Tag: homer

My Past Paper Resource for the ever-dwindling Classicists

Pedagogy

I’ve complained before—perhaps over a cup of tea in the staff room, or in the quiet echo chamber of my own thoughts—about the peculiar solitude of teaching CIE Classical Studies 9274. Where was the bustling agora for us? The CIE support hub could be quiet, the Facebook groups a ghost town, and Reddit… well, let’s just say the threads exemplify how few people are crazy enough to take this course. We were a scattered cohort of teachers and learners, navigating this magnificent, dense course largely on our own.

So, I did the only thing a frustrated classicist can do. I’ve created a resource for A-Level Classical Studies 9274, using the same obsessive-compulsive principle as my IGCSE History 0470 one. It’s all here: past papers dissected, topics mapped, and question trends laid bare in an attempt to create the shared foundation I felt was missing.

But let’s get to the fun part. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

Back in October 2025, as we were deep in the final revision push for the November series, I decided to test a theory. I fed years of meticulously organised data for Paper 4 (Homer’s Epics) into an AI and posed a simple, high-stakes question: Based on the patterns of the last several years, what are the highest probability topics for the upcoming exam?

The AI, coolly analytical, spat out its top candidates. And lo and behold, when my students opened their exam papers, there it was: a question focusing squarely on the theme of Xenia.

Screenshot from my October 2025 chat with Deepseek.

Cue my stunned silence, followed by a very undignified moment of triumph at my desk!!! The resource I built to create clarity had just proven its predictive power. A screenshot of that AI conversation is my new favourite piece of pedagogical evidence. Do you need any more convincing of how useful this is?

The point isn’t that we can now gamble on exams. The point is that by systematically understanding the past, we can better prepare for the future. This tool makes that possible.

So, consider this your invitation to the 9274 agora. This resource is here, free for any teacher or learner who needs it. May it save you time, spark your ideas, and maybe—just maybe—give you a glimpse into the mind of the examiner.

If you find it useful, or if you have ideas to make it better, let me know. Let’s stop teaching in isolation and start building this community ourselves. After all, that’s how the classics have survived this long—through shared scholarship, one scroll (or spreadsheet) at a time.

The First Draft: On Building a Classical Studies Course from the Ground Up

Education, Pedagogy

The light is different now. The sharp, golden clarity of a Hong Kong autumn has settled in, and with it, a certain quiet. The frantic energy of the 2025 October/November exam series has dissipated, leaving behind that peculiar, post-campaign stillness that Alexander must have felt after reaching Hydaspes. The battlefield of past papers and revision notes has been cleared away, and in the quiet, I’ve been thinking about what we’ve just built.

This past cycle of teaching Cambridge’s Classical Studies 9274 felt less like teaching a prescribed course and more like building a ship while already out at sea. The blueprint was the syllabus, yes, but the timber and the nails—the very substance of it—we had to fashion ourselves.

The most palpable challenge was the silence. Not the silence of a focused classroom, but the vast, echoing silence of a subject without a definitive textbook. It’s a peculiar kind of vertigo, standing in front of a class and knowing that the canonical resource they’re relying on is the one you stayed up past midnight formatting, the one with your own marginalia embedded in the headers. I became less a deliverer of content and more its architect, obsessively cross-referencing my homemade workbooks with the CIE scheme of work, terrified that some crucial nuance of the Athenian legal system or a pivotal flaw in Trajan’s propaganda might slip through a crack I had created.

This was compounded by a professional solitude I hadn’t anticipated. Where were the other ship-builders? The online spaces and official CIE Support hubs where teachers typically congregate to share war stories and lesson plans were, for this course, not even ghost towns. They were non-existent. It felt like just me and my 3 students, our little vessel, and a great wide ocean of curriculum.

And the calendar itself, as CIE only offers November series exams for this course, felt like a contraption designed to test our mettle. Compressing a two-year AS/A2 journey into little over a year created a peculiar, accelerated rhythm. Our summer “break” was punctuated by the faint chime of a Teams call connecting, my students’ faces blinking onto my screen from a beach in Korea, a family home in Romania, and a sleepy town in Canada, all of us trying to untangle the complexities of Homeric heroes from our scattered corners of the world. There was something beautifully anachronistic about discussing ancient myths while we were all so decidedly, digitally nomadic.

But this is where the magic, stubborn thing, took root.

Building something from scratch means you get to see the flaws in the first draft—and you are granted the rare, immediate privilege of a second draft. The lessons from this pioneer cohort are not abstract notes for some distant future; they are immediate, actionable blueprints for the students who walked in the following August. That initial, frantic build has now given way to thoughtful renovation. For example, I immediately changed the Paper 2 topic from Roman Architecture to Augustus. Ultimately, a single man’s rise to power is easier to comprehend than the unimaginable construction of some of the world’s greatest ancient remains. Additionally, I assigned the 25-26 cohort ALL of Plutarch’s Life of Alexander in the summer between their IGCSE and A-Levels. This saved us considerable time and allowed us to hit the ground running in Term 1.

The greatest unexpected yield, however, was the depth of the relationship forged in that pressure cooker. There’s no time for the formalities of a slow-burn academic relationship when you’re navigating such treacherous waters on a tight schedule. We became a tight-knit crew, fast. And the pride I feel is not the distant, professional satisfaction of a job completed, but something far more visceral. It’s the swelling, almost Priam-like pride of seeing them achieve something monumental, something they themselves might have doubted was possible in such a short span.

The light is shifting on my desk. The afternoon is waning, and there are new workbooks to refine, new primary sources to discover for the next cohort. The ship, though tested, is seaworthy. And I can’t wait to see where we sail next.