Tell any acquaintance that you’re spending two weeks in July teaching Latin to teenagers and they’ll likely look at you a bit funny. You can see what they’re thinking, even if they don’t come out and ask ‘What sort of teenager does that over their summer holiday?’
Answer: a delightful group of eccentric, thoughtful, committed, offbeat, inclusive, and super-inquisitive teenagers from around the world.
At one end, you have the Esperanto-speaking undergrads who flew in from the continent. At the other end, the typical teens of Years 10 and 11, wanting to push on with their GCSE skills in a small and supportive setting. And everything in between. And all sorts of outliers. It was a heartening and hugely rewarding way to spend two weeks in July.
And what did I learn, as a teacher?
1. Sixth-formers like seating plans
Under the weight of high expectations and heavy workloads, what a relief it can be for someone to do some thinking for you. A large class size lent itself to lots of independent pair work, and at the age of 16 or 17 the task of picking a partner and rubbing along with them can be more fraught than we teachers realise. Do you pick someone who’s a friendly face- a safe choice? Or someone with complementary skills? Or someone a bit new and interesting?
I decided to keep the dynamic lively by re-appointing pairs and groups every three lessons. After two weeks, there was more esprit de corps and goodwill within the group than in some classes I’ve taught for a term.
Why don’t we do this with every sixth form class?
- We don’t have enough pupils to regularly re-configure!
- We’re afraid of patronising them with that degree of micro-management.
The first point- sure. On the second point, here’s the thing: it depends what purpose spoken or unspoken your seating plan is serving. If it’s a suspicious seating plan, for behaviour management, sixth-formers will sense it and maybe resent it. After all, that’s how you’d handle your Year 7 groups. If it’s to enrich their learning and spread their skills around then great, who wouldn’t be up for that?
2. Class discussions don’t need resolving
I can’t remember who said that the difference between religion and literature is that religion gives answers which can’t be questioned while literature questions what can’t be answered. I’ve carried that one in my back pocket for a few years now.
When it comes to broad-ranging class discussions, though, it can be tempting to canvass views from the ‘floor’ and then, like a judge passing sentence, cap off the discussion with your own concluding thoughts. As a teacher, that’s a great pleasure- who doesn’t like imparting their own critique- but it can also have an inhibiting effect on the class.
Pupils can start to doubt their own legitimate personal responses. Pupils can worry they haven’t accounted for contexts or alternative readings. Pupils can feel just generally uninvited.
It takes a lot of time and effort to listen well- in a spacious way. And in our usual classrooms, the pressure of counting down to exam season can invade that listening space. I’m sure we’ve all been there, when energy has dipped and the appetite for deep thinking has upped and gone. You look around and the class just want your ‘definitive’ opinion. Their faces say: OK, but what’s the answer?
Of course, there isn’t an answer- this is Ovid, not scripture.
That pupil urge to defer to the teacher on literary evaluation is absolutely sustained by the notion of definitive answers. Kick them out of the classroom. The best discussions in Wells, hands down, were those where the journey was thoughtful and creative and compelling, and the destination was deferred for another day- or forever.
3. How to negotiate between pace and precision
Probably worth a standalone blog post, this one…
In two weeks (27 hours), we read the equivalent of two A Level set text prescriptions. We stepped back most days, too, to consider content, meaning and context. And, of course, we took the odd grammatical detour as points arose.
But it was fast- sometimes 50 lines an hour- and even as the teacher I felt myself pulled along by a strong current.
Was it worth it? Yes.
A Latin Camp course has lower stakes than an A Level course: an obvious point. And so covering 50% more text, say, at 80% rather than 95% understanding is not going to cost any university places, but it will build a sense of momentum and even fluency. And the perception of fluency was perhaps the greatest pleasure and motivational driver for our pupils. Some put that on their feedback forms, but for me the most meaningful test is this: how energetically did they start out the blocks when going back to paired work?
As someone once put it: the only way to tell if they’re enjoying it is when you watch them at work and you see it in their eyes… Now that also is probably a standalone blog post!
Thanks for reading and please post your thoughts below. Did you attend as a pupil? Have you taught on this camp or Bryanston or Repton? Have you attended as a trainee teacher?
