Everybody loves chariot races, gladiators and Roman baths. The questions we’ve found ourselves asking in teaching the Roman City Life paper on the new GCSE for Class Civ are how much can 15-year olds love Epicureanism, and what on earth is vetch?
Roman City Life is one of the three “Literature and Culture” options – the other two, Homeric World and War & Warfare, have already been discussed on Quinquennium. We picked Roman City Life as we felt the trade-off in studying satire (material which was previously examined at A level!) was being able to do all the juicy cultural topics many pupils love from media and Key Stage 3 teaching. That, and I couldn’t convince anyone that Mycenaean archaeology is fun…!
We took the decision to teach Roman City Life first, mimicking how we taught the old GCSE with the Rome material, before moving on to Myth and Religion in Year 11 – so we’ve got two years’ experience of this material. Here are some of the things we’ve learnt along the way that could be useful.
1. Don’t cross the streams
The Roman City Life material is divided into two sections, as with all the other Literature and Culture options. Unlike the other options, there is significant overlap in topics covered in both sections; dinner parties are a hugely popular topic in the literature, for instance. This has its benefits for teaching the paper; we took the approach of teaching culture topics that then led into looking at literature, for instance teaching the first part of the Juvenal (the insula on fire and the different fates of Cordus and Assaracus) immediately after doing the Roman Housing material. This made things more organic than strictly delineating the two components of the exam, which I can imagine is a little jarring on The Homeric World for example.
However, where this approach comes unstuck is in formal assessment. Because of the overlap of material (and as noted in the Examiners’ Report for this paper), pupils can easily write about literature in the culture section and vice versa, thus not gaining credit. We’ve yet to find a fool proof solution to this with our very mixed intake who can be reluctant to remember advice on exam technique; my current tack is to get pupils to write PPHJ (Petronius, Pliny, Horace, Juvenal) at the top of their literature 15 markers and check them off when they mention them, and a giant NO LIT on their culture work. It seems to be working slowly, but requires constant reinforcement!
2. Be prepared for the satires.
The themes of the literature are very accessible to pupils of all abilities once you’ve explained what’s going on. This isn’t so much of an issue for the Pliny (referred to fondly by one pupil as “my spirit animal” – make of that what you will…) or the Petronius, but the Juvenal and in particular the Horace are dense with pop-culture references and (in the translation provided by OCR) odd turns of phrase; who knew that vetch was a type of chickpea? Do your homework before going in – read a commentary if you can! – and do not underestimate the limitations of pupil vocab knowledge (a colleague in our English department was visibly shocked to see the difficulty of the texts studied here). It’s the only one of the Lit/Cult papers where pupils score noticeably lower on the literature than the culture…
I have taken to prepping a version of the text beforehand for them to note down key annotations from before they ask me questions about other things, and we do a lot of reading in class as comprehension tasks often end in disaster for our SEN/EAL-heavy cohorts. If you can grind through the nitty-gritty of the texts, concepts like Epicureanism or the links between the poems are actually far more straightforward; then you can work on the traditional traps of pupils writing overly narrative essays and so forth.
3. Don’t be too culture-complacent.
There’s no denying that the literature has been the toughest thing in teaching the course. By comparison, teaching the culture seems like a breeze, with its highly visual elements lending itself well to a variety of source work (and the occasional cheeky YouTube clip…) and long-term favourite topics making regular appearances – plus a plethora of “30 mark” questions from the old GCSE Rome/Pompeii papers to cannibalise for 15 markers – always the boon of a stressed out teacher!
With that said, some brief observations:
- The “prescribed inscriptions” are easy to forget about, with their single lines of text being tucked away in the textbook and not adding massively to many topics. We got ours to write them on flashcards and annotate them with AO2-style analysis, as we would with images of the “big” sources like the Colosseum or Large Theatre.
- Getting pupils to remember that ancient pantomime is more like modern mime – particularly when they have to learn about mime as well! – may traumatise you.
- No-one will ever spell Naevoleia Tyche correctly. Embrace it.
If you’ve got any particular pearls of wisdom about teaching Roman City Life, it would be great to hear from you.
