teaching – Page 3 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Is it really too easy?

One of the many joys of tutoring is the time and space it affords you to check out whether a student understands basic concepts. This does not only mean basic academic concepts, such as the differnce between the subject and the object; it also means looking at some of the ostensibly simplest sorts of questions on the exam papers and making sure that they know how to go about them.

Teachers of Latin GCSE are under enormous pressure to get through the syllabus content in the time they have available. Latin classes – certainly in state schools – often start from a position of disadvantage, having already had a limited number of teaching hours at Key Stage 3; some GCSE classes even start ab initio. The exam board then demands that a huge amount of complex material is covered, including a ludicrous amount of real Latin literature. The reality of this means that class minutes are at a premium, and teachers will move rapidly over basic concepts and may even assume that simple questions are understood and do not require practice. Often, as a direct result of this, key marks are lost due to small misconceptions or a lack of clarity in a student’s mind when it comes to how to approach such questions.

This week I finally got around to reading the Examiners’ Report from 2023 and their comment on the derivatives question really leapt out at me. It said, “this question is designed to be accessible to candidates of all abilities, and most scored at least 2 marks.” Personally, I find this utterly delusional on the part of the examiners. How, pray tell, is a question accessible to all candidates when it relies on a breadth of literacy and general knowledge not covered in the syllabus itself? And how is a score by many of 50% on this question indicative that it was indeed accessible? The comment is simply astonishing and I’m afraid it betrays yet again how out of touch the world of Classics is with reality. I have worked with a variety of students who have been scuppered by the derivatives question and their struggle is due to one or more of the following reasons:

Students do not know their Latin vocabulary well enough to be able to access the question. You can’t come up with a viable derivative if you don’t know what the Latin word means. This is more complex than it perhaps sounds, as the word is often presented in a form that is different from the one they have learnt e.g. dabat from the verb do), meaning that candidates who find the subject challenging will probably struggle to recognise it.
Students are EAL (English as an Acquired Language) and lack the breadth of English necessary to succeed in this question. They may be performing outstandingly well in the subject, but they have not yet come across the word regal or sedentary.
Students do have English as their first language but are not widely read, meaning that they struggle to come up with derivatives; they might recognise one when it’s pointed out to them, but they find it difficult to reach for one. This means that students for whom reading is modelled and encouraged at home are at a huge advantage, which is one of the main reasons why the examiners’ assertion that this question is “accessible” really grinds my gears.
Students have simply not been taught how to approach this question, or if they have been shown how they have not practised it at length. Teachers rarely spend a significant amount of time doing so because they assume (like the examiners do) that the question is easy. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, it may be time they do not have. In my experience to date, the best schools practise deivations from the very beginning of Key Stage 3, and this is certainly the best way to embed the knowledge for GCSE.

Some students really do have no problem with the derivatives question, and when that’s the case I leave them to it. These students are always highly literate and usually well-read. Unlike them, many students need to be shown multiple examples of derivatives and time needs to be invested in guiding them through the vocabulary list looking for such derivatives – the examiners even recommend this in their notes, yet still cling to the delusion that this question is highly accessible. Believe me, any question that cannot be done without detailed, explicit, one-to-one guidance from an expert is not accessible; teachers do not have time on the curriculum to prep for this question adequately.

Another question that many teachers lack the time to focus on and tend to assume the students will cope with just fine is the 10-marker in the literature papers. Because the question is open-ended and requires no knowledge of the Latin, this question really is accessible in the sense that even students who have struggled with the material should be able to do it; I say “should” because once again there is some guidance required. Students tend to apply what they have been taught about answering other types of questions (even in other subjects) to the 10-marker and this can lead them down the wrong path; answers need to be full of quotations/references but not to the Latin, to the text in translation. There is also no requirement for detailed analysis. I have written about this in more detail here. The 10-mark question makes up 20% of each literature exam: that means it makes up 10% of a student’s entire result – way more than the difference between two grades. It’s definitely worth spending some time on!

It’s a real joy as a tutor to be able to dive into the basics and make sure that students are well-prepared for what they face when it comes to exam time. Questions that the examiners and teachers assume are easy usually are so once you know how to approach them, but it’s that assumed knowledge that I’m interested in. Once a student has been gifted with said knowledge, that’s when they can start to fly.

Invested in Education?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair

Full disclosure: I’d never heard of Upton Sinclair until I read this quotation. I first came across the remark when reading about the literacy crisis in America. I had already listened to the eye-opening podcast Sold a Story and was appalled at what I had heard. I then started looking at some of the debates happening online around how reading is taught in the US and how this has been dominated for so long by methods that don’t work effectively, but which make certain authors and publishers a great deal of money. The notion that anyone could push an idea in education purely for monetary gain seemed so appalling that I found myself wondering whether it could possibly be true.

Spolier alert: it is entirely possible. However, like most things in life, I think it’s a little more complicated than pure greed. Sinclair is absolutely right that people will continue to advocate for a bad idea to sustain their income, but I do cling to the notion that they probably have a personal investment in the idea that goes beyond the financial. Their self-worth, their self-belief and sometimes their very identity can be at stake. It’s jolly difficult to admit that you might have been mistaken about something that you’ve made your life’s work. Add to this the fact that – as Sinclair puts it – your “salary depends” on not being mistaken, then the process of enlightenment becomes close to impossible.

I have changed my mind about a range of things during my 21 years as a classroom teacher. What I believed to be the case when I started turned out to be wrong, and this is not because I became a cynic or “gave up on my principles” – quite the opposite. Changing your mind is challenging. The principles I have stuck to have been to follow the evidence of what is best for the majority of children. When I have been presented with overwhelming evidence that my approach towards doing something is less effective than someone else’s, then I have been willing to change my approach. I let go of my beliefs in the face of the evidence and I am a better teacher for it. Sadly, this seems to be an unusual attitude and I am constantly disappointed by how determindly people hold onto their beliefs against all the evidence. It seems to me that a lot of people care more about following their ideology than they do about genuinely doing what’s right; anything that seems to jar with their worldview frightens them so much that they’d genuinely rather avoid it, even when the evidence suggests that it helps learners more, or lifts a greater number of people out of poverty.

Even Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced and now struck-off consultant paediatrician, who first penned the now-discredited studies claiming a potential link between autism and the MMR vaccine, believed in what he was doing at the outset. Since then, having moved to America and been welcomed with open arms by the “anti-vax” lobbyists across the pond, doubling down on his beliefs rather than accepting the overwhelming scientific evidence that they were incorrect is by far the more attractive path for him to take. Why roll back on a position that’s making you a fortune? He will never change his mind – why would he?

It would probably shock most people to know just how much the education system has been at the mercy of snake-oil sellers and woo-merchants over the last 30 years. Some of it is still ongoing. In my time in schools I have sat through talks on such unscientific nonsense as Brain Gym, learning styles and the left-brain-right-brain “theory”. All of these sessions were run by “educational advisors” that the school had paid to train us. The waste of tax-payers’ money paying these people – whether they were well-meaning and deluded or outright fraudsters – makes me want to weep. Worse than this, however, is the thought that this money has not just been wasted, it has actively harmed the education of hundreds of thousands of children; teachers have been directly taught misinformation about how the brain works and about how children learn, at the expense of the wealth of genuine information that there is out there through cognitive science. If I think about it too much, it’s not good for my blood pressure.

I would love to think, with the advent of grassroots movements such as ResearchED giving ordinary teachers the confidence to push back against the tide of quackery, that the days of such cynical peddling are over. Sadly, we are not quite there yet. Just this week, with examination boards purportedly considering a shift to examinations being done on computers instead of by hand, there are the usual string of ed-tech salesmen rubbing their hands with glee. The amount of money that schools have wasted on tech over the years makes me feel quite ill. In the 21 years I spent in the classroom, I saw the arrival of the first interactive SmartBoard in one, lived through their proliferation in every classroom in every school, and lasted long enough to see the majority of them ripped out again, replaced by ordinary whiteboards. Each one of those SmartBoards originally cost a couple of thousand pounds and they all ended up in a skip – not because they were replaced by superior technology, but because most teachers realised that they were unncessary, unwieldy and impractical to use in the classroom.

There isn’t a week that goes by when I don’t think of Sinclair and his insightful observation. In terms of education, all we can do is continue to empower teachers to question everything that they are asked to do. My mantra in my last few years was “show me the evidence”. I know he’s a controversial figure for many, but Richard Dawkins writes so well and has a talent for wordsmithery that far exceeds mine. In his wonderful letter to his 10-year-old daughter, he concludes as follows: “What can we do about all this? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: ‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.“

Poking and fussing

Do you ever wonder whether we’ve somewhat lost our way when it comes to the purpose of education?

When I decided to become a teacher, it was made clear to me back in 1999 that my role would be complex. Given the trend back then for group work and making lessons fun, the role of the teacher had become somewhat synonymous with the purported aims of the BBC: to educate, inform and entertain, not necessarily in that order. Beyond that, it was also made clear to me in 1999 that I would have numerous responsibilities that blurred the line between education and social work, and none of them were unreasonable. Teachers – particularly primary school teachers – spend a huge amount of time with a large number of individual children every day; as a result, teachers are without question some of the best-placed adults to notice when there are concerns to be had, when a child’s demeanour changes or their health declines. I took my duty of care very seriously and regularly reported safeguarding concerns; the ability to raise such concerns anonymously, with more experienced experts who took me seriously and followed up on them, is something I miss greatly about being in a school.

The overwhelming majority of teachers take their safeguarding responsibilities extremely seriously. Nobody goes into teaching with the belief that they will be nothing but an academe, pouring knowledge into the minds of the young with no thought given to their health, their personality, their family situation or what might be going on inside their head. Teaching is a constant dialogue between adults and the young, and our empathy with and understanding of a wide variety of issues that may be holding a child back in their learning is crucial. But let us remind ourselves that what we are there to do is to impart learning. We are not there to solve all of society’s problems, from knife crime to nutrition.

In the last decade or so, and most particularly during and after the pandemic, schools have been expected to take up the slack for every single failing in society: for the failings of government, for the failings of under-funded health services, for the failings of over-stretched social services and sometimes – let’s not be afraid to say it – for the failings of parents. Parenthood is hard – incredibly hard – and not everybody is acing it; but teachers are not parents to the children in their care and they cannot – nor should they be asked to – replace that role.

I hesitate to make political predictions as I am notoriously bad at it and if the last few years have taught us anything it should be to prepare for surprise. That said, it seems likely that we will have a change of government at the next General Election, and it seems likely that the new ruling party will be Labour. This means that what the Labour party said about education at its recent conference becomes potentially more important and relevant than the Conversatives’ blustering about mobile phones (already banned in most decent schools) and maths up to the age of 18 (where they will find the teachers yet to be confirmed). But the Labour party’s pledge to bring in “supervised tooth brushing” for primary school children aged 3 to 5 caught my attention and got me wondering about what they think teachers are for. It also got me wondering whether any of them have ever set foot in a primary school, never mind stayed there for any length of time.

As one primary school teacher on the platform formerly known as Twitter pointed out, teachers have already experienced what it is like when they are asked to supervise hand-washing on a massive scale, when there was a big focus on this during the pandemic. “I remember getting the children to wash their hands at the sink during covid. It took an hour and they missed learning … My TA had to supervise them instead of support children. And that was a class of Y6 children. I can’t imagine how long it would take to shepherd 4 & 5 year olds through the process. This policy has not been suggested by anyone with experience of primary.” Her comments were in answer to someone who claimed that supervised tooth-brushing “would only take a few minutes”. Several primary school teachers responded, with comments like “30 very young children. Probably only one sink. Cleaning the cup after each child. Making sure each child has their toothbrush. At least 50% won’t like the toothpaste … I could go on and on.” My personal favourite was the one who pointed out the problems that would arise from all the spitting. Covid hygiene? Whatever. All in all, the discussion was (or should have been) an eye-opener for anyone who does not work with large groups of children on a daily basis, especially the little ones. You may (I hope) have supervised your own child’s toothbrushing at home. This is not the same as trying to do it with a class of 30.

The British Dental Association has stated that it is “encouraged” by Labour’s proposal, but I feel more than a little despair. As one teacher put it “it’s a sticking plaster for a gaping wound. Babies have teeth. We need NHS dentists, breastfeeding support groups at doctors surgeries, 0-4 family centres. Teachers have an educational role but they’re outsourcing it to us because they don’t want to fund the real support needed.” Absolutely. And it has to stop. Given the amount of time that every primary school teacher knows realistically that this tooth-brushing regime will take, what would people like those teachers to do less of to make it happen? Less supervised play? Fewer handwriting skills? Ditch basic numeracy? You choose.

For me, the suggestion sums up the tangible lack of respect that politicians have for the teaching profession. Teachers are treated as punching bags by all the major parties, belittled and taken for granted across the board. The profession is haemorraghing staff at an alarming rate and to this date not one single political party has taken any kind of frank look at this. Any pledge to “recruit more teachers” falls far short of what’s required, when we know that currently one third of teachers are quitting the profession within five years. It costs a lot of money to train a teacher, so a proper focus on how we retain them – not recruit them – would save the country a fortune.

Readers around my age may recognise the title of this post as a quotation from Pam Ayres’ I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth, a poem which pretty much every child my age was told to learn off by heart at some point during their time in primary school. “Poking and fussing” (or – more accurately – “pokin’ and fussin'”) is how tooth-brushing seemed to Ayres as a young child. For me, it’s a rather good description of the approach taken by politicians towards education.

The problem with homework

Self-directed study remains one of the most insurmountable barriers to success for most young people. For many of them, their first introduction to this process is homework. The very concept of homework in state schools is quite modern and seems to have been an expectation pushed in grammar schools rather than in secondary moderns. According to a survey of male pupils carried out by the Central Advisory Council for Education in 1947, 98% of boys in grammar schools received homework regularly, compared to a figure of just 29% of boys in a secondary modern setting. (The fact that this research was carried out into boys only tells you even more about the attitudes towards education at the time – liberals were starting to care about what happened to boys from lower-income backgrounds, but girls didn’t matter full stop). A fascinating booklet published in 1937 by the Board of Education reveals that the government were looking into the issue of homework and evidences firstly that it was on the increase in state schools and secondly that this was not popular; there is notable evidence that homework was used as a punishment rather than as something which was designed to support learning.

Homework remains a controversial issue in modern school settings and some teachers eschew its usage altogether; some educationalists believe that homework advantages those students with greater support at home and puts unnecessary pressure on those without the resources to facilitate it. Certainly, if a child is sharing a room with younger siblings or is in a multiple-occupancy household, and/or if that child has caring responsibilities, committing to any kind of study outside of their compulsory schooling can be a huge challenge. Interestingly, however, I have become increasingly aware of just how unsupported even the most affluent children can be when it comes to self-directed study. They may have all the facilities in the world, but they may not have any idea of how to go about their work. Unless the adults at home have a wealth of time and patience to offer their children, homework and self-directed study can become a real pinch point for families and can severely impair a child’s educational performance.

If I could convince parents of one thing that would make a difference to their child’s educational outcomes it would be this: most people drastically overestimate their child’s maturity when it comes to self-directed study. This includes their child’s ability to self-regulate, their capacity to self-motivate and their fundamental understanding of how to learn. None of this should be surprising given that most adults still have a very poor knowledge and understanding of how humans learn. Many people are still influenced by long-since debunked research on “learning styles” or similiar dangerous mutations and edu-myths that simply will not die; they remain wedded to the idea that the way their child learns is somehow unique, and that the child must discover the best ways of doing so for thesmelves. The reality is that we know more than we ever did about how humans learn things, and there is a wealth of advice out there about how to do so; most people simply don’t take it on board. With this in mind, what follows is a summative reminder of the advice that I give on a regular basis and provide for all parents who wish to support their child with learning.

1. Testing:

Even if your child thinks that they don’t know something, the first thing you should do is test them. I know that might seem strange, but the process of testing forces the brain to concentrate. Just staring at a word and its meaning won’t work; to succeed at memorisation, your child needs to engage with the process and the easiest way to make them do so is to start testing them. This is because memory is the residue of thought (Daniel T. Willingham): in other words, to remember something you have to think about it actively on muptiple occasions.

2. Small amounts, little and often:
This is absolutely crucial. If your child’s Latin teacher has set 30 words for them to learn over one week, they will need to tackle the task repeatedly. While for most homeworks they may be able to sit down and tick them off as done after an hour’s blitz, vocabulary learning should be done in short bursts: take 5-10 minutes once or twice a day and spend that time testing. Start with 10 words. Then later that day or on the next day, return to those 10, adding another 5 words on top. Then repeat those 15 words, adding another 5 and so on. By the end of the week they should be confident. Why so much repetition? There is a reason, and here it is …

3. Spaced learning:
When you rote-learn something quickly, you forget it pretty quickly too. But do not despair! The process of well-spaced repetition strengthens the links your brain has made with what it is learning and lengthens the retention. If a child does their vocabulary homework in one sitting, one week later they will have completely wasted their time. Instead, they should do it in short, spaced-out bursts, with “forgetting time” in between; this way they will spend around the same amount of time in total but their recall will be close to perfect. As a child gains confidence, you should extend the length of the spaces and ultimately you should revisit material that has not been covered for quite some time – days, weeks, months later.

4. Make intelligent use of flashcards:
Flashcards are an outstanding tool when it comes to vocabulary learning. You can use the traditional method of physical cards or an online version, which has the advantage of speed and efficiency. Personally, I am a huge fan of Quizlet, and your child already has access to my flashcards on there. What do I mean by intelligent use of them? Well …

Firstly, do not let your child spend hours making them look pretty, especially not drawing lovely pictures all over them. The use of images on flashcards actually has close to zero impact on students’ ability to learn vocabulary, which can turn into a ridiculous game of “say what you see.” For example, if I showed you the Latin word “femina” with a cartoon picture of a woman next to it, I’ll place a bet you’d be able to tell me that the word means “woman”. But what have you learned? Frankly, nothing. You’ve recognised a picture of a woman, which a two-year-old can do. Much better to discuss the meaning of the word “feminine” with your child and fix the Latin word in their head through the understanding of derivatives (of which more below).

Secondly, make sure that your child is definitely using the flashcards to test themselves (a process called retrieval), not to reassure themselves through recognition. Research shows that one of the most common mistakes students tend to make is to turn the cards over too swiftly; this way, students become convinced that they know the meanings of the words when in fact they are merely recognising the answers – and it can be surprisingly difficult for students to discipline themselves out of this habit, which is why you should help them. Make sure that you’re supporting them at least some of the time by controlling the turnover of the cards. Talk to them about flipping the cards too swiftly and make sure they’re aware of this tendency.

Thirdly, another temptation for students is to keep testing themselves on the familiar words (we all like to feel comfortable!) Remember, flashcards are a tool to help someone to learn the words they don’t know, so separate out the ones that your child has gained confidence with and spend longer on the ones they are struggling to recognise. This can be done on Quizlet by marking up cards with a yellow star (top right-hand corner of each card). That said, another mistake students make is to overestimate their level of confidence with words they have recently learned, so make sure you revisit the “no problem” pile a couple of times before you decide that the words have really stuck in your child’s longterm memory.

Finally, shuffle the deck. This is hugely important. The brain works by mapping links between the things that it is learning; as a result, it has a strong tendency to remember things in order, so the danger with learning several words at once is your child will remember them only in order. You should constantly shuffle the deck to ensure that this isn’t happening, or your child will never recognise the words out of context. On Quizlet this can be done by hitting the “shuffle” button in the bottom right-hand corner of the flashcard deck.

5. Focus on derivatives.
Not only does this help with vocabulary learning, it will develop your child’s knowledge and understanding of their own language and any other language(s) that they are learning. Furthermore, it will consolidate their learning because their brain will be linking its newfound knowledge to prior and future learning – and this all helps with its innate mapping skills.

All of the above requires time, energy and effort from a caring adult. I am acutely aware that this is a lot to ask and that for some people it will simply be too much for them. However, if you are able to dedicate yourself to the process, your child’s learning journey will be made infinitely easier and they will develop the habits and routines that will set them up for success in their studies later in life.

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.