I’ve only recently discovered Mary Beard, and am already a massive fan. She’s a professor of Classics at Cambridge and recently presented a really rather brilliant television series on the Romans. She also wrote an amazing piece for the BBC on ‘pushy parents’ in ancient Rome…

According to Mary, Roman parents pushed their children to work hard from a young age out of both necessity and ambition. ‘Family planning’ didn’t really happen in Rome, so some families could end up with lots of children, and with many mouths to feed. Some families couldn’t easily afford to look after so many offspring so it was necessary to get all hands on deck and set children to work to help out. Skeletons of children have been found in workplaces like laundries, which show how they undertook challenging physical labour in order to contribute to the family’s finances.

Other parents pushed their children hard to perform well academically. A certain level of encouragement and ambition is great, but you can push your kids too hard… In Piazza Fiume in Rome you can see a replica of the tombstone of Quintus Sulpicius Maximus who died aged 11 because he worked too hard. A few months before he died he entered a poetry competition, usually entered only by adults, proving that he was indeed a very gifted young scholar. Although he was Roman, Quintus wrote his impressively long poem in Greek, displaying his flair for languages even at such a tender age. But it was his dedication to learning that sadly caused his death and at the bottom of his tombstone it says, “Sickness and tiredness tore me away because I devoted myself to the muses morning noon and night.”

I can imagine that it would take an awful lot of sleep deprivation and relentless studying to kill you, so poor Quintus must really have over done things in order to work himself to death. Hopefully nobody currently revising for exams is pushing themselves so hard that they are on the brink of collapsing! Balance is the key, so make sure you work hard and rest well at the end of the day too. Just be grateful that you don’t have to get a physically demanding job from a very young age like many Roman children had to do.

The content of A Level exams is under fire yet again after a report by Score (Science community representing education) has suggested that A Level science papers do not contain enough maths-based content to adequately prepare students to take on science degrees.

Graham Hutchings, who is the chairman of Score told the BBC, “Our findings are worrying. A significant proportion of the mathematical requirements put in place by the examinations regulator, Ofqual, for each of the sciences were simply not assessed and, if they were, it was often in a very limited way.”

Hutchings is particularly concerned about how the A Level science syllabus is missing key areas of maths, which underpin a lot of scientific topics. For example, calculus and converting between different units are not taught in many schools. Some exam boards assess more maths than others, but this disparity is also worrying because it means that students will have very different knowledge bases according to which exam they sit.

With the exam boards leaving out key areas that are essential to the study of the sciences at degree level, pupils are just going to have a much tougher time at university. Already many universities (as reported in a blog last week) need to offer remedial classes to first students who arrive as undergraduates without sufficient knowledge and skills to confidently begin BA courses. This shouldn’t need to happen; universities should not have to make up for poor teaching at school, and instead they should be able to imediately start expanding and challenging undergraduates’ knowledge and thinking.

Unfortunately it isn’t only the science A Levels that don’t contain enough maths; when the Nuffield Foundation looked at the A Level papers for economics, geography, psychology, computing, business studies and sociology in 2010 their report “concluded that with the exception of computing, the variation in mathematical content was so great that the qualifications did not give universities or employers a meaningful indication of students’ level of mathematical skill or understanding.” (Judith Burns, BBC).

These reports add further evidence to the argument that universities and employers should be more involved in designing A Level courses, so that they don’t exist in a bubble and can more adequately prepare students for the demands of employment and degrees.

Need a revision break? Fancy something tasty and good for you to give you a bit of a boost? Here’s a recipe for some ridiculously easy flapjack-y/granola-bar type things. I don’t technically know what the official difference is, so maybe we should call them flap-olas or something as I have a feeling they are a bit of both!

The first thing to do is to melt some butter in a pan over a low heat, and then stir in either a bit of honey, maple syrup or some dark muscavado sugar (or a combination of the three). Now chuck in some oats, a couple of dessertspoons of flour (this will help stop the flap-olas from being too crumbly and totally falling apart), and then you can add in the really fun stuff…

Have a dig around your cupboards and see if you can find some dried fruit, nuts and seeds. Chopped apricots, raisins, cranberries, prunes, dates etc all work really well and so do almonds, hazelnuts and pistachios. If you’re feeling indulgent you could put some cocoa powder in or some chocolate chips. Stir everything together until you have a sort of oaty-mush that isn’t too dry, so that it will stick together. If it is looking a bit too dry, then squeeze in some more honey.

Now press the mixture into a lined tin and bake it in the oven at 180 for about 20 minutes. Take it out to cool.

If you want to make them extra luxurious you can drizzle some melted dark chocolate on top and sprinkle some seeds/crystallised ginger into the chocolate drizzle. Once the flap-ola is cool you can slice it up and enjoy with a nice cup of tea.

One minute we’re being told that children are eating too much and now there’s evidence that secondary school pupils are ‘not eating enough’…

The School Food Trust recommends that students should get a third of their daily nutritional intake from their lunchtime meal, but research suggests that most are currently only getting a quarter.

The School Food Trust recently completed a report on children’s nutritional habits at school, and the results have caused concern that pupils aren’t getting enough food at lunchtime. Not getting enough fuel at lunchtime means that pupils can’t concentrate as well in the afternoon. One of the main issues is that there are too many choices on offer and so often pupils don’t eat the right sort of foods to prepare them for the afternoon.

According to the School Food Trust, “The secondary school environment is more complex than primary, and the style of food service makes it more challenging to ensure that pupils are making healthy choices whilst catering for their needs at lunchtime.” And “despite huge improvements to what’s on the menu, teenagers are still not choosing food combinations that will give them enough energy and nutrients to stay alert all afternoon.”

The good news is that since new nutritional guidelines were put in place, double the number of children are now eating fruit and vegetables on a daily basis. There are also fewer unhealthy foods on the menu. In 2004, 43% of school pupils ate chips with their lunchtime meals, but this dropped to just 7% in 2011.

It is fantastic to hear that school students are generally eating healthier foods, but now we need to make sure that they are given guidance about balancing their nutritional intake so that they get a range of nutrients that will provide them with the energy they need to concentrate and work hard in the afternoon.

I recently discovered www.funnyexam.com, which as well as providing a great deal of amusement, also offers some excellent lessons in how not to answer certain exam questions. But what can you do to get the examiners on side and, delight them and so earn yourself plenty of marks? Here are some tips to help you do just that…

-Present your work neatly.
Nobody likes to have to decode messy handwriting, so make sure your work is legible. Writing on alternate lines in the answer booklets will help to make your writing easer to read and easier for the examiner to mark because there will be plenty of space for them to write comments.

-Answer the question!
Although this sounds terribly basic, you’d be amazed at how many people just don’t answer the question. Take a moment to figure out exactly what you are being asked to do and then try and do exactly that, nothing more, nothing less, and no irrelevant tangents.

-Check your spelling and punctuation.
You can really let yourself down if you make lots of silly mistakes like getting apostrophes in the wrong place or using the wrong version of a word (there/their etc). Take a few moments at the end of the exam to look through your answers and make sure the spelling, grammar and punctuation are all tip top.

-Balance your time carefully.
Use the mark scheme to guide you when it comes to planning how long to spend on each question. Questions worth higher marks will require more detail and attention. If you take a moment to look through the paper and plan out how long you should spend on each section you should prevent yourself from running out of time or spending too long on a question that only requires a short answer.

-Be confident enough to be selective with your knowledge.
If you’ve done a lot of revision you can feel a big urge to show off everything you know, but examiners aren’t interested in you listing off thousands of facts, dates and quotes willy-nilly. Instead they want to see you using your knowledge effectively and in a sophisticated, well-structured way. Choose the best evidence to support your answers and weave the knowledge in stylishly, rather than just plonking in information wherever, and the examiners will be delighted with your answers.

There are lots of clichés about exams, some of which are true, buts some of which could really do with being dispelled. Here are some common thoughts about exams that should really be banned in order to make your life less stressful and so in turn, your approach to exams more positive and effective…

‘Failing the exams would be disastrous’
Of course you want to do well in your exams, and you should try as hard as you can to do yourself justice, but if something does go wrong and you don’t get the marks you hoped for, it really isn’t the end of the world. You can sit most exams again six months later, or you can reassess your options and choose a slightly different path to get to where you want to go. Exams are not a life or death matter, and if you spend too much time worrying about ‘failure’ you’ll waste valuable energy that could be channelled elsewhere more productively.

‘I need to know everything before I sit the exam’
It is impossible to know absolutely everything about a particular topic and all you can do is follow the syllabus, look through past papers, talk to your teachers about the course and base your revision on these things. Read around the subject, make sure you equip yourself with the essential topics, and then you should be fine. If one or two unexpected elements turn up in the exam, don’t panic and do your best to answer the questions with the knowledge you do have.

‘My memory isn’t good enough to do well in exams.’
Memory is a muscle that can be trained and honed. You also need to tap into how you remember things, as everyone’s brain works differently. Don’t rely on memorising things the night before, but instead build up your bank of knowledge gradually and keep using the knowledge so that it is easily accessible. As soon as you stop using things you begin to forget them…

‘I have to revise 24/7 in order to well in exams’
This is not true at all, and it much better to do shorter bursts of really effective revision than to work non-stop in the run up to exams. If you deprive yourself of sleep and relaxation then you will totally wear yourself out and you won’t be able to do your best in the exams. Yes, you do need to work hard in the run up to exams, but prepare carefully and make sure you look after yourself as well. Eating well and getting plenty of sleep is also a vital part of exam preparation.

Try and thing positively about exams, and see them as a way to bring all of your knowledge and hard work together and to show off how your brain has been developing. Do the best that you can, but don’t think of them as the be-all and the end-all, because in the grand scheme of things they are important but not the only thing that matters, in fact far from it.

There’s no end to the complaints about GCSEs and A Levels these days, and the debate about whether or not A Levels adequately prepare students for the rigours of studying for a degree is continuing ferociously.

I recently read an article by The Sunday Times’ Sian Griffiths ,which detailed how many universities have to offer undergraduates remedial classes to fill in gaps in their knowledge before they can really delve into degree-level study. According to data published in Griffiths’ article, in a survey of 633 lecturers, two thirds said that their universities offered extra tuition, and 75% had to adapt their teaching style ‘to accommodate floundering first years’.

Even students who have achieved a string of top-grade A Levels need booster classes when they reach university. Oxford and Cambridge both only admit students with superb academic track records, and yet they also have to offer ‘catch-up classes’. Professor Helen Watanbe-O’Kelly, chairwoman of the modern languages faculty at Oxford told the Sunday Times how disappointing the GCSE and A Level languages syllabi are, because they offer so little grammar. To compensate for this, ‘everyone except native-language speakers gets one hour a week of grammar classes; the lowest stream gets two hours a week. In the past they would arrive at university with this knowledge.’

Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, told a House of Lords select committee: ‘This is one of the issues where you might think that a university such as Cambridge would be exempt from the problem, but we are not… In our fairly heavy mathematically orientated physics courses we are having to embark on remedial teaching in mathematics.’

The obvious solution to the problem is to make A Levels more challenging, really boost the quality of secondary-school teaching and for there to be a greater level of ‘joined-up-thinking’ when it comes to structuring A Level courses and their relation to BA degrees. With the current curriculum review underway, here’s hoping that the above will happen, as it would be a great shame indeed if universities had to pump more energy and resources into ‘patching up’ students’ knowledge than advancing and expanding their understanding and thinking.

This week, students taking IB English will have to write a commentary on an unseen passage of prose or a poem, so I thought it might be a good idea for us to brush up some literary terms. You don’t need an encyclopaedic knowledge of technical vocabulary in order to analyse a poem, but having a few terms up your sleeve will really help and impress the examiners enormously. Try and learn a few of the following and see if you can find some examples of them when you are preparing for the exam with practice papers.

ALEXANDRINE
A line of iambic hexameter (six iambs).

ALLITERATION
The repetition of a consonant

ALTERNATE RHYME
The rhyme scheme ‘ababa…’

ANAPHORA
Repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines or clauses

ANADIPLOSIS
The repetition of a word or phrase at the end of one line and then the beginning of the subsequent line.

ANTITHESIS
Contrasting ideas/pairs of opposites placed reasonably close together

APHORISM
A wise, and often witty/pithy saying

APOSTROPHE
As well as being a punctuation mark, ‘apostrophe’ is also the moment in a poem when the speaker suddenly addresses someone or something.

ASSONANCE
Repetition of vowel sounds

BLANK VERSE
Non-rhyming verse, mostly in iambic pentameter. (See Milton’s Paradise Lost for the most famous example of blank verse)

BLAZON
Verse which methodically lists and examines different body parts (usually female)

BOMBAST
Very heightened/exaggerated language

CAESURA
A pause or breath in the middle of a line of poetry

RHYMING COUPLET
A pair of rhyming lines. Shakespeare’s sonnets mostly end in rhyming couplets.

DICTION
The writer’s choice of words

DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE
A poem that is expressed in the voice of an imagined character. Robert Browning wrote many dramatic monologues.

ELISION
The omission of parts of or entire words.

ENJAMBMENT
The opposite of end-stopping (i.e. the sense of the line runs into the next line of verse)

EPISTROPHE
The repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive lines

FEMININE ENDING
An un-stressed ending to a line

FREE VERSE
Poetry that isn’t written in a particular form and with a specific pattern of rhyme etc.

HEROIC COUPLETS
Rhyming couplets written in iambic pentameter

HYPERMETRIC
A line with an extra syllable

LITOTE
An understatement for comic effect

MASCULINE ENDING
If the end of a line finishes with a stressed syllable.

ONOMATOPOEIA
When a word sounds like what it means (e.g. ‘bang’)

OXYMORON
A contradictory phrase such as ‘hot ice’

PARALEPSIS
To say something whilst trying not to

PATHETIC FALLACY
To attribute life and emotions to inanimate objects

PERIPHRASIS
Writing about something in a roundabout way

QUATRAIN
A stanza composed of four lines

QUINTAIN
A stanza composed of five lines

SESTET
A stanza composed of six lines

SONNET
A fourteen-line poem following a particular rhyme scheme

SYNCOPE
The elision of an entire syllable from a word

TERCET
A stanza composed of three lines

Mr Oliver is back in the news again after expressing his anger at Michael Gove, and accusing him of allowing nutritional standards in academy schools to plummet.

Thanks to Jamie’s amazing work a few years ago, which began with the programme Jamie’s School Dinners, the last government made radical changes to the nutritional guidelines for food served in schools. Since 2008, schools have been improving the quality of the food on offer to students, however it seems that standards are slipping, much to the disappointment of Oliver.
According to Oliver, education secretary Michael Gove is “playing with fire” by allowing academy schools to ignore nutritional guidelines. It is no secret that Britain is getting fatter; with approximately a third of children being classed as ‘overweight’ and obesity costs the economy millions of pounds every year. For the future of the UK, it is vital that we feed younger generations (and ourselves!) healthy food.

Oliver told the Observer Food Monthly Magazine that he has “nothing against [Gove] personally…but the health of millions of children could be affected by this one man”
. Gove is reluctant to impose guidelines on the head teachers of academies because he says he trusts the head teachers to deliver the best to their pupils.

However, many head teachers seem to have the schools’ bank balance, rather than their pupil’s health in mind, allowing vending machines into schools because they are so profitable. It has been reported by the Guardian that vending machines can bring in up to £14,000 a year to a school. So it is easy to see how money-hungry heads might want to keep them in their schools. Most state schools are only allowed vending machines that sell healthy snacks such as nuts, fruit and water, but academies are currently allowed to have those offering chocolate bars, crisps and other unhealthy items.

Jamie Oliver, whose explicit and vociferous comments against Gove’s attitude include: “This mantra that we are not going to tell [academy] schools what to do just isn’t good enough in the midst of the biggest obesity epidemic ever…The public health of 5 million children should not be left to luck or chance.” is not the only one applying pressure on the education secretary. Tory MP Zac Goldsmith tabled a motion in praise of Oliver’s campaign and the motion, which asks for academies and free schools to “adhere to the standards for school food so that the one million children now attending these schools can benefit from this commitment to their health and wellbeing”. So far 54 members of parliament have signed the motion.

I very much hope that Michael Gove does indeed take notice of the mounting pressure, and in the interests of the health of current students and future generations, he stops allowing nutritional standards to slip.

Not too long ago I wrote about how there was a bit of a furore among certain circles about how students are taught IT, and how they know how to use software, but are not given an understanding of either how it works, or how to build it. Considering the fact that we are now quite staggeringly reliant on computers, smart phones, tablets and the like, it really is a shame that we are not teaching students how to be masters of technology. However, it looks like things are now about to change thanks to a special computer-programming project, which is being set up in primary schools across the country.

Some enterprising and generous volunteers have set up an initiative called ‘Code Clubs’, which will teach the building blocks of computer programming to children aged 10-11. Clare Sutcliffe, one of the brains behind the project, told the BBC that it grew out of a concern that “we’re teaching our kids to be secretaries rather than programmers”. She wants to give students the skills to be creative with technology and “build things that are really exciting…we want them to be making stuff.”

Sutcliffe and her colleague Linda Sandvik are aiming to set up Code Clubs in 25% of British primary schools by 2014. It is also hoped that the clubs will all be run entirely by volunteers, to prevent teachers from having to increase their workload.

Code Clubs sound fantastic to me and I hope that they are a huge success. There are murmurings in the Department of Education about changes to the IT curriculum, which is likely to become more focussed on programming. With any luck the changes will take place soon, and combined with initiatives like Code Clubs will mean that in a few years’ time we’ll have a generation of ambitious and talented computer programmers in the UK.