This time of year I always spare a thought for the wit and wisdom of Usain ‘Lightning’ Bolt. He has said many times – and if you’ve seen him run 100 metres you’ll know what he means – that a race is always won in the final third.
And I think that’s good advice to give a Year 11 pupil in January after their mocks (and not before, mind!). They come back after Christmas and the new term shoos them straight into the examination chamber. They sit their mocks. Some feel reassured, some feel regret, some feel outrage, some come to life, others feel bludgeoned, and so on.
What can we do to sweep them all up into a position of earned confidence and academic self-awareness ahead of Easter and then study leave?
Below are 3 ½ ideas to make the most of the time available.
1) Re-calibrate their expectations (a ½ idea )
There’s a lot of road to run between January and June, and the general lift in intensity – across the class, cohort and subjects – will galvanise even the lowest-attaining pupils. Their revision skills will sharpen, their handwriting will quicken, they will become more comfortable in timed conditions etc. And they will have buckets of feedback from conscientious teachers, because all Classics teachers are conscientious. They’ll also become more aware of time management inside and out of lesson time and they’ll become more adept at prioritising.
But preparation needs to be active not passive, of course, and it’s also possible to feel overwhelmed by the faster currents of this penultimate GCSE term.
So what are some Latin-specific ways to maximise the impact of their learning time in this important final third of the race?
2) Make the set texts work harder
The gap between literature and language at GCSE is an enduring challenge for Classics teachers. By January of Year 11, that gap can still be very significant and what’s more disturbing is how some habits of the revision period can actually worsen the lang-lit gap.
This happens when a pupil succumbs to the twin evils of a) memorising an English translation of the set texts and b) approaching the defined vocab list as isolated words, ignoring parts of speech, principal parts, gender, declension etc.
Set text revision can be an economical way to reinforce the importance of stems and endings and the basic idea of inflection…
Activity 1: vocab tests pulled from the set texts
These are some tricky words from a passage of this year’s Aeneid 2 prescription, manipulated to make them unfamiliar. Choosing a different stem of the verb, or making a noun look like a verb, or asking for gender or a preposition’s case can force pupils to join up their understanding of how Latin works with the unadapted Latin they have read. This targets problems like noun-adjective agreement, which are especially pronounced in verse and always mentioned in examiners’ reports for the language paper.
Activity 2: silly sentence work using set text vocab
Spot the mistakes in the two sentences below (three in each):
i. Perhaps we should carry back the ancient tree trunk.
forsitan debimus referremus truncum longaevam.
ii. The doors have been destroyed because of the youthful doves pouring out.
ianuae convulsae erant prope columbas iuvenales fundentas.
These are fun ways to start a lesson, especially for early arrivers. Such sentences can easily be differentiated up and down. An extension sentence for the top end might be:
iii. With him having died, the heat is to be avoided.
Make them silly a) for fun and b) so they aren’t able to guess the meaning obviously. They must engage with stems and endings. The last extension sentence also uses one of the most common (and commonly bungled) phrases in Latin language papers, historically: eo mortuo. On this topic, here is a handy list of other culprits I’ve scooped from past papers:
magna voce; plurimi; diutius/ saepius; summus mons; quo facto; illo tempore; ad eundem locum; his verbis auditis
3. Become more competent consciously
The best feedback is precise, non-numerical feedback. I would say that giving pupils awareness of their pet pitfalls is more important than, say, marking every practice unseen laboriously using a legacy mark scheme. Yes, that can provide a concrete record of progress, but the principal benefits of that are motivation and accountability: both important, but at the cost of more implementable feedback? Without formative comments, what is the educational value of marking an unseen, say, like an OCR examiner would?
#feedbacknotmarking trended on Twitter recently (well, among tweeting teachers) and there is lots of valuable advice out there on maximising the impact of formative assessment.
Popular among English and MfL teachers was a proforma listing common mistakes, which was then filled in by either teacher or pupil or both in a check-list way. Ticking a box strikes me as quicker and minimally less effective than writing out comments in full on each script, especially for common mistakes which will need addressing multiple times across the class. Combined with verbal feedback, the checklist method comes out favourably when plotted on the ‘time spent vs. impact’ graph. (See a comparable chart from the Economist at the bottom of this post.)
What might a Year 11 GCSE Latin language target sheet contain?
- Translating plural as singular; pluperfect as perfect; irregular superlative as positive
- Leaving out pronouns, and little connectives
- Making every ut a purpose clause and every cum a preposition
- Se: both singular and plural- and reflexive
- Endings… (esp. ambiguous cases, pluperfect tense and comparative/ superlative adj)
- Identifying and defining English derivatives
- Planning & reviewing your end translation: skim-reading, spotting inaccuracies
- Matching up nouns and their modifiers
- Recognising and translating indirect statement into natural English
- Accounting for pronouns, esp. se
- ‘Cashing out’ participles and ablative absolutes naturally (e.g. as temporal clause)
- Spotting and negotiating confusable vocab
- Relative clauses: spotting connecting relative & handling genitive/ dative/ ablative
- Committing to a single translation of a word or phrase: no hedging
- Handling proper nouns precisely: Romani vs. Roma & oblique case translation
- With comprehensions, using the number of marks as a pointer for time allocation
- Planning the passage by skimming for signposts, prepositions and pronouns
- Avoiding ‘harmful additions’
- Using the clues provided: English rubric, glossed vocab (gender of characters)
- Inference skills: blank out the word and do some good guesswork
- Reading it over: check it hangs together (allowing for the quirks of myth)
- Making the examiner’s life easy: handwriting, supplementary pages
This list is not exhaustive, nor is the order of these significant. It would be interesting, I think, for pupils to have a go at ranking these in terms of importance/ frequency/ personal track record and so on, updating at key stages in the term.
4. Modelling and re-modelling
The penultimate term of Year 11 is relentless for all parties, and the workload of teachers can rocket as the familiar regime of practice questions and passages kicks in. How often, though, do we stand back and calculate the impact of each piece of work and how successfully our careful feedback has been absorbed?
When it comes to past papers, there’s a troubling assumption that doing more is the only means to doing better. There are more dimensions at play in this time-pressured term, and I’m not convinced that doing more guarantees anything more than teachers burning out and pupils becoming more anxious, risk-averse and mark scheme-inhibited.
Let me be clear: lots of past practice is important. But as with all training, quality trumps quantity.
What does this look like for set text practice?
- Providing model answers for them to scrutinise at the most basic level: quotation choice & incorporation; word economy; adjective choice, if describing the effect of an author’s ‘style of writing’, and so on.
- Asking them to re-write their own and model answers, even if this means doing slightly fewer new practice questions.
Re-drafting as a skill and a worthwhile exercise, in or out of lesson-time, is still hugely neglected.
Consider the example below, again from this year’s Aeneid 2 prescription.
hic Hecuba et natae nequiquam altaria circum, 515
praecipites atra ceu tempestate columbae,
condensae et divum amplexae simulacra sedebant.
Q. How does Virgil, by his style of writing, emphasise the vulnerability of the women here?
Pupil point: The chiasmus of line 516 is a highly technical accomplishment by Virgil which creates a vivid image and highlights the vulnerability of the doves being swept up in the black storm.
Task: Identify two specific things you would improve in this pupil point.
Extension: re-write it, recycling the detail from the text they identified.
Below is another way to encourage re-drafting and heightened awareness of pupils’ own strengths and weaknesses (a process sometimes called metacognition). This I used when reading Aeneid 9 with Year 11 a few years ago.
impastus ceu plena leo per ovilia turbans 339
(suadet enim vesana fames) manditque trahitque
molle pecus mutumque metu, fremit ore cruento:
Q. How does Virgil make his description of Nisus at this point dramatic and exciting?
Task: Which of the pupil points below is more effective and why?
Extension: re-write response A (formulaic) in the style of response B (expressive), and vice versa.
Pupil A
‘impastus’- ‘hungry’. This strong adjective, emphatically placed at the start of the line, creates excitement as it makes Nisus out to be animalistic, suggesting he is powerful and even uncontrollable when he is on the attack.
‘manditque trahitque’- ‘it mauls and it drags’. The pair of main verbs here, emphasised by the extra ‘and’ (que), makes this battle scene more exciting as more action and incident is occurring. It is fast-paced and frenetic.
Pupil B
The image of a lion hunting prey suggests that Nisus is powerful: a successful predator. The contrast between molle pecus mutumque, ‘weak and dumbstruck flock’ and the blood-smeared lion is complemented by the alliteration of soft ‘m’ sounds in the flock’s description. This works in contrast to ore cruento, ‘with blood-stained jaw’, which describes the lion. The detail of the description here, packed with sense imagery, enlivens the scene and makes the fighting more dramatic.
These two examples are at the higher end, of course, but flooding pupils with models from the top end, and talking explicitly about how the English expression is serving the demands of the question, is critical this term. These resources are renewable, at least for the second year of the set text, and they can be shared round the department easily.
Pupils also find, in my experience, that re-drafting and evaluating concrete answers is an enjoyable antidote to just churning out more and more practice working from abstract advice or their own previously below-par produce.
Do more with less, would be the mantra. Model and re-model. It means less marking for teachers, and more meaningful engagement with the practice and the process – rather than just the outcome.
What do you think?
Each teacher and each department will have their own routines for the ‘final third of the race’ and it would be wonderful to hear from as many of you as possible!
Absolutely agree! Thanks for the comments
Thanks for this Dom – I’ve just pinged it round the department I work in as a suggestion for some stuff for post-mock feedback.
Both the lang and lit skills transfer nicely over to the non-linguistic bits of Classics as well – so often errors are repeated in essays (too much narrative, not answering the question). I would go a step further after a while of doing this and then get the kids to fill in the checklist forms themselves; the more they can critique their own work and provide that ever elusive self-reflective feedback loop the better!