teaching – Page 5 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Sick bugs and toxic policies

This week, I’ve been thinking about illness and absence. As someone who has entered the post-pandemic trend of working from home, I feel remarkably cushioned from the winter bugs currently circulating. By this time of the year, as a full-time teacher, I would have been hit by at least one virus, maybe two. I worked in a building filled with over a thousand teenagers and around one hundred adults. The results were inevitable.

The news is currently filled with the tangible threat of being in such close proximity with others. It seems unsurprising that cohorts of children, who have spent a significant part of their formative years in lockdown, are now experiencing a surge in both viral and bacterial infections, a spike in cases which might otherwise have been spread out over the last two years. I have around 30 online clients who are under 18 and every single one of them has been suffering with something over the last few weeks – even those who are home-schooled, since they live with siblings who attend school and bring the bugs home. It’s simply unavoidable.

One of the few positives that I hoped would arise out of the recent pandemic was a shift in attitude away from dogged presenteeism and towards a more pragmatic approach towards what it means to keep your colleagues and your schoolmates safe and healthy. The schools I have worked in were as guilty as most when it came to dolling out awards for 100% attendance, something which has always made me acutely uncomfortable.

My own attendance record as a colleague was excellent, but something which colleagues will not have known about me was that my school attendance as a child was absolutely dire. Percentages weren’t recorded in the 1980s with the same zeal as with which they are now, but I would guess that my attendance hovered at 70-80% – well into the “danger zone” by modern standards. I have no desire to bore you with the reasons in detail, but suffice to say I was in and out of hospitals a lot plus I was – to be frank – just a sickly child. If I got something, I got it with bells on, and I usually lost several kilos in weight during the process. All in all it was not a happy time – for me, or for my family.

Thankfully, in recent years there has been some pushback from professionals against the use of attendance awards, with several high-profile voices in education raising the obvious point that they are discriminatory. This is especially true of awards which pool the results of a group or a cohort, thereby harnessing the toxic influence of peer pressure. A student such as I was, with complex medical issues leading to unavoidable absences from school combined with what amounted to a string of bad luck, would have been hammered mercilessly by the modern system. Not only that, but the students who are the real targets – you know, the ones who could definitely do with getting their tails into school a little more often – remain markedly unmoved by the whole system.

It never ceases to amaze me just how much schools somehow convince themselves that their rhetoric and pressure-systems will have any effect whatsoever on the miscreants they are supposedly aimed at. As it happens, my oldest friend was one of those miscreants. She was perfectly fit and healthy but managed to attend school rather less frequently than I did. She just didn’t like school (or at least, she didn’t that particular school, a sentiment with which I have some sympathy). And yet, when our maths teacher lost her cool with my friend, and let it slip one day in front of the entire class that she was nicknamed “the part-timer” in the staff room, she embraced the title like a badge of honour. I still throw the so-called insult at her occasionally, and it still makes us both laugh nearly 40 years later. The very notion that she would buck her ideas up and attend school more often as a result of this gibe is utterly laughable to anyone who remembers what it was like to be a teenager. Why on earth would she have cared? Get real, Mrs Rutherford. Yes, I remember you.

Of course, attendance is important. But it is unrealistic to think that our pathetic attempts to maniupulate the teenage mind is having any effect on the Ferris Buellers of this world. More than this, our heavy-handed systems are indeed having an effect: they are pressurising the most anxious of students to attend school when they shouldn’t. I can name countless students over the years who dragged themselves into school when they should have been at home in bed. Not only was this detrimental to their own health, it was detrimental to the rest of us who were exposed to their viruses. Even worse than this, I have known students distressed that their attendance record might be affected by their presence at a family funeral or arising from otherwise distressing circumstances. This is madness. And it’s our fault. Presenteeism is a horrible curse upon the dutiful, the well-behaved, the sensitive and the anxious child – and that’s before we even return to the issue of students who suffer from underlying medical conditions or disabilities which require regular medical attention and/or intervention. By contrast, it has no impact whatsoever on young Ferris.

As if these systems being used on children were not bad enough, many of us on EduTwitter were made aware this week of a school which has been marking its staff’s identity badges according to whether that member of staff had achieved 100% attendance at work. The justification for this was that it would “raise a great opportunity for staff to start conversations with students about the importance of attendance.” Not only was I blown away by what a spectacularly toxic thing this is to do to your staff, I once again found myself thinking of the vanishingly small handful of staff that this policy is (presumably) aimed at.

Come on, admit it. We’ve all worked with at least one or two of them in our time; the one whose name appears on the cover sheet with such glorious regularity that it becomes a kind of performance art. But will they be shamed by a policy like this? I guarantee you that they will not – they certainly weren’t shamed by me covering their lesson for the umpteenth time in a term, so I fail to see why anything so prosaic would make a difference to their attitude. Once again, we have a system which punishes the dutiful and fails to address the actual problem. Poor attendance by individuals (a rarity in schools in my experience, but something which does occur on occasion) is something which needs tackling directly, frankly and robustly by SLT; manufacturing a shaming system for every staff member that falls foul of this year’s worst winter virus is heartless in the extreme.

When it comes to both staff and students in schools, we need to stop idolising the notion of “in at all costs” for the costs are too great – costs to the sick individual and costs to the community. If your child is ill, they should be at home. They should also make a conscious and proactive effort to catch up on their return. Schools should have an effective and workable cover policy, one which leans towards usage of set work and does not pressurise the sick individual to be sitting at their laptop at 4.30am writing cover sheets (which I have done in my time). Schools also need to face up to the fact that policies need to focus on making life less comfortable for the individuals that do make a habit of their absence – not introduce shaming systems which will harm members of the team who are trying their hardest.

Don’t mock the afflicted

Something which has struck me this year is the huge variation between schools when it comes to handling their mock examinations. Some schools have set them in November, some in December, some in January. Some schools have provided infinite details and guidance as to what the examinations will contain, some have not. Some of my tutees didn’t even know how many examinations they were due to have in each subject and on which topics, although I am hyper-aware that teenagers are not always the most reliable of sources! It is always interesting to ponder just how accurate a reflection of reality I am receiving from the outside …

Mock examinations are important to schools for a number of reasons. As a general rule, they are considered to be an indicator as to whether a student is on target to achieve their predicted grade, although the jury is still very much out on the accuracy of this process. Most schools put their staff through an agony of results analysis, with students being flagged or colour-coded as to whether they are on, above or below target. Sometimes this coding is even passed on to the students. I have heard of schools that hand out the results on colour-coded paper: green for on/above target, amber for close to but below target, red for well below. Apparently it can make for some very interesting reactions, when students who might otherwise have been pleased or distressed at their results were shown them in the context of how they were performing against their targets.

Personally, I don’t like target grades, as I feel that they categorise children unfairly and set up a mindset that is not always helpful. Students with very high targets can feel overwhelmed by the pressure, students with lower ones can feel like the system doesn’t believe in them. So in my eutopia we wouldn’t have them at all. I once met a Headtacher who worked in an outstanding school with outstanding results. They gave every child the same target – to get as far above the pass grade as they could.

One disadvantage of mock examinations is the amount of curriculum time that is eaten up by the very process of examining, a factor which led directly to the demise of the AS/A2 system at Key Stage 5 – losing most of the summer of Year 12 to an examination period was considered simply too costly. In Year 11, however, the mock examination period is mercifully short, with most schools cramming all of their examinations into a two-week or three-week window. The price is paid by the students and by the staff, who face a very intense time during that period.

But, despite the gruelling nature of the winter exam-sprint, mock examinations are truly essential for Year 11 students. In many schools this is the one and only time that students experience a practice run of what it will be like to sit their final papers in the summer; many schools don’t have the physical space to facilitate formal examinations for all year groups, so it’s really important for Year 11 to get this one real chance at experiencing what it is like to line up as a year group according to a designated seating plan, file into the room in examination conditions and sit a series of examinations, one after the other. Students experience what it’s like to receive formal instructions from the Examinations Officer, to be told to hand in their mobile phones and check their pockets for banned materials (pretty much everything), to have to have their equipment in an appropriate clear container and to surrender any equipment that is more modern than an analogue timepiece.

All of the above can create tension for students, but it is hugely important for them to experience the process so that they know what to expect in the summer. It can be a real balancing act for schools to create the right atmosphere – just the right amount of gravitas so that students experience the seriousness of the real thing, without sending the entire year group into a state of controlled (or, even worse, uncontrolled) panic.

One of the things which students struggle the most with when it comes to their first experience of examinations is timing, and this is indeed one of the many reasons why mocks are so important. There’s nothing like the full experience of being in a large exam hall and having to work to timed conditions to make you realise that this is something that you need to practise, practise and practise again. There is no point in working on exam-style questions if you are not doing so in timed conditions – in fact, I would argue that doing so could potentially be damaging in the long-run; if a student gets used to tackling a question over a longer period of time, they’re going to struggle to adjust their performance to what is required in the final paper. This is why it’s important to practise things under time pressure from the very beginning.

But mock examinations are more than just an opportunity to experience “the real thing”. They are (or should be) an opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. Teachers expect some students to read the paper wrong, to answer the wrong section, to tackle too many questions or not enough. The point is that they get to experience the impact of this and learn how important it is to approach each paper in the right way. Beyond that, they also get to dissect their performance in detail and (in an ideal world) receive thorough, individualised feedback from their teacher. The mock examinations should highlight areas of weakness and shine a light on the skills which need honing and improvement.

So what of the worst case scenario? A student totally bombs in the mocks? Well, even that’s not a disaster. I have seen students turn things around in a manner that I might not have believed possible had I not seen it with my own eyes. A real stinker of a performance in an examination can even be the catalyst that some students need to get them focused – if no amount of their teachers or their parents telling them to buck their ideas up has worked, then sometimes totally crashing down to earth with truly disastrous grade can be the ticket.

So do not despair. We have around six months until the final examinations in the summer. That’s more than a quarter of the curriculum time remaining. Time to re-group and time to focus. Success may be closer than you think.

Reinventing the wheel?

This week I’ve been thinking about resources. On my never-ending list of Things To Do has been the project of sourcing or creating some more GCSE-style language practice papers that won’t risk wrecking a school’s assessment process. It is crucially important to me not to use actual past papers from the current specification, unless I know for a fact that the child I am working with has already been exposed to that particular paper in examination conditions. The risk of me inadvertantly showing them a paper that will then be used for in-class assessment or – even worse – for their Mock examination, is simply too high. Much as my students would I am sure be delighted to have an advance stab at their Mock paper with a tutor’s guidance, this would be unforgiveable and would entirely undermine the purpose of the Mock.

As a result of this personal rule, I use a bank of papers that I created from the old legacy GCSE to give my students more practice. Prior to the specification change in 2018, dozens of examination papers existed that could be made to fit the new specification with some relatively minor tweaks. I have around 10 or 12 of these already, which I made several years ago, but I have always wanted more.

As so often happens, once I put my mind to it, I found that I had a folder of stuff I had sourced from heaven knows where and saved into my “look at this at some point when you’ve got time” folder – a folder which is pretty enormous, as I never seemed to find said time. One folder in a folder in a sub-folder turned out to have a set of practice papers created by another teacher, all of them recognisably from papers from the dim and distant past or from relevant text books. So someone else had the same idea as me but used different sources to create them, and I’ve managed to get my hands on their work. Halle-blinking-lujah.

But this got me thinking. Something that friends and family find it hard to understand is that even though a huge amount of my time is spent working on resources, none of these can be monetised. I am grateful for my background in academia, a period during which a paranoia about plagiarism was drummed into me – and rightly so. There have been numerous cases of teachers monetising resources that have then turned out to be based on the work of others. Much of the time, I honestly believe that this may not even have been entirely deliberate. The way that we work means that it can become genuinely difficult to remember where your work ends and that of another begins. Teachers tend to be the curators of an ever-evolving bank of resources that many others have influenced in different ways over the years. I am acutely aware that pretty much everything I produce as a working resource for students started its life somewhere else – as a passage in an old text book, from a bank of files kindly shared by a colleague, on a dim and distant exam paper from days gone by. Very little of what I produce, therefore, can be claimed as entirely original and monetised. If you’re still not convinced, take a look at what happened on The Classics Library website, where resources being shared entirely for free fell foul of copyright laws and had to be taken down as requested by Cambridge University Press: anything which even relies on the ideas and concepts created by others is not entirely your own work.

Given how many times this issue has been raised in relation to the monetised resources on the TES website, I do worry about the number of teachers and tutors who are now monetising vast quantities of resources. I do hope that every single one of them can truthfully claim that every single word of what they have written is original to them and didn’t start life as part of a set of departmental resources or as a piece created by a colleague or a trainee. Personally, I can lay claim to very little that is entirely original to me, because I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel unless I have to. Much of my time is spent hunting for useful resources, then reimagining them in a format that I find most useful or compelling. To use a rather sickening phrase, I take a resource and “make it my own”. But it is not my own, in the sense that I can lay claim to its birth and monetise it as my own work. It simply isn’t. Even if it is barely recognisable from its original, it is still not mine to claim. And certainly not to sell.

A regular occurence for me throughout my career has been that I manage to get my hands on a bank of departmental resources only to find that they are using something that I wrote 15 years ago. There are numerous advantages to taking on a trainee teacher, and one very useful one is harvesting what they have brought from other schools; the number of times I have opened up a file with great excitement only to go … hang on … this looks familiar … oh yeah, I think I wrote that. Or did I just adapt it? Who knows?

So, while my resources are all available to the students I work with and I share them gladly, they are not something that I can actually charge for because they are the result of my work combined with that of others – sometimes another person that is known to me, sometimes a whole list of people whom I have never met. I’ve always known this and have always found it to be in stark contrast to how things work in academia, a world in which you have to footnote every giant’s shoulders on whom you stand. The trend of teachers and tutors monetising resources does give me pause for this reason; I only hope that they are aware of the rules, and can hand-on-heart swear that everything they are selling started life in their own head and came to fruition by their hand alone. If they can, then wow – they’re definitely a hell of a lot more original than I am.

INSETs I wish I’d walked out of

When I reflect on the hundreds, possibly thousands of hours I have spent sat on a plastic chair designed for children, listening to half-baked, poorly-researched, unevidenced clichés and banalities, it’s actually quite difficult not to be angry.

Like anything in life, you have to be detached from something to get it into perspective: and more perspective makes me more cross rather than less so. How much of my time was wasted at tax-payers’ expense? Even worse, how many children continue to be taught badly while undiscerning leaders pump out empty platitudes instead of making themselves aware of and sharing the wealth of information that we do have about how humans learn?

I wish I’d been braver. I wish I’d voted with my feet and walked out of some sessions, rather than saving my disapproval for the anonymous staff surveys. It’s easy to say now, I realise that, and when your salary is being paid by those presenting at INSET, it might seem a little foolhardy to make your feelings so apparent. But the SLT in the school in which I spent the last 13 years of my career were pretty good at taking things on board. They weren’t tyrants; they were humane, benevolent and willing to be challenged. Maybe if I’d been a little bolder I could have helped to drive them towards evidence-informed pedagogy a little sooner. As it was, I had to wait for some personnel changes at the top and for some of the figures at leadership level to start reading the right material. It took years. It was infuriating.

Even more than this, I regret not following my instincts in the early days of my career. In particular, the instinct that if something sounds, feels and smells like unscientific hokum … then that’s exactly what it is. I knew that “Brain Gym” was an unrelenting stream of hogwash. And yet I sat there and listened to it (eyebrows in my hairline, but still I sat there). Now I feel dirty and used. Fortunately for all of us exposed to this achingly bad presentation back in around 2006, on the next day, another colleague – one of the scientists, I suspect – pinned an article by Ben Goldacre onto the staff room noticeboard; the piece was a precursor to Goldacre’s book Bad Science, which I later read, exposing “Brain Gym” and its ilk as pseudo-scientific snake-oil. Thanks to that article, and to the teacher who anonymously shared it, the use of “Brain Gym” was quietly shelved by anyone in the school who was even borderline capable of critical evaluation.

“Brain Gym” wasn’t the only bad science that I had to endure. Within the last decade the school where I worked invited in an outside speaker (at I know not what grotesque expense) to tell us all that mind maps were the only way for children to learn because they look a bit like your brain does under a microscope. I kid you not, he showed us an image of neurons and pointed out how similar mind-maps look, like it was some kind of gotcha. He also espoused the “left-brain/right-brain” hypothesis, admitted that “neurologists think it’s a little bit more complicated than this” (they do?! It is?!) but then declared breezily that “for our purposes” it was “a good working model”. Right. Presumably his definition of “a good working model” was the fact that it enabled him to keep rolling out his useless PowerPoint rather than telling us anything that was actually true about the brain. The only thing that got me through that particular session was another colleague: every time this fraudulent salesman made a statement of about the brain, the biologist sitting next to me muttered “no, it doesn’t”. And thank heaven for her.

Bad science aside, the number of INSETs I wish I’d walked out of simply as a statement that SLT were wasting my time remain alarmingly high. Here are some further examples of some of what I have been made to endure and/or partake in over the years:

VAKing, now fortunately condemned to the bonfire by anyone who knows anything. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t agonising sitting through this claptrap at the time, then being made to interview children about what they felt their preferred “learning style” was (some schools put a sticker on the front of children’s exercise books, naming their “preferred style”. We got them to colour it in). The very concept of preferred learning styles is unscientific hogwash; unfortunately is still being peddled in some places, especially in the US.
It’s all about growth mindset. No it isn’t, nor was it ever, and now we have the evidence to prove that its impact in schools amounts to net zero. Next?
Drumming. Ah what an INSET that was. We each had to choose our own percussion instrument, and this in itself was made out to be some kind of personality test. We then all “learned” to perform a short percussive work. I believe that the message was something about working as a team for the greater good. Inspirational.
Juggling. Here the message was that it’s difficult to learn a new skill and we should remember that when we’re teaching. I am unclear as to why it took two hours of me attempting to catch small bean bags to drive this message home.
Guess what’s in the trainer’s head. I have a genuine issue with someone standing up at the front of the hall and asking me to guess the correct answer to a question they are then going to give me the answer to. How many cases of child neglect were reported in the Surrey area during the last academic year? I have no idea – why would anyone who hasn’t just checked the figures have any idea? I assume you’re planning to tell me, so can we just move on to the bit where you provide me with the actual information, rather than ask me to guess?
Death by PowerPoint. The trainer reads everything that’s on every slide then assures you that it will be on the shared drive for you to access, which begs the question why on earth you had to sit and listen to him reading it aloud.
Death by Ted Talk. No. Just no. If anyone is still in some kind of idealistic bubble in which they think that any Ted Talk is profound and worth hearing, then de-program yourself by watching this. “Let’s look at a picture of the planet for no reason” is I think my favourite moment.
Look at me and my big book. This was a recent lethal mutation from the welcome move towards schools becoming more research-informed. In this genre of INSET, a manager that you know full well rarely if ever opens a book puts the image of the front cover of one he’s been told to read on a projected slide so he can demonstrate how research-informed he is.
Mindfulness. Again, I’m afraid that the research on the impact of this in schools simply isn’t there. Until it is, I don’t want to hear about it and I certainly don’t want to do it with colleagues. Asking me to lie on the drama-room floor (seriously?!) while someone talks in a soothing voice is also a big no.
Bad quotations. Even if correctly attributed, there is nothing more cringe-worthy than an “inspiring” quotation on a PowerPoint slide. And I don’t know a single manager who hasn’t used a falsely-attibuted one at some point or another.

As Abraham Lincoln famously said, the trouble with quotes on the internet is you never really know whether they’re genuine.

Why is Latin difficult?

Latin has something of a reputation. Everyone thinks it’s difficult and indeed it is. But so is mathematics and so is any language once you get beyond “bonjour, je m’appelle Alain”. Grammar is difficult and still not explicitly taught in our own language to the degree that it is in many other countries.

So why do some children struggle with Latin over and above anything else?

One reason is the unfamiliar territory that the language presents to family and friends. Many parents and guardians feel able to offer some kind of support to their children in the majority of subjects, certainly in the early years. I work with many families who are thoroughly involved when it comes to the children’s homework and it’s true that many children benefit from adult support in their studies at home – during lockdown, this took on a whole new importance. Lots of families employ me because they care about their children’s studies and feel ill-equipped to support them due to their own lack of knowledge, and with only around two and a half percent of state schools currently offering Latin on their timetable, I don’t anticipate the situation changing in a hurry. As a result of the fact that so few people have any experience of Latin as a subject, it maintains a certain mystique, all feeding into its reputation for being inaccessible and challenging.

Furthermore, and at the risk of stating the obvious, Latin is an ancient language – and a dead one. What that means quite simply is that nobody speaks it any more. As a result, the content of what you are translating will often seem obscure to you, due to the fact that the world has changed rather a lot. The ancient world was very different from ours and much of what went on even in the most mundane aspects of daily life can seem unfamiliar or even bizarre. Add to this the fact that a lot of the time students will be looking at stories from ancient myths or founding legends and we’re in a whole new world of weirdness. This inescapable fact is captured rather brilliantly in this little meme, which has been circulating the internet for as long as I can remember:

The thing is, children generally like the weirdness and indeed the darkness. If you think that youngsters don’t like dark stories then explain the thundering success of an author such as Patrick Ness. Generally, children are not put off by the puzzling nature of what they are translating; but it certainly can contribute to their belief that the material is obscure.

So, we’ve dealt with Latin’s reputation and we’ve established that the inherent fact of it being an ancient, dead language may make it potentially difficult to access. On top of that lies the inesecapable fact that Latin as a language is very different from our own. The most important thing to understand about Latin is that it is a heavily inflected language. This means that word formation matters, but we’re not just talking about spelling here: we’re talking about the fact that the very meaning of a word is adjusted by its formation. In inflected languages, words are modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, voice, number, gender and mood. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation and this will be familiar to students of all languages. However, in Latin (and in other heavily inflected languages such as German) nouns are inflected too, as are adjectives, participles, pronouns and some numerals. The inflection of nouns is called declension.

What blows students’ minds the most, in my experience, is how this inflection translates into English and how the rendering of that translation can be confusing. For example ad feminam means “to the woman” but in the sense of “going towards”. I might use it in a sentence such as “the boy ran over to the woman”. However, feminae can also mean “to the woman”, but this time in the sense of giving something to: so I might use it in a sentence such as “I gave a gift to the woman”. And that’s before we’ve even explored the fact that we also use the word “to” when forming our infinitive “e.g. “the woman likes to run”). Trying to unpick why grammatically different concepts sound the same in English is just one tiny example of a myriad of misconceptions that children can be carrying around in their own head.

Misunderstandings can arise everywhere. Imagine I’m in front of a class and I say “the dative case can be translated as “to” or “for” in English. Pretty clear, right? But if you were hearing a teacher say this rather than reading it, I wonder if you might have heard “the dative case can be translated as “two” or “four” in English.” I discovered this misconception once and it exemplifies perfectly why dual coding (providing a visual representation of what you are explaining, ideally formed in real time) is essential when it comes to grammatical explanations. What’s great about one-to-one tutoring is these kinds of misconceptions can be uncovered and rectified.

Due to its inflection, many Latin words can be difficult to recognise as they decline or conjugate, and this brings us to what many students can find the most disheartening aspect of the subject: vocabulary learning. If a student has worked hard to learn the meaning of a list of words, imagine their disappointment and frustration when this effort bears no fruit for them. A child may have learnt that “do” means “give”. Yet will they recognise “dant”, “dabamus” or “dederunt” as parts of the same verb? Without explicit instruction and support, probably not. This can be really depressing for students and can result in them giving up altogether. It’s also why parental support with vocabulary learning can only take a student so far. That’s where a tutor can help.

Furthermore, due to the inflection of the language, a Latin sentence has to be “decoded” rather than read from left to right – breaking the habit of reading from left to right is something I have written about before and it is without a doubt one of the biggest barriers to students’ progress in my experience. Working on this and supporting students with their ability to tackle each Latin sentence in the right way forms much of what I do as a tutor. Even when a child has worked hard to learn all of their noun endings and all of their verb endings, they still need a huge amount of support and scaffolding to show them how to process these and map them onto what they are translating.

I remain unsure whether Latin really is any harder than any other subject. I believe that its reputation is mainly to do with the fact of its obscurity and how few people have the ability to access it. While this remains the case, however, the demand for support and tutoring will always be high.

One-to-one tuition

What is the benefit of working one-to-one with a student, and why does it trump group work every time? This is a question I have been pondering this week, as I listened to two podcasts aimed at private tutors, both released on the same day, both making the case for tutors like me to make the shift into setting up groups for online tuition. The podcasts were great. The group tuition model? I’m not so sure.

With the explosion of online tutoring into what amounts to one of the fastest-growing corners of the gig economy, I find myself and my recent career-change somewhat on trend. As usual, however, I also discover that I am swimming steadfastly against the tide. Well, thank goodness for that; being in the zeitgeist is definitely not something I’m used to and I’m more of a heckler than a celebrity.

Many online tutors are expanding their businesses into groupwork, to the extent that some are abandoning the one-to-one tuition model altogether. The reason seems obvious; as one parent pointed out to me when they first got in touch to seek help for their daughter, I could make a lot more money if I worked with several students in each slot. This does, of course, rely on there being a high-enough demand for a certain kind of tuition at a particular level: to be frank, in my rather niche subject – taught in only around 2.5% of state schools – I am not sure that’s ever going to be the case. I do have one group of three, which arose because a parent contacted me directly with the request that I work with three children of the same age who were all ab initio and wanted to learn together: in that circumstance, with three friends at the same level who are all keen to start a new project together, the model works very well and I’m enjoying it. But with remedial tutoring (by which I mean the process of supporting a student who has come to you because they are struggling), I have serious doubts. Firstly, I doubt that demand is high enough in my subject but secondly – and I am still idealistic enough to say more importantly – I do not believe that group tuition is a good model when it comes to making that kind of difference to an individual child’s progress.

One of the absolute joys in switching from classroom teaching to one-to-one tutoring is the incredible privilege of taking a child from the bottom of their class to the top. Taking a child who is failing and turning them into one who can achieve the highest of grades. Taking a child who hates your subject and turning them into a GCSE candidate. Taking a child who has been hiding at the back of their classroom for so long that they need a huge amount of coaching and coaxing before they find their feet. One parent told me that their child was coming home in tears after their Latin lessons because they simply had no idea what was going on in the class and had no idea how to access the learning; after working with me, that child went on to choose the subject at GCSE and achieve a very good grade. One of the client reviews I am proudest of reads “you have turned despair and dismay into enjoyment and enthusiasm”. Another says simply “your lessons were transformational.” None of this could be achieved without the one-to-one model. I stand by that. I simply cannot accept that you can take a child who is failing dismally in a subject and get them a top grade without working with them closely as an individual. It’s what tutoring is all about.

I have written before about the power of tuition and the overwhelming benefit which comes from the opportunity to delve in and unpick a student’s understanding – or rather their lack of it. A good tutor will uncover a whole raft of small misconceptions or gaps in a student’s knowledge within the first session. I likened a student’s developing knowledge of a subject to a wall; students who come to a tutor for help have often got bricks throughout that wall that are either misshapen or missing altogether, causing the whole structure to be at risk of collapse. One-to-one tutoring diagnoses the problems, finds the missing bricks and provides the repointing, replacement and reinforcement required. No amount of rhetoric will ever convince me that the same can be done in a small group. Of course, small group-work is great and you can achieve much more than can be achieved with a class of 30; but it still can’t beat the one-to-one model.

Quiet students can often suffer the most in the mainstream classroom – they can fall behind without being noticed or can have enormous potential in a subject – again, without being noticed. A good tutor (and indeed a good classroom teacher) is an excellent reader of body language. I’ve thought a lot in my work about non-verbal cues, those tiny indications that an individual student can give off when they’re not following something – a twitch of the mouth, a furrow of the brow. In a one-to-one session, that’s my cue to pause and rewind and it’s an absolute joy to be able to do so. In the classroom, not only did I not have the time to respond to every non-verbal cue but the reality of a large class meant that I more than likely missed the majority of them. Due to a quirk of timetabling which I won’t bore you with, I once ended up with an extra Year 9 class of 5 students. Yep. Five. I had another group of 24 and yet another of 28 and one of 5. Ask the previous Head why that ridiculous situation arose. Of course, the children in the group of five progressed – on average – better than those in the two larger groups. But it still wasn’t one-to-one tuition and they still didn’t progress as well as they would have done had each of them – in some kind of fantasy parallel universe – had a good private tutor as well.

I have no desire to stand in the way of progress and if enough online tutors are finding that there is enough demand for small-group tuition in their subject and can get decent results with that model then good luck to them. For me – and this is perhaps because I have spent far longer at the chalkface than any other professional tutor I have met so far, I do not believe my heart will ever be in it. I came into tutoring in the sure and certain belief that the one-to-one model is absolutely unbeatable when it comes to building a child’s confidence, tackling misconceptions, breaking down the mindset that they “can’t do it” and launching them onto a new path of success.

For me, nothing else will ever be as rewarding as that.

Happy New Year

tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis

For those of us whose lives are tied up with education, the academic year can be a far more powerful marker of the changing times than the winter solstice.

I have always found the gateway to January a strange thing to celebrate, yet the pressure you’re under to party like it’s 1999 on December 31st is relentless. Fast-forward 24 hours and suddenly everyone is on a detox, which is even more depressing: count me out on that one – as if January weren’t miserable enough! January is – without a doubt – the most intolerable month of the year. Long. Cold. Dark. Simply awful. One of my oldest friends has a birthday in the first week of January and she tells me it’s agony. Quite literally, nobody wants to know; everyone battens down the hatches and goes into hibernation when it comes to socialising. It’s a month to be endured, not enjoyed.

September 1st is the New Year for me – always has been. As someone who has never left education, my year has been shaped by the academic calendar for as long as I can remember. I left school for university, stayed there far longer than is decent and then went into a PGCE followed by full-time teaching. I have quite literally never seen the world when it has not been shaped by academic term times and academic holidays. So as the days start to shorten at the end of August, quite strikingly in that final week, it’s as if the world is preparing itself: ah yes, I think, time to sharpen the pencils and prepare the rucksack. Season of lists and hello brutalness: it’s back to the chalkface again.

This year, of course, feels somewhat different for me, and today is particularly symbolic. Today the local school I used to work at opens its doors to staff and welcomes them back for two INSET days prior to students returning on Monday: many schools across the country are following a similar pattern. For the first time in 21 years I will not be there. So what will I be doing? I have a couple of clients in the morning, one child who – like most – is not yet back in school plus a regular adult client. After that – and just because I can – I’ll be going into London to meet an old friend for lunch. Cheers!

I won’t miss the hard plastic chairs and the “vision” for the next five years. I won’t miss the results analysis. I won’t miss the overwhelming feeling that my time could be better spent preparing my classroom and writing my seating plans. I will miss the people, the camaraderie, the sense of belonging. I knew it would be this way: the price we pay for opting out of any system, for jumping off the hamster wheel, is a slight sense of wistfulness as we watch the other hamsters do their scampering. It’s still worth it.

For many teachers, the start of September is marred by anxiety dreams. Many teachers love their job, but this does not make them immune to feelings of apprehension when it’s time to go back to school. Six weeks is a long time away from a job which relies so much on performance and – like any performer – teachers are often plagued with self-doubt prior to their return to the stage. My most common recurring dream is being in front of a class which will simply not listen; I stand impotently at the front, wringing my hands, snapping at the children who either talk over me or laugh. There have been times when I have woken myself up shouting. Strangely enough (or perhaps it’s not so strange) I have still had a couple of these anxiety dreams this year; my subconscious has clearly not absorbed the fact that I will not be returning to the chalkface and is still convinced that I will find myself in front of a class next week; given that I still occasionally have an anxiety dream about completing my PhD – something which I did in 1999 – I’m not holding my breath for when these dreams will stop.

Teaching is a wonderful job in a thousand ways and while the end of the summer holiday was always a bit of a drag (as my husband puts it: fundamentally, work sucks) I did still look forward to the start of the new year in September. There was something wonderful about the fresh start and the preparation for the return of old students and the welcoming of the new. Each year I strived to do a better job than the last and each year – in incremental ways – I believe I managed it.

This year for me brings greater excitement though, as I step into my new guise as professional Latin tutor and start shaping my business for the academic year. The summer is a tricky time for tutors, with many families choosing to take the whole holiday away from the books; despite this, I have been pleasantly surprised by the amount of work that has come my way, with several new clients booking in for summer booster sessions and others wishing to make a head-start on their studies for the new academic year. I have an encouraging number of new clients booked in from next week and my weekend slots are already close to full for the year – something I could not have imagined happening so quickly.

So to mark the beginning of the academic year I shall be raising a glass to my colleagues and thinking of the scores of friends I have stepping back up to the chalkface once again. Like me, many of them truly love it, but also like me, many of them have found the last couple of years the toughest since the start of their career. I hope things get better for them. I hope the press and the government cut them some slack for once. I hope OfSted don’t come calling until they’ve at least got into the swing of things once more. I hope they’re able and allowed to turn the heating on when they need it. I hope the students know how lucky they are.

Long, lazy summers?

Is a child’s progress affected by the long summer break? Research seems to suggest that it is. Classroom teachers often report that some students struggle in their first few weeks back at school in the autumn. The phenomenon of summer learning loss means that young people lose academic skills and knowledge as a result of the long break.

Photo by Drew Perales, published on Unsplash

One obvious question is to consider why on earth it is that we have such a long summer holiday in the first place. A popular myth is that school children were let out of school over the summer so that they could help with the work in the fields. There seems to be no basis to this widely-held belief (I believed it myself for years).

The UK school system was in fact developed over the course of the 19th century, by which time English farms were rapidly becoming mechanised. Children being required to help with the harvest would only have been relevant to a vanishingly small percentage of the population and besides, anyone who knows anything about farming will tell you that a holiday ending at the start of September is not going to be of much use for bringing in the harvest, the bulk of which tends to happen in early autumn. Whatever the origin of the traditional six weeks off at the height of summer might be, it certainly wasn’t for agrarian purposes.

The educational tradition of a long summer break allowing for travel dates back to the concept of the Grand Tour, which in the 18th century was an important rite of passage for young men graduating from Oxford or Cambridge. The Grand Tour involved visiting classical sites, viewing great works of art and architecture, developing their language skills and cultural knowledge and collecting souvenirs; the whole process was seen as an extension of a young man’s cultural education and an essential part of their initiation into society. While the Grand Tour may seem like something from another era, its principles are still with us – what we do as tourists (visiting museums, buying souvenirs, practising our language skills and trying to absorb local culture) is strongly influenced by the aims of the 18th century; the enduring popularity of Paris, Rome, Florence and Venice as essential destinations for all perhaps betray the fact that we’re not as far from that mindset as we think we are. Given that the educational reform acts of the 19th century were driven in parliament by enlightened educational idealists, it seems plausible that they were (perhaps unwittingly) influenced by the notion that extended time for leisure and travel must be built into the academic timetable. Quite how they thought the working poor were going to access its benefits is anybody’s guess, but maybe they were able to see into the future and predict the advent of cheap flights in the 20th century.

But, I digress. The long summer holiday is here to stay and while there have been numerous calls over the years for the system to be adjusted, nobody has yet come up with a viable suggestion for how to make it happen. So here we are, with all students facing six to eight weeks out of school and the potential learning loss which comes with it.

Let’s look at what the research says about summer learning loss, which has been superbly summarised in a recent blog post by Innerdrive. They point out that according to a recent meta-analysis of 13 studies, which looked at over 50,000 students, children experience an average summer learning loss of around one month. But learning loss over the long summer holiday is neither inevitable nor insurmountable – not all students suffer from it. Therefore by taking some proactive steps and preventative planning, not only can summer learning loss can be minimised but the long stretch away from the classroom can be an opportunity for catch-up.

So what can families do to support their children during the long break? Without a doubt, the most powerful thing they can do is to read to and/or with their child. Children benefit in multiple ways from being read to. Adults reading aloud to children exposes them to material that may currently be beyond their reading age but to which they are able to respond; this helps to increase their vocabulary as well as their general exposure to literature and the wider world.

Many families like to make the most of the holiday to do more educational trips and visits; museums and galleries are much more child-friendly these days and most of them offer interactive workshops free of charge. While such experiences may not appear to support your child’s curriculum directly, you’d be amazed what a difference they make to a child’s general view of the world and their place within it.

There has been a notable increase in demand for summer catch-up sessions this year, and I wonder whether more and more families are taking action to counteract the various ways in which their children have suffered learning loss over the last two to three years. This summer I have several clients who have specifically sought out a tutor for intensive work during the summer holiday and this can certainly be a powerful way to make up for lost time. Parents can help with studies too by supporting their child when it comes to the rote learning; a tutor can do the complex work, demystifying a subject and identifying misconceptions, but the process of memorisation requires frequent repetition: unless you want to pay your tutor to meet with your child every day (or even several times a day!) this is where you come in. Ask your tutor to give you a copy of what your child should be learning and spring frequent quizzing upon them: there really is no substitute for regular, short bursts of retrieval.

Whatever decisions you make for your child during the long summer break, remember that learning in itself is a valuable and enriching process. Too many people remain convinced that children require a “complete break” from learning, as if learning in itself is a strain. The reality is that children are hard-wired to learn; asking them to continue to do a little bit of academic work is not going to ruin their life (although some teenagers may of course claim otherwise …).