more than a decade I wondered over the meaning of the second part and what was the surreal linkage between the two. If I said the quote to someone, “Knowledge is power, France is bacon,” they nodded knowingly. Or someone might say “Knowledge is power” and I’d finish the quote, “France is bacon” and they wouldn’t look at me like I’d said something very odd, but thoughtfully agree. I did ask a teacher what did “Knowledge is power, France is bacon” mean, and got a full 10 minute explanation of the “knowledge is power” bit but nothing on “France is bacon.” When I prompted further explanation by saying “France is bacon?” in a questioning tone, I just got a “yes”. At 12 I didn’t have the confidence to press it further. I just accepted it as something I would never understand. It wasn’t until years later I saw it written down, “Knowledge is power,” Francis Bacon, that the penny dropped.

Anonymous post on Reddit, 2011.

The ease with which such misconceptions can arise is something that all teachers should be aware of. Most likely, you can remember some of your own from childhood. For me, most memorably, it was the phrase “rich as Croesus”, which my mother used to use regularly. As a kid, unsurprisingly, I’d never heard of the ancient Greek king of legendary wealth, so I heard “rich as creases.” For years I wondered what being rich had to do with having creases, or why creases were considered to be the same thing as being rich. I just put it down to one of those weird things that grown-ups say.

It is important to remember that much of what adults say is inherently puzzling to young children. Before we berate them for a lack of intellectual curiosity (why on earth didn’t I just ask … ?), it is important to remind ourselves that pretty much everything that adults say or do can seem puzzling on some level to very young children. It is not, therefore, surprising when they shrug and accept a saying or something that they are told is a truism that makes little obvious sense: nothing makes obvious sense when you’re small.

Further to that, the account of the child who heard “France is bacon” illustrates the anxiety that most children have that they have at best missed something obvious or at worst that they are inherently stupid. You can feel the child’s unease as they anxiously test the waters with the various ways in which they attempt to have the saying explained to them. Even the teacher completely misses the opportunity to correct the misconception, as they clearly did not realise where the misconception lay. This illustrates the tendency that we have as teachers to assume that we already understand what it is that a child needs explaining to them: in this case, the teacher assumed that the child was puzzled as to the underlying message of the saying – in what sense can knowledge bring power? What the teacher actually needed to do was to quiz the child on why they were asking about it – what was puzzling them about the quotation? Had the teacher done so, the misconception would have been identified and rectified.

One of the things that I love about tutoring is the opportunity that the one-to-one setting brings to uncover such misconceptions or gaps in a child’s knowledge. This is partly because of the time and focused attention that it affords, but it is also because of the opportunity that you are offering a child to ask all of those “stupid” questions that they’ve been bottling up for years. Nothing brings me greater joy than a tutee who develops the confidence to interrupt me and demand an explanation for something, or to ask me a question that I did not realise that they needed to ask. That’s when the relationship between the tutor and their student has really developed, when a child gains the confidence to demand the most out of their sessions.

Just recently, I was reminded how careful we need to be when assuming what a child knows. I showed my tutee the translation of a Latin poem by Catullus, which contains the metaphor “my purse is full of cobwebs”. Now I went in with the assumption that the child might need encouragement to grasp the metaphor, as many children do not find these as easy as you might assume. During the discussion, however, I discovered that she did not in fact know what “a purse” was. There was no chance of her understanding the metaphor until that was rectified! It had not previously occurred to me that this might be a word that a 16-year-old might not know: but if your family have always used the word “wallet”, or your parents carry their change in their jeans, or – as is becoming increasingly the norm – they don’t really carry cash at all, then maybe it is simply not a word you have come across. We should never, ever assume.

Misconceptions that arise from mishearings such as “France is bacon” or “rich as creases” also illustrate the essential importance of dual coding. A couple of years ago, I realised that one of my tutees was convinced that the dative case had something to do with numbers. After a couple of minutes of trying to explore where this misconception had come from, I suddenly realised what had happened: his teacher had (quite rightly) taught his class that the dative case was to be translated as “to” or “for”. My tutee, however, had heard “two” or “four”. He heard numbers instead of words, and he had been understandably confused ever since. Yet had the teacher simply written the words “to” and “for” on the board as well as saying them out loud, this misconception would have been avoided. So many people confuse dual coding with the idea of simply putting a nice picture on their handouts, or the ridiculous belief that illustrations are essential for basic vocabulary learning. Not a bit of it. Dual coding is the process of combining words with visual stimulus. It is used to help the brain to grasp a concept without misconceptions: using a visual representation of what you are explaining in written words, or writing down what you are explaining verbally.

Children will always form misconceptions and that fact is nothing to be feared. It does, however, mean that teachers must be particularly alert to them and the methods that are most likely going to help to resolve them, or to prevent them from forming in the first place.

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

Responsive Tutoring

One of the most powerful tools for promoting student progress is what’s called assessment for learning (AfL). When I was first teaching and the phrase was all the rage, you wouldn’t have passed an interview without mentioning it. While the acryonym AfL is less often used these days, it still underpins modern teaching.

The thinkers credited with the founding principles behind the use of AfL in the classroom are on record as saying they wish they’d called it something else. Rather than “assessment for learning”, they wish they’d called it “responsive teaching” and I can see why. In many ways, AfL is about neither assessment nor learning – at least, not in isolation. AfL, or rather responsive teaching, is about what a teacher does differently in response to where their students are in terms of their understanding.

While summative assessments (such as a GCSE examination) focus on evaluating final outcomes, AfL is embedded in day-to-day teaching in order to gauge students’ progress, clarify misunderstandings and – most crucially – to guide further learning. Effective use in the classroom presents a unique set of challenges for teachers, especially when working with larger groups. The process is infinitely easier in a one-to-one setting, where the dynamic between the tutor and the tutee shapes the entire process.

Responsive teaching is meant to be a continuous loop, the gathering and interpretation of evidence used to shape a teacher’s instructional decisions. AfL can also be used to help students to recognise their own current level of understanding and set goals to improve. It is meant to be an ongoing, dynamic process and requires teachers to have a nuanced understanding of each student’s needs, strengths, and areas for improvement. To be effective, AfL requires not just frequent feedback but feedback that is individualised and actionable. In a one-on-one setting, a tutor can more naturally meet these requirements, while in a classroom with multiple students, the process becomes complex, requiring considerable skill and resourcefulness from the teacher.

When implementing AfL in the classroom, teachers encounter several challenges that are unique to managing large groups. In a classroom of 30 students, teachers must balance AfL with the demands of covering the curriculum, managing behaviour and addressing a multitude of diverse learning needs. The time constraints are significant. For each student, providing specific feedback and tailoring instructional adjustments is an ideal that is often close to impossible to achieve in practice. In any single lesson, a teacher may only have a minute or two to focus on each student. This time is rarely enough for comprehensive feedback, making it challenging to provide meaningful guidance on areas for improvement.

In larger classrooms, teachers have to rely on quick, general assessments, such as asking questions to the class or using hand-raising methods, but these approaches can miss individual nuances and only provide superficial insights into each student’s understanding. Real-time feedback is essential for the process to work, but logistical challenges mean that teachers sometimes delay feedback until they can examine students’ work. This delay can diminish the impact of the feedback and may hinder a student’s immediate progress. It also places a significant workload burden on the teacher: even schools who have understood and embraced the principles behind whole-class feedback are still placing a considerable assessment burden on the classroom teacher in terms of work that must be completed outside the classroom.

In any classroom, some students may actively participate and show enthusiasm, while others remain quiet or withdrawn. Unless a school has fully embraced and embedded the principles of “no excuses”, teachers will struggle to gauge the understanding of all students. Ensuring equal participation is challenging, and without specific engagement from each student, teachers may only get a partial view of the overall class understanding. Implementing AfL strategies requires significant time and energy, which teachers often need to dedicate to managing classroom behaviour. Students can become disengaged, especially if they don’t immediately understand a lesson or find it challenging. The need for behaviour management can take time away from delivering AfL, reducing the effectiveness of feedback and lesson adaptation.

By contrast, one-to-one tutoring provides an environment where AfL shapes and defines the entire process. In a one-on-one setting, the tutor’s focus is exclusively on a single student and this individual attention means the tutor can tailor questions, feedback, and guidance specifically for that student. Any misconceptions or gaps in knowledge are immediately identified and addressed, without the need for complex assessment. For example, a tutor might notice hesitation in a student’s response and immediately reframe the question to clarify understanding. This kind of personalised, immediate and dynamic intervention is impossible in a classroom.

In tutoring, feedback is instant. If a student misunderstands a concept, the tutor can pause and offer corrective feedback on the spot. There is no need to wait, no need to press ahead with the curriculum. This timely response to a student’s needs helps to solidify learning and build confidence, making AfL truly effective. Tutoring allows for a flexibility in pacing which simply cannot happen in the classroom. A tutor can spend as much time as necessary on a particular concept, adjusting the level of challenge to ensure that a student remains engaged. For example, if a student masters a topic quickly, the tutor can introduce more complex material. Conversely, if a student is struggling, the tutor can slow down, review foundational concepts, or use alternative explanations.

One-to-one tutoring fosters a relationship where the student may feel more comfortable expressing misunderstandings or asking questions. I actively praise my students for interrupting me and asking questions, although I am careful to highlight for them that this is the right environement in which to do so; it is important to me that I support classroom teachers by clarifying to students that they cannot – nor should they – demand this level of individual attention and feedback in the mainstream classroom.

Reading their minds?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shooting the Moon

During the period when I was writing my PhD, my main source of temptation and distraction was an electronic card game called Hearts. This was before the turn of the 21st century and while there were indeed some strange men in some of the science departments talking about a mysterious and abstract notion called “The Internet”, most of us had not discovered it yet. So, in 1998, I had neither cat videos nor social media to distract me, but I did have Hearts. Traditional card games such as Hearts and Solitaire (which I have always called Patience) were included along with the Microsoft software on my laptop, and it turned out to be a genuinely powerful temptation when the alternative was doing some work.

Hearts is a simple game for four players (or you plus three players driven by the computer). It is an evasion-game, in which you must try to avoid collecting any cards in the suit of hearts, plus particularly avoid collecting the Queen of Spades, which carries a heavy penalty and is essential to avoid. Generally speaking, the more hearts you end up stuck with at the end of the game, the worse your score, plus if you end up with the Queen of Spades you are particularly in trouble. I discovered all of this gradually: the motto in my family has always been, “as a last resort, read the instructions”, so in the style to which I had become accustomed, I plunged into the game and learnt the rules through trial and error.

One day, I was having such a bad round that it became clear that I was going to lose every single hand. Amused, I continued on my losing streak, keen in fact to make sure that I did indeed lose every single hand, purely for entertainment. (Please remember – the alternative was neoplatonic metaphysics). It was through this throwing in of the towel that I discovered the phenomenon of “shooting the moon” – it turns out that that in Hearts, if you lose every single hand and thus collect every single card in the suit of hearts and you collect the Queen of Spades, you actually win that round. It’s a slam-dunk, all-in move, like placing all your chips on one roll of the dice. I never managed to replicate the phenomenon and so only ever managed to win through shooting the moon on that one, accidental occasion.

In the last couple of years, I have become of aware of an increasing number of people who are keen for their children to “complete the syllabus early”. Some parents have expressed their wish that the entire specification be covered by the end of Year 10 (good luck with that!) and others adamant that they want the most complex concepts taught early or taught from the beginning. I have no idea where this notion has come from, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it found its origins on some online parent forum somewhere. Some high-achieving schools used to push this kind of rhetoric but with the shift in 2018 to specifications which are far more content-heavy, most schools find themselves struggling to complete the entire syllabus on time in some subjects, never mind early. The desire to push ahead also fails to take into account the rapid development that children are undergoing in their mid-teens. What a child is capable of towards the end of Year 11 may be poles apart from what they were capable of at the start of Year 10. On the other hand, it may not. It’s impossible to predict and – lest we forget – children are not machines.

One or two parents I have spoken to are so utterly wedded to the idea that the syllabus must be completed months ahead of the exam that they simply cannot be persuaded otherwise. Sometimes they claim that their child is vastly ahead in another subject – often mathematics – and express frustration that this is not the case in all. In the past, I might have accepted their take that their child was indeed in this position and argued that languages are different. Now I am married to a man with a mathematics degree, who rues the fact that he feels – on reflection – that he did not have the intellectual maturity to cope with the more nebulous fields of study that he was exposed to during his degree, it gives me pause. Is there honestly any subject in which a child or a young adult, however intelligent, can advance so rapidly without paying a price further down the line? Do they really understand what they are doing, or will it all come crashing down like the proverbial house of cards when they get a little further down the road? My feeling is that unless your child is some kind of savant (and to date I have never met one of those, so I’m telling you your child isn’t one of them) then you’re taking quite a risk with this approach.

Many parents who want their children to do well are concerned about the trickiest concepts in the syllabus. Sometimes they have feedback from their child’s schoolteacher that they have struggled with one or more of these more complex concepts. What some people find difficult to accept is that much of the time, it is not the tricky concept that is the problem – the problem lies deeper, in the foundational studies that their child may have been whisked through at high speed and left with tiny, often imperceptible gaps in their knowledge. Like the invisible holes in the enamel of a tooth, these gaps store up trouble for the future and before you know it you’ve got a gaping cavity in front of you. It is the rarest of occasions when this is not the case and indeed it is often the children who have historically done well in a subject that are most at risk. The better a child appears to be doing in a subject, the harder and faster they are pushed and the greater the number of tiny, undetectable cracks are formed which will make their presence known in the future. It’s the nature of the beast and nobody’s fault, but parents do need to trust a tutor who tells them that it’s time to go back to basics.

The overwhelming joy of what I do now is having the one-to-one time in which to genuinely test and shore up a child’s fundamental understanding. Asking them the same question in multiple different ways to ensure that they possess a genuine grasp of the topic, not a superficial ability to provide a text-book answer to an anticipated question worded in a style that they recognise. Asking them to define a grammatical term and give an example. Most of all, asking them to explain why a phrase or a sentence translates the way it does – does their translation stem from the ability to skate on thin ice or from a genuine grasp of the underlying principles?

You see, shooting the moon is exciting. But risking it all on one turn of pitch and toss is – as any recovered gambler will tell you – a seriously bad idea. Success comes from baby steps, strong foundations and a genuine grasp of how things are put together. Success in study is a marathon, not a sprint, and if a marathon runner started the race with the speed of a 100-metre sprinter, they would never make it to the end, never mind win. Early and fast does not mean better – quite the opposite. It can mean failure. So be patient and trust in the process. Shooting the moon is both elusive and risky and there are infinitely safer ways to win a round of cards.

Covered in glory

It is difficult for anyone outside the profession to comprehend the full potential gamut of horror that is the secondary-school cover lesson. Not only does it mean losing what is potentially your only free slot of time during that day, the reality of that cover lesson can be genuinely terrifying.

I recall opening up the cover folder and reading instructions such as the following:

“Explain to students the fundamentals of the carbon cycle”. Um. Okay.

“Invite students to share their views on …” (insert anything here, frankly, for horrors to commence).

“Go through the answers” – when this was Key Stage 4 maths, my blood truly ran cold with terror.

Yesterday, on the platform formerly known as Twitter, Andrew Old (who is a figure that will be known to anyone who does EduTwitter) asked the following: what is the worst cover lesson you have ever had to do? He followed this up with his own entries for the competition, saying that he was torn between an MFL lesson where the work was a wordsearch that didn’t actually have any of the words in, a science lesson where the work was “write a rap about the rock cycle” and “any PE cover where they actually had to play a sport”. The latter brought back a flash memory of one Year 9 tennis cover during my first year, during which I learnt a valuable lesson and a principle that I stuck resolutely to for the rest of my 21-year career: do not – repeat not – go into work with a hangover. You will be punished.

Others on the platform added their own entries to the competition and I share some of these experiences purely so that readers may appreciate just what it is that your average teacher may go through on a typical day. One reported a double-booked room and having to find another room with a class he did not know. One reported the radiator bursting during the session. Too many to account for reported simply diabolical situations that would try the patience of anyone who values their sanity (most of them involving either PE or Music), but I think my personal favourite was the following: “I received a cover sheet. The first instruction was: collect inflatable sheep from sports hall. I replied and said that I would not be covering this lesson”. I think I laughed for 5 minutes about that one.

The only other response I found that involved someone simply refusing to go ahead with a cover lesson was this one: “during my PGCE (first day of my first placement no less) I had to perform CPR on my mentor teacher after he suffered a cardiac arrest. I was asked to cover his lessons for the day after he was taken to hospital. After a pregnant pause I simply said no. I wish this was made up.”

These days, I get to hear about cover lessons from the students’ point of view, and in many ways their accounts are no less gruelling. Students that I work with who attend school in the state sector report teacher absences at a record high and last year I worked with several Year 11 students who had no teacher at all for the majority of the school year; one student was affected in this way in multiple subjects. In the private sector, recruitment and retention seems to be marginally better, but the absence rate remains significant and the quality of cover work an issue. The problem is always particularly acute in minority subjects, when the absence of the subject expert can create an insurmountable vacuum that nobody has the expertise to fill. This was a pressure I felt acutely as the sole Latinist in the school I used to work in. The one and only time in my entire career when I was genuinely too sick to set work (indeed I could not get out of bed and considered the need for medical help), my HoD rang me up to ask me what he should do. I understand, I really do, and it certainly brought home the need for some kind of emergency provision.

One of the things that has struck me since leaving the profession is how little attention most schools give to the inescapable reality of cover and how damaging this is to the student body. I recall school leaders talking about this but in a manner that simply seemed to emphasise how important our presence was in the classroom, not a manner that brought any practical solutions to the unavoidable fact that sometimes we will be absent. School leaders really do need to face up to the reality that every child in their school will face a significant number of cover lessons during every month – at times, during every week. Schools should have a clear and workable policy when it comes to the expectations for a cover lesson, and these expectations should also be shared and repeated as a mantra to the students. For example, one school I worked in had the rule that cover work must be something that students could complete independently and in silence; this was a great rule, but it would have been considerably more powerful if that rule were shared as an expectation with the students!

I realise – now that I am outside the white heat of the situation – how much more I could have done to prepare students for what to do in a cover lesson. I absolutely could have done this myself, although I maintain that it would have been much more powerful to make it a school-wide expectation and something that is displayed for all students to see. All learners could be instructed on what they should do in the absence of specific cover work: for example, learning material from their Knowledge Organiser. With a bit of effort to do the groundwork, this would make life so much easier both for classroom teachers when they end up sick and for those who are providing the cover.

As a professional tutor now, I cannot influence what happens in the classroom, but I can help to make that experience more profitable and worthwhile for the individual students that I work with. I discuss with them what they can and should do when their teacher is absent and many of them take these suggestions on board. There are so many things that a student can use spare time for, but most of them lack the initiative to make use of that time without explicit instructions and guidance. The students I work with always have something that they know we are rote-learning and I talk to them about making efficient use of any spare classroom time to test themselves on whatever it is we are working on. In languages, the list of what students need to commit to memory is pretty relentless, so no student should ever be left twiddling their thumbs: but they really do need it spelled out to them that this is what they should be doing with the time.

Snacking

This week I resolved to do more snacking. Not of the doughnut kind (tempting as that is) but a thing I have read about called exercise snacking. It’s rather fun. Instead of resolving that anything other than a full-scale workout is a waste of time, the philosophy of snacking advises working small bursts of activity into your daily routine, whatever that is. I decided to experiment with it. So far this week I have done some calf exercises on the bottom stair while my coffee was brewing, some balancing exercises in the kitchen while cooking (there are probably some health and safety issues with this but I’m a grown adult and doing it at my own risk), plus some squats while finishing a drama on Netflix (far less risky, although the cat was pretty weirded out). None of this snacking is replacing my twice-weekly visits to the gymnasium from hell, but they form a picnic hamper of exercise snacks that I can work into my day without making any effortful changes to my everyday lifestyle.

This got me thinking about how the principles of snacking can be applied to studying. As clients will know, I work in half-hour slots and spend a great deal of my time persuading students that short bursts of focused work are far superior to longer periods of dwindling focus. So many students remain convinced that they need huge swathes of time in order to be able to study effectively, when in fact the reverse is true. No matter how much we learn from cognitive science about the limited capacity of our working memory and the shortness of our attention span, most students (and often their parents) remain wedded to the idea that they need a lengthy stretch of time for studying to be worthwhile.

Much of this attitude, of course, stems from good old-fashioned work avoidance. We’ve all done it: pretended to ourselves that we simply don’t have time for something when in fact what we’re doing is manufacturing an excuse to procrastinate whatever it is that we don’t want to do until the mythical day when we will have plenty of time to dedicate to it. You wouldn’t believe how much time I can convince myself is required to clean the bathroom. Part of overcoming this tendency is to call it out: point out to students when they are using their lack of time available simply as an excuse. But there is, I think, also a genuine anxiety amongst many students that they need long stretches of time in order to be able to achieve something. It often surprises them greatly when I inform them not only that much can be achieved in 10, 15 or 20 minutes but that in fact this kind of approach is optimal. It is not a necessary compromise in a busy lifestyle to fit your work into short, focused bursts: it is actually the ideal. The same is true for exercise snacks, for which there is a growing body of evidence that suggests the benefits of these short bursts of exercise can actually outweigh those of longer stretches.

One of the most counter-intuitive findings from cognitive science in recent years has been that regularly switching focus from one area of study to another is actually more effective for learning than spending extended periods of time on one thing. At first, I really struggled with this in the classroom, as all my training had taught me to pick one learning objective and hammer this home throughout the lesson. But up-to-date research-informed teaching advocates for mixing it up, especially in a setting like the school I used to work in where lessons were an hour long. A whole hour on one learning focus is not effective; far better to have one main learning focus plus another completely separate one one to reinvigorate the students’ focus and challenge them to recall prior learning on a completely different topic. I frequently do this whenever possible in my half-hour tutoring sessions, which may have one core learning purpose but with a secondary curve-ball which I throw in to challenge students to recall something we covered the previous week or even some time ago. This kind of switching keeps the mind alert and allows for regular retrieval and recall.

Retrieval snacking is also something that friends and family can help with and that students can and should be encouraged to do habitually. If you’re supporting your child with learning their noun endings, why not ask them randomly during the day to reel off the endings of the 1st declension? This kind of random questioning will pay dividends in the long-run, as it forces a child’s brain to recall their learning on a regular basis and out of context. Nothing could be more effective at cementing something into their longterm memory, which is the greatest gift any student can give themselves in order to succeed. My grandfather (a trained teacher himself) used to do this with me when I was small and was struggling to learn my times tables. “What are nine sevens?” he would yell out at random points during the day and I had to answer. It worked.

So, let’s hear it for study snacks. Short, random moments when a student challenges themselves to remember something. Adults can help and support them in this process as well as encourage them to develop it as a habit for themselves. Share with them the fact that this works and will help them with longterm recall. Apart from anything, it sends the message that study – like exercise – should be a part of daily life and woven into the fabric of your routine and habits. You don’t even need a desk to do it.