The watchword at Abingdon School for the last few years has been ‘rigour’ – a term I prefer to ‘stretch and challenge’ – and this has given plenty of opportunity to consider how best to challenge the top end in Latin at GCSE.
I feel that, as Latinists, we are already on to a winner; the inherent complexities of the subject mean that many pupils are going to be stretched just to cope. It is no accident that Latin is emerging in some schools precisely as a stretch-and-challenge subject. It also means that the very brightest pupils are often attracted to Latin, and it is to those pupils that I would like to devote the following thoughts.
Firstly, I believe that we can push the top end to understand that translation is fundamentally a creative process, and that a literal translation is not good enough. This, of course, goes well beyond GCSE – and perhaps even A-Level, since the removal of marks in the unseens for stylish translations. It is right, I suppose, that when pupils first encounter vocabulary or constructions, that they are taught a ‘safe’ meaning – that tristis means ‘sad’ and an ablative absolute containing a P.P.P. means ‘with the noun having been verb-ed’ – but top-end Latinists should quickly move beyond this.
Vocabulary is far more interesting than the learning of word-for-word vocabulary-lists suggests, and clever pupils will appreciate this; exploring the reason behind the different meanings of imperator (a word routinely mistranslated at GCSE) opens up an exciting period in Roman history – many words themselves have an exciting story.
We push pupils to be creative, for example, with the following drills: we go around the class coming up with as many translations of tristis excluding ‘sad’; we explore the difference between a magister (sadly no longer on the GCSE list), and a dominus; or we consider the nuances in the various translations of nolo – can you be ‘willing’ but ‘not want something’, or is ‘refusing’ more aggressive than ‘being unwilling’?.
At the level of whole constructions, this sort of flexibility of thought shows a deep understanding and self-confidence. Participles, for instance, are a helpful feature to open the eyes of the top-end to the possibilities of creative translation. Given a passage of Latin, pupils quickly notice (and feel frustrated by!) the endless sentence, kept going by participles and other subordination; fewer reflect on why they, as native speakers of English, should feel uncomfortable with this, and ask what English does to avoid this.
When a bright pupil, faced with such a sentence, feels the confidence to put a full-stop where there isn’t one in Latin, and begin a new sentence, my heart soars.
Such an attitude can be encouraged by diverging temporarily from the GCSE straight-jacket, and marking pupils’ translations only on the criterion of ‘quality of vocabulary/phrasing’.
An added benefit of such an approach with the top-end is that it starts to break down the barrier between considering a passage as something to be translated (language), and considering the decisions made by an author in creating a text (set-text); the divorce of these aspects of studying Latin is unfortunate, and something to be questioned with brighter pupils.
This neatly connects to the second way that we have tried to challenge the top end at Abingdon; we move through the process of introducing language features more quickly in order to finish the GCSE syntax at the end of Year 9. Given that we don’t begin any of the set texts until Year 11, this gives us the opportunity to use Year 10 for our own devices.
In Year 10, we read a number of texts focused around themes such as ‘the City of Rome’ and ‘Roman Women’; we believe that access to quality literature is the key reason for studying the language, and that, by encountering a wide range of real Latin, bright pupils venture not only out of their comfort zone linguistically, but also activate their emotions and begin to appreciate great literature.
Such a reading course brings a number of benefits: it significantly opens up the literature of another culture, a unique opportunity for a pupil at GCSE level and an almost endless challenge (and enjoyment) for bright pupils. This year of carefree, experimental study of texts – where pupils learn to ask the right questions – also means the pupils are readier to volunteer their own insightful ideas with confidence when it comes to studying the GCSE set-texts the following year.
Moreover, self-confidence breeds confidence in the subject, which is one of the key factors in choosing ones A Level options. For almost all the pupils I ask, it is the literature that is the decisive factor in choosing Latin.
Reading more texts on the one hand, and pushing for better translations on the other, are not such diverse aims; they unite pleasingly when, for example, a pupil challenges my own translation of the GCSE set-text: ‘Sir, is that really the best way to put this phrase? How about…?’
Rigour is an incredibly important concept for the top end at GCSE; the more we can lift the pupils beyond the limited scope of the exam and immerse them in the full linguistic experience, the more both they and we will enjoy the lessons.
