teaching – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

The widening summer gap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

School Daze

Before reading any further, try a simple experiment. Think of a teacher from your school days. Not necessarily the best teacher you ever had. Not necessarily your favourite. Just the first one who comes into your mind.

I have no doubt that somebody came to you almost immediately. You may be able to picture the classroom. You may remember the sound of their voice, the clothes they wore or a particular phrase they repeated endlessly. You might even recall a specific lesson, despite the fact that years or even decades have passed since you last sat in front of them.

Now, try remembering what you ate for lunch three days ago. Chances are, you’re finding that rather more difficult. This curious imbalance lies at the heart of one of the most fascinating questions in psychology. Why do so many of us retain vivid memories from our school days while forgetting vast stretches of our adult lives?

As a tutor, I am frequently reminded of just how powerful these memories can be. Mention Latin and people often respond not with a discussion about language but with stories about school. Sometimes they remember an inspirational teacher. More often, they recall a terrifying one. They may remember little about the subject (most usually Caecilius est in horto) but they do remember the smell of the classroom and the location of the windows. Such memories remain remarkably persistent.

The human brain is not a recording device. Most of us intuitively imagine memory as something like a video archive, faithfully storing the events of our lives for later retrieval. In reality, memory is selective, reconstructive and deeply influenced by emotion. Not only is the brain constantly making decisions about what information is worth keeping and what can safely be discarded, it reconstructs those memories each time it brings them to mind. From an evolutionary perspective, the process makes perfect sense. A memory system that preserved every detail of every day would quickly become overwhelmed. Forgetting is not a flaw in the system, it is one of its most important features. The interesting question, therefore, is not why we forget so much but why we remember certain things so clearly.

One answer lies in emotion. Psychologists have long known that emotionally significant experiences are more likely to be remembered. This does not necessarily mean dramatic or traumatic events (although those are often disturbingly persistent). Embarrassment, excitement, pride, anxiety, surprise and even mild humiliation can all strengthen memory formation. School provides a quite remarkable number of opportunities for such emotions. The first time a child answers a difficult question correctly or incorrectly in front of their peers. The panic of forgetting a line in a school play. The pride and embarrassment of winning a prize. The horror of realising that homework has been left at home. The embarrassment of calling your teacher “Mum” in front of a class (actually, I’ve even been called “Dad”, which was interesting). Such experiences may seem trivial to an outside observer, yet they provoke heightened emotions at the time and hence become deeply embedded in our memory.

Teachers frequently become part of this process. The teachers we remember are not always the most effective educators. More often, for better or for worse, they are the ones who made us feel something: who inspired us, frightened us, encouraged us, challenged us or infuriated us. Emotion acts like a preservative, signalling to the brain that a particular experience may be worth keeping long-term. Even now, my oldest friend and I can remember how terrified we were of our needlework teacher when we were 13. Her favourite method of crowd control was ritual humiliation. “Everyone gather round to see how badly Ros is doing this,” is a classroom memory we will both take to the grave. To this day, I genuinely wish I had found the courage to defend my friend and told that teacher exactly where she could shove it. Exclusion would have been 100% worth it.

School provides us with a series of novel firsts. Much of adult life is surprisingly repetitive and the very predictability that makes adult life manageable can make it difficult to remember. One Tuesday begins to resemble another. Childhood is different, since everything is happening for the first time. Our first day at secondary school. Our first examination. Our first close friendship, the loss of which can be our first taste of heartbreak. Our first major disappointment. Such experiences define our narrative. All of this helps to explain why our memories of school often feel so vivid. It was not necessarily that school itself was more memorable than adult life. Rather, our experiences in school were a plethora of firsts, which our growing brains identified as key events in our evolving self-definition.

In addition to the inescapable fact that our school days introduce us to a series of first-time experiences, it is also important to remember the profound effect that experiences have on us when they happen during our younger years. Psychologists have identified a phenomenon known as the “reminiscence bump”, one of the most intriguing findings in memory research. When older adults are asked to recall events from their lives, they tend to remember a disproportionate number from childhood, adolescence and very early adulthood. Memories from these years appear unusually durable. I have witnessed this first-hand as I have watched my parents age: both of them, now in their 80s, talk more about their childhood and their youth than they have ever done before. Researchers continue to debate exactly why this occurs, but it is a recognised side-effect of ageing and several explanations have been proposed. Our younger years are often characterised by major life transitions and significant personal development; we form identities, establish relationships, make important decisions and experience many of life’s defining moments. That period also coincides with a time when the brain is laying down new neural pathways and thus appears to be particularly sensitive to memory formation. I find this the most interesting part of current theory: many neurologists believe that the changes that the brain is going through during adolescence and our early 20s are as significant as those that happen during our first two to three years of our lives.

For all of us, education is not simply something we experience, it is the environment within which much of our identity is formed. For some people, the experience is something they never quite recover from, and a significant challenge faced by schools is managing the feelings and prejudices projected by some parents for whom school was a thoroughly traumatic experience. For some, school was such a place of struggle and of negative comparison of oneself to others that it becomes associated with entirely negative experiences. School is where many people first encounter challenge and failure and it can be difficult for some adults to let go of the powerfully negative associations they may have towards education as a result.

All adults inevitably revisit their own experiences of school when their own children join the classroom. This sparks memories and every time a memory is reconstructed, it is updated and made more vivid. The past remains alive because we keep returning to it. This process can sometimes create the illusion that we remember school more accurately than we actually do. Every act of remembering involves a degree of reconstruction and we do not retrieve memories so much as rebuild them. This helps to explain why siblings who attended the same school often remember it so differently. They are not recalling a shared objective reality: they are reconstructing experiences through the lens of their own emotions, personalities and subsequent lives.

As somebody who has spent much of my professional life working in schools, I find all of this both fascinating and sobering. Teachers rarely know which moments students will remember. The lesson that took hours to prepare may vanish entirely from memory, whereas a careless throwaway comment may still be remembered forty years later. I am painfully aware of this. Our school experiences occur at precisely the moment when our identities are taking shape, when all of our experiences are new and our emotions feel most intense. The result is a collection of memories that can remain astonishingly vivid for the rest of our lives.

Endgame

As I write, there is one more optional paper outstanding for the OCR Latin GCSE, albeit one that very few of my students will be sitting. By the time this piece is published, all of the examinations will be over.

For those of us who work in education, the end of the examination period marks not only the conclusion of a set of assessments, but also a kind of letting go. While we can explain, reassure, encourage and prepare, we cannot sit the papers for them. When the scripts are placed down on the desk and the clock begins its inexorable march forward, that student must go it alone. The weeks leading up to that moment are often characterised by a steady accumulation of worry. Students fear forgetting what they know. They fear difficult questions, poor sleep, unexpected illness and disappointing results. Even the most capable candidates are rarely immune. Indeed, some of the highest-achieving students often carry the heaviest burdens, acutely aware of the expectations they have placed upon themselves.

Alongside the students stand their parents. Public discussion of examinations often overlooks them, yet many experience the season as a prolonged period of helplessness and worry. They can provide revision resources, quiet spaces and encouragement, but they cannot sit the papers either. They must watch their children navigate stress, self-doubt and exhaustion and, quite naturally, absorb all of those emotions themselves.

Teenagers are notoriously good at emotional projection. Adults who work with teenagers often report walking into a room feeling calm and leaving feeling worried, pressured, angry or overwhelmed, all without immediately understanding why. In psychodynamic theory, it is purportedly possible for someone to unconsciously induce another person to experience feelings that they themselves cannot comfortably hold; rather than saying “I feel anxious”, the anxious person behaves in ways that leave everyone around them feeling anxious. Psychoanalysts have long reported experiencing sudden feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, irritation or helplessness that seem to originate in the patient’s emotional world rather than their own, and they are trained to reflect on their own feelings after a session and identify whether those feelings may reflect those of their clients.

In a similar way, tutors can become vessels into which the worries of students (and indeed their parents) are poured. A student arrives at a session convinced they have forgotten everything. A parent sends a message late in the evening asking whether their child is doing enough. Another student worries that a single mock result has predetermined their future. A parent fears that one poor performance will close doors forever. Perhaps most significantly at this point in the process, a parent accepts their child’s report of a disastrously poor performance in an examination as gospel: in fact, as I have written about before, research shows that students are generally very poor at assessing their own performance.

One of the less discussed realities of educational work is that emotional labour forms a substantial part of the job. We carry confidence when students temporarily lose theirs. We maintain perspective when parents struggle to see beyond an approaching exam date. We absorb fears that we know are disproportionate while simultaneously respecting the fact that, to the person experiencing them, they feel entirely real. During the examination season, this responsibility intensifies. Every session acquires a heightened significance and every practice paper feels loaded with meaning. A student’s disappointment over a dropped mark is rarely about the mark itself, it is about what they believe that mark represents, which is weakness and failure. The role of the educator becomes part teacher, part interpreter and part custodian of perspective.

When I worked in schools, this experience was concentrated within a single cohort. There was a collective rhythm to the year. One group of Year 11 students moved together through the same milestones, the same assemblies, the same revision sessions and eventually the same examination timetable. Their anxieties often echoed one another. For better or for worse, there was a shared atmosphere in the classroom and across the school. The pressure was intense, but it was unified.

Independent tutoring has altered that experience in unexpected ways. Rather than accompanying a single cohort through a common journey, I now work with numerous individual students, whose educational lives rarely intersect. I work across two examination boards and across all the myriad of choices that their teachers can make (hence the variety of end-dates I mentioned in my opening lines). Their examination timetables differ, their schools differ and (to be brutally frank) the quality of the teaching they have received also differs.

The cumulative effect can be surprisingly profound. While a classroom teacher may be carrying the concerns of thirty students in a single year group, an independent tutor may be carrying the concerns of dozens of individuals whose worries arrive separately and require separate attention. There is no collective narrative, rather there are multiple overlapping stories, each wildly significant to the person who is living it.

This is not a complaint. On the contrary, it is one of the privileges of the profession. Trust is not given lightly, particularly by adolescents navigating one of the most scrutinised periods of their education. To be entrusted with those concerns is an honour. Yet it would be dishonest to pretend that educators remain untouched by them. This year, it has been particularly challenging, for we have also been in the process of trying to move house. We accepted an offer on our property back in February and since then we have been playing the horrifically stressful game of strategy with agents, solicitors and some very anxious, very inexperienced first-time buyers. At last, as of this week, it looks like the deal is about to go through. Given the period of anxiety-inducing uncertainty that we’ve been through during the run-up, I’m almost looking forward to the stress of packing.

As examinations take place, many teachers and tutors find themselves carrying a quiet sense of responsibility that extends beyond any rational measure of their influence. We know that success or failure does not rest solely on our shoulders. We know that students ultimately achieve through their own effort and ability. Yet anyone who cares deeply about their work will recognise the feeling. We celebrate their successes personally and experience their disappointments personally too.

This is why the final examination of the season often brings relief not only for students but also for those who have supported them. The relief is different, of course. Students are relieved because the challenge is over. Teachers and tutors are relieved because the waiting can finally begin. There are no more last-minute questions, no more urgent revision plans, no more attempts to compress confidence-building into the final twenty-four hours before an exam. The work has been done. The papers have been written and nothing further can be added.

The weight that educators carry during examination season is rarely visible from the outside. It does not appear in timetables, performance measures or inspection reports. It is measured instead in conversations, emails, reassurances and moments of calm offered to students who need someone to remind them that an examination is important but not defining.

Results day remains ahead, of course. There will be celebrations, surprises and occasional disappointments. Yet results day belongs to a different emotional landscape. The uncertainty of preparation has ended. The long months of revision have passed. Whatever happens in August, the students have already done the hardest part: they have walked into the examination hall and faced the challenge.

Ghosts in the Machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trouble with Sleep

As someone who works almost exclusively with young people between the ages of 14 and 16, I am well-versed in the problem of teenagers and sleep. Any teacher who has been scheduled a challenging class on a Monday morning will understand the issue, but since working online I regularly have the pleasure of being presented with a youngster who has quite obviously been peeled unceremoniously from their bedsheets less than a minute prior our session. I have often advised parents to book a later session, on the grounds that their child is simply not in a fit state to absorb anything prior to mid-morning. There are some that can cope, but for others it becomes apparent that their parents will be wasting the money that they pay me, so groggy and unengaged is their child when the session begins. But just why do teenagers find mornings so palpably difficult?

At the centre of everything is our circadian rhythm, the internal clock which governs when we feel sleepy and when we feel alert. In younger children, as every parent knows, the clock tends to run on the early shift; but somewhere around puberty, the clock shifts — enough to have a pretty big impact. In adolescents, the hormone melatonin, which is central to what drives our urge to sleep, is released later in the evening compared to both children and older adults. This shift in their natural sleep phase means that teenagers genuinely feel more alert late into the evening and do not feel ready to sleep until much later than they used to. I remember this with visceral clarity. Staying up to watch Moonlighting, followed by Indelible Evidence, felt effortless, while waking the next morning felt simply agonising. Teenaged bodies, still growing and developing rapidly, require a substantial amount of rest — typically around eight to ten hours. But if a teenager is wired to fall asleep at midnight, yet still needs to wake up at 7.00 a.m. for school, then we’re faced with a problem.

I always like to ponder why these evidential facts about our biological nature and development might have evolved. It is undeniable that most teeangers experience a change in their body clock as they develop, and it is also undeniable that adults vary in terms of their own body clock: some are natural night owls, some are larks. (You probably have a good idea which one you are, but it’s quite fun to do the test: some people are very strongly one or the other, some people are flexible. I am as much of a lark as it is possible to be). So, why might it be that we vary in this way? As humans evolved, it would have been useful for a tribe to have a variety of members within it, to ensure that there is always someone that is capable of being hyper-vigilant at any time. When life was lived on a knife-edge, an endless battle for survival, it was crucial for the safety of everyone that at least some members of the tribe were capable of functioning at any one time. Thus, these subtle differences in how alert we feel at different times of the day may have been an essential advantage and thus these differences were perpetuated through natural selection.

Of course, biology is only part of the story. If teenagers were tucked away in candlelit rooms with nothing but a paperback novel and their thoughts, they might still stay up slightly later than the adults in the household, but probably not quite as late as they do now. Modern life has introduced a dazzling array of sleep-delaying tactics, most notably in the glowing rectangle of the smartphone. Social media, messaging apps, streaming platforms — all of these operate on the principle that there is always one more thing to see, one more conversation to have, one more video that might be even funnier than the last. If you can establish one rule in the home, it should be that these devices do not take the journey to bed with you. Teenagers are particularly sensitive to reward and novelty, meaning that the little bursts of satisfaction provided by notifications, likes and new content are especially compelling. The result can be a perfect storm: a brain wired to seek stimulation, a body that doesn’t feel sleepy yet, plus a device that delivers endless entertainment on demand. Bedtime, under these conditions, becomes achingly oppressive.

Waking up early for school is difficult not because teenagers are being dramatic (although, to be fair, some drama may be involved in some cases), but because the teenaged internal clock is still firmly set to “night mode.” When an alarm goes off at 6.30 a.m., it is essentially interrupting the biological equivalent of midnight. Imagine being forced to wake up at 2.00 a.m. and then expected to perform algebra, write essays and engage in meaningful discussion. That is not far off what most teenagers are experiencing every day.

The misalignment between biological rhythms and social expectations is sometimes referred to as “social jet lag”. It’s the same groggy, disoriented feeling one might have after flying across time zones, except instead of being a temporary inconvenience, it is a daily occurrence. The result is chronic sleep deprivation, which has a range of effects that extend far beyond simply feeling tired. In the classroom, this can manifest as difficulty concentrating, slower cognitive processing, and a general sense of mental fog. Teachers may notice students staring into space, struggling to retain information, or reacting with the enthusiasm of someone who has been asked to solve a puzzle while underwater. It’s not (always) that teenagers don’t care about their education; it’s that their brains are not operating at full capacity during the hours when learning is expected to happen.

Sleep deprivation is also closely linked to irritability, emotional volatility and increased stress. Sound familiar? Parents, who may already be operating under the assumption that their teenager simply needs to go to bed earlier, are so often met with morning grumpiness that can escalate into full-blown conflict. The state that a young person is in can reinforce the adults’ belief that the child should retire to bed earlier. The teenager, meanwhile, feels misunderstood and unfairly judged, leading to a cycle of frustration on all sides. What makes this situation especially tricky is that both perspectives contain elements of truth. Teenagers do, in many cases, make choices that exacerbate the problem — staying up later than necessary, using devices late into the night and underestimating the importance of sleep. I did this myself on an infinite loop and looking back it seems ridiculous. Yet at the same time, I remember vividly how alert I felt in the late evening and how utterly unattractive it seemed to take myself off to bed. The fact remains that the underlying biology of teenagers genuinely does make early sleep and early waking more difficult for them. It is not a simple matter of willpower, nor is it entirely in their control.

Some schools have tried to take the peculiar biology of teeangers into account by experimenting with later start times. Research suggests that even a modest delay in the beginning of the school day can lead to improvements in attendance, academic performance and overall well-being. Teenagers who are allowed to wake up in closer alignment with their natural rhythms tend to be more alert and more engaged. I have always wondered, however, what these schools are like for the adults. Speaking as someone whose energy is now heavily weighted towards the morning (I spring awake, starving hungry, at around 5.30am most days), I would hate to work in a place where the day was shifted later. This is the problem: the teenagers are not the only ones with skin in the education game.

Given that all schools still start significantly earlier than most teenagers would like, there are nevertheless small changes that can help. Exposure to natural light in the morning can nudge the circadian rhythm slightly earlier, making it easier to wake up over time. Limiting screen use in the hour before bed can reduce the stimulating effects of both blue light and stimulating content, giving melatonin a better chance to do its job. Consistent sleep schedules, even on weekends, can also make a difference, although this is perhaps the most challenging suggestion of all, given the powerful allure of a Saturday lie-in. It all seems rather easier said than done, and my parents certainly gave up even trying. Ultimately, understanding is key. If families can recognise that their teenager’s sleep patterns are not entirely a matter of choice, and if teenagers can be persuaded to acknowledge that their habits can influence their well-being, the conversation can at least be had.

It is, in the end, a delicate dance between what our bodies want and what our schedules demand. Teenagers, caught in the middle of this dance, are not failing at mornings so much as they are beginning to negotiate with them. If they’re lucky, they will become a lark like I did, and the world will become an infinitely easier place to negotiate (unless they want to work in the nightclub industry, I suppose). So, if your teen occasionally hits the snooze button one too many times, it might be worth remembering that they are not resisting the day — they are just trying to catch up with a night that ended a little too soon for them.

The Fitness of Fitness Instructors

To what extent should it be evidentially apparent that we practise what we preach? I have been pondering this dilemma, since observing a distinctly less than svelte gentleman, who regularly oversees the training regimes of customers in the gym, encouraging his clients to build muscle and burn fat whilst resting his own arms on his notable and substantial belly. I will admit that my mind went somewhere slightly uncharitable, a thought process that can be summed up in the line, “maybe get your own house in order first,” but then I found myself wondering: to what extent does a fitness instructor have to be fit?

The question became more complicated the more I thought about it. Given the well-documented fact that many doctors smoke and drink alcohol and that many of them are also overweight, does that make those same doctors any less qualified to tell the rest of us what to do when it comes to looking after our bodies? Their ability to diagnose and treat doesn’t disappear if they don’t always follow ideal habits. Shift work is notorious for making it difficult to sustain a healthy diet and lifestyle, as is stress: so should we think less of them for falling prey to the same barriers as the rest of us? And why should this not apply also to fitness instructors?

Physical trainers and their clientele at the gym are something of a source of fascination for me. It is (for me, at any rate) simply impossible not to eavesdrop on their sessions, and I’m fascinated by the barely-concealed disinterest with which so many of the PTs conduct their sessions. It is, to be fair, a pretty repetitive job, watching a variety of newbies straining to improve their fitness, but I am startled by how dismally uninterested some of the instructors seem to be in the process of fitness. Why apply yourself to a career without that basic love for what you do? Personally, I still get a kick out of explaining how participles work, after nearly thirty years of doing so, and I still take joy and pride in watching the lights go on when I help a student to understand something that they have not managed to grasp before.

Perhaps the most enthusiastic personal trainer at the gym is a man whom I have nicknamed (in my head, you understand) The Dangling Frog. This man is genuinely interested in pumping iron, although I would question the degree to which he is an advocate of what I would deem true fitness, given the amount of steroids I suspect he has imbibed. So, why Dangling Frog, you ask? Well, he has done so much upper body work that he resembles one. Imagine holding up a frog by its body and letting its bowed, skinny legs dangle beneath? That’s what this guy looks like. I have witnessed him working on his own muscles and the level of strain he applies to his shoulders and biceps is impressive: the poor old legs don’t get a look in, so they remain a mere shadow of his upper-body musculature. To be frank, I’m surprised that his legs can sustain the downward force of his upper body. One day, I fear that the unarguable laws of physics will complete the inevitable demonstration of force and gravity and his legs will give way.

Still, disproportionate physique aside, this guy is certainly more enthusiastic than most. His favourite regular client is older than him, so he gets to show off a bit under the guise of training and encouragement, but I saw him recently with a younger compatriot and I couldn’t quite work out whether this was a trainer-client situation or simply a meeting of mutual appreciation. Whatever the circumstances, it looked like a beautiful bromance was developing, and their conversation went something as follows:

Bro 1: yeah I think I’m trying too hard.
Bro 2: yeah you need to reduce to 36K and focus on letting your body do what it needs to do.
Bro 1: yeah exactly.
Bro 2: yeah.
Bro 1: Maybe I’ll try 30K.
Bro 2: I tried with like 42K last week.
Bro 1: no way wow.
Bro 2 (preening slightly): yeah that was like way too much but you know.
Bro 1: yeah man.
Bro 2: yeah.

It was like listening to poetry. Dangling Frog at least practises a significant amount of what he preaches, which is (I suspect) lots of upper-body pumping, the constant imbibing of protein-based sludge and (I also suspect) a regular date with some anabolic steroids. Is he a better role-model than the instructor with the standard paunch, I found myself wondering? I’m honestly not sure. So, where are the genuine fitness enthusiastists? Is it really that hard?

For fitness coaches, credibility is surely tied to example. If I were a client, I’ll be honest that I would expect them to look fit, and I would expect them to practise what they teach. If a coach promotes healthy eating and an active lifestyle but doesn’t look as if they follow their own advice, my trust would go out the window. Much of their job involves demonstration and motivation, so one would have thought that leading by example would be their most powerful weapon.

Yet, how about counsellors and therapists? They give advice on emotions, coping strategies and behaviour, but they are not expected to have perfect mental health themselves. Indeed, many counsellors have faced their own struggles and a therapist who has sailed through life with no challenges would be an inadequate one indeed. What matters is that they understand techniques and can guide others effectively. While practising what they preach is helpful, self-awareness and professional skill matter more than personal perfection. Perhaps this should also apply to fitness instructors?

I am still pondering this and am left asking myself why it is the case that I would expect and demand a fitness coach to be an exemplification of what they are employed to teach. Perhaps it is because I would assume that the process of fitness is a source of personal interest for them. Likewise, I also perhaps assume that once one is truly knowledgeable about fitness then one surely would not be able to resist the urge to apply it to one’s own lifestyle. For example, once you truly understand the damage that a sedentary lifestyle can cause, surely you cannot help but be more active? Yet, if this were true, then nobody would smoke, nobody would drink, nobody would be inactive. Is it really the case that ignorance is the problem, given the overwhelming amount of information with which we are all surrounded?

When someone claims authority — whether it be a teacher, a coach or a religious leader — humans instinctively look for alignment between their words and actions as proof that their advice is genuine and achievable. If a teacher follows their own guidance, it signals integrity, builds trust and makes their teachings feel real rather than abstract. On the other hand, hypocrisy can weaken respect and create doubt, because it suggests either a lack of belief or a gap between theory and real life. Ultimately, we value authenticity, and seeing someone embody their own principles makes those principles more convincing.

Effective study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lord of the Flies: a very adult novel

Suddenly, everyone is talking about Lord of the Flies. It is one of my favourite novels, one which I taught for GCSE English literature for around a decade. I’m afraid that I have no urge to see what the BBC have done with it. I have also been somewhat irritated to see multiple hot takes on social media, critisising the story’s doom-laden attitude towards childhood and children’s psychology.

First of all, Golding was emphatically not being doom-laden about the nature of children, he was being doom-laden about the nature of humanity as a whole: let us not underestimate the extent of his doom-mongering, please. Secondly, Lord of the Flies is no more a novel about children and childhood than Animal Farm is a novel about livestock and animal husbandry. Like Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies is an extended allegory, and its message is a profoundly depressing one. So, buckle up.

Golding’s work of genius (one which he, incidentally, dismissed in later life as “boring and crude”) is a thoroughly disturbing exploration of what happens when the structures of civilisation fall away. It is emphatically not a novel about children. While the novel appears to contain the trappings of childhood: children’s games, their fears, their rivalries and their capacity for cruelty, it becomes clear as the narrative unfolds that Golding’s central concern extends way beyond childhood psychology. The island on which the children find themselves stranded is a microcosm of the world that the boys have left behind, a specimen society in which rival authorities, social hierarchies, violence and superstitious ideology rapidly emerge. Golding uses children in order to examine society stripped to its essentials, suggesting that what we call “civilisation” is a fundamentally fragile construct laid over a persistent human capacity for savagery. The novel is less an anthropological study of childhood than a parable about the nature of society itself.

From the outset of the novel, in which the boys find themselves stranded in the wilderness, the protagonists attempt to recreate the structures of the adult world from which they have come. They call assemblies, establish rules and elect a leader. Ralph’s authority rests on apparent legitimacy: he is chosen through a vote, and a conch shell is used as a tangible sign of democratic order. The conch regulates speech, embodies fairness and stands as a shared agreement among the boys to abide by rules. These early chapters might seem to suggest that humans, left to their own devices, instinctively lean towards mature governance; yet Golding makes it clear that the boys’ desire for adherence to a set of rules depends not on moral conviction but on a fear of consequences and a individual lust for dominance, for the boys speak immediately of the punishments that will face anyone who transgresses the rules they plan to lay down for themselves. Furthermore, as the hope of rescue fades, the rules lose all of their potency. As Ralph puts it, “things are breaking up. I don’t understand why.” The deterioration is not portrayed as uniquely childish; rather, it reflects how flimsy and insubstantial social contracts are when the institutions that sustain them collapse.

Jack’s transformation from choir leader to autocratic demagogue underscores this shift. His authority on the island grows not through reasoned persuasion but through his manipulation of fear and the promise of hunting and meat. He paints his face, embraces ritual and forms a tribe built on spectacle and intimidation. In doing so, he does not regress into childhood so much as adopt the tactics of a charismatic despot.

It is hinted from the outset that the boys have arrived from a society already engaged in a global conflict. The island society quickly begins to resemble the violent regimes and wartime mentalities of the adult world and the children’s play-acting of war quickly becomes indistinguishable from the very worst forms of human brutality. The murder of Simon is not an impulsive scuffle between children; it is a collective frenzy, a ritualised killing fuelled by hysteria and conformity. In that pivotal moment, Golding depicts the terrifying ease with which ordinary individuals can participate in atrocities when swept up by mass hysteria and mindless ideology. This is emphatically not a comment on the nature of children: it is a study in group dynamics and the power of suggestion.

Prior to his death, Simon’s role in the novel further supports the interpretation that Golding is examining society and group dynamics. His encounter with the pig’s head, the eponymous “Lord of the Flies,” reveals the central moral insight of the book: “the beast” that the boys fear is not an external creature but something within themselves. The pig’s head, swarming with flies, seems to speak to Simon, telling him that it (the beast) is part of them, is inside them: it is not an external force, rather it is innate to humanity. Golding aims to convince his readers that the impulse toward violence and domination is an inherent aspect of human nature, one that civilised society attempts, imperfectly, to restrain. Simon’s death, at the hands of boys who mistake him for “the beast” crawling out of the forest, symbolises the destruction of moral truth by collective fear and aggression. The tragedy lies not in the fact that the children are capable of evil, but in the implication that all humans are in the wrong circumstances.

Piggy represents rationality, scientific thought and the values of ordered civilisation. His glasses, which enable the boys to make fire, symbolise the power of technology and reason. Yet reason alone cannot withstand the tide of savagery once the social consensus collapses. Piggy is marginalised, mocked and finally killed when Roger deliberately dislodges the boulder that crushes him. This final act by Roger is particularly significant: earlier in the novel, he is depicted as throwing stones at the younger boys but he deliberately misses; the implication is that he is an inherently violent boy who is restrained in his urges by what Golding calls “the taboo of the old life.” As those restrictions erode with the breakdown of society, so too does his individual restraint. By the time he kills Piggy, Roger acts with deliberate intent. Golding’s emphasis on the gradual disappearance of internalised moderation points to his theme of the importance of societal structures in shaping and curbing antisocial behaviour. When those structures weaken, he believes, our latent cruelty surfaces.

Golding’s novel is emphatically not about childhood. The boys bring with them the hierarchies, prejudices and fears of their culture. The choirboys, accustomed to discipline and exclusion, quickly form an elite group under Jack. The “littluns” (as the youngest members of the group are collectively referred to) are marginalised and terrorised by the older boys and even Ralph, ostensibly the champion of order, participates in the violence against Simon. No character is exempt from moral compromise and this universality suggests that Golding is less interested in developmental psychology than in the broader human condition: his view of us is emphatically not a happy one.

The sudden arrival of the naval officer at the end of the novel crystallises the evidence that the island society is a mirror that Golding is holding up to the adult world. The officer is initially amused by the boys’ appearance, viewing their behaviour as a childish game. Yet he represents a world engaged in destructive warfare: his warship waits offshore, a reminder that organised violence is not confined to the island but is institutionalised in the adult society that lies beyond it. The boys’ painted faces and sharpened sticks are grotesque reflections of his uniform and the weapons he brings. The officer’s presence does not negate the horror that has occurred; rather, it frames it within a wider context. The island is not an aberration but a microcosm: Golding implies that the same forces driving the boys to chaos are operating on a global scale.

Published in 1954, in the aftermath of the Second World War and at the dawn of the nuclear age, Lord of the Flies reflects a period of unprecedented recent human destruction. The belief in steady moral and social progress had been shattered by the exposure of the Holocaust and the growing fear of atomic warfare. Golding, who had served in the Royal Navy, stated that he had witnessed firsthand man’s capacity for organised brutality and illustrating this was his purpose in writing the novel. His choice to use schoolboys as protagonists was an artistic decision: by stripping away adult institutions and placing children in isolation, Golding constructs a controlled experiment in which the island mirrors the essential dynamics of society in a concentrated form. The boys’ age if anything underscores the horrifying argument that the seeds of societal violence lie not in complex political systems alone but in the fundamental aspects of human nature. While the “beast” that the children fear can be seen as a childish nightmare, Golding does not treat their fears as trivial. “The beast” evolves into a powerful symbol of how societies create external enemies to embody internal anxieties and explain the darkness within them. The boys’ belief in the beast apparently justifies Jack’s desire for authoritarian rule and explains the abandonment of rational deliberation. In this way, childish superstition becomes analogous to the propaganda and scapegoating we find in adult societies.

It is undeniable that the novel challenged the mid-twentieth-century literary tradition, which portrayed children as naturally innocent and if anything morally superior to adults. In traditional adventure stories, still popular at the time, stranded boys tend to maintain British civility and cooperation. Golding deliberately inverts this literary convention. His boys do not build a utopia; they descend into barbarism. This inversion, however, is not a comment on children but a critique of the complacent belief that civilisation is secure and that moral behaviour is natural and instinctive. By showing that even well-educated English schoolboys can commit atrocities, Golding aimed to dismantle the myth of inherent cultural or moral superiority. Ralph’s uncontrolled grief at the end of the novel is portrayed as a source of embarassment to the naval officer. He weeps “for the end of innocence” and “the darkness of man’s heart,” a final summation of Golding’s bleak vision.

To read Lord of the Flies as a novel about the nature of children is to overlook its broader philosophical ambitions. Golding did not believe or aim to suggest that children are uniquely savage or that society alone corrupts them. Instead, he proposes that society is both a product of and a defence against the darker aspects of human nature. Civilisation provides structures — laws, social norms and institutions — that channel natural instincts such as aggression and desire into appropriate avenues. When those structures disintegrate, as they do on the island, the underlying impulses are revealed. The boys are not aberrations; they are average human beings.

Golding’s frankly brilliant work interrogates the very foundations upon which social order rests, yet it achieves this by focusing on children, whose assumed innocence sharpens the shock of moral collapse. Golding invites readers to question their comforting assumptions about progress, about culture and the nature of morality. The savagery on the island is not confined to childhood; it is an ever-present possibility within human communities. By the time the naval officer arrives, the reader understands that rescue from the island does not equate to rescue from the darkness within. Golding’s enduring message is that society’s stability depends upon our constant vigilance against forces that originate in the human heart. How’s that for a bedtime story?