teaching – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

I Don’t Care

There are few phrases guaranteed to irritate a teacher quite as efficiently as these three words. Usually delivered with an impressive combination of shrugging, eye-rolling and studied indifference, they appear to announce that the child in question is completely uninterested in whatever it is that has just been presented to them. The test result? Don’t care. The homework? Don’t care. The fact that they have just spent twenty minutes insisting that amicus means “enemy”? Apparently, they don’t care about that either.

But sometimes, “I don’t care” actually means almost the opposite. This is something I think about quite a lot in tutoring, partly because one-to-one teaching gives you a rather different view of a pupil’s apparent attitude to learning. In a classroom, a child can look disengaged for all sorts of reasons. They can avoid putting their hand up, copy what somebody else has written, let another pupil answer the question and generally keep their head below the parapet. A tutee doesn’t have that luxury. When you are sitting opposite somebody for an hour and there are only two people in the room, it becomes impossible to fly under the radar.

Children are not particularly good at admitting that something matters to them when there is a possibility that they might fail at it. Adults aren’t especially good at this either, but we have generally had rather more practice at managing our anxieties more effectively. A child who desperately wants to do well in an exam has something to lose if they don’t. A child who announces that they couldn’t care less about the result has, at least in theory, protected themselves from disappointment. If you never cared about the mark, then the mark cannot possibly hurt you.

I see versions of this in tutoring all the time. A student will arrive apparently unconcerned about a test, shrug when I ask how they did and insist that it doesn’t matter. Five minutes later, they are telling me exactly which questions they got wrong, which answers their friends gave and whether the teacher has said anything about the marks. A child who genuinely doesn’t care usually doesn’t need to tell you quite so much about the thing they don’t care about.

There is something rather clever about this, even if it isn’t particularly helpful. If you care about getting an answer right, getting it wrong is uncomfortable. If you care about an examination, failing it matters. If you care about being good at something, discovering that somebody else is considerably better can be humiliating. And if you have spent a long time being told that you are clever, the possibility of discovering that you can’t do something can be particularly threatening. It’s much easier to shrug and say “I don’t care” than to say “I really wanted to get that right and I’m really disappointed that I didn’t.”

One of the things I like about tutoring is that there is no audience for this performance, which robs it of a lot of its power. A student can more easily admit that they don’t understand something without somebody else hearing it. They can also try an answer, discover that it is wrong and have another go. There is no need to pretend that they knew the answer all along, or that they weren’t really trying, or that the whole thing is beneath them anyway, all of which can have some considerable allure when surrounded by one’s peers: when there is only the tutor sitting opposite you, there is considerably less point in performing indifference.

This can make quite a difference to students who have acquired the reputation of being “unmotivated”. I have had students described to me in precisely those terms, only to find that once we are working together they are perfectly willing to engage. They may not suddenly become wildly enthusiastic about every aspect of their schoolwork, but they are certainly prepared to try when peer pressure is removed and when they find themselves in a safe environment. Sometimes, the problem has been that they have become accustomed to failing in public and have worked out that not trying is a much safer option.

The distinction matters. A child who is genuinely disengaged may well not be interested in the subject, and there is no point in inventing a profound psychological explanation for every unfinished piece of homework. Children are perfectly capable of deciding that they would rather be doing something else. But there is a particular kind of reluctance that I think tutors are well placed to spot because we see the child without the rest of the class around them.

Some students can be remarkably defensive when they first come for tutoring. They may insist that they are terrible at Latin, that they can’t possibly remember vocabulary, that they don’t understand grammar and that there is no point trying because they are going to fail anyway. I don’t believe any of this. The first few sessions are often focused on persuading a pupil to attempt something than on the thing itself. If they have already decided that they are no good at the subject, then every mistake confirms the verdict and every success can be dismissed as a fluke.

This is where having an hour with somebody who isn’t judging you in the way that a peer group can be judging you becomes valuable. I can say, “Have another look at that,” without a dozen other children hearing the mistake. I can ask a question which nudges a pupil towards the answer rather than simply giving it to them. Gradually, a student begins to discover that getting something wrong is not nearly as catastrophic as they had imagined.

There is a particular moment in tutoring when you realise that a student has stopped trying to protect themselves and has started trying to solve the problem. It might be a difficult Latin sentence, a piece of grammar they have repeatedly got wrong or a question they would previously have refused even to attempt. Suddenly, they are willing to sit with the uncertainty for a little longer. They may still get the answer wrong, but they are no longer using the possibility of getting it wrong as a reason not to try. That is a much more important change than whether they happen to get the question right.

One-to-one tutoring cannot magically make somebody care about everything. Nor should it. I don’t expect a child to emerge from a lesson suddenly passionate about the ablative absolute. I am not particularly passionate about it myself. But tutoring can remove some of the reasons for pretending not to care. There is, quite simply, nobody else to impress. This is particularly important for older students, for whom caring about something can be socially risky. It is so much easier to say that you couldn’t care less about an examination than to admit that you spent all weekend revising for it and still struggled. Much easier to shrug off a poor mark than to acknowledge that you really wanted to do well. In a classroom, where everybody is watching everybody else, the social consequences of appearing to care can sometimes be surprisingly powerful. Tutoring provides a useful refuge from that.

Perhaps the most useful thing a tutor can provide is not motivation in the conventional sense. We can’t manufacture ambition, and we can’t make a child care about a subject simply by telling them that it matters. What we can sometimes do is create a situation in which it feels safe to try. Once a child is prepared to have a go, even if they get the answer wrong, there is something to work with.

What’s the point of it all?

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” A five-year-old might announce that they want to be a vet, an astronaut or a princess. A few years later, the questions become serious, pointed and relentless: what subjects are you going to take? What do you want to do after school? Have you thought about university? What sort of career are you interested in? I feel exhausted just thinking about it on their behalf.

By the time a child reaches their teenage years, we can be remarkably insistent that they should have some idea of where their education is taking them. But where exactly is it supposed to be taking them? This is a question which sounds as though it ought to have an obvious answer, but the more I think about it, the less obvious it becomes. Is the purpose of education to prepare children for employment? To equip them to get into university? Is it to make them economically productive adults? To teach them to think, to understand the world around them, to appreciate culture, to become good citizens or simply to give them a body of knowledge which they might otherwise never encounter?

There is a tendency to assume that the answer must be connected to utility, and this is hardly surprising. We live in a world in which almost everything is expected to justify itself in monetary terms, and education is no exception. Parents understandably want their children to have good employment prospects. Governments want a workforce with the skills required by the economy. Schools want their pupils to leave with qualifications that will open doors. There is nothing unreasonable about any of this. But there is a danger that once we start asking what a subject is for, we restrict our idea of education to whatever immediate practical purpose we can identify.

This is particularly obvious whenever somebody asks what the point is of learning Latin. I have lost count of the number of times I have been asked whether Latin is useful. Useful for what, exactly? It is certainly useful if you want to read Latin, which may sound rather like a circular argument but is actually rather important. It is useful for understanding the roots of a considerable amount of English vocabulary, but then so is French, which is the route via which English acquired its Latin influence. Latin can illuminate literature, history, law, medicine and science and it can develop an awareness of how language works. But I don’t think any of these is quite the point. The point is that there is a body of human knowledge which has survived for two thousand years and there is value in giving young people the opportunity to encounter it.

I am increasingly suspicious of the idea that everything children learn has to earn its keep by demonstrating an obvious application. This has been tried multipe times in multiple generations and we always get it wrong. The truth is that most knowledge in inherently useless. Why study the history of the Roman Republic if you aren’t going to become a historian? Why read Shakespeare if you aren’t going to become an English teacher or a famous Director? Why learn about volcanoes if you aren’t going to become a geologist? Why study art if you aren’t going to become an artist? Once you start applying this logic consistently, the curriculum becomes a rather dreary list of vocational preparation and we lose all sense of what defines us as human beings.

There is another glaring problem with the idea that education should primarily prepare children for their future careers: children don’t actually know what their future careers are going to be. Most adults don’t either, at least not when they are children. We ask a twelve-year-old what they want to be as though the answer ought to be waiting somewhere inside them, fully formed and ready to be discovered. Some children do have a very clear ambition, and there is nothing wrong with that. Most have absolutely no idea, which seems to me a perfectly sensible response to being twelve. I certainly didn’t spend my childhood following a carefully constructed career plan and I don’t imagine that many people did. Even those who thought they knew what they wanted to do may have found themselves somewhere entirely different twenty or thirty years later. Careers change, industries disappear, opportunities arise unexpectedly and people discover interests they didn’t know they had. We cannot possibly prepare a child specifically for a future which does not yet exist, particularly when we don’t know what that future is going to look like. This is why the whole “21st century curriculum” movement is such a dismal waste of time: trying to predict the future, to ascertain the skills and knowledge that employers will be seeking in 20 years’ time, is a fool’s errand.

This is the problem with the increasingly common idea that education should be closely aligned with employability. There is a perfectly respectable argument for giving children practical skills and an understanding of the world of work. Of course they should eventually know how to manage money, communicate professionally and navigate the practical demands of adult life. But there is a considerable difference between preparing somebody to be an adult and preparing them for a particular job. The first is a proper purpose of education; the second is much more difficult to achieve because we simply don’t know what the person will eventually become.

And this brings us back to the rather odd question we ask children: “What do you want to be?” Perhaps we should be asking a different question. What do you want to know? What are you interested in? What would you like to understand? What have you encountered that has made you curious? These are much harder questions for a child to answer, particularly because curiosity is often something that develops rather than something that can be identified on demand. A child who has never encountered Latin is unlikely to announce that they would like to spend their teenage years translating Cicero. A child who has never seen a fossil may not know that palaeontology exists. We cannot expect children to choose interests from a menu of things they have never been shown.

This is why the breadth of a school education is so important. Children should encounter things they would never have chosen for themselves, precisely because they don’t yet know what they might like. They should occasionally be bored, puzzled or even irritated by something that doesn’t immediately seem relevant. They should discover that the subject they thought they would hate is actually rather interesting, or that something they assumed would be easy is considerably harder than expected. The point of education is partly to expose us to possibilities we would otherwise never have known existed. Seeing education solely as a route to a predetermined destination rather limiting. School isn’t simply the first stage of a career ladder; it is one of the few periods in life when somebody else is deliberately putting an extraordinary range of human knowledge in front of you and saying, in effect, “Here. Have a look at this. You might find it interesting.” There is something rather wonderful about that.

Perhaps the problem is that we have become rather obsessed with outcomes. We want measurable progress, qualifications, destinations and employability. the These things matter, but they are not the whole story. An educated person is not simply somebody who has acquired the qualifications necessary to obtain a particular job. They are somebody who has encountered enough ideas, knowledge and different ways of looking at the world to have developed a mind of their own. And that is a rather more difficult thing to measure.

Reluctant Learners

One of the things I find most fascinating about teaching is how much better people are at giving advice about learning than they are at actually learning. We tell children to listen carefully, pay attention, practise, ask questions, accept correction, learn from their mistakes and not give up when something is difficult. All perfectly sensible advice. We then spend our adult lives doing almost exactly the opposite.

None of us like being corrected: we don’t enjoy discovering that we don’t understand something and we can become irritated when we can’t do something immediately. Given the opportunity, we will frequently find a way of blaming the person who is trying to teach us. I know this because I do it myself. We all do it. It is spectacularly difficult to avoid.

There is something peculiarly uncomfortable about being a beginner. You are, by definition, not very good at whatever you are attempting to learn and, worse still, you are having to demonstrate this incompetence in front of somebody who knows more than you do. It is not a comfortable position to be in. Most of us would much rather be the person who already knows what they are doing, which is presumably why so many of us find it easier to give advice than to receive it. There is a considerable difference between being interested in knowing something and being prepared to admit that you don’t know it.

Children, of course, have an advantage here, as they are beginners at almost everything. Nobody expects a five-year-old to be able to read fluently on their first attempt, or a six-year-old to produce a perfect drawing, or a child learning to ride a bicycle to glide elegantly down the road without falling off. Being bad at things is simply a part of childhood. As we get older, however, we become gradually less tolerant of our own incompetence. We also acquire identities: I am good at English; I am hopeless at maths; I am a languages person; I can’t draw; I’m not musical; I’m useless with technology. Such statements can sound like harmless descriptions of ability, but they can also become excuses that enable us to avoid the uncomfortable experience of being a beginner. If I have decided that I am simply “not a maths person”, then struggling with algebra is no longer an unpleasant stage in learning; it is confirmation of something I already believe about myself.

There is another problem, too, and that is that we don’t particularly like being corrected. Being told that you are wrong is not a particularly pleasurable experience, especially if you thought that you were right. Some children are remarkably sensitive to it, but adults aren’t necessarily much better. Watch somebody being taught to use a new piece of technology and you will see this in action. They press the wrong button, the person helping them says, “No, you need to do this,” and there is an almost irresistible temptation to reply, “Yes, that’s exactly what I was trying to do!” I have spent enough time teaching to recognise this phenomenon in myself as well as in my pupils. There is a difference between wanting to know something and being willing to learn it. The first is easy: the second is the bit that requires some effort.

Learning requires us to expose the gap between knowing and not knowing. A pupil who answers a question incorrectly has just demonstrated something useful: there is a gap in their understanding, and the teacher now knows where it is. A student who refuses to answer because they don’t want to get it wrong is protecting their fragile dignity at the expense of their learning. This is just one reason why a classroom where pupils are genuinely allowed and encouraged to make mistakes is so important. If getting something wrong is treated as a catastrophe (or mocked by others), children quite reasonably learn to avoid situations in which they might be wrong, which is disastrous for the learning process.

But there is an even more subtle problem. Sometimes we don’t want to be taught because we believe we already understand. This is one of the reasons students can be so attached to rereading their notes. The material looks familiar, the words make sense and everything feels reassuringly comprehensible. Then they are asked to explain it without looking and suddenly the knowledge has mysteriously disappeared. It hadn’t disappeared, of course. It had never been as securely learned as they thought. Recognition is seductive, whereas retrieval is considerably less comfortable, and yet that uncomfortable business of having to drag something out of your own memory is often precisely what strengthens the learning.

Good teaching can be something of a paradox. A good teacher is supposed to make things understandable, but making something understandable is not the same as making it effortless. Sometimes the most useful thing a teacher can do is to allow a student to struggle for a little while: not endlessly, and certainly not pointlessly, but long enough for them to have a chance to work something out for themselves. This is particularly powerful in one-to-one teaching, when a tutor can focus their attention entirely on one student, without the pressure to move on with the rest of the class. This is also one of the reasons why one-to-one tutoring can be so intensive (and thus why I work in shorter sessions): the student is put under the gentle pressure to figure things out, they cannot pass the baton on to the next learner in the room.

There is a particular moment when you can see a pupil wrestling with a problem and you have to resist the urge to rescue them. You can almost watch the thought process happening. A student who is struggling does not necessarily need rescuing, nor should they be left to flounder indefinitely. Sometimes they need a carefully constructed question or a small suggestion, and sometimes all they need is another minute to think. Getting that balance right is one of the more difficult and hence rewarding parts of teaching. There is a world of difference between a teacher who refuses to help and a teacher who knows that sometimes the most helpful thing they can do is wait; knowing when to step in and when to hold back is the one of the most nuanced parts of teaching, and it is surprisingly difficult to get right.

Good teaching is not simply about explaining things clearly. Of course, explanations matter enormously and a teacher who cannot explain something clearly is not doing their job. But explanation is only a part of teaching. At some point, the pupil has to do something with the explanation, and that usually means attempting something that they cannot yet do perfectly. There is a slightly uncomfortable gap between understanding an explanation when somebody else is talking and being able to apply that understanding when left to your own devices. Good teaching has to cross that gap rather than simply making the explanation increasingly thorough.

It is a peculiar modern tendency to interpret difficulty as evidence of failure. A child finds something hard and we immediately ask what went wrong. We ask whether the teacher is not engaging enough, when all the evidence shows that engagement is a poor proxy for learning. We ask ourselves whether the explanation was insufficiently clear, rather than considering the fact that the student may just need a little more time to wrestle with it. Worst of all, we ask whether the work needs to be simplified or brought down a notch. But learning something difficult is, by definition, difficult; it’s not a problem to be solved.

I suspect that adults find this particularly hard because we have forgotten what it feels like to learn from the beginning. We have become accustomed to competence. The accumulated knowledge and skills of adulthood make an enormous amount of life feel automatic. Then, when somebody asks us to learn something genuinely new, we discover that we are not nearly as clever as we had become accustomed to feeling. It is humbling, and perhaps this is why adults can sometimes be so remarkably defensive when somebody tries to teach them something new.

The best teachers should be enthusiastic learners, cheerleaders for the process of acquiring knowledge. They should remember what it feels like to be confused, particularly when something that ought to be easy suddenly isn’t. They ought to know that horrible moment when everyone else appears to understand and you are still trying to work out what on earth is going on. A teacher who has recently been a beginner at something can have a rather different attitude to a struggling student, because they understand that learning does not feel like a smooth progression from ignorance to mastery. It involves wrong turns, false starts, frustration and the occasional exhilarating moment when something that made no sense five minutes ago suddenly does.

Learning requires a certain amount of intellectual humility. You have to be prepared to admit that you don’t know something and to accept that being bad at something is an unavoidable part of eventually becoming good at it. None of this is comfortable, but it is crucially important. We want children to become confident, independent and capable of coping with difficulty, but the route to all three involves an unavoidable period in which you are none of those things. Before we can become good at something, we have to be prepared to be bad at it.

Perhaps the most important thing we can teach children, therefore, is not simply how to learn but how to be taught. Being teachable is not the same as being passive. It means being willing to look slightly foolish from time to time, to allow somebody else to point out what you have missed, and then to have another go. It is not particularly glamorous, but it is a remarkably useful skill, and one that doesn’t become less important simply because we have left school.

Results Day

There are very few pieces of paper capable of making a sixteen-year-old cry before breakfast, making their parents feel physically sick and causing an entire family to wake up several hours earlier than usual, teenagers included. A GCSE results sheet is one of them.

This morning, thousands of teenagers will have collected a handful of numbers that they have spent months, sometimes years, believing will tell them something fundamental about themselves. For some, those numbers will be a source of enormous joy and pride. For others, they will be a bitter disappointment. Most will fall somewhere in between, opening their results with a mixture of relief, excitement and mild bewilderment. What fascinates me is the disproportion between the importance we attach to results on this particular day and the significance they are likely to have in the lives of the people receiving them.

I do not mean to suggest that GCSE results are unimportant. That would be a rather glib thing to tell a sixteen-year-old who has just discovered that they have missed the grade they needed for the college course they wanted to pursue. Results have consequences: they can determine which subjects a student can go on to study, which courses they can access and, in some circumstances, which opportunities are available to them. Academic attainment at sixteen is also associated with a range of later outcomes, including employment and earnings, and there is evidence that GCSE results can be particularly consequential for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

So no, I am not going to tell disappointed students that their results “don’t matter”. They do matter. What I would like to suggest is that they don’t matter in quite the way that they currently think they do.

Sixteen is an extraordinarily young age at which to receive what feels like a definitive verdict on your intellectual capabilities. Yet this is exactly how examinations can come to feel. A student who has spent years being told that they are clever may look at one disappointing result and conclude that they have somehow been exposed as a fraud. Another who has always struggled may see a low grade as confirmation of something they have already come to believe about themselves. Even the student who gets a collection of grade 8s and 9s can be convinced they are a failure, if their parents have set them the heinous target of a perfect set of 9s.

A GCSE is an assessment of what you knew and could do in a particular subject, at a particular age, under a particular set of circumstances. That is, as it happens, a useful thing to know. It is not, however, a comprehensive psychological assessment. Your GCSE results cannot tell you whether you are going to be kind, funny, interesting, resilient, creative, courageous, generous, successful or happy, nor can they tell you what you are going to be good at for the rest of your life.

I am always struck by how little we remember about other people’s results once a few years have passed. Ask somebody in their thirties or forties what their school friends achieved at GCSE and most will struggle. They may remember the person who got a clutch of top grades and went on to medical school. They may remember somebody who failed spectacularly and was devastated at the time. They may remember their own results with surprising clarity (although these days, for my own part, I have to think quite hard about it). But the grades of the vast majority of the people they sat beside in the classroom have disappeared completely from memory.

This is particularly strange when you consider the emotional intensity of results day itself. At sixteen, it can seem as though everybody will remember what you achieved forever. The grade you received in English literature can feel like a permanent addition to your identity. You can almost hear the adults around you mentally filing you away: bright, average, disappointing, exceptional. Yet life has a rather irritating habit of refusing to respect these classifications.

People evolve. They discover things they did not know they were interested in. They meet people who alter the course of their lives. They leave school and discover that they are suddenly rather good at something nobody had ever noticed before. They fail at things they expected to succeed at and succeed at things they had assumed were beyond them. They make spectacularly bad decisions and, occasionally, spectacularly good ones. Some become doctors. Some become plumbers. Some become teachers. Some become artists. Some start businesses. Some spend twenty years doing something they thought they would love before deciding that they hate it and changing direction completely.

When I was sixteen, I had no idea what my eventual career would be. I certainly could not have predicted that I would spend my adult life teaching Latin. Had somebody shown me a list of the things that I would eventually do, I would probably have assumed that most of them belonged to somebody considerably more organised and sensible than me. Life does not unfold according to a careers questionnaire completed at sixteen. (I think the one I did told me I should be an analyst: I have still got absolutely no idea what that is).

There is a tendency, particularly on results day, to divide young people into winners and losers. Newspapers love photographs of teenagers holding up results sheets with enormous grins, surrounded by delighted parents and teachers. There is nothing wrong with celebrating success, and students who have worked hard and achieved the grades they wanted deserve every bit of the celebration they receive. But the visual language of results day can be rather unforgiving. One group gets to stand outside the school holding their grades aloft. Another group quietly disappears home, perhaps feeling that they have failed at something considerably larger than an examination. The reality is much messier. One student can achieve excellent grades and be miserable; believe me, I’ve met dozens of students like this and my heart aches for them. Another student can achieve disappointing grades and feel liberated. I always think of Robbie Williams, who got the call to say he had been selected to join a new boy band called Take That, just a couple of days after he had received his frankly atrocious GCSE results. Some students get exactly the results they wanted and discover six months later that they have chosen the wrong course. Others can miss their grades, take a different route and eventually find themselves thriving doing something they would never have considered had everything gone according to plan.

This is not an argument for pretending that educational achievement is irrelevant. Quite the contrary. Education opens doors, and some doors are considerably harder to open without particular qualifications. The point is that a door is an opportunity, not a destiny. GCSE results can influence the route you take through the next few years without determining where you eventually end up.

Perhaps this is why I find results day so emotionally complicated. It is entirely reasonable to be proud of a good result and entirely reasonable to be devastated by a bad one. What is unreasonable is to imagine that either response tells us very much about the person standing in front of us.

The Dangerous Myth of the “Natural” Student

“She’s just not a languages person.”

If I had a pound for every time a parent has said these words to me, I could probably have retired by now.

Every now and then somebody announces, with complete conviction, that their child simply “doesn’t have a languages brain”. They might say the same about the sciences. Whatever the subject, the sentiment is always the same: somewhere along the line, often years before they arrived in front of me, students have absorbed a mythology about what kind of learner they are. More importantly, they have already reached a conclusion about what kind of learner they are not.

The extraordinary thing is the certainty with which the students themselves then make those pronouncements. They are delivered not as opinions but as established facts, rather like informing me that they have blue eyes or are left-handed. “I’m just not academic.” “I’ve never been any good at languages.” “My sister got the brains.” There is no discussion to be had. The case, apparently, is closed. In many cases, they have reached this conclusion after spending no more than two or three hours a fortnight studying the subject.

Imagine hearing a fourteen-year-old say, “I’m just not a driving person.” Or, “I’m not really a mortgage sort of individual.” We would laugh, because those are things they have never seriously attempted. Yet children routinely write themselves off in academic subjects before they have even finished compulsory education. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, they have somehow become convinced that their intellectual destiny has already been mapped out.

I suspect that adults bear some responsibility for this. We are extraordinarily fond of describing children with labels. One child is “sporty”. Another is “creative”. Somebody else is “musical”. We speak warmly of “natural mathematicians” and “born linguists”. Children who succeed with apparent ease are praised for being clever, while those who struggle are reassured that “not everybody is academic.” All of this is done with kindness. None of it is intended to do harm. Yet, perhaps contrary to popular belief, children tend to believe what adults tell them.

The educational psychologist Carol Dweck became famous for distinguishing between what she called a “fixed” mindset and a “growth” mindset. Like all psychological theories, it has been over-simplified to the point of parody, and there is now a healthy academic debate about precisely how powerful those effects are. (Spoiler alert: not very, if you try to replicate them artificially). Nevertheless, the central idea has always struck me as reasonable and worthwhile. Children who believe that ability can develop through hard work generally respond to difficulty very differently from those who believe that intelligence is something fixed at birth. One group tends to interpret failure as evidence that they have more to learn. The other is far more likely to interpret it as evidence that they were never capable in the first place. The question is whether it is possible to actively encourage a growth mindset and the answer to date appears to be “no”. Like most important learning, the development of a growth mindset comes subliminally, from watching your parents and your peers, not from being told to get one. If your family lives and breathes it as their approach to life, then you are far more likely to develop one yourself. Like so many things in childhood, our earliest attitudes towards learning owe a great deal to simple good fortune.

Once you become aware that some students have more of a growth mindset than others, you begin to realise just how important it is. One student translates a difficult Latin sentence incorrectly and says, “Can you explain where I went wrong?” Another translates the same sentence incorrectly and sighs, “I told you I wasn’t any good at this.” The first student has made a mistake. The second has made a judgement about themselves. They are not remotely the same thing.

But there is another side to this story that is discussed rather less often. People assume that being labelled “clever” is entirely beneficial, yet I have taught plenty of students for whom this has become something of a burden. If a child grows up believing that success ought to come naturally, what happens when they finally encounter something genuinely difficult? Very often, they panic. Suddenly, they are no longer the child who always gets things right and that, when you think about it, is terrifying: it shatters their very sense of self. Rather than seeing challenge as an inevitable stage in learning, students whose identity has become bound up with being clever can begin to wonder whether they have somehow ceased to be so. It is one of the reasons why some exceptionally bright students develop a horror of making mistakes. Their identity has become entangled with effortless success. Yet genuine learning is rarely effortless.

As I explored a few weeks ago, one of the most important findings to emerge from cognitive science is that learning often feels considerably less successful than students imagine it ought to. Retrieval practice is frustrating. Spaced revision feels inefficient. Difficult questions expose weaknesses that many students would rather not confront. In other words, the very strategies that produce the strongest long-term learning are often the ones that make students feel least intelligent while they are doing them. Education has an awkward habit of rewarding perseverance rather more reliably than immediate brilliance.

One of the great privileges of tutoring is that I get to watch children change their minds about themselves. Contrary to what television dramas would have us believe, this does not happen in a single inspirational lesson accompanied by soaring orchestral music. It usually happens so gradually that neither the student nor I notices it at first. A child who once apologised before answering begins having a go without prompting. Somebody who announced in September that they “couldn’t do Latin” quietly translates a difficult passage by Easter. Nothing miraculous has happened. They have simply accumulated enough evidence to make their old story about themselves increasingly difficult to sustain.

This is why I have become rather wary of the word “gifted”. Of course, natural aptitude exists: anyone who has taught for more than about five minutes knows that children differ enormously in the speed with which they grasp new ideas. To pretend otherwise would be absurd. Yet, education is not a horse race in which the order established after the first furlong determines the final result. Children develop at different rates and excellent teaching can transform performance. So can hard work. So can discovering, perhaps for the first time, that making mistakes is not a catastrophe.

Perhaps the greatest danger posed by the myth of the “natural” student is that it persuades children to mistake who they are today for who they will always be. It encourages them to believe that ability is something to be discovered rather than something to be developed. Once that idea takes hold, challenge becomes threatening rather than exciting, because every struggle feels like confirmation of an identity that has already been decided.

I would much rather children left school believing something altogether different. By all means recognise talent when you see it, celebrate achievement and admire those who make difficult things look easy. But never allow a child to conclude that the boundaries of their ability have already been fixed. Childhood is surely far too early to decide what sort of learner you are going to be for the rest of your life.

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.