It is officially peak summer and A Level results are here
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salve Reader! I hope you open this email while enjoying a well-deserved break over the summer. I am writing from my hometown myself, just hours before I head off to France, then back to the northern coast of Catalonia for my yearly holiday. Yes, there will be diving and ancient ruins, so here is a heads-up that I may take a bit longer to reply to emails. This has been quite the week for me. One of the highlights was observing an almost total eclipse with my children and experimenting with the light and a colander. I had the luck to be in the field where I used to play as a child, which was quite magical. As you may already know, I do not generally share my students' results. This is mostly because results come with no context, and they can contribute to unhelpful comparisons. However, I understand that you probably wonder what happens to students who prepare for university entry with me. This was an unusual year: the three Y13s I worked with all applied to Oxbridge and all got in. But I would be misleading you if I said that all my students go to Oxbridge. I prepare students for the option that suits them best, and the range is very broad. This variety is one of the reasons I love my job so much. In any given year, there is also a mixed bag, and not everyone is able to get the B they are aiming for (and yes, it is perfectly fine to aim for a B!) or the elusive 9 that stayed a couple of marks away. I think it is important to acknowledge that things sometimes do not go to plan, and that the plan needs to change. That does not mean that all doors are closed, and I have been teaching long enough to know that results are just the beginning. If you are a current client, you will hear from me before we get started in September. For those of you who are thinking about joining me, there are still a few spots available for the GCSE and A Level programmes. Please get in touch as I meet all families before registration. Finally, before I set my autoresponder, here is a link to my latest blog post about Nolan's Odyssey. Do you agree with my view? Let me know! in proximum🏛️🌿
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Hi! I'm a Classics specialist
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salve Reader! If you have been following me for a while, I am sure you have noticed that I discourage my students from learning vocabulary through apps like Quizlet. I promote keeping a written record, reading extensively and using the words in new contexts. Still, I am aware that some students just love the app format. So, after much insistence from students on having a vocabulary list or suggesting an app that works, I have opted for a middle path: an app that has words unlikely to not be...
salve Reader! Do you know the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí? He is the genius behind the Sagrada Família in Barcelona. He believed that love came before any technical considerations, and looking at his ground-breaking architecture, I think we can all agree that his approach worked. This love-first approach is key to language learning. If there is no interest in reading a text to enjoy a story, it is very difficult to find the motivation to look at the grammar holding it together. The...
salve Reader, I am sure you have noticed I am not a native speaker of English. In fact, English was not even my second language until my twenties! I grew up and studied in Spanish and Catalan, my A-Level MFL was French, and I only really started developing my English after I received a scholarship to spend a summer in Ireland aged 21, where I kept talking to people in German because my English was still, ehem, a bit lacking. Young 20-year-old me enjoying the Irish summer Moving to England was...