Some people say,
If only these kids read more Shakespeare
At home.
Or even saw a production or two
At The Globe.
That, and maybe listening to a bit of Mozart and a trip to a gallery
To worship at the temple of Art,
Would make all the difference. Even Tate Modern would do, at a pinch.
They deserve it, really.
Culture, that is. It’s just not fair to abandon them
To their parents, who were
Abandoned in their turn.
So we cannot blame them. Not really.
Others, well meaning, no doubt,
Talk of Stormzy and Assassin’s Creed
Of Mice and Men and Game of Thrones
As if they had the same worth.
But everybody knows that proper culture must be
Old and Hard, otherwise it does not count. It is not
Culture with a capital C.
It’s common sense.
It’s alright for them. They’ve got their exams already.
Missionaries in Africa did not agonise about their task to civilize,
But set to work to bring light to the darkness.
Not for them the liberal guilt that stalks us today
Or the righteous anger of The Woke
Now that Black Lives Matter.
But in between, where people live, culture is imbibed
Without thinking, like breathing in.
Like air, we need it to survive.
The air we breathe nurtures and sustains, whether its breeze stirs lush, clipped roses
Or scatters crisp packets in a grimy dance.
It is the same air.
It is the same culture.
It is ours, not theirs.
This is for all those teachers, of whatever stripe, that have ever held a class spellbound, and more particularly, for those English teachers who have ever read fiction aloud to a class of students. My very last thoughts on retirement, honest.
Casting Spells
I have loved casting spells
In the gathering gloom of wet November Friday afternoons
As yellow lights held us all in a web of careful, bold words.
Thirty pairs of eyes wide and gleaming in the dusky, chalk-dusted corners.
Thirty breaths held in a cloud of concentration above our heads.
Yes, that was worth the whole shebang.
But I did not like
The Marking, that squatted on my life like a Toad.
There will come a time, on a wet November afternoon, when a pile of bruised and scribbled purple books might be the object of my wildest dreams.
But not yet.
Not for a long, long time.
And come September, when Summer’s warmth begins to fail and blistered leaves turn yellow,
I will watch the lines of scrubbed children laden with heavy bags,
Proceed to school with first day nerves, and think, with sadness and relief, that no bell summons me,
To cast the old spells
Afresh for them.
Is this the inevitable fate of the retired teacher on Twitter?
After this strange, extended hiatus, stretching back to March, the finishing tape looms into view. As I suspected a few months ago, I have already taught my last proper lesson. The last three years of part time English teaching, an enjoyable Indian summer in many ways, comes to an end next week as there are no hours available next year. Such is the lot of the part timer.
I can’t quite believe it’s all coming to an end. Just a couple of stories to wave it all goodbye. About 25 years ago, as an Assistant Head at the peak of my powers, we had an after school presentation from some insurance company and pensions. I think they were trying to flog AVCs or something. As part of his presentation, the rep got all the staff to stand up (it was a teaching staff event) and then asked people to sit down when he’d got to the age they would ideally like to retire. He started at fifty years old, which tells you how long ago it was, and worked through in five year intervals, thinning out the standers as he went. Towards the end (I forget now what age he had got to) there was a growing ripple of laughter around the audience and I looked around to share the joke. To my embarrassment, the joke was me! I was the last person standing and it became a standing joke at school that I was actually aiming for Death in Service.
Looking back now it seems extraordinary. But as a young man I absolutely loved my job and could not imagine not coming in to work to teach English and to develop whole school systems of assessment and CPD and all those other things that seemed so important at the time. But time does take is toll, and eventually energy drains away. Working as a member of SLT in “challenging” schools is hugely demanding and after a while, you find you have nothing left to give. I was very lucky in the sense that I never got to the point where I was dreading going into work and counting down the days to retirement. Retirement came out of the blue and was all the more of an enjoyable surprise for that. And then going back to a spot of part time teaching also sugared the pill for a few years.
But now, semi-retirement will turn in to proper retirement (with a bit of teacher training thrown in) and I can’t quite imagine what not being a teacher will be like. Since the age of five my life, like that of all teachers, has been governed by the rhythms of the agricultural calendar that the academic year shadows. September as a new beginning through to the long summer holiday to recharge the batteries before beginning again My thoughts have turned regularly in the last few weeks to how it all began, in an attempt to get some perspective and to close a bracket. Thirty Seven years ago, almost to the day, I had finished my PGCE and was wondering what was going to become of me. This was in the days of the great, much maligned (unfairly in my view) ILEA, when as soon as you qualified, your name went into the ILEA Pool and you could be offered a job in a school anywhere in Greater London.
One day in July, I was lounging around the living room of a shared house in Brixton, surveying the wreckage from a particularly wild evening of young person entertainment the night before, when the phone rang. It was County Hall. “Are you still looking for an English job, Mr X?”, came the question. When I confirmed that I was, he continued. “Can you get to School Y by 1pm?” I looked at my watch. I confirmed that, yes, indeed, I could do that. This was, of course, a lie. I had no idea where school Y was, but faint heart never won, etc etc.
I put the phone down and worked out that I had about 45 minutes to get ready and get to the school. My A-Z (ask your parents, youngsters) told me that the school was just up the hill. And then, with a sinking feeling, I remembered that my only pair of trousers were drying after a rare trip to the laundrette and I was lounging around in a pair of scabby Adidas shorts. Even I, an innocent in the ways of the corporate world, knew that that would not cut the mustard at an interview. Two minutes later I was on my bike, hammering down Brixton Hill for some emergency shopping. Morleys of Brixton (“South London’s West End store”) furnished me with an acceptable pair of black cords. I just had enough time to cycle back up the hill, get changed and get to the school by one. Until I put the cords on.
Disaster! They were far too long and unhemmed. My entire career hung in the balance and for a nano-second I considered not showing up. And then, the same amalgam of inspiration, winging it, and sheer effrontery that was to serve me so well as a teacher and then member of SLT, kicked in. Ten minutes later, I was sitting in the Head’s office for my interview. I can’t remember a thing about it now except for the memory of having my feet firmly tucked in as far under my seat as possible, so that no-one could see the line of shiny silver staples in a ring around the ends of each trouser leg. Emergency hemming to the rescue.
It was the last day of the Summer term and, as the interview was taking place, the staff were already gathered in the staffroom for the end of term jollies, desperately hoovering up warm white wine and twiglets to mark their successful survival for another year. I did not know it at the time, but I was the only candidate for the job and I would have been appointed even if I’d been bollock naked. In some ways when I look back on the last thirty seven years, I see now that this was my finest hour, the high water mark of my educational achievements.
So, what now? How can I continue to pontificate on Twitter about Teaching and Learning when I no longer teach? Will I turn in to the educational equivalent of Alan Shearer on Match of the Day, the ex- player boring everyone to death with his endless, blindingly obvious analysis? Or even worse, an Edu-Twitter version of Geoffrey Boycott, bemoaning how everything was better in the good old days and that young teachers today have got it all wrong. My ambition is to emulate Gary Lineker. Someone who used to be very good, is still a fan, is self -deprecating, a bit funny, and has some thoughtful insights to offer while not taking himself too seriously. Let’s see how that goes for a while.
And for all those of you I am leaving behind in the socially distanced classroom, I send my best wishes. Enjoy your privilege, for English teaching is the noblest profession. For me, it was a blast and I will miss it terribly.
This is the long-awaited second installment of Pullman’s trilogy, The Book of Dust, a sequence that revisits the fantasy parallel England of His Dark Materials. Anyone interested in children’s literature or the fantasy genre as a whole, will have been counting down the weeks until this release, such is the power of Pullman’s fictional world, and the impact that the original trilogy had when first published in 1995. Those original fans will soon be joined by a whole new group generated by the BBC adaptation of His Dark Materials which is set to air on Sunday November 3rd. The trailer certainly suggests that it will be a much more successful rendition than the ill-fated dog’s dinner that was the 2007 blockbuster starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. Not that that would be too difficult mind you.
So Pullman is hot stuff at the moment. But what about the book? Let’s just get a few things out of the way first. Pullman is A Great Writer. His Sally Lockhart novels are glorious confections of London Victorian adventure mysteries, with pea-soupers and coal stained brick warehouses on the banks of the filthy Thames. Those alone would guarantee his reputation. But it’s the first trilogy, His Dark Materials, that moves him into the ranks of the genuinely great. Engrossing, believable, moving, challenging, Pullman creates a parallel world that is both restrained and oddly familiar. He asks big questions about belief, orthodoxy, law and punishment and democracy. But perhaps his greatest achievement is the creation of his central protagonist, Lyra Belacqua, and his invention of the notion of the Daemon, an animal- like creature that everyone in this world has as a lifelong companion, a representation of the soul, the quintessence of the individual. Lyra is one the most memorable characters in children’s fiction. In all fiction. Appearing first as an eleven year old girl in a version of Oxford University, she is resilient, loyal, brave, intelligent, and without any trace of snobbery or prejudice about race, class or gender. And she is one half of one of the greatest love stories ever told.
Dafne Keen as Lyra Belacqua in His Dark Materials
The first instalment of The Book Of Dust, La Belle Sauvage,
featured Lyra as an infant, rescued from the baddies by Malcolm Polstead, an
eleven year old boy. The second book moves us on twenty years. Lyra is now an
undergraduate at Jordan College. Malcolm, is a University Lecturer. They both
become caught up in the struggle between the CDD, the repressive state police,
responsible for rigorously enforcing religious orthodoxy, and the liberal
resistance. The struggle centres around the control of the source of a
mysteriously powerful species of rose oil that is grown in the Levant (the
equivalent of Syria/Turkey) Pullman uses this to reflect upon contemporary
struggles between the West and the Islamic world, on the issues of religious
wars, refugees, terrorism, populism. It dies s through the vehicle of a journey
eastwards from Oxford, to the Middle East. The journey has all the elements of
the classic adventure story: the main protagonists are split up and are all on
separate quests to find themselves and to find solutions to their separate
problems. Their journeys allow Pullman to paint a vivid picture of exotic
lands, full of bazaars, train stations, cafes and markets, serially escaping
dangerous situations, only to fall into more dangerous situations. It’s
exciting and mostly well told. Pullman can still knock out a page turner.
Mostly.
But. This is not a children’s book. It’s complex, dealing with real world issues of politics and prejudice. It is quite adult at times, in its language and depiction of relationships. It’s very sophisticated in the way it handles the growing awareness of sexuality of Lyra, following on from The Amber Spyglass. The depiction of a near gang rape is genuinely disturbing. Pullman himself would I think be quite pleased with that verdict. He has been very reluctant himself to categorise his novels as being for children. And there is a strength in that, because it allows him to break free of the constraints imposed by genre. The worst crime Pullman commits, however, is that, at times it’s a little ….dull. The political wranglings of the Pullman equivalent of The Vatican are arcane and convoluted, and I’d be surprised if they held the attention of many children. Certainly not the ones I know nor the ones I have taught. And it suffers, above all else, from the curse of the established writer. It’s far too long.
Weighing in at over 700 pages, this is a book that wouldn’t have got past the first fence had he been an unknown. That first book has to be absolutely tightly- wrought, like a finely tuned piano. Not a spare word out of place, coming in at under 300 pages tops, the draconian guidelines of publishers and agents at least produce economy and crackle. They impose discipline as much as formulaic writing. Look what happens when you’ve made it. J K Rowling’s Harry Potter books just kept getting longer and longer as no-one would dare to suggest to the behemoth, Jo, maybe you need to rein it in a bit, love. One can only be grateful that she had only planned seven of them. If she had kept going, we would have been at over the thousand page mark by now, no question. The same applies here. And this, for all its strengths and joys, is a little flabby and baggy.
I’m sounding very negative. It’s still a wonderful book and he’s still a titanic writer. The return of the Great Love, at least in Lyra’s memory and regrets, and the beginnings of a new love to replace it, is fabulous. Even so, it’s only a four star member of his astonishing list of achievements. And when you’ve set the bar as high as he has, that’s a little disappointing. If you’re an English teacher, or you just love books, you still must read this. And hopefully, you’ll love it more than I did.
For much of my career I was a moderator for one of the big
exam boards for GCSE English and part of the job every October was to chair a
regional meeting of schools to go through a variety of agenda items to help
schools to prepare their students to successfully navigate the exams and
coursework (or controlled assessments) in the coming year. They were to learn
the lessons of the cohort just gone and a key weapon in the battle to teach
them those lessons was the Chief Examiner’s report, which distilled the main
messages from the national data. It was a hugely useful process and was largely
responsible for the year on year improvement in outcomes achieved by students.
(I’ll draw a tactful veil over the canny manipulation of the marking tolerances
and the blancmange-like rigour of the Speaking and Listening moderation that
also played a part. That is, perhaps, for another blog, when I’m feeling
stronger.)
Year after year the Chief Examiner banged on about the same
issues. Every year he identified what he saw as the game changer as far as
English Language results were concerned. Every year I reinforced this message
in the regional meeting. Every year I strove to enact this pearl of wisdom in
my own classroom. What was it, this Holy Grail of GCSE English teaching, this
elusive crock of gold at the end of the rainbow?
Planning
writing.
They look so simple, those two little words written down in
black and white. Simplistic, even, as a panacea for underachievement in GCSE
English. But behind those two little words lies struggle, pain, resistance,
frustration, anger, resentment, incomprehension, stretching back years. If you
are an English teacher who has ever tried to prepare a class for an upcoming
English Language examination, you will surely recognise the following scenarios.
Put simply, I have never, in any of the last 35 years,
introduced the concept of planning writing as a step to writing better, without
it being greeted by students in the same way that every group of teachers in a
training session respond to the prospect of Role Play. With horror. Without
fail, the following questions are asked and points raised:
I can’t plan. I don’t know how to.
I never follow the plan, Miss, so what’s the
point?
Do you get marks for the plan?
Of course, as a fully paid up member of the liberal metropolitan elite, I have consistently delivered the standard, honest answer to this last question. That is, I have explained in painstaking detail that no, actually, no marks are awarded for the plan, but that writing that has been planned is always better than writing that has not. I’ve supplemented this with reference to the Chief Examiner’s report, sometimes going to the trouble of distributing copies of it, or in latter years, displaying the relevant section on the Whiteboard. This often leads to classic teacher sarcasm: “Of course, (insert student’s name), if you think that you know better than both myself and the actual Chief Examiner, who have been doing this stuff for over thirty years whereas you are barely out of nappies and have done the GCSE , let me see how many times is it? Oh yes, you’ve never done it have you? Then by all means go ahead and completely ignore our professional advice and just make it up as you go along and see what happens. This produces the following response, brutal in its logic:
So, I don’t really have to plan then?
On a couple of occasions, unable to bear this ridiculous
exchange another time, I just lied, and said, without skipping a beat, “Oh Yes,
of course you get marks for writing a plan.” Then I would put up with the
liberal guilt about ethical behaviour as a teacher before eventually going back
the original approach the following year, shamefaced.
Early doors, I used to be moved by the first of the examples
above, the idea that no-one had taught them to plan, so of course they would be
resistant. In this scenario, I could cast myself as the hero, who could save
the disadvantaged from their own lack of cultural capital by actually opening
the gate to the secret garden of middle-class academic knowledge and take them
through the basic steps of planning. This would inevitably furnish them with
the transferable skills that allowed them to structure their thinking and their
writing in English and every other academic discipline. And so, I devised over
time a series of imaginative approaches to planning, which resulted in this
terrible and embarrassing flowchart of the planning sequence:
Spider diagrams.
Amending
Deleting
Synthesising
Sequencing
Numbering
Ticking off
It was surely only a matter of time before a lucrative book
contract landed on my hallway floorboards to be followed by a regular series of
training events based on a whizzy powerpoint presentation and a glossy
ringbinder. Fame and fortune awaited.
I would spend a few lessons on this, only to find when I
received the exam papers, that out of a class of thirty students, only three
had written a plan. Did I dream that sequence of lessons? Was I actually in the
room? Or was I just a shit teacher?
This pantomime carried on for years, surviving a range of
different approaches, none of which had any discernible impact on the students’
practice. In the end, it was one of the many things that had ossified in my
teaching, into another example of stuff that could be categorised as, “Oh well,
that’s just the way it is in reality.” I kept on doing the same stuff, even
though I knew it didn’t work. It was a tired recognition that teaching is a
difficult process of alchemy, and that sometimes we have to acknowledge the
limits of our influence. The best laid plans (no pun intended) and all of that.
And then, eventually, I retired, satisfied that, all things
considered, I had done a pretty good job over the previous thirty-five years.
Early in my retirement, I started to dabble with creative writing: short
stories, poems, novels. I reasoned that the excuse of being too busy just
didn’t hold water anymore, so I did a bit of internet research (a classic
delaying tactic this) and then sat in front of my laptop staring at the screen,
not allowing myself to get up and walk away until I had produced some writing.
A paragraph or two, at least.
What did I have in my locker that persuaded me I might be
able to write creatively? I had not joined a writers’ group, I had not done any
kind of creative writing course. No, I was convinced by my thirty-five years of
teaching children to write, my three years of studying English Literature at
University and a lifetime of reading books of every type and genre. The craft of
writing? Pah! Either you’re touched by the muse, or you’re not. Ah, the
arrogance! I sat, staring at the laptop for a very long time.
Then it came to me. Of course! A plan! I had to write a plan
before I could come up with anything even vaguely coherent. Wasn’t that what
I’d been boring young people to death with for all those years? And if it was
good practice for them as writers, then surely it would be good practice for
me. I had read in the weekend papers many times, interviews with authors
promoting their latest book who talked about their meticulous approach to
planning. Index cards. Exercise books, colour coded for plot, character, theme.
Every last thread spun and tied up neatly by the end. And it was clear that
their planning process must work because they were proper writers, with books
on the shelves and everything. And once this intense planning had been
completed, with eyes closed and chin on finger tips, Sherlock Holmes style,
then the writing could begin. And now, it would be a doddle, simply a matter of
splurging all those great thoughts onto the paper, ticking off each subsequent
element of the plan as it was completed, just like I advised my students to do.
And then, with the wet slap across the face of epiphany, I
realised.
Planning doesn’t work. At least not the kind of planning I
had been teaching for years.
Obviously, it didn’t work. Leaving aside for the moment the
idiocy of testing creative writing via a 45 minute slot in an exam hall, even
with unlimited thinking time you couldn’t easily plan every detail of, say, a
short story. Or if you did, you would be planning out the magic that is
produced by the act of writing itself. Functional, sequential planning has its
place in producing transactional writing, when it is simply a matter of ordering
and clarifying one’s thoughts, but creative writing is a very different process
and does not bend to the same rules and regulations.
I’m with Philip Pulman on this. In a recent interview in The Guardian to promote his latest book, The Secret Commonwealth, he pleasingly berates the functionalists who are currently having a moment in the sun at the expense of school children across the UK. Their niggardly focus on the naming of parts and their slavish insistence that the main function of a piece of writing is to show off the writer’s grasp of the full range of punctuation is rightly blasted. But he is also very interesting on the notion of planning. It’s right at the end of the interview (link below). Have a look.
What I’ve discovered over the past nearly three years is
that the planning process for fiction does exist, but that it is bespoke to the
writer. I’ll tell you what works for me. It might work for some kids and some
other adults, but there’s no guarantee.
The impulse to write comes, for me, from a very strong image
of a situation. It could be anything – an atmosphere, a dilemma, a
relationship, a texture. From that a story emerges. First the characters and
their relationships. Then the skeleton of the plot. Then the next layer of
characters. In the course of that process, the story and the subplot start to
take roots, but as gardeners everywhere will know, plants are unruly beasts and
go where they want. So the vivid image of the starting point, (which may not
end up as the start of the story at all) is accompanied by a strong sense of
the end point. As a writer, I know where the thing is headed, I’m just open to
the route we take. There may be a couple of other definite waypoints (or Vias
as the SATNav would have it). Other vivid scenes that have to be navigated
around. And no, despite the scornful reaction of some of my friends when
discussing this, this is not just a pretentious version of making it up as you
go along. It’s surrendering yourself to the process. The act of writing
generates ideas that are generally better than those produced by the act of
thinking.
When I started the process of trying to write fiction, I read a piece by D B C Pierre, the Canadian author, on starting to write. It was extremely helpful, particularly his metaphor of compost, of all things. Just write, he advised. Enjoy the sense of your growing wordcount. At some stage you will hit a critical point where, like compost heap, you will have accumulated enough copy for it to start to react, to spontaneously breakdown in a process of decomposition, producing something entirely other than that which you started with. And then eventually, when it seems as if you have written something that you are pleased with, that means something to you, that you would like to read, you can begin the real work, the hard work of turning all of that compost into something that somebody else might conceivably want to read as well.
And so it has proved. From a strong image, a sense of the
resolution, and a couple more luminous scenes en route, fiction has emerged,
almost without my agency, and certainly without detailed planning. And how I
wish I could go back and rethink all of those well-meaning lessons on
students planning their writing.
Because, unfortunately, they are still saddled with the insanity of having to
produce some piece of “Creative” writing in about 45 minutes of exam silence.
And that means English teachers have a moral responsibility to prepare them to
do it as well they can.
So what practical lessons do I glean from this revelation? I
still teach English, as well as writing myself, and I still desperately want my
students to do well. I keep it much simpler now and focus on those key
elements:
An arresting scene, full of texture and
atmosphere. Often the opening paragraph.
Two or three characters, their relationships and
potential conflict
A final resolution. Even a last paragraph to
work towards, a pole star to help them steer the ship
A balance between description and dialogue.
Avoid back story
Show not Tell
And then, the last piece of advice to be ringing in their
ears as they enter the exam hall: Let the writing take you where it will, as
long as you reach that last paragraph. And it’s still a nonsense, to ask
children to write creatively in these conditions, as a means of ranking them.
It will produce a lot of stuff that wasn’t worth their bother: formulaic,
trite, cliched. Perfectly suited to an exam devised on exactly the same lines.
But at least they might enjoy it a little more and not be too worried about
synthesis and sequencing.
And some of them might, just might, want to keep writing.
The Old Grey Owl 