teaching – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Going in stealth

One of the things I love most about what I do now is the stealth and anonymity. As a frontline classroom teacher in a modern educational setting, you are constantly exposed. Teaching means being quite literally on display at the front of the classroom putting on a show for multiple classes, multiple times per day. You’re also putting on a show for management, who in turn are putting on a show for each other, for parents, for OfSted or for the ISI. Everything, frankly, is performative. The whole world’s a stage.

Even more stressful than this is the fact that your results are under scrutiny. The pressure of this will vary from setting to setting, but there are vanishingly few schools now which do not now make individual teachers directly accountable for the academic results of the students in their classes. At the high-achieving grammar school I first worked in, the Headteacher would meet with every academic department every year and go through A level results with a fine-toothed comb. Every member of the department had to prepare for the meeting and bring along their justifications as to why some students may not have made the grade. It was a toe-curling and sometimes genuinely upsetting experience.

These days, with the work that I do, I am very much behind the scenes. I’m the person you’re not supposed to see. Black leggings and a balaclava have replaced the vibrant costumes I had to wear for my classroom performances. While there are some students or parents who inform the classroom teacher of my existence, most do not. I hear reports of teachers that are amazed, delighted and genuinely mystified as to how a student has made such a marked improvement in a short period of time. Some of them must (surely?!) hazard a guess as to how this might have happened, but many seem to remain in the dark, along with my services. In terms of the results that my tutees achieve, those results go on the books of their regular classroom teacher and they are welcome to them. I know the truth, as does the tutee and their parents who paid for my work. There is something strangely satisfying about it. I genuinely love being the secret silver bullet, the hidden reason why a child makes the shift from the bottom of their class to the middle or even to the top. I cannot tell you how exciting and rewarding it is.

One student brought me up short this week when she described the situation in her classroom. In a high-achieving school, in which many of the students studied Latin from an early age in prep schools, she has always felt slightly behind the curve and I knew this already. What I did not know was the extent to which the classroom teacher relies on the fact that students have prior knowledge and thus doesn’t feel the need to teach new concepts in anything like enough depth for a novice.

“You’ve actually taught me this stuff,” my tutee said, as we celebrated her improved understanding of the uses of the subjunctive. As I listened while she elaborated, I became more and more horrified. She explained that the classroom teacher pitches the work in a manner that works for those to whom the material is not new. The overall assumption seems to be that the students already know the basic grammatical structures and thus the teacher’s job is simply to give them a quick reminder plus some further practice. The problem is so bad for those in the class that do not have the prior knowledge that several other students have also acquired a tutor over the last few months, since they too are struggling to keep up. “What I find really funny,” my tutee said, who is wryly perceptive for a young person of her age, “is that everyone who needs one always gets a private tutor, and then the school congratulates itself every year on amazing results.”

While I have never taught in the private sector, I have some experience of this phenomenon in the grammar school I used to teach in. We had a couple of teachers who were basically ticking off the days until retirement and quite frankly they were diabolical. As an A level student, if you were put into Mr Dudley’s German class, you knew that you would never get through the exam without external help. As a result, every single member of Mr Dudley’s class was given the benefit of support from a private tutor by their families. (Parents who have got their kids into a grammar school are usually well on board with the idea of private tuition: it’s how most of them got their kids into the school in the first place). So, Mr Dudley’s class would crash its way through an untaught syllabus, with lesson after lesson being provably and audibly chaotic. But guess what? Mr Dudley’s results were better than all of ours put together. And he got the credit for it, despite his palpably dreadful teaching. To be honest, it used to drive the rest of us wild.

Private tutors’ work is incredibly difficult to track because its behind-the-scenes nature means that is not systematically recorded. Without centralised data collection or mandatory reporting, it is impossible to measure how widespread private tuition is or indeed how significantly it affects educational attainment and inequality. But when a high-achieving school boasts consistently outstanding results on their website, I must admit I do find myself wondering just how many tutors there are behind the scenes to make them possible.

Reflections on Inflection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When practice makes too perfect?

Every teacher wants their students to succeed. All teachers put in hours of effort to build the competence and confidence of their students. Yet across most schools in most subjects, there is a subtle but pervasive problem: teachers giving students tasks that directly contradict the conditions under which students will ultimately be assessed. Perhaps the most common way I see this manifested is when teachers set an exam question for homework but do not set a time limit. Students are encouraged to produce their best answer, without the contraints of timed conditions. On the surface, such a task may seem not only harmless but supportive: but what are the risks involved?

Teachers rarely encourage harmful practice out of sheer carelessness: quite the opposite. Such practice arises from good intentions. Teachers often want their students to slow down, to think carefully and to produce their best work. Removing time pressure feels like a way of fostering both their learning and their skills. Teachers are also conscious that timed tasks can cause stress and many, understandably, fear overwhelming their students; ironically, it is most often the already-anxious student that is most damaged by the practice of no time-limits, since the temptation to spend an excessive amount of time on a task in order to produce a perfect answer may be overwhelming for them. Likewise, such students are usually the most deeply affected by the looming prospect of time pressure in an exam. Thus, in their desire to reduce pressure on their students, teachers may unwittingly create more pain for the most anxious of students in both the short-term and the long-term.

Another reason why teachers may set a task without time parameters is that when students are given more time, they often produce more complete work. Completed work gives the teacher more to comment on and the student more to reflect on. Students are more likely to manage to write something at length if they are not under strict exam conditions and thus teachers have more to work with when it comes to marking and feedback. Again, however, we are faced with a painful irony as a result: not only are students practising the wrong skills, their teachers’ time is being wasted as it is being spent giving detailed feedback on irrelevant skills. To be frank, everybody loses.

What is thus most surprising about some teachers’ reluctance to impose time-limits on their students is that they fail to see how setting time-limits is a win-win situation for everyone. Not only will the student benefit from the fact that they are practising precisely what they will need to do in the examination, that student will benefit in the short-term from a homework task that is time-bound and manageable. Far too often, students are set open-ended tasks which can expand to fill the time they have available: for anxious and/or high-achieving students, this can be almost infinite. Likewise, the time that teachers have to spend on marking and feedback is minimal and needs to be tightly-managed, for the sake of their own workload and to ensure that the time they do spend on that task is valuable and effective. I will never forget Professor Paul Black (50% of the brains behind the now-ubiquitous educational concept of Assessment for Learning) stating to a roomful of teachers that we were all marking too much, too often, for too long and (here’s the really devastating bit) that we were all wasting our time. That was 25 years ago. And we’re still doing it.

Outside of workload, a further risk that arises from setting students exam-style questions with no time limit is the illusion of competence. Cognitive psychology has repeatedly demonstrated that students — and indeed their teachers — can be misled by what feels effective in the moment. When a student has unlimited time on a practice essay, their cognitive load is relatively low. There is no pressure to recall information quickly, organise ideas under time constraints or make strategic trade-offs between detail and speed. As a result, tasks feel more manageable and the final product looks polished. Students and teachers might both reasonably conclude that they are exam-ready on that topic, but this belief is built on a false foundation. What are they actually ready for? In real exams, time limits force rapid decision-making. Perhaps what is most important is that students must develop an understanding that examinations do not demand perfect, polished answers: to expect this under time pressure would be grossly unreasonable. Students must learn the importance of producing a sensible, structured response that is as well-crafted as can reasonably be expected in the time allowed. This is not the same thing as what one might produce given infinite preparation and review time, for example when drafting a manuscript for publication. When exam practice is performed without time constraints, students may master individual components of the task (knowledge, technique, structure) but they will fail to integrate them at speed during the exam. Students who have never practised in timed conditions may also experience extreme panic when they first encounter them, at a time when it is too late to build that resilience.

Research tells us that learning sticks when students are forced to retrieve information under conditions that mimic the challenge they will face. Slow, open-book, or time-unlimited tasks do not recreate the retrieval demands of an examination. They allow students to look things up, pause, think in a leisurely fashion or redraft their answers. Yet again, they are practising the wrong skills, as these behaviours are impossible in an exam room. For a skill to transfer from practice to final performance, the practice must include the key features of the performance context. Practising sections of a piano piece slowly can help with accuracy, but to perform at performance tempo, you must ultimately practise at performance tempo: you must also avoid repeating mistakes in your practice, lest they be embedded. The same principle applies to writing essays, solving equations and analysing sources.

Musical practice is not the only example of a process that academic teachers could learn from. The older and more experienced I get, the more I realise what an oversight it is that academic teachers do not listen to and learn from our sporting peers. Athletes understand the training process: they understand how to break challenges down into achievable goals and what is needed in order to practise for a final performance. More and more, I talk to my students about their studies in a way that draws on the processes used by competitive sports men and women.

With many students facing their Mock examinations at around this time, the extent to which they are prepared for those is very much on everyone’s mind. Without a doubt, most teachers understand all too well that students need to be familiar with the look and feel of assessment questions, and try to produce questions which mimic the phrasing and typical format of the questions that they will face. They also know that students need to practise retrieving their knowledge without notes, prompts, or textbook guidance. Yet the thing that is most commonly overlooked with exam-matched practice are realistic time constraints. I would argue that to encourage students to practise answering these without the additional parameter of time constraints is a dangerous and counter-productive waste of everyone’s time.

Unknown Unknowns

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

Plato’s Socrates, Apologia, 399 BCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

GCSE Latin set texts – why students struggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A time and a place for questions

The importance of questions in the mainstream classroom has, in my opinion, been rather over-emphasised in schools. This might seem a somewhat old-school, even Gradgrindian approach to my old vocation, but bear with me while I explain.

Questions are indeed important, but classroom teachers have at times been told to encourage them to excess. As so often, this move was driven by specialists in the Humanities, whose own peculiar experiences in the classroom seemed to shape every INSET I have ever sat though as a teacher. Notions such as “there are no foolish questions” and “everyone’s opinion is equally valid” might work to a degree in an RE lesson, but such an approach is frankly disingenuous in many other subjects. I’m not convinced it’s even the right approach in the Humanities, if I’m honest; in an age in which most people seem much better at speaking than they are at listening, it seems to me that excessive encouragement of questions from a point of ignorance more encourages a desire for a question to be aired and the questioner’s voice heard, rather than any real desire to hear the answer.

Excessive questions from the floor can truly derail a lesson and this is never more true with Year 7, many of whom have been encouraged (or at least not discouraged) in the primary setting to ask questions all the time. In some of the Year 7 lessons I recall there were some children so bursting with excitement and desperation to ask questions and share their ideas that their arms would be waving like windmills. As Ben Newmark argued in his excellent post on this topic, students like this can dominate a lesson to the detriment of the majority. In a class of 32, it is a teacher’s role to divide their attention and focus as evenly as and fairly as they can; allowing one or two students to dominate with questions and anecdotes is unfair to the others. Moreover, as Ben also argues, children who are obsessively thinking about their next contribution are not actually focusing on the lesson, nor are they listening to anyone else. He makes the case that teachers should not encourage an environment in which students can ask questions whenever they want do, rather one should encourage them to save their questions for the appropriate time.

There is no escaping the fact that asking questions is one of the most powerful tools a student can use to deepen their understanding. When a student poses a question (especially a good one), they are actively engaging with the material rather than passively receiving information. Ideally, this process forces them to think critically about what they know, identify gaps in their knowledge, and seek clarification. In doing so, students can begin to develop a stronger conceptual grasp of the subject. This approach to study is explored by Dr. Paul Penn in his guide for university students on how to study independently; he makes the point that you cannot gain a great deal from a text if you don’t interrogate it. In an ideal world, asking questions helps students to take ownership of their learning. This sense of agency not only boosts confidence but also makes learning more meaningful. Ultimately, the practice of questioning transforms a student’s learning; students can develop the skills to think critically and independently.

So here’s the joy of what I do. Tutoring, unlike the mainstream classroom, can be based entirely around a student’s desire to ask questions. Tutees who come with a barrage of questions gain a lot from the process and it can be a wonderful outlet for children who feel frustrated by having to wait their turn in the classroom. By the same turn, it can also provide the opportunity for those less confident students to ask the questions that they might not feel able to ask in class (including the ones they worry are foolish). One of my key aims as a tutor is to encourage these questions right from the start, providing a safe environment for a child to start this process – for those who are significantly behind in their subject and who have spent months or even years trying to hide at the back of the classroom, it can take some time to break down these barriers.

The tutoring environment is one in which students can be encouraged to interrupt, something which cannot be managed successfully in the mainstream classroom. Once a child is confident with a private tutor, the opportunities are endless, but both student and tutor must remember that these opportunities are peculiar to the one-to-one relationship and cannot be mirrored or encouraged in a school. As someone who tried to do their best in both worlds, I am constantly reminded of this fact now I am privileged to work solely one-to-one.

Results and Expectations

As GCSE results roll in today, I’ve been thinking about expectations and how they shape our response to students’ results. It’s a painful and undeniable fact that there are some students every year who will not only be disappointed but will have to deal with the disappointment of their own parents. In my experience, this usually happens with relatively high-achieving students, some of whom have families that expect nothing but the best. This can transfigure into the genuinely distressing situation in which a line of excellent grades will be met with disinterest.

I sometimes wonder whether this is a very modern phenomenon. I recall a family friend, whose daughter was a year or two older than I was and who therefore sat her GCSEs before I did. She achieved straight As and I remember my father (a man of excellent academic ability himself) being genuinely agog. He simply couldn’t believe that anyone could achieve the top grade in every single subject. I remember thinking the same. This, of course, was long before the existence of the A* and the starred grade was indeed brought in as an attempt to recognise the absolute top of the top – an elite class of those who achieved the A-grade and not originally envisaged as something that would be achieved in multiple subjects. Likewise, the current grade 9. As many of us predicted at the time, this philosophy was completely lost on everyone, and failed with immediate effect: the A* and the grade 9 became simply the top grade as far as everyone was concerned and as a result, we now have families who report “disappointment” with an A-grade at A level or a grade 8 at GCSE.

While I’ve never been one to shy away from setting high standards, I really do have to wonder what’s gone wrong for a person who isn’t happy with their child achieving an A-grade or an 8. What do they think the problem is? Exam results are undeniably important, but they do not define you as an academic. Want to know my GCSE grades? Okay. I sat nine GCSEs in 1990, relatively few by modern standards, but that’s how it was in those days. Some students sat nine, some sat only seven or eight. I achieved six grade As, one grade B and two grade Cs. To this day I swear they mixed up my biology paper with somebody else’s, as I was expecting a C grade (along with the C grades I did achieve in maths and chemistry) but that subject came out at a grade B. I was probably more knocked out by that grade than by any of my others, which overall were much better than I was expecting.

My line-up of grades would probably be considered pretty mediocre by some of the families I have worked with. They will perhaps be rather surprised (possibly even alarmed!) to learn that I did not achieve straight As in everything. But here’s the thing. Not only did I go on to achieve a 1st class honours degree, I achieved the highest degree mark in my whole year group (the Head of Department told me). After that, I achieved a Masters with Distinction and then went on to complete a PhD. My perfectly decent but perhaps unremarkable GCSE grades were no barrier to this, and while I don’t want to sound like Jeremy Clarkson rolling out his tedious yearly claim to a champagne-fuelled, Lamborghini-driving lifestyle on the back of two Us in his A levels, I would definitely suggest that everyone should keep their exam grades in perspective.

There are numerous reasons why I wasn’t one of the absolute top-performers at school. I wasn’t very good at studying when I was younger and it took me a while to learn the methods that worked best for me (there was no decent research or advice in that area in those days). As an adult, I am fascinated by the psychology of effective study, and it is a real focus in my tuition sessions. If you want to consult a genuine expert in the field, look up Dr. Paul Penn, who is a psychologist and researcher who specialises in how to study. You can visit his website here and he has a great YouTube channel. I interviewed him for Teachers Talk Radio in 2022, and you can listen to that episode here.

Other reasons for my relatively unremarkable performance in my GCSEs? Well, I didn’t enjoy school very much and if I’m brutally frank I found a lot of my teachers tiresome and dull. That’s no excuse for anything of course, but it may have been a factor in my distinctly average peformance in some subjects. Finally — and this one’s the killer — I know that a lot of teachers believed me to be significantly cleverer than I actually was. That might sound odd for someone who ended up with PhD, but quite honestly a doctorate is no indicator of brilliance. You wouldn’t believe the number of mediocre academics who manage to scrape together enough to qualify for that title. Making it through a PhD is actually a case of whether you can hack the process and apply the required amount of discipline rather than an indicator of genuine excellence. As I once heard someone say of the difference between those who make it in elite weight-lifting and those who do not, the main deciding factor is whether or not you have the tolerance to endure the sheer, unrelenting tedium of repeated effort.

So why did my teachers believe that I was so clever? I think it’s because I was very articulate and good at writing. As I came to realise when I read The Language Instinct by Steve Pinker, while this is not necessarily an indicator of high intelligence, it is assumed to be so by most people, even those who are supposed to be experts in the field of education. Thus, as a result of my linguistic fluency, all of my teachers laboured under the impression that I was seriously smart. My genuinely poor performance in mathematics and the sciences was put down to laziness, bloody-mindedness, wilful ignorance or just about any other character flaw you could imagine. (God forbid it could be down to their poor teaching). I tried many times to tell my maths and science teachers that I was genuinely struggling and needed help with basic concepts, but I was ignored. The only reason I passed maths was because they eventually realised that I was in serious danger of failing (due, in their view, to my sheer wilfulness) and — in a panic about their pass-rate — they made the correct call to enter me for the intermediate paper, which is designed to help candidates get over the threshold to achieve a C grade. The only reason I passed chemistry was because in Year 11 we gained a new teacher who was not particularly likeable but was actually rather good — a rarity indeed, for most of our teachers were truly terrible, as they could be in the 1980s. After a few weeks of observing my wild guesswork when it came to balancing chemical equations, he looked me straight in the eye and said, “you don’t even know what the valency table is, do you?” I enlightened him as to the fact that not only was this true, but I didn’t actually understand what the periodic table was either. Or indeed … anything. He nodded. He gave me some basic remedial help plus a few bluffing techniques and I made it through the exam thanks to him. As for biology, like I say … Lord knows. I swear to this day that it was an error and I wasn’t going to tell them that.

So, as results are announced today, I find myself thinking of those students and their families across the country who will be disappointed with excellent grades. How very sad that sounds. My grades were a source of celebration in my household and I recall not only that I was delighted with them but that my parents were too. While we all want to set high standards for ourselves and our children, let us not forget that a string of top grades in everything are not the be-all and end-all for a happy and successful life. Even Einstein didn’t get top grades in all of his subjects.

Who needs decent resources?

It is an absolute miracle. For the first time in the history of the subject, a publisher has produced a complete Anthology, containing all of the OCR GCSE Latin set texts for examination in 2027 and 2028. In an unprecedented move, someone has had the ground-breaking idea of actually publishing the resources that OCR wish teachers to teach and children to study. Such radical thinking can only be attributed to a stroke of genius.

Previously, it may surprise non-specialists to know, only some of the GCSE Latin literature texts were published in a modern format and only some of those publications were formally ratified by OCR. What an incredible leap of imagination it must have taken for the intelligentsia behind the wheel at OCR to think of the idea of a published Anthology of all the texts that they have selected, in the fancy modern format of a book! To be fair, they have been very busy coming up with their dramatic new rebrand, an imminent name switch from “OCR” to “Cambridge OCR”, billed in an email they sent me this week as “an exciting change”. Fundamentally, it means that a group currently called OCR, which stands for “Oxford, Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts” will now become “Cambridge Oxford, Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts”. I hope that’s clear.

Anyway, back to the majestic leap of imagination that is the new Latin Anthology. Not only has someone printed the texts out, they have even glued the pages together! It really is quite the thing. And get this. You can buy it through the publisher, you can buy it through bookstores, you can even buy it on Amazon! Did you know that you can purchase books on Amazon? Imagine my excitement. What relief and joy this publication will bring! Obviously, it will be aimed at students, will it not? Or perhaps aimed rather at teachers, as a complete preparation tool? I was breathless with anticipation. However, within five minutes of glancing through my much-anticipated purchase, it became apparent that this Anthology was an attempt at both of these things and a success at neither.

The first thing to note about the publication is the distinctly bizarre “endorsement statement” from OCR (soon to be Cambridge OCR) at the beginning. It states that while “the teaching content of this resource is endorsed by OCR” (for which I read that they’ve managed to select the correct bits of the text) we are told that “all references to assessment, including assessment preparation and practice questions of any format/style, are the publisher’s interpretation of the specification and are not endorsed by OCR.” Erm, okay. There follows some further language of accountability avoidance that goes on for quite some time, but the general gist is a clear and rather anxiety-inducing attempt by the board to distance themselves from the statement printed on the front cover, which is that the book is “endorsed by OCR”. Does this even happen in other subjects?! Maybe it does, but it seems distinctly odd. Either the book is endorsed or it isn’t, surely?

Things then get worse. The preface and “how to use this book” both seem to slide and shift constantly between the implication that the resource is aimed at teachers for preparation purposes and that it is aimed at students as a workbook. The result of this apparent attempt at dual purpose (or perhaps confusion/indecision as to the purpose at all), is unsurprising: the Anthology fails in its attempt to achieve either of these things. Whether this is the fault of the publisher or the authors is impossible to tell, but it really is a tangible fail.

So far, I have only worked through the Virgil text (extracts from Book II of the Aeneid), and I am already half way to despair. Firstly, despite its promise in the preface to students and non-specialist teachers that the book “aims primarily to help readers understand what the Latin means” there is one rather glaring omission. The authors do not provide an English translation of the texts. For the love of God, why not?! As a friend and fellow tutor put it to me in a message last week, “If [OCR are] going to be so picky as to what they allow … they might as well provide [a translation] and put everyone out of their misery.” Exactly this. In mark schemes over the years I have frequently seen phrases such as “do not accept [perfectly legitimate translation of the word in my reasonably well-informed opinion]”. So, teachers are still expected to somehow divine what it is that examiners will and will not consider to be an acceptable translation of every single word and phrase in every single text. It is genuinely exhausting and I simply do not understand why we have to play this game every single year. Just give us the translation that you approve of, for crying out loud.

The authors’ (or perhaps OCR’s) decision not to provide a translation causes further, compounding inadequacies in their notes, since they frequently fail to give sufficient thought to their suggestions for the translation of individual words. For example, they suggest the translation “waves” for both undas and fluctus, when those two words occur very close together and surely need differing translations to avoid confusion and to mimic the original Latin; in the same lines, the authors provide “raised” for the participle arrecta, then “rise above” for superant, which comes very soon after it. Following their instructions, this would render the lines:

pectora quorum inter fluctus arrecta iubaeque
Their chests raised above the waves and their blood-red crests

sanguinae superant undas.
rising above the waves.

Not only does this fail to do Virgil any kind of justice, it lacks clarity for the novice reader. The authors’ failure to sit down and decide how they would render a full and competent translation of the lines in their entirety (a task which will be asked of the 16-year-old novices who will be examined on this text) leads inevitably to some thoroughly confusing suggestions on their part for the translation of individual words. This is merely one example, but I found multiple cases throughout the Anthology which evidenced this lack of coordinated thinking.

In addition to the conspicuous omission of an approved translation and the knock-on effect that this has on the notes, the notes are disappointing in other ways. While some of them provide useful textual support, there have been times when I have wanted to wail in frustration. My exasperation stems from the authors’ palpable lack of clarity about the purpose of this Anthology, their inability to decide their target audience. Here is just one example of what I mean: at the end of the first section of the Virgil text, Aeneas claims reluctance to recount the painful story of how the Greeks sacked Troy. He says, quamquam animus meminisse horret luctuque refugit, incipiam: “although my mind shudders to remember and recoils in grief, I shall begin.” I would love someone to explain to me the purpose of the facing note in the Anthology, which relates to the final word of this section: it says, “what tense is incipiam?” Ugh. Obviously, I can tell you what tense incipiam is, because I am a Latin teacher: I do not need help with recognising the future tense. But if I were needing help with this (for example, if I were a student, or if I were a non-specialist who was wrestling with the material), then what is the point of asking me a question to which I may not know the correct answer? This is exactly the kind of infuriatingly pointless annotation that is useful to precisely nobody. For a subject expert, it is superfluous; for a novice, it is maddeningly unhelpful.

I am honestly quite a cheerful person, with a positive outlook. Yet, with so many people in institutions that have power and influence over my own working life so unrelentingly mediocre at what they do, it is becoming increasingly difficult to remain sanguine.