‘Scattered as Empty Gifts to the Clouds’: 5 More Tips for Online Learning

Teaching can often feel Sisyphean: in our gloomier moments, which of us hasn’t contemplated the endless repetition of our teaching day, week, term, and even year? It can be hard to resist the thought that, as soon as we roll the boulder to the top of our individual hills, it will instantly tumble back down again.

Naturally, such thoughts could only be exacerbated by our current situation. Of course, we are not unique in this regard: in many ways, we can count ourselves far luckier than many other professions right now. Yet I suspect that many – if not most – teachers enter into this field for the promise of high degrees of social contact: stripped of that particular perk – one which brought such diversity and freshness to the school-day – and now stranded in our living rooms, you could be forgiven for resenting the ‘groundhog-day’ quality of online teaching.

However, it is also true to say that our pupils have, once again, risen to the challenges of lockdown learning: once again they have demonstrated just how resilient and adaptive they can be. I taught a recently a series of lessons introducing the Greek alphabet to a few Year 5 sets: the plan was to use whiteboard.fi (an activity which I previously wrote about here) so that I could draw each individual letter, and then watch the pupils mimic and practise it on their own whiteboards.

Was I concerned that the technology would be beyond a Year 5 class? Yes. Should I have been? Of course not: there was not a single issue. Rather I enjoyed watching on as a whole carnival of animal-letters appeared: there were deltas as ducks, sigmas as snails, omicrons as owls.

However, worries linger – specifically for our examination groups. Even when you are relentlessly incorporating as many assessment strategies as possible, it can still be difficult to gauge just how much the pupils are taking in, especially when faced with an unbending wall of blank and muted screens. True, these occasions are rare, but they remind us that, with all the will in the world, little can compare to the dynamics of the real classroom in terms of the instinctive recognition of (mis)understanding.

In those infrequent moments, it can feel like you’re addressing nothing but the void.

It’s a sensation that has occasionally reminded me of a particular image from classical literature: those moments when someone gives instructions to an addressee, only for their words to be scattered in vain by the unfeeling winds.

It’s a trope that has stuck with me in particular because, in a curious coincidence, it featured in both of my own AS Level texts – Book IX of Virgil’s Aeneid, and Book VIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the former, Iulus gives instructions for the foolhardy Nisus and Euryalus to take to Aeneas, absent in Pallanteum; in the latter, Scylla, fresh from betraying her kingdom to Minos by means of her father’s purple lock of hair, bewails her abandonment:

Even if the context of these two episodes are starkly different, the relevance of the shared image requires little unpacking: the underlying concern is how can we best ensure that our own words reach their desired audience. Building on our previous piece, we have collected a few further activities that will hopefully boost your online teaching.

Chariot Racing

This is the activity that I turn to the most: it can prove so popular with the students that whole double periods can disappear in a frenetic flash.

The objective is for teams (or individuals) to translate ten sentences as quickly as possible: so far, so unsurprising. The trick is that you only give each group/individual one sentence at a time. It’s an activity that I used a lot in the ‘before times’ too: I would hand out scraps of paper with a single sentence written out and, once they thought that they had an accurate translation, they would have to rush up to my desk for me to check their work. If it was correct, they would receive the next sentence, and hurry back to their seat: this counted as a lap – thus, ‘chariot racing’.

This game actually works more fluently online: though the physical movement has gone, the tension remains. Using Microsoft Teams, you divide the students into ‘breakout rooms’; you send them the first sentence at the same time; they then type back their answers, and you can either give them the next sentence, or correct them in real time.

The competitive atmosphere remains in that they can now no longer see their classmates, and thus have no understanding of how far the other groups are from winning.

This can be used for translations, comprehensions or, for that matter, any sort of questions. It’s a student favourite, and it never fails to galvanise even the most sluggish set on a Monday morning!

Ladders / Error Spotting

Next we have two exercises which are fantastic at providing scaffolding in time-scarce lessons. By the time we reach the third instalment of the Cambridge Latin Course, a familiar problem arises: the stories are infamously too long and, in a period of shorter lesson times and slower progress, you could spend whole lessons on a handful of lines. These activities pare back these long passages into far more manageable chunks, while maintaining narrative momentum and focusing on key issues of grammar.

I’ve given the first exercise many different names over the past few years, but I’ve tentatively landed on ‘ladders’, purely because of my latest design. Simply put, you ‘gut’ the proposed passage for all its key elements: for the Cambridge Latin Course, I will focus on pieces of accidence and grammatical constructions, as well as key vocabulary. You can then group these elements into varying levels of difficulty – the blue ladder contains the easiest forms, while the red ladder (with its gravity-defying rungs) is reserved for the very irregular parts of the passage.

The ladders can then be used in different ways: you can assign differentiated groups to specific ladders; you could ask groups to race through the ladders (in the style of the chariot racing above); or you could make it one enormous ‘free-for-all’, with levels of points assigned for each ladder.

It’s an exercise that can be used for any sort of text, be it a translation passage, a comprehension or even a stylistic exercise – I’ve used it for my Sixth Form as a lighter way of skipping through set texts.

The second exercise is similar in its ‘slimming-down’ of lengthier texts: it’s perhaps even more effective in keeping classes engaged in the stories in the CLC. There’s nothing new to it: I’ve simply written out a ‘bad’ translation, and challenged my classes to find all the errors in grammar, vocabulary and spelling.

Again, this can be incorporated into your lessons in countless ways. I’ve used it in combination with the collaboration space by asking a whole class to pick their way through a passage simultaneously; you can also divide pupils into groups for a certain amount of time, and then pitch those teams against each as they compete to find the most of errors.

Even though the pupils are arguably translating the same amount of text, it’s surprising how much faster they work once the basic syntax of a sentence has been given to them; the increase in confidence is also palpable as the students recognise how much they have covered.

Interactive Warm-Ups

With all the compressed lessons, it can feel like every minute is even more precious than normal: as a result, a couple of late students can kill any sort of momentum or hope to cover your entire plan. I’ve found that Quizlet Live is the perfect corrective here.

For those who haven’t used it yet, it covers all the elements of a well-planned starter: the competitive edge is an easy way of drawing pupils into the lesson quickly; there’s an anonymous element in that each student is assigned an animal; and (best of all) it allows pupils to practise their vocabulary in the ‘lobby’ as they wait for any sluggish classmates.

There are many great sets to be used, whether for set text recall or basic vocabulary: however, I’ve found that this deck covers all the key elements of accidence and vocabulary that feature at GCSE!

I’ve also started to play a form of ‘Scattergories’ with my older Latin classes as a warm-up, using the following website: the students have to find a noun, verb, adjective and preposition that begin with a particular letter. You can randomise this, but some careful selection might prove more fruitful: best of luck finding prepositions starting with ‘m’!

‘Don’t Press Enter!’

The next strategy has been hugely beneficial in drawing out responses from less vocal members of my classes – I often begin lessons by using this as a means of recapping previous points of grammar. I’ll ask a set to type in ‘anything and everything’ they can remember about a particular topic, be that the indirect question or what Aeneas was up to in our last lesson. Importantly, I’ll tell the set not to press ENTER until at least ten seconds have passed: this allows all the students to consider their response in good time, and it thus gives the opportunity for those slightly more tentative pupils to contribute. At a time when replies can be few and far between, the sudden torrent of ideas can be a refreshing change!

Self-Testing Online

My final suggestions are a few websites which allow pupils to test themselves upon elements of language besides their basic vocabulary. There is, of course, the fantastically resourced Cambridge Latin Course website, but my current favourite is Magistrula: here (with a little bit of set-up), students can build and translate sentences that focus on a specific grammar point, depending on their requirements.

For those of you teaching Ovidian unseen translation at A Level, here are a couple of pages that are invaluable for scansion practice: I prefer Hexameter for the ability to create a ranking system for your class, but Metron is perhaps more user friendly (and to the point!).

I hope that you’ll find some of the ideas and resources above helpful in bridging the gap between yourselves and your students, both during this period of online learning and beyond.

Fingers crossed that your words keep making their wingèd way to your appreciate students!