Tag: writing

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.

My Attempt to Tame the Past Paper Pile

Pedagogy

Let’s be honest, my Downloads folder was a mess. In the frantic rush of the school year, it had become a digital cupboard where every IGCSE History 0470 past paper went to get lost. I knew the valuable revision tools were in there, but finding a specific question on the Spanish Civil War or the Cuban Missile Crisis felt like an archaeological dig. I needed a system, for my own sanity as much as for my students.

I’m sure more polished versions of this exist somewhere in the ether. This is not a revolutionary product, but a teacher’s homemade solution—I’m basing my aggregation off of a long-ago Instagram post by venerable Miss Stout’s History Class over in Ireland. So, I built a thing. A resource born equally from a desire to streamline my own teaching and to give my students a clearer path through the thicket of exam preparation.

The goal was simple: to slice and dice the past papers into a searchable, sortable format. For me, it has been a quiet lifesaver. I can now, in the minutes before a class, instantly pull a ‘Describe’ question from 2018 on the Potsdam Conference for a quick do-now task. I can build a focused mock exam on the Cold War in Europe without an evening of cross-referencing. It gives me back the one thing teachers never have enough of: time.

Its real success, though, is measured in the classroom. There’s a palpable drop in anxiety when a student looks at a past paper and recognises the structure, when they can say, “I’ve practiced ten of these ‘Type b’ questions.” It breaks down the monstrous exam into manageable, familiar chunks.

I will admit, the process of creating it was its own education. The Paper 2 breakdown, in particular, was a meticulous labour that required more than one pot of matcha. It’s far from perfect. I’m already looking at my own topic categories for Paper 1 and seeing the seams. History, in its glorious complexity, doesn’t always fit into the neat boxes I designed, and I’m sure the next iteration will be better.

But a work-in-progress is better than no progress at all. So, I’m putting this one out into the world. If you are a fellow educator grappling with the same paper pile, or a learner looking for a structured way to revise, you are welcome to it.

I’ve uploaded it here for anyone to use, free of charge. It’s my small contribution to the teaching community that has given me so much. If you do get a chance to use it, please let me know. I’d love to hear how it works for you, and what I can do to make it better. After all, the best resources, like the best lessons, are always a collaborative work in progress.

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.

Thesis writing with Wonder and Sadness

Uncategorized

I wonder why my partner and roommate of one year wrote a love letter to an ex of two years prior, and let me read it. This word .docx populated with rosy memories, gentle language and subversive desire for response was my eviction notice. His words for her pushed me from our shared apartment, my relationship with a beloved cat, and eventually, from the muffled sadness that was our life. Muffled and ‘ours’ no more.

I wonder why I resisted the sinking feeling for two months. Perhaps it was a fear of being regarded in emotional inferiority that led me to mask the misery of love lost in jolliness to my friends, my family, my self. Public, digital personas of the online universe— the near and dear and the faraway and famous— shouted happiness at me. A synesthesia of sorts translated their bright, carefree smiles into a heard command: Do Not Sulk! It took two moons and two bottles of wine with a waxing crescent until I told them to fuck off.

I wonder for how long my sense of freedom and relief will be speckled with longing for the past.  These days I desire to be only mine, but if I were honest with myself, I also desire to be desired. Moments flush with opportunity seem to be bookended by me staring at a notification-free phone. I should keep busy. I should read more. I should work more. Maximizing productivity is considered medicinal in this state of the heart, but my research into traditional Chinese medicine teaches instead of the healing effects of optimizing balance. The irony.

It is a wonder how the unspooling of these words have calmed me. Many have said wise words on the act of writing. The English playwright David Hare said, ‘The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.’ I believe I am fortunate that the end of my relationship coincided with the end of the data collection stage of my research. It is a life-event of boundless bounding, an in-between rich with creative force. This is the sense of wonder and these are the affects I am approaching with as I embark on writing the first draft of my M.A. thesis.

“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair–the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.”
—Stephen King

The search for truths continues. Thank you for indulging me!