A Latin learning parable

I think anyone who teaches Latin in a university (or school) in this country will recognise what I am about to describe. You hand out a student questionnaire (or more likely now you post it online) and many of your diligent and clever students will reply (with boxes ticked, comments inserted) that they feel uneasy about some key pieces of grammar (usually the gerund) and that they want more face to face teaching, more classes (on the gerund).

The easy solution (and the apparently student friendly one) is to provide more classes. Sounds obvious.  But it probably takes about 20 years in the game to see how misjudged that might be, and how it might not be student friendly at all. To be sure, just occasionally, extra teaching is what's needed, but 90% of the time it is not .. and the teacher's job is to explain why it is not.

1. The basic answer is to insist that grammar learning is something which no one else can do FOR  you. A class might help you see the principle, but the teacher can't actually learn it for you.

There is a bigger issue here about the whole basis of learning -- and the need to break the increasingly common assumption that you are only "learning" when you are "being taught", when actually you are learning best when your head hurts in the library (that's a fact that sits uneasily next to the idea that you should divide your £9k a year by the number of contact hours you are receiving....).

To put it a different way, I'm there to help anyone, for as long as it takes, who has worked on the gerund from the many excellent text books there are, and still doesnt get it... but I am not so keen on doing another presentation to a mixed group on "verbal nouns/adjectives", which they could just as well read.

2. Another answer is to point out that those that worry most are not necessarily the worst equipped ("remedial classes" in my experience are often populated by the "worried well", who are about to storm their way to a first, even if they dont realise it). Classicists have always been cowed by the fear that they "don't know their grammar"; when in truth part of "knowing your grammar" is actually not quite getting it, because it really doesn't quite add up.

Besides, most Romans didnt understand the bloody gerund either.

3. Another is to wonder whether the fixation on grammar and its rules might not be a metaphor for a worry of a different kind. Am I really getting this subject? Because if that is the case, then throwing more teaching at the problem might be completely beside the point.

In teaching students, in other words, it is a given that their anxieties are important and to be taken seriously -- but they might not have diagnosed the correct solution.

And the parable? Well, there are problems with this comparison (little with large), but -- as with all such -- there's a point here too. When I hear UKIP talking about people's worries (on immigration or whatever), and when I see the mainstream parties following them, and when I see the simple solutions coming out, I wonder who is going to say that those simple solutions might be just wrong. That, however commonsensical it might sound, "taking control of our borders" might no more hit the spot than "more classes on the gerund".