teaching – Page 2 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

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.

What GCSE students don’t know about the Aeneid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

arcebat longe Latio, multosque per annos
and for many years

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

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

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

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

The unbeatable value of one-to-one tutoring

Last week I wrote about how class size doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to outcomes for students. While it can have a notable effect on a teacher’s workload (and I believe that this is important), the evidence that smaller class sizes improve student performance simply isn’t there, certainly at secondary level.

You’d think, given both this and my commitment to being evidence-informed, that I would thus be in support of the idea that tutoring in small groups can be as effective as tutoring one-to-one. Quite the opposite. The very fact that research and my own experience tells me that the size of the group seems not to impact upon the outcomes for students only serves to reinforce my belief that there is something uniquely special about working in the one-to-one model. David Cameron once said that his support for equal marriage was not in spite of the fact that he was a conservative but because he was a conservative. By the same token, I don’t support the view that one-to-one tutoring has a greater impact than working with small groups in spite of the fact that there is no evidence that reducing class sizes improves outcomes; I support the view precisely because of this fact. It is my view that groups – however small – will never provide a child with the same level of intervention as working with an expert one-to-one.

During my last few years of teaching, I had the opportunity to teach a group of five students. The official line was that the small group was due to a timetabling glitch, but the full story was that the Headteacher had unwittingly made a promise to a small handful of parents, a promise which turned out to be impossible on the timetable. Because the mistake had been made by the Headteacher, she had the power to say “make it happen.” Thus, after a considerable amount of shuffling, the staff responsible for timetabling came up with a solution: we would create an extra group to accommodate the subject combination promise that had been made to those students and their parents. This left me – the only Latin teacher in the school – with three Year 9 groups instead of my usual two: one was the usual size of around 28 students, one was somewhat smaller at around 23, the third was the group of 5.

Initially, I was quite excited by the idea. As someone who had tutored one-to-one in my spare time, I felt quite certain that working with such a tiny number of students would feel more like tutoring than teaching. I would be able to offer them close supervision and thus, I presumed, their progress would be exponentially greater than that made by students in the other groups.

Certainly, I was able to pay those students more attention than I otherwise might have been able to do and certainly they all did well. Yet, so did the students in the other two groups. Over the two years I was not able to identify any measurably different outcomes for those students and the experience of teaching them was nothing like the experience of tutoring. Small class size or not, all the other variables were the same. They had the same teacher – me, like it or not – and they had to be marched through the same curriculum. Five students is still enough for there to be considerable diversity among the group, so the pace was still on the slow side for some, rather too pacey for others. While I was – of course – able to offer more individual support than in a larger classroom, it was genuinely surprising how limited the impact of this was overall. Had any of them chosen to engage a private tutor, they would have benefitted as much as any of the students in my group of 28.

As a result of the high expectations that are placed upon teachers, it is easy for them to feel threatened by the very existence of private tuition. I experienced this myself, when I watched a boy who was struggling in my subject transform his performance as a direct result of working with a local private tutor. It was a truly humbling process to witness, and I don’t deny that for a short while I felt rather dismal about my own apparent failure as his classroom teacher. But as a private tutor, I have seen the game from the other side of the fence. I know that what I can do with a child in a regular series of bespoke one-to-one sessions bears little or no resemblance to what I can achieve in the mainstream classroom. It is because I work one-to-one that I am able to do this.

As a private tutor, everything I do is in direct response to one individual’s needs. The key to outstanding private tuition is developing the ability to read each person closely; in a one-to-one session, I can watch for every tiny non-verbal cue that a child is giving: every shift in the chair, every bite of the lip, every furrow of the brow. Of course, I often noticed these signs in the classroom too, and I endeavoured to pay close attention to those individuals who were expressing some puzzlement. But how often must I have missed such nuances, due to the sheer number of faces in front of me? Every missed moment is another tiny chink in that student’s progress, another fissure in the delicate and ever-evolving construction of knowledge and understanding.

In a classroom, children must wait – an individual query may not be relevant to the whole class, and some students, especially in the younger years, seek to reassure themselves by querying what a teacher has said before the sentence is barely out of their mouth; this desire to ask questions at every stage of an explanation can ruin the flow of a lesson for the majority, and students must learn to save their questions for later, when a teacher is circulating the room. Teachers try then to address each individual query and pay personal attention to every child, indeed the importance of this is one of the things that makes teaching both challenging and rewarding. But the rules are reversed in private tutoring, when a tutor can actively encourage a child to interrupt as many times as they wish; as a result, the lesson is truly tailored to the individual and every potential misunderstanding is addressed – simply impossible in the mainstream classroom.

I am not unsympathetic to those educationalists who have concerns about private tutoring. In stark contrast to the case of my student whose progress was transformed as a result of tuition, I have also come across cases when a child has been thoroughly let down by a tutor with no professional experience. Many of those advertising at the more affordable end of the scale are university students – I would willingly have tutored for £10 an hour as an undergraduate – and some of them do an excellent job. However, such tutors have no experience of the ever-changing expectations that children are working towards; if you are simply looking for someone to de-mystify a subject then this kind of tutor can work very well, but if you are looking for your child to make progress towards a specific educational goal or to excel in a particular set of examinations, you’re taking quite a risk in paying someone who is not an expert in this process.

Yet the main objection against private tuition often raised is not a lack of professionalism on the part of some tutors; rather, it seems to touch on the wider issue of so-called “helicopter parenting” and a tendency to problem-solve on behalf of our children. In truth, no matter how much a parent might wish it to be so, private tutoring is not a magic solution; it is merely an opportunity, with which the student has to engage in order to progress. A few will rock up confidently with a myriad of questions, but the vast majority have spent so long hiding at the back or trying to bluff their way in a subject they are struggling to understand that it takes some time to strip away their defences and encourage them to participate without fear.

The tutees that come to me are often in a state of despair. More than one parent has described the dreadful bouts of gut-wrenching anxiety and floods of tears as a child finds themselves getting further and further behind their peers. My subject is obscure, and few parents are blessed with the knowledge to help their child through the quagmire of this difficult and unforgiving discipline; so, they can watch in despair while their child suffers, or they can find a compassionate and competent professional to provide the right kind of support for them. As one parent put it to me, “you have turned dislike and dismay into enjoyment and enthusiasm.” Sounds like something worth paying for.

Latin language GCSE

Tomorrow the several thousand students studying Latin across the UK will sit their language examination. The Boards clearly collaborate when it comes to exam timetabling, so both OCR and Eduqas/WJEC have their Latin language examinations on the timetable tomorrow, both of them setting a paper that lasts and hour and a half.

Having worked with both Boards for three years now and having worked proactively through the existing past papers for both Boards in somewhat obsessive detail, I consider myself something of an expert on the quirks of each. Broadly, the Boards take a markedly different approach to examination, although they have a couple of interesting quirks in common. For example, both Boards seem somewhat obsessed with candidates noticing whether or not an adjective is in the superlative, including when that superlative is irregular. Personally, I don’t really understand why it is so crucially important that candidates translate plurimi as “very many” rather than just “many”, but for whatever reason, both Boards are very keen on it. Neither Board lists the irregular comparatives and superlatives as separate vocabulary, which given their obsession with their accurate translation seems a drastic oversight to me.

The language exam for OCR has a much longer history than Eduqas, which is the relatively new kid on the block for Latin. Those who taught the subject prior to the examination reforms in 2018 will understand why the OCR paper is divided into two sections, which bear no relation to each other: Section A represents what used to be Paper 1 and Section B what used to be Paper 2: the Board have simply merged what used to be two language papers into one, which I remember thinking at the time was quite extraordinarily lazy and has made for the current exam seeming bizarrely disjointed. Section A, worth 30 marks, consists of a 16-mark comprehension, a 4-mark derivatives question and then a choice between some grammar questions based on the comprehension passage or three English to Latin sentences. I always advise candidates to attempt the grammar questions as these are relatively straightforward (although considerably harder than the ones on the Eduqas paper). The grammar questions are quite ridiculously predictable and it is easy to drill even the weakest candidates to get full marks or close to full marks on this section. Section B of the OCR paper starts with a completely new story and contains a longer comprehension followed by a translation, which is worth 50% of the candidates’ overall marks. Section B is considerably harder than Section A and candidates do need to be aware that 50% of their overall mark is represented by that final translation passage.

Eduqas takes a completely different approach, one which followed the spirit of traditional “momentum” tests of old: the same storyline is maintained throughout most of the paper (which seems much more sensible), and what is labelled “Section A” is 90% of the paper: it consists of a short passage for comprehension, two short passages for translation and then a longer comprehension at the end; because the story is continuous, candidates benefit from completing the paper in order. Section B is worth only 10% and consists of a choice between some English into Latin sentences or some quite remarkably simple grammar questions, based on a very short and very simple passage of Latin, which is not even close to the complexity of the rest of the paper. As for OCR, the grammar questions are repetitive and predictable, thus it is easy once again to drill candidates to gain full marks on this section.

One notable quirk of Eduqas, and it is one I dislike, is that they seem particularly keen on candidates being able to follow the story. The reason I dislike this is I feel it advantages students who come from a background of traditional schooling, who may know the story involved. Candidates are often asked to infer things that are not actually contained in the passage and I find this unfair as those who have spent time in the prep school system or know the ancient stories from general interest may well find themselves better off. Another thing I dislike about the way that Eduqas examines candidates is that it uses a huge number of multiple choice questions, many of which seem specifically designed to trick candidates. They will, for example, encourage candidates to select the wrong meaning of words that are easy to mix up. That said, their approach to derivatives is much more benevolent: OCR seem ludicrously wedded to the idea of forcing candidates to define the meaning of the derivative they select, which I simply do not understand. I generally dislike questions about derivatives as again I feel they disadvantage candidates from certain backgrounds; they certainly disadvantage those for whom English is their second language, especially if that language is not European.

I am reaching the point where I know the vocabulary lists pretty well for both Boards, and there is roughly a 90% crossover. If anything, Eduqas has more words that are easy to mix up due to its inclusion of adiuvo (often confused with audio) and pareo (often confused with paro). That said, OCR included the word liber (book) as well as liberi (children), whereas Eduqas only has the latter. Both Boards have both iacio and iaceo, a nightmare to distinguish, and they also both have puto as well as peto, neco as well as nescio. All of these are regular traps that candidates fall into. When it comes to irregular verbs, OCR has more of these and includes the particularly awkward verb malo, which in my experience is massively undertaught in schools, which all focus on volo and nolo (as per the Cambridge Latin Course) and do not appear to teach malo discretely at all. Eduqas do not included it on their list.

As candidates make their final preparations for the exam one can only hope, as ever, that we have prepared them for the relevant pitfalls to the best of our ability. Michael Gove once said that he wanted to eliminate teachers’ ability to teach to the test but I’m afraid he has failed dismally in that department. While results continue to matter, teachers will continue to prepare candidates for the specific exam that they are facing. Not to do so would be sheer negligence.

Why is translation so difficult?

I recall being puzzled a few years ago, when the languages department I was attached to invited me to present to them on how I go about teaching the skill of translation. I had assumed that the process of translation was almost synonymous with language work, and would be embedded into the teaching of all languages. It was news to me that a change in syllabus meant that translation from the target language into English was a new and hitherto under-explored field for modern linguists, and this belies my background as someone who has specialised in Latin.

When it comes to ancient languages, translation is what we do. Without delving into the thorny issue of justifying the value of studying Latin per se (!), it is a simple truth that the ultimate goal of this kind of study remains to be able to read and decipher a text that was written down in Latin and to translate it into English. Despite this obvious truth, a huge number of children who study the subject struggle with the process of translation, and it is worth reflecting upon why that might be.

Broadly speaking, the clients who get in touch with me asking for help for their child fall into two camps, and those camps tend to be based on age-group. Most of the people who want help for a younger child (say in Years 7-8) will say that their child is “okay with translating” but “struggles with the grammar”. This is always a massive red flag for impending disaster, for it means that their child’s translations are based entirely on instinct and guesswork; the child may have appeared to manage okay so far, but as things get harder they will fall apart and the child will soon find that they can comprehend very little of what’s in front of them. It is a drastic misconception, in my opinion, that “grammar” is something separate from “translation”. This really gets to the heart of Latin as a subject and belies why so many children need help with it. Grammar is not an optional luxury for those most deeply versed in the language: it is the beating heart of how the language works.

Parents of older children (broadly speaking in Years 9-11) tend to be the ones who are already experiencing the fall-out of translation without the systematic application of grammar rules. Students by this time find that their previously-successful methodologies of translating on instinct have all but collapsed. Parents of students who have reached this stage will usually tell me that their child struggles with absolutely everything and is on the verge of giving up. A few will say that their child is “okay with the grammar” (which means they have rote-learned their endings) but cannot make it work in the context of a translation. This less common scenario is what tends to happen with a highly-motivated student, generally successful in their studies, who has been told to “learn their endings” and has dutifully done so, but has not had the opportunity to sit down with somebody in one-to-one sessions and have the process of translation – actually making use of those endings – modelled and unpicked for them. This is not to say that their classroom teacher has not used the method of modelling, nor that they have not tried to dedicate some one-to-one attention to such a child. But the reality remains that such processes are remarkably difficult to embed and often require repeated, intensive one-to-one work to make a tangible difference to outcomes. This is especially true for a child that has developed the habit of translating on instinct and has not been drilled from the beginning to analyse Latin sentences rigorously. I’m afraid to say that the most popular text books used in secondary schools (the Cambridge Latin Course and Suburani) tend to encourage and compound such an approach. These courses are nicknamed “reading courses” and aim to encourage fluid and instinctive reading from the outset, eschewing the process of analysis. My personal experience with such an approach is that it is disastrous for a child’s long-term grasp of the subject and results in an inability to translate when things get even remotely complicated. Lots of people disagree with me on this, and if you’d like to hear me interview one or two of them, then listen to my podcast; in Season 2 Episode 1, I interview Caroline Bristow (Director of the Cambridge Schools Classics Project) and in Episode 6 I talk to David Carter, who is an advocate for a methodology called comprehensible input. If you’d like to hear me interview someone who shares my views, listen to Season 2 Episode 2 with Ed Clarke.

Much of my time in one-to-one sessions is spent asking students to justify their translation. When they tell me that rex deorum means “the king of the gods” … was that an easy guess based on the fact that they know the vocabulary? Or can they identify the fact that deorum is genitive plural, which is why it translates as “of the gods”? If they can’t unpick their reasoning behind very simple sentences, then in my experience they will never be able to translate more complex ones. My focus is therefore to present students with a variety of sentences, using vocabulary that is familiar to them, then challenge them to identify and articulate the morphology and syntax which justifies and explains their translation.

It is also important from the very beginning to present students with sentences which cannot be translated successfully without some kind of analysis. Even at the most rudimentary level, this is easy to do. While reading courses such as Suburani tend to encourage students to follow their natural instinct to read from left to right by using pronouns at the start of a sentences like English does, I prefer to present students with sentences that lack a noun or a pronoun as the subject, so they are forced to look at the verb ending in order to find out who is doing the action. During lockdown, I basically re-wrote the Cambridge Latin Course for my students and one of the main things I did was to remove all those subject pronouns. This change made an immediate and tangible difference to outcomes with the beginners in my classroom. From very early on, students were forced to cope with sentences such as ad tabernas festinas (you are hurrying to the shops) when previously they had been shown tu ad tabernas festinas, which means exactly the same thing but provides them with the subject (you) as vocabulary at the front of the sentence and hence removes the need to look at the verb ending; take away the subject pronoun, and the learner is forced to develop the correct habit of parsing the verb ending (festina-s, as opposed to festin-o or festina-t). Initially, of course, this slows the learner down, but the ultimate gain is the right kind of rigour, which will pay dividends in the long-term. While it will initially appear to take students longer to be able to translate basic sentences with fluidity and skill, their translations when they come will be based upon real understanding, not the false appearance of success. It is this false early success – in my opinion – that makes the reading courses so popular; students feel brilliantly successful in the early stages, but they are living in a house of cards.

By far the most common scenario presented to me as a tutor who specialises in supporting struggling students is a child who has enjoyed and appeared to thrive in Latin in Years 7-8, who then experienced an enormous crisis in Year 9 or at the start of their GCSE studies. These students feel cheated and let down, and understandably so. A lot of them come to me saying that they regret selecting the subject for GCSE and are convinced that they cannot do it. Happily, I am usually able to convince them that they can do it, but this involves unpicking the habits they have formed in the early years and retraining them from scratch. While reading courses such as Suburani and the CLC continue to dominate the market in secondary schools, I don’t see this situation changing in a hurry.

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

Let me count the ways

How do we let young people down in 2025? Let me count the ways. Beyond our inexplicable willingness to allow them unfettered 24-hour access to the dark world of the internet, beyond our discomfort with and unwillingness to take the responsibility that lies with adults, to be in charge and to be the grown-ups in the room, beyond this lurks yet another way in which we can let them down. We can teach them an inflated sense of their own importance; we can let them believe that the world revolves around them and let them imagine that, when they reach adulthood, their employer will bend to their every whim. How do we do that? Let me give you an example.

It is not often that I read a post on LinkedIn, as it’s never an enriching experience. But imagine my horror when I happen upon someone who claims to be a fellow educationalist openly celebrating the news that a child is missing their lessons for no good reason other than the fact that it is their birthday. “Let’s normalise taking your birthday off without any further explanation or drama required,” she exclaimed. “Life’s too short not to!” She also celebrated “the beauty of flexi/online schooling,” showing at least some awareness of the fact that the average UK school would take a pretty dim view of any student – or their parents – citing a birthday as a reason to take a day off.

To be clear, it was apparent from her post that this person was talking about the kind of tutoring that is there to replace traditional schooling, not supplement it. As someone who works with students who attend mainstream school, I have had several occasions on which parents have cancelled their evening appointment with me due to birthday celebrations, and that is just as it should be: the child has already done a day’s schooling and it seems more than reasonable to reserve their evening time for birthday celebrations with family and/or friends. But this tutor was celebrating the fact that their student was missing an entire day’s worth of schooling, and even seemed to be implying that – in an ideal world – schools would be willing to accommodate such a decision. The responses were mainly positive, with several people – all of them no doubt making money out of the increasing trend of parents taking their children out of the traditional education system – applauding the sentiment. “Brilliant! Joy, wellbeing and belonging first, then education will flow and be valued” asserted one, a remarkable claim which I would love to see the data on. “All my students take their birthdays off, and I encourage it,” said another. “Absolutely brilliant,” said a third: “I too encourage my students to take their birthdays off!”

There were one or two of us speaking up for sanity, so all is not lost. One or two people commented that allowing students to take random days off is disruptive to both the teacher and the learner. I commented that allowing students to take time off in this way is surely setting them up for future disappointment in life. There are not many people in this world who are so blessed that they can pick and choose whether or not they go into work on a particular day. If at least part of education’s purpose is to prepare students for working life, then what kind of precedent are we setting by normalising the expectation of a day off on their birthday, rather than explaining to them that school is still there – birthday or not – and reassuring them that celebrations will be had when it is finished for the day?

There are innumerable jobs which do not allow for days off at your preferred time, including some quite noble careers. Teaching, for example, is well known as a profession in which you do get lots of time away from the chalkface, but the price you pay for the significant chunks of flexible free time undeniably allowed to you is that the times when you are tied to the chalkface are 100% dictated by your employer. It is quite remarkably difficult for classroom teachers to negotiate any time away from their classroom, for blindingly obvious reasons. I remember a wealthy friend once invited myself and my husband to Glyndebourne, in an ill-fated attempt to convert me to opera. “You’d have to take the afternoon off,” he said, airily. I snorted with mirth, for this was just one example of how someone in his wealth-bracket tends to presume that the world works for everybody else. It was almost worth me booking an appointment with the Headteacher, just to see the look on her face when I requested the afternoon off “to attend the opera.” Many of our young people will end up in jobs like mine, when time off at one’s own behest is simply not on the cards. Granted, many of them won’t. The point is: all jobs include “have-tos” (true even for my wealthy barrister friend), and young people need to learn this simple fact. Otherwise, we are letting them down.

Beyond the fact that school attendance teaches children about the “have-tos” in life, allowing time off at a child’s behest devalues education itself. Taking students out of school for random events should not be done lightly, for in doing so we are inevitably sending a message to a child that their schooling is not important to us. This then echoes down the line when it comes to their day-to-day studies, their preparation for examinations, their overall efforts to achieve academically. Why should it matter to them, if we are constantly undermining the message that it matters to us by taking them out of school?

My third and final objection to the idea of allowing and encouraging students to take time out of school for their birthday is perhaps a little controversial, so brace yourselves. Here goes. Quite simply, I think it is too self-indulgent. I am so depressed at how society seems to be shifting more and more towards an entirely individualistic mindset, one which prioritises the wants and needs of the individual over and above the needs of the community as a whole. While I would never object to the idea that one should be mindful of one’s own health and wellbeing, indeed I write often about my efforts to centre my own, the expectation of one’s right to do so has become so unquestionable that we are beginning to forget what binds us together as a community. In our relentless pursuit of independence and self-efficacy, I fear we may end up with a world full of egocentrics.

In the grand scheme of humanity, nobody’s birthday is actually that important, because nobody is the centre of the universe. We need to keep our special dates in perspective. They matter to us and – if we are lucky enough – to those who care about us. They do not – nor should they – impact upon the rest of the world. If that seems a little too nihilistic for your liking, then here’s another way of looking at it: if it’s their birthday, wouldn’t it be better for a child to go into school and celebrate by sharing the love with their classmates? Over the years, I have had several colleagues who liked to make a fuss on their birthday, so they brought in cakes and shared them with all of us. It was an absolutely lovely thing to do and everybody enjoyed it. And everyone wished them a happy birthday! So, if we believe that birthdays are so special and important, then why don’t we teach our children that their birthday is a chance to bring some joy to their usual routines and responsibilities, not an opportunity to evade them?