teaching – Page 3 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Sliding Doors

As thousands of students receive their A level, BTEC and T level results this morning, I’ve been thinking about moments in life that I and no doubt many others from my era nickname “sliding doors”: moments that mark a turning point in the course of your life. The 1998 film Sliding Doors explores the idea that the course of one woman’s career as well as her love-life hung upon whether or not she managed to catch a particular tube-train; it follows both scenarios in parallel – one in which she catches the train, one in which she doesn’t.

In real life, of course, without the omnipotency of a film director, one cannot do this. We cannot see the different scenarios played out and choose which one we prefer. We can look back at pivotal moments in life and acknowledge that something shifted in our lives at that moment, but we cannot know what would have happened in an alternative universe. In the context of romantic relationships, this concept is expressed wonderfully in another 1990s classic, one of my favourite songs by Pulp, called Something’s Changed. In this song, Jarvis Cocker explores the chance nature of his meeting a partner and how it might never have happened; it also uses the conceit of imagining himself writing a particular song on a particular day, which then became about that person:

I wrote this song two hours before we met.
I didn’t know your name, or what you looked like yet.
I could have stayed at home and gone to bed.
I could have gone to see a film instead.
You might have changed your mind and seen your friends.
Life would have been very different then.

Later in the song he returns to the conceit and perhaps my favourite moment (probably upsettting to the more romantically inclined among you), is when he even ponders that without his partner, he might have met somebody different:

When we woke up that morning we had no way of knowing
That in a matter of hours we’d change the way we were going.
Where would I be now?
Where would I be now if we’d never met?
Would I be singing this song to someone else instead …?

The tone of the whole song is wistful but not melancholy, nor is it overtly gushing – those of you who know Jarvis Cocker will understand that he doesn’t really do gushing. The girlfriend is given a voice, but she uses it to tell Jarvis to “stop asking questions that don’t matter anyway”. The general conclusion is: ah, well.

I spoke to a friend this week – on Zoom because we live 300 miles apart – and she too is at a turning point in life. We spoke about sliding doors moments and I told her about how miserable I was doing my PhD and how eventually I decided not to pursue an academic career because I realised that the lifestyle was making me deeply unhappy. “I finished it,” I said. “But it nearly killed me.” This friend then asked me something that nobody has asked me before. She asked me whether I regretted finishing it.

Lots of people have asked me whether I am glad I finished my research. That tends to be the expected tone of the conversation. It is in my view a marker of how insightful this particular friend is that she worded it differently. Do I regret finishing it? Do I regret putting myself through that process? It got me thinking. Maybe I should.

Looking back, the reasons I finished it were all in relation to external pressures. I had received funding from the British Academy and that is very hard to come by – I would have felt guilty that I had taken somebody else’s place and squandered such a privilege. My parents would have been disappointed. My Supervisor would have been disappointed. Finally, and perhaps most foolishly of all, I didn’t like quitting and I still believed that the qualification was important. So, I soldiered on and I finished the thing. I cried multiple times a day. A low point was sitting in my college room and pondering how long it would take somebody to notice if I died in there.

Not only did I finish the PhD, my deep unhappiness and loathing for the life drove me to finish it in record time. Two and a half years. For the last 4 to 6 months when I was officially “writing up”, three copies of the completed thesis sat on my desk, all printed out and ready to be bound. I hid this even from my Supervisor. It was not the done thing to finish in less than the standard three years, plus I had nowhere else to go once my thesis was completed. I had a place to start teacher training in September, but until then I needed to hang on to my college room. So I waited. Eventually, the thesis was bound and sent to the examiners and ultimately my Viva went without a hitch. PhDs are not officially graded, but truthfully there is a hierarchy to what the examiners may say to you at the end of your Viva. Best case scenario is that they mark in pencil a few minor errors or typos and tell you that these do not require correction in order for the thesis to be accepted; worst case scenario, they tell you to tear the thing up and never darken their doors again. Most people fall somewhere in the middle, with corrections advised or sometimes a re-write of some sections recommended. Mine was waved through with the minor pencil errors. The examiners shook my hand at the end of the session and used my brand new title for the first time. Being me, I did correct the minor errors even though I didn’t have to, and submitted it to Senate House.

My PhD has brought me some benefits, not least an exposure to teaching which ultimately became my career choice and is not, I think, something I would have considered as a possibility had I not been thrust into it. It has been useful, as a woman, to sign off as “Dr. E Williams” when writing to certain types of people or institutions – until we bring down the partiarchy (work ongoing), it can be handy to let the recipient of your complaint assume that you are a man (which those certain sorts of people or institutions inevitably tend to do when you use an academic title). My PhD is also something I am proud of, solely because I know just what it took me to complete it. Many of my research peers fell by the wayside (ironically, all of them claiming to be loving the process of research, while I was always very vocal about how miserable I was finding it). A few years ago, I was invited back by my university as something of a voice of doom on a panel about postgraduate research: it’s tough, and most people don’t really enjoy it. So be careful what you wish for.

Back to my lovely friend’s question. Do I regret finishing my research? I have always told myself that I don’t, since I made it through and have something to show for it. My field is pretty niche (true of most PhDs) but my contribution was significant and is still cited in other people’s research in this field right across the world. Quitting would have meant that I had a bad experience and had nothing to show for it. Also, when it comes to sliding doors in life I think it’s best not to have regrets: you made the decisions you made or things happened and that’s how it is – there is little point in asking yourself what you could or should have done differently. But the way my friend worded that question really has made me think about that particular decision a little differently.

Sometimes in life, putting yourself through more pain truly isn’t worth it. The more I think about that awful time, the more my decision seems a little crazy. Much as I cannot see the alternatives played out with the clarity of a film, I can make sensible and reasonable predictions about what might have happened. My career would still have worked out: I had already been exposed to teaching (that happened in my very first year of research), so I probably would have chosen to switch to teacher training if I’d had the foresight and courage to jump ship when I could and should have done. I would have started work earlier, bought a house more cheaply than I did, paid into my pension for longer. If I’m honest, I’m not sure that my PhD has benefitted me in gaining work to the extent that I have told myself it has; my first class Honours degree and Masters at Distinction level was probably plenty and I’m not quite sure why I’ve never considered that before. So in truth, I cannot think of a negative outcome that would have happened due to quitting, other than the immense courage it would have taken to do so.

It is healthy in life to have no regrets, and I’m certainly not going to beat myself up about a decision I made in my mid-20s. I shall continue to make use of my title, and maintain pride in what turned out to be the toughest achievement I have ever faced in life. Go me. But if I could go back in time and tell myself what to do in 1997, I’d tell myself that the brave decision was not, in fact, to soldier on and do what was expected of me; the brave decision would have been to run for the hills. Sometimes, quitting is the bravest act of all.

Image from the British film *Sliding Doors*, starring Gwynneth Paltrow and John Hannah.

Back to Basics

One of the best things about tutoring is the time and space to go back to basics. Many students come to me with a list of tricky constructions that they are struggling with, and without question I will address those things in the time I spend with them. More often than not, however, while the student may be requesting help with the ablative absolute or the indirect statement, what I discover is that they don’t even know their basic noun endings.

Over the years I have given a great deal of thought as to why this is so. The discovery – through tutoring – of just how many students this was true for certainly informed my own practice as a classroom teacher. I came to realise that the basics must revisited time and time again before students can claim full confidence and that this was true for all students, not just those that appeared to be struggling. So tutoring completely changed my approach in the classroom, for it gave the the realisation of just how much students naturally forget over time.

Given that Latin is a subject with which most people are unversed, I like to make analogies with subjects that are familiar to all of us. Imagine a child sitting their maths GCSE and trying to cope with the complexities of algebra and trigonometry. Then imagine that same child trying to sit their maths GCSE before they have fully grasped the meaning and process of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Maybe indeed you were that child. Maybe you were pushed through your GCSE or your O level with a shaky grasp of those basics. If you were that child, you will have been frankly terrified of maths as a subject and probably still believe that you’re “rubbish at maths”, all because nobody took the time to ensure that you understood the rudimentary basics. Remember how that felt? That’s what I’m talking about.

One of the first things I always check out when I meet a new student is whether they are confident with the order and meaning of the cases. You wouldn’t believe how many Year 10 or Year 11 students I have worked with who, when asked about this, have absolutely no idea. But what is the point of them learning their noun endings if they don’t know what those endings mean? So I start with a blank table and ask students whether they can tell me which case comes first and what the meaning of that case is. (Answer: nominative, and it’s the subject of the sentence). Most students who are taking GCSE are able to tell me this (although not all). Beyond that, many – not all, but the majority – start to fall apart from there. For example, they cannot remember whether the genitive comes before or after the dative and/or they cannot remember which one means “of” and which one means “to” or “for”. Immediately, therefore, we have a fundamental clue to what the underlying problem is with their approach to any Latin sentence: basically, in reality, they are guessing.

Delving into the gaps in a student’s knowledge like this is an enormous privilege and helping them start to plug those gaps is one of the best things about my job. All of these students have been taught these concepts before but all of them have forgotten that material. This is how memory works and this is why retrieval practice and revisiting past concepts in the classroom again and again is so crucial. Most classroom teachers, it seems to me, are still underestimating the importance of this and the extent to which even the highest of achievers need regular checks on their two times table interwoven with their introduction to the finer points of matrices. But the reality is that no matter how good the classroom teacher, no matter how solid and consistent their use of retrieval practice, there will still be some students who fall by the wayside; this may be due to illness causing absences or it may just be that they find it harder than the rest of the class. And that’s where tutoring comes in.

Sometimes people assume that repetition is boring and that working with lots of students on the same set of fundamentals would also be so. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every child is different and every child that is struggling in the classroom has their own personal and private worries; often a child has an instinct for the fact that they are missing some fundamental pieces of the puzzle but their situation has become so stressful that they feel unable to ask for help. Breaking down those barriers and helping them to grasp the core concepts and knowledge that they need in order to start succeeding is without a doubt the most rewarding thing that I could spend my time doing. Parents often tell me that their increased confidence and improving performance feels like a miracle.

So if your child is struggling with complex material, that is without doubt something which needs addressing. However, it may not be the case that the complex material is where we need to start. After many years of radio silence, I have recently taken up the piano again and am trying to re-learn some complex pieces that I could rattle off without hesitation at the age of 18. What I realised when I started at the music was that I have forgotten some of the most rudimentary bits of knowledge – when there are four sharps in the treble clef, what does that mean? I honestly can’t remember. So, before I can play with confidence, I will have to revisit some of those basics. I know that they will come flooding back, but the reality is that they need to be revised. So, back to basics I go. It will be worth it in the long-run.

What’s wrong with GCSE Latin?

Sometimes you have to step off the treadmill to reflect on what is wrong with the system. After 21 years of preparing cohorts of students for Latin at GCSE level, it has taken me a year or so off the hamster wheel to reflect upon what is wrong with it and how the examination at GCSE level is fundamentally flawed.

To understand how the Latin GCSE fails our students, we first of all need to reflect upon what the purpose is of studying Latin – without this, the decisions made by the exam boards will seem even more incomprehensible than they actually are. First and foremost, forgetting any wild claims to promote excellence, increase vocabulary or whatever else we tell ourselves about our subject, the purpose of studying Latin is to train students to be able to read real Roman texts. This is the end goal and everything else is broadly irrelevant. This inescapable reality is – I believe – why both exam boards and QCA are so irrevocably wedded to the notion that students must study a substantial proportion of “real” Latin texts in order to gain a basic qualification in the subject.

Let us reflect for a moment on what this actually means. Unless a child has attended prep school and studied Latin from Year 5 or 6 onwards, students will have started Latin as a beginners’ subject in Year 7 and will be unlikely to have had more than one hour’s tuition per week in the subject. This may increase margially in Years 8-9, but not by much. Within that space of time, the exam boards are expecting a student entering Year 10 to be prepared to study real Latin texts, a frankly laughable notion. Imagine expecting a student of French to read and understand Voltaire or Maupassant during their GCSE course, when they are still wrestling with the fundamentals of the language.

The argument is often trotted out that modern language students have more to contend with, because they have to work on a wider variety of skills: Latin – being a dead language – does not require students to be tested on speaking or listening. Agreed, these skills take up a huge amount of teaching time for modern linguists that we do not have to dedicate when it comes to an ancient language. Believe me, however, this is more than made up for by the linguistic content required. My first Head of Department once quipped, when I mentioned to him that one of my Year 10 students had suddenly asked when we would learn to tell the time in Latin, that I should have replied “when you have learnt the pluperfect passive subjunctive.” He had a point. (He was right, by the way: the pluperfect passive subjunctive is required at GCSE). Rod, who had only ever taught French and German, had seen the list of grammatical constructions required for GCSE Latin and it never failed to astonish him.

Now that I am on the outside of the school system, working with a large number of GCSE candidates from a variety of schools, I am being exposed to a broad range of approaches from each school. Most of them do what I did and plough through as much of the GCSE language content as they can during the first two terms of Year 10, then start tackling the literature texts in the final term of Year 10 and throughout Year 11. This is the best we can do. I have come across one school that takes longer over the language then expects students to have gained enough linguistic knowledge to tackle the set texts very quickly due to their broader knowledge-base; this is frankly nonsense, given that the language required for the texts goes way, way beyond that required at GCSE for the language paper. Some schools start the texts immediately and encourage students to work on them from the very beginning, but this is rare.

For the unintiated, let us be clear: GCSE candidates do not have anything like the linguistic knowledge required to study the real Latin texts that are prescribed for the GCSE. The only way they can cope with and even borderline understand the texts is to learn the English translation off by heart, a simply mammoth rote-learning task. This is what I spend much of my time supporting students with as many are not given the tools and the skill-set to do this on their own.

This year I had something of an epiphany when working with a handful of independent students. Why do we do it? The requirements for Latin GCSE are so unrealistic that I would go so far as to say that the qualification is wildly inappropriate. My belief that this is the case means that I no longer encourage students to take the qualification as a supplementary subject: it simply is way too much to cope with on top of their regular studies. I do not say this lightly, not least because it will mean I miss out on a significant amount of potential tutoring work. But the truth must be told, and parents of students who have a desire to study Latin independently need to think very long and hard about the reality of what that means and whether they are prepared for the sheer slog that it will entail.

So long as the texts required for GCSE go far beyond the students’ linguistic skills, the only way to prepare for the examination will continue to be to learn the texts off by heart. I shudder to think the number of wasted hours that has been spent on this. One of my skills as a tutor is in helping students with this process, because there are indeed ways in which it can be made less arduous and more manageable. I shall continue to do this, to assist students in their quest to attain top marks in the qualification for which they have been entered. But really – what are we doing it for? Is it really the best way to prepare students for a future in the subject? I do wish QCA and the examination boards would take a long, hard and realisitc look at what they are demanding from 16-year-olds and face up to the reality that their examination in its current form is not really fit for purpose.

Pink spots, pink lines and seeing red

This week’s “controversy” on EduTwitter seems to be the very suggestion that crowd control might be necessary in our schools. The mental gymnastics that some people will perform in order to persuade themselves that children do not behave in the proven, well-documented ways that we know all human beings behave is quite extraordinary.

Perhaps well aware of the reaction his post would get, David Scales, Principal of Astrea Academy, Woodfields, tweeted a couple of pictures from his school: “Introducing pink spots and pink lines. Pink spots – a duty point that staff must occupy if empty. Pink lines – one foot either side and queue if at a T, otherwise a corridor divider, walk on left.” Let us be clear, this is the use of visible guidelines for where large numbers of youngsters should assemble and/or where those managing them should ideally stand. How on earth this is controversial I will never truly understand, but the reaction it sparked would be hilarious if it weren’t so depressing.

“Professional adults expected to occupy spots; no wonder politicians treat us with contempt. It starts within” said one. Others seemed to feel that the staff at Scales’ school must be suffering from some kind of Stockholm syndrome: “It’s astonishing and worrying no staff have pointed out how ridiculous this is.” Numerous responses suggested that Scales does not trust his staff and that they are being treated with contempt, while others seemed to find the very need for visible markers beneath their contempt. “Utterly ridiculous. 37 years of teaching in primary schools and I have never wanted or needed anything like this.”

I am speechless. Stunned. Do these people occupy a different planet from the one on which I have spent my years to date? I spent 21 years in two secondary schools – neither of which could be considered “tough” schools by any stretch of the imagination – and I can well see the need for the spots and lines.

One of the things that I find particularly puzzling about people’s hysterical reaction to painted guidelines is their inability to see that a forward planning prevents poor behaviour from occuring, keeps everybody safe and shows children how to conduct themselves in the right way; the very people who claim to value students the most seem hell-bent on not showing them what good looks like, on not showing them how to behave, on setting them up for failure. Presumably the plan is that the kids should just line up however they fancy leaving staff to shout at them when they get it wrong. How incredibly stressful for all concerned.

One of the most important things to understand about schools – particularly large secondary schools – is that they work like a hivemind, like a well-oiled machine. Everything relies on staff being where they’re expected to be and on students knowing where to stand, how to move around, when to be quiet and what kind of conduct is expected of them. As soon as this is allowed to unravel, people are at best confused – the kind of situation that causes untold stress to many vulnerable students and their staff; at worst, people can find themselves at serious risk of harm.

Many critics of crowd control seem to possess a quite stunning inability to grasp that large numbers of people – any people, not just children – is a potentially risky situation in and of itself. I find myself wondering whether they are wilfully ignorant of human behaviour as well as remarkably blind to the architecture around them. Have they not noticed how many buildings are designed specifically with subliminal crowd control in mind? This is not because town-planners and architects believe that we are all savages, who will instantly descend into a re-enactment of Lord of the Flies as soon as we’re let out of our cages; it is because they know that people move around most comfortably, more conveniently and more safely if the flow of movement is managed in an orderly way. Quite simply, guidelines make things better and less stressful for everyone.

The Romans were concerned about crowd control. With their visceral distaste for civil unrest (perhaps a result of the regularity with which it occurred), Roman architects designed their public spaces with considerable thought to the fact that large numbers of people would be involved. Over a decade ago, archaeologist Alexis McBride wrote a fantastic blog post exploring the apocryphal skill with which the Colosseum – a structure that could hold up to 80,000 people – was designed to empty of its crowds as rapidly and efficiently as possible. By modern standards, the process would have been uncomfortable and dangerous but, as McBride puts it, it would have been fast! Likewise, this post from 2007 draws on the knowledge of Keith Still, an expert on modern crowd control, who has consulted on the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca and the Beijing Olympics; he found the amphitheatre at Pompeii to be a striking example of good design when it comes to crowd control.

So let’s hear it for painted spots and lines and for crowd control in general. If you’ve never felt unsafe in a crowd, lucky you. I have been terrified in crowds before, perhaps never more so than in an unsupervised crush at the very small, very expensive private school I was sent to as a child. You see, it doesn’t matter what kind of people are involved; if there is no order and no clarity, and you add in a little hysteria, a little noise, a little excitement, real danger can occur – even if the members of the crowd are all female, most of them bearing names such as Philippa and Felicity. Since that day I have always been alert to the risks of crowds, and have of course been at the centre of much larger and potentially more dangerous ones since – on the London Underground, on protest marches, after a concert. In all of those scenarios I have been viscerally aware of and hugely grateful for the time, the effort and the planning that other people have put into the process of keeping the members of that crowd safe. I would highly recommend that we show the same level of care and respect towards our children and the staff who are paid to look after them.

A glorious image of the Colosseum in Rome by Dario Veronesi on Unsplash

Can Chat GPT write in Latin?

I’m always a little bit behind the curve when it comes to technology. If you’re looking for future predictions, I am definitely not the person to come to. You’re looking at the woman who said that texting would never take off and who confidently remarked in 1998 that the internet “didn’t sound particularly useful.”

Fast-forward to the end of 1999 and I was surfing like a Californian, thanks to a fellow student on my PGCE course. He sat down next to me one day and issued a statement which – on honest reflection – may have had more impact on my life than anything I read in my 8 years at university. “I’ve discovered a great new Search Engine,” he said. “It’s called Google.”

Now I didn’t know what a Search Engine was and my knowledge of computers to date had extended to word-processing (remember WordPerfect?) and the use of a CD Rom. I had been given an email address, which one accessed by logging into Telnet and navigating a series of processes so tedious and clunky that I really couldn’t imagine why anyone would wish to make use of it. Then Matthew introduced me to Google and the rest, as they say, is history.

So this week – around 6 months after it was launched, I took a look at Chat GPT for the first time. For the uninitiated, Chat GPT is a free chatbot which utilises artificial intelligence. It was developed by a company called Open AI and launched into the world at the end of November 2022. In summary, you can ask it questions and it will answer them for you, drawing on the internet for information. So what’s different for the user from using a super-clever search engine such as Google, you may ask? (I certainly did). Well, Chat GPT will generate a lengthy response to your question, written in whatever style-register you ask it to mimic.

Chat GPT’s ability to produce complex and extended verbal responses in a particular vocal register has caused a great deal of consternation in education, with teachers realising just how easy it now is for students to ask their computer to produce an alarmingly convincing response to an essay question. A student can simply type their essay question into the system (“what were the causes of the First World War?”) and Chat GPT will generate an essay-style response. The more information you give the system, the better and more useful it will be to you. For example, you can give it a word limit and you can ask it to pitch its response at a particular kind of audience. The system has also caused some wry consternation and a bit of self-reflection amongst journalists, following the news that The Irish Post was forced to withdraw an Op Ed arguing that fake tan is racist; the article turned out to be AI-generated and was submitted as genuine by someone in an undeniably successful bid to make the editors at the publication look foolish. The article was titled Irish women’s obsession with fake tan is problematic and its opening line read “Dear Irish women, we need to talk about fake tan.” Well played, chatbot. Well played.

As so often, I do find myself being thankful that this kind of technology was not available to me when I was younger and learning how to construct an argument or write persuasively “the hard way” – by actually doing it myself. Where Chat GPT will take us in terms of the future of essay, speech and Op Ed writing as a skill and as a means of testing knowledge I have no idea. I’m jolly glad it’s not my problem. It’s all a little overwhelming and makes me want to lie down in a darkened room for a while. Perhaps I shall do so, and Chat GPT can finish the rest of this blog post for me.

Given the inescapable fact that Chat GPT and its ilk are here to stay, I dived in with some consternation but with also a little glimmer of excitement that I might be at the point of reliving my Google moment in 1999. Could Chat GPT be as life-changing as that discovery was? Well, I am here to tell you that the answer is potentially yes.

Given the truly abysmal state of Google Translate, I was highly dubious at the notion that Chat GPT could generate accurate Latin. Well, it can and it does. Moreover, you can give it perameters, which makes it fantastically useful as a teacher-tool. You can ask it to write you a passage of Latin based on a particular story and instruct it to make the passage suitable for GCSE candidates: for example, “I need a passage of Latin, around 100 words, suitable for GCSE students, based on the story of Claudius Pulcher”. It can do that! You can ask it to generate a series of sentences to practise a particular grammatical construction: for example, “write me 20 Latin sentences using the ablative absolute, suitable for GCSE students”. It can do that too!

One thing that I have not yet fully established is how to force it to use only the GCSE vocabulary, and this brings me to the biggest complaint that I (and others) have about Chat GPT in its current form: it presents incomplete, dubious or frankly false information with the confident swagger of a scruffy blond Etonian. It doesn’t tell you what it doesn’t know, and this – given the open availability of the system – is somewhat alarming. For example, when I asked it to create a passage suitable for GCSE candidates using only the OCR GCSE vocabulary list, it claimed to have done so. I pointed out that a particular word was not on the GCSE list. “Apologies!” it said. “Here is the passage again, with that corrected.” It then produced the passage again, with that word replaced by another one that was not on the GCSE list. I pointed this out also, and again the system responded in a manner that suggested it was fixing the error. I then pointed out several other words that were not on the list and eventually it admitted that it was not able to consult “outside sources” such as the OCR GCSE list. Hmmmm. By the way, before anyway thinks that I’ve lost it, I am fully aware that yes, I was having a conversation with a computer-generated entity: the weirdness of that does not escape me.

I discovered through colleagues on the Twitter hivemind that it was possible to put links into Chat GPT, so I gave it a link to the OCR GCSE list. I also tried experimenting with pasting the whole list into the the chat box and asking it to use only that vocabulary. The latter seems to generate the best results and – in terms of creating a series of practice sentences – pretty much solves the problem if you work within tight perameters; for example, ask it to generate some GCSE-level sentences practising adjectival agreement, and give it the adjectives on the GCSE vocabulary list. It still utlises a wide range of vocabulary when creating an extended passage, so a teacher would still require a knowledge of (or the patience to check) all of the words listed by OCR, or whatever other examination body you are working to.

As for the accuracy of the Latin? It is extraordinarily good. Given that I work with beginning students and candidates up to GCSE level, I grant you that I am not asking it to do anything overly complex, but this is still a giant leap from anything else we have seen in my lifetime. Some sentences I felt were a little unnatural and would wish to tweak, but grammatical errors are minimal. This is borderline miraculous given that up until now the best we have had has been Google Translate. Nothing prior to Chat GPT has been even bordering on accurate and therefore useful in any way.

So, can Chat GPT write in Latin? The answer is that it can. In the hands of an expert teacher it is going to be a genuinely brilliant tool that will save infinite amounts of time and will assist in the production of high-quality resources. Chat GPT will produce the bare bones of a worksheet in seconds, leaving the expert teacher free to develop, tweak, personalise and perfect their new resource. This is a genuine godsend. It has the potential to mean that every new resource a teacher writes will be better, for it will already have been through much of the fine-tuning process which normally relies on students acting as guinea pigs. In terms of the hours it will save us, I am still slightly in shock.

Defining your terms

This week I had a request from a client that made me reflect on how differently terms are used in different subjects, and how confusing this can be for all of us. At best it may mean that we are talking at cross purposes; at worst, it can mean focusing on areas that aren’t important, to the detriment of progress overall.

For much of my career I taught English language and English literature as subjects, as well as Latin. My first job indeed was advertised as “English with Latin” and for much of my career in schools around 50% of my timetable was filled with teaching English. It’s how one survives and earns one’s keep as a classroom teacher in a niche subject, especially in the state sector. English departments are always very large and always have a high turnover: consequently, there is always a little bit of room for you if you can offer it as a subject. This was how I was able to ring up a school which was advertising a very part-time Latin job and tell them that I needed a full-time job and could teach English up to GCSE. Did they have room for me in their school? Of course they did! Suddenly a role which was advertised as 0.4 became a full-time post overnight.

But back to defining our terms. Comprehension is an important skill in the subject English. Reading comprehension is used (for better or for worse) to test students’ ability to read and understand a lengthy passage of writing, extract key bits of information from it and assess its tone; they may also be asked to identify areas of bias or nuances which indicate the author’s viewpoint or opinion. Many students find comprehension remarkably difficult and as a strong reader myself I’ll be honest and say that I found this tricky to address; in my opinion, I was never a particularly brilliant English teacher because the material came so easily to me that I wasn’t very good at identifying the ways in which I could help those students for whom it was more of a struggle; Latin I had to work at, which makes me a better practitioner when it comes to teaching. But whatever my personal failings, there is no question that comprehension is a challenging and complex area in the teaching of English and it’s certainly a skill which students need to practise.

This, no doubt, is what led my client to request a focus on comprehension skills. But “comprehension” in Latin – by contrast to how this term is used in English – is an entirely different beast, certainly in the language paper at GCSE level. Students are not asked to sift a long passage for information, nor are they asked to identify connotations or empathise with the writer’s viewpoint. In Latin, the examiners direct the students to the information by quoting it, then basically ask them to translate what’s there. For example, the first sentence of a passage might be as follows:

Tarquinius erat rex Romanorum.
(Tarquinius was the king of the Romans).

The first “comprehension” question would then be:
Q1. Tarquinius erat rex Romanorum (line 1): who was Tarquinius? [2]

Not only does the examiner direct students to the relevant bit of the Latin by quoting it, they demand merely the ability to translate what’s in front of them. Comprehension is therefore not a complex skill which requires a great deal of repeated practice. Sometimes students need to be encouraged to take their time and ensure that they have written down everything that the mark scheme requires, but that is generalised exam technique – look at the number of marks and consider whether you have answered all aspects of the question. It’s not a unique skill in itself, like the process of comprehension is for students and teachers of English. Comprehension questions in the literature examination are also largely “say what you see” with the exception of those questions which ask about style – these, children do need repeated practice with. These areas I have addressed in more than one post in the past.

Another misconception which many people have is 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 bolt-on, it is the beating heart of how the language works. An extraordinary number of people will say when they get in touch with me that their child is “okay with translating” but “struggles with the grammar”. Sadly, this means that their translation will be based on guess work and indeed they may have got lucky to date – but as things get harder they will fall apart and find that they can comprehend very little of what’s in front of them.

Much of my sessions are spent asking students to justify their translation – when they tell me that rex Romanorum means “the king of the Romans” … was that a guess based on the fact that they know the vocabulary? Or can they identify the fact that Romanorum is genitive plural, which is why it translates as “of the Romans”? If they can’t do that, they will never be able to translate more complex sentences. My focus is therefore to present students with a variety of sentences using vocabulary that is familiar but to challenge them to identify and articulate the morphology and syntax that makes the translation work.

It is important to be able to explain to clients how our particular subject may differ from areas in which they may be quite an expert, so that they can make more informed decisions about how and why their child needs support and the best ways to provide this at home. Pretty much everyone I meet wants to support their children in their studies, and giving them concrete guidance on how they can do so is one of the many pleasures of tutoring.

It’s never too late when it comes to the grammar questions

Have I mentioned that this month is busy? For a few days it seemed like every time I picked up my smartphone there was a new message from an anxious parent seeking last-minute support for their child. GCSE Latin may be somewhat niche, but it is still sat by thousands of students across the UK every year, and many of them are feeling uprepared.

Last week I wrote about how many of the students that have approached me are woefully ill-informed about how to go about the process of learning their set text. We are rapidly hurtling towards a time when fixing this within the available time-frame will be a real challenge. Despite this, some students who have approached me for help only recently are rising to it; but their lives could have been made so much less stressful had they been taught these techniques in the first place and tested on the text regularly.

In the last week, however, I have been approached by students presenting with concerns across the whole specification. While at this stage it is not realistic to promise a dramatic turnaround, there are things that can be done to improve a student’s grade at this late stage. Many students present with concerns about the language paper, quoting a grade 3/4 in this element and a grade 7 in the literature. They express surprise when I tell them that more work on the literature might actually help them the most. At this stage, improving a child’s grade is little more than a numbers game. For example, if I can teach them some techniques which will help them to gain full marks in the 10-mark question (which is worth 20% of their literature grade and therefore 10% of their mark overall) I can make a difference. Students who know the text well should be able to achieve a grade 8/9 in the literature papers, which will pull up their overall result, even without any improvement in their language grade.

So is there anything that can be done at this late stage to improve a child’s performance in the language paper? Well, with five weeks to go, there is little to be gained by delving in and analysing how much basic grammar is missing from a student’s knowledge bank – that can’t be fixed in five weeks, especially given the plethora of other subjects that students are studying at GCSE: it’s not like they can dedicate the majority of time to their Latin. More realitically I can focus on one element of the examination and improve their performance in that. The easiest win is the grammar questions, worth 10% and gloriously predicatable.

I teach students a series of rules and show them dozens of past and practice papers one after the other, focusing entirely on this question; as a result, students are able to identify how predicatable the examiner tends to be and at this stage that can really help. It also empowers them by enabling them to understand the language used in the questions and to identify what it is that the examiner is looking for.

Most students, in my experience, have not been prepared well for this question and there’s a reason for that. Grammar questions are a relatively new thing at GCSE level. They were introduced to the syllabus in 2018 and most teachers saw them as an entirely new phenomenon. But grammar questions have been a feature of the Common Entrance syllabus for decades and guess what? Some of the same people involved in setting those are also involved at GCSE. If anything, the GCSE questions are easier – I would place them at between Level 1 and Level 2 at Common Entrance – Level 3 grammar questions go way beyond the expectations at GCSE. As someone who has tutored the Common Entrance for years, the “new” grammar questions introduced in 2018 looked entirely familiar to me and I was immediately able to predict how they would work. In addition, Taylor & Cullen have published a series of practice papers in their books that accompany the OCR GCSE, as well as further practice with the grammar questions. Teachers now have a minimum of 10 practice, specimen and past papers to model for them how the questions work – and they are consistently repetitive.

The best way to prepare students for this element of the examination is to show them as many examples as you can in quick succession – select just this part of each paper and do one after the other. That way, students are able to spot how certain words, phrases and expectations are repeated time and time again. I usually find that within two half-hour sessions I can take a child from one who was previously mystified as to what to do and guessing wildly to one who is able to score 8, 9 or – on a good day with the wind behind them – 10 out of 10 consistently on the grammar questions.

errare humanum est

How children respond to making a mistake is very telling. Working closely in a one-to-one situation with lots of different young people has really started to make me think about the psychology of erring and how an individual’s response to it can be a powerful indicator of their resilience and their potential for success – both academically and in terms of their emotional welfare.

I should stress at the outset that none of my personal observations are truly evidence-based; I work with lots of youngsters, but my reflections are no more than a series of anecdotes. However, my thoughts have sent me off on a bit of a whistlestop tour of what the research does say. For example, a child’s age radically affects their ability to cope with making mistakes and receiving feedback on them; younger children are much less able to cope with negative feedback and require more overt positivity and reassurance. However, recent research supports the notion that making mistakes is crucial to the learning process, and that setting the bar high is more productive in terms of learning outcomes. Yet children will not benefit from this if their response to making mistakes is riddled with anxiety or other negative emotions, and it is this insecapable fact which led to the popularity of the concept of growth mindset in schools; unfortunately, the longterm results show either no benefits or only very small incremental benefits for all the money and time that has been hurled into the concept.

Like many proven concepts in psychology, the truth about growth mindset is not greatly surprising: children with what could be described as a growth mindset – in other words, with the resilience that enables them not only to cope with making mistakes but to learn from them – these children do better in school overall. Well, duh. I’m not sure this is news to anybody. However, what happened in response to this proven research, inevitably, was a rush to develop and advocate for strategies through which schools could encourage a growth mindset in all children. Now, let’s be realitic. Of course, schools can model and encourage a growth mindset in students, but they’re never going to radically adjust the psychology of every individual sat in front of them; pretending that this is possible is part of the pressure that is driving teachers out of their jobs. Let us be clear: the model that children see at home is, always has been and always will be more powerful than what is modelled for them in school.

The observations I have been making about how children react to mistakes are something I am still pondering about. I have yet to meet a child with a truly mature response to the process and I don’t expect to – that maturity comes (if you’re lucky) during adulthood. But I think I can spot the ones that are already on their way there and the ones that I am concerned may struggle along the way.

The clients that worry me the most are the ones that immediately apologise for every error they make. If a child’s response to an academic mistake or misjudgement or mis-recollection is that it is something they need to apologise for, I can only imagine the psychological strain that this places upon them on a daily basis. The feedback loop is essential to study and the process of learning, and I have yet to find a way that reassures such children that this is the case, to the extent that they stop apologising. No matter how much reassurance they are given, no matter how well they are doing, such children will – in my experience to date – continue to apologise for errors. It concerns me greatly for their wellbeing, never mind the limitations that it may place on their longterm ability to learn.

At the other end of the scale are the children who won’t accept they have made a mistake. This too, I suspect, may stem from anxiety. The child will go to endless lengths to tell you why what they said is not wrong, or is the same thing as what you said, or is what they meant in the first place. For some children, granted, this can just be a bit of fun – I have one very high-achieving client who likes to be flippant and retort “same thing” when I tweak his translation; he knows and I know that he’s having a joke with me and will in fact file the correct answer for future reference. But I have met a handful of children who will tie themselves up in knots before they will admit that something is wrong, so desperate are they to avoid the suggestion. One problem with this is that so much learning time is wasted; a more serious concern is that their reaction to the situation belies a level of anxiety about making mistakes that will hold them back in the longterm.

A reaction I have noticed among some high-achievers is what I call self-policing. These students will wail “why on earth did I say that?!” when they make a small slip – they are hyper-aware when their mistake is a minor slip of the tongue, perhaps due to rushing, and they flagillate themselves for it mercilessly. Interestingly, such children are very concerned by minor errors, but deal much better with the process of puzzling out more challenging tasks, in which they expect to make mistakes and learn from them. I find this fascinating. Of course, we all have the urge to tick ourselves off when we do something that we perceive to be foolish, but I have found myself pondering recently whether something more complex is going on. Many of these sorts of children are in very high-achieving schools and/or come from families with high expectations. Are they used to being pounced on when they say something foolish? I remember a colleague who had worked in one of the most academically high-octane boys’ schools in the country telling me that the boys had a particular word that they would all shout in a chorus when another boy “said something stupid”. I absolutely cringed. What an awful learning environment for children, and what a dreadful place that must have been to teach. To what extent, I wonder, do such places contribute to an inability to face up to one’s own mistakes, when blustering and denial seems an infinitely safer option?

But here is the good news. A genuinely surprising number of students deal with mistakes superbly and every time I observe this I want to grab their parents and hug them. Do they realise, I wonder, what a great job they must have done in those formative years? Do they know just what a difference it will make to their child’s longterm wellbeing and their ability to learn? When a child is able to say “aha! Yes, I see that.” Or “ooh, so why is that wrong?” Or even “hang on, didn’t you say x earlier?” which will then help us to uncover a misconception or confusion or exception or false friend or other glitch in the matrix of learning. Such children feel the advantages of tutoring the most, for they are able to access its benefits face-on and without fear.

As a passionate tutor, I try to guide all my students towards this approach by helping them to develop this mindset and attitude towards their studies. But for some it comes naturally, for others I will always be fighting the tide of their previous experiences, their anxieties, their beliefs about themselves and their ability to learn, the way that they have been spoken to or had situations modelled for them by a myriad of family members, friends and teachers throughout all the challenges that they have faced so far. But the more I think about it, the more I come to believe that a child’s attitude towards mistakes is central to their potential for progress (and indeed central to their happiness and wellbeing), so it is something I shall continue to give a great deal of thoughtful energy to.