It’s all ‘bout that quote, ‘bout that quote, no ideas!

Quotation learning is a poor proxy for literature revision. There, I’ve said it. The problem I have with it is that a quotation can only get you so far with exploration of a text. In fact, it stops the flow of thought and ideas. Students mould the thinking to the quotation rather than the quotation to the thinking. 

Over the years, I have seen quotations, plot (I take no prisoners on this one) and context become the juggernauts of revision. Students feel confident if they know some quotations, they know the plot and they can throw in some contextual facts into an essay. In fact, they have become the markers for revision. But, this is where the rub comes, they generate a level of false confidence. They give the appearance of knowing the text well, when that isn’t the case. 

Revision in English has become very knowledge led. But, the knowledge is limited to quite a narrow field. The knowledge of quotations. The knowledge of plot. The knowledge of context. If we are honest, these are the easiest bits of knowledge related to our subject. They are the things we can easily teach, text, and repeat in lessons. This ‘easy’ knowledge spills into how students revise. They revise these ‘easy’ knowledge elements and because they are more concrete than other types of knowledge there’s a sense of accomplishment. Students feel a sense of achievement in a largely abstract subject because they have learnt something concrete. Teachers feel a sense of accomplishment because they have taught something tangible and concrete - and easily measurable. 

There is some value in learning quotations, plot and context, but in the English classroom these should not be the drivers. Sadly, they are, which in turn converts to the idea that in English, all you need to revise is quotations, plot details and contextual facts. They are foundational things rather than exploratory and cumulative things. If you don’t believe me, then check out the examiner’s reports. I have yet to see one that says that students need to learn quotations. 

The knowledge of ideas. The knowledge of concepts. The knowledge of the writers’ feelings and thoughts. These are generally left behind with this concrete knowledge revision focus. We don’t see revision built around these. The complexity of the subject is the main reason. The plurality of ideas means that you cannot easily mark these sorts of things. You cannot easily tick or cross them. You cannot boil them down to a quick true or false task. You cannot summarise them easily. We don’t factor this complexity into revision and so revision doesn’t focus on the complex. Yet, what we expect students to do is get these complex ideas naturally armed with quotations, plot details and contextual knowledge. 

For this reason, I’ve been playing around with revision with our Year 11s. They are preparing for their first mock in November and I thought I’d explore different ways to build and develop a level of complexity in the revision. So, each Friday, we set the first ten minutes on answering these questions about a character studied. Not a quotation really in sight. 

I wanted them to think big and exploratory but also think like they would under exam conditions. They aren’t writing in full sentences, but bullet points. Then, I reveal what I would reward on an online version of the document.  The idea is to score as many points as you can.

Interestingly, students throw out ideas. I’ve used fatherly, is that ‘parent-like’? If they have an idea that I haven’t included, then I add it and add a score to it. This week I gave one idea 5 marks, because it was so good. The idea that the Friar links to the theme of rebellion. Cue more students trying to outdo that 5 marks. 

What I noticed was a real engagement with ideas and characters. Exploration and ideas were at the heart of the revision. It wasn’t just knowledge recalling, but idea forming… and exploring. It is quite easy to do but the key thing is showing a hierarchy of ideas. That’s where we can help make something abstract seem concrete. The categorising of some words or ideas being better is often something we say but don’t actively work on in lessons. Yes, some words are better to describe a character than others. Some words are precise and some words are general when describing things. 

The texts are massive banks of quotations. Seeing texts as disjointed entities is the problem here. Our obsession on quotations is warping how students interpret texts. They are thinking around the quotations and not thinking around the text. We need to reassert that distinction in lessons. A student that can think around a text writes the best essays.   

Ideas are the interesting things in English and we have a duty to make sure that our subject isn’t all quotations and extracts. If we are not careful, students are interpreting the subject as being all about the quotes and not the ideas. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris 

Which one crossed the road first? The poet? Or the idea?

Poetry analysis can be both one of the easiest things to do and one of the hardest things to do. What is the poet saying about X? It sounds like an easy question, but it is so much more complex than we think. When we explore things in literature, we are getting students to make a number of inferences: 

# Inferences for character / topic  (the character is jealous); 

# Inferences for the reader (the reader would be shocked) ; 

# Inferences for the writer (the writer is highlighting the lack of power women had in society).

It is no surprise that students are good at making inferences about characters because they are doing it every day with their and other’s body language.  Inferences around feelings are hard because it is about their own reactions. A teenager is a bag of mixed emotions and they can rarely pinpoint their precise emotion let alone others. 

The problem we have in English is that the drivers for lessons tend to be the texts and not the people. That’s why it becomes hard when we are analysing texts, because students see texts and they don’t see living (well, they were living at one point) person behind them. The writer becomes the afterthought and therefore so removed and disjointed from the process. When you’ve spent several week’s looking at the story and the character of Scrooge, it becomes jarring when the emphasis switches to the writer.  I don’t know why Dickens did it. He just did it, didn’t he? 

Forming a picture of writers is something we actively have to do. Shakespeare the person. Dickens the writer. Stevenson the author. Owens the poet. We need students to infer something about the writer’s personality. Their opinions. Their perspectives. Their hopes. Their fears. The problem is often bogged down with the factual knowledge of the character rather than the inferred personality of the writer. Students focus on the historic figure rather than the human person. My favourite questioning around texts goes like this: 

Who does Shakespeare really like? 

How do you know he likes them? 

Why do you think he likes them? 

I like the route of this question because it is about the person and the personality inferred from a text. The best work I have read always has their grasp of the writer’s personality. They pick the stitching and unpick so much. The great thing is that students see so many different things. Mercutio because of his joy for life. The Nurse for her bawdiness. Juliet because she defies social norms. The ability to form an opinion about a writer is such an important aspect of English. 

Writers are like us. They laugh, breath, cry, make jokes, use sarcasm and find things boring. Students don’t see writers as people. They are ghosts. They are ghostly apparitions that the English teacher holds seances in their classroom to communicate with. Knock twice if you used that alliteration to highlight the extreme nature of war. Knock once if you didn’t think about it all when writing. 

I have never been a fan of giving students a load of verbs around the writer’s intent. You end up getting sentences with verbs in a sentence around the writer’s intent. You don't have the students working to build an opinion of the writer, their personality and the reasoning behind things. Instead you get lots of nice words.  

Students are pretty good at spotting language features in texts. That isn’t the problem. To be honest, it never has been a problem. The problem has always been the reason why. The writer’s reason why. We have largely told students the writer’s reason as fact. We haven’t really taught students to build those inferences themselves when reading the text. Look at how our writing structures Point Evidence Explanation / What How Why place inference around the writer’s reasoning at the end. We leave inferences around the writer towards the end. It is an afterthought. We don’t put the writer’s personality in the driving seat. We hide it in the trunk and we wait for a suitable place to dump the body. 

Therefore, there is a duty for us as English teachers to resurrect these dead / alive writers. There’s a reason why in academic and degree essays we write about writers in the present tense. The analysis is when we see them as alive. They become alive. They breathe in my lessons. Shakespeare is the guy who would probably drink me under the table but has such a subversive humour. Dickens is the well meaning guy but does go on a bit. Austen will probably laugh at my jokes and then go to critique me in her writing. We the teachers bring them alive and the students help us to build the inferences around their personality. We co construct a person around the reading of a text. Anyone get the sense that Dickens is bored here?  Shakespeare’s up to his old tricks again, isn’t he? That Stevenson! You would see Dickens do it like Stevenson, would you? 

Now, before you start dedicating a lesson a week to finding a writer’s personality lessons, we  don’t need to do much to change this emphasis. Simply tweak our way of questioning and exploring. This week I spent some lessons looking at Exposure. 

[1] We read a small section of the poem and explored what we thought the writer felt and thought. 

[2] Next, we read the full poem and explored anything else we noticed. 

[3] I then shared this with students to decide on words to describe the writer’s perspective on things. Often students lack the words and the precision of words. We put too much stock on their vocabulary in the first instance. Students need to build those connections up between writers and thoughts. 

The poet’s perspective …
Positive	Negative
Optimistic	Pessimistic
Praising	Critical
Gentle	Loud
Spiritual	Physical
Mental	Moral
Emotional	Emotionless
Exaggerated	Understated
Romanticised	Realistic
Sensory	Visual
Dreamlike	Nightmare
Grand	Simple
Significant	Insignificant
Dramatic	Dull
Supporting	Attacking
Nonpolitical	Political
Deceptive	Honest
Celebratory	Accusatory
Personal	Public
Private	Open
Respectful	Flippant
Clear	Ambiguous
Subtle	Vivid
Lyrical	Poetic
Confrontational	Sentimental
Sparse	Concise
Mundane	Haunting
Original	Clichéd

[4] Student then took a whole page and wrote this sentence down in the middle. As a class, we decided what was wrong with it. Together we changed the words and phrases. At this point we are exploring and refining inferences and rewording them accordingly. I think this is a skill we largely undervalue - the selection of the words to enable precision. X isn’t the right word, by Y is. 

Wildred Owen's positive and simple poem 'Exposure' highlights the bravery of the soldiers fighting in WW2 and how they feel valued and appreciated.

[5]  Then for each part of the sentence we explored where we could see it in the poem. What did the writer do with language to show that idea? We wrote them down and where possible we looked for more than one device to show those ideas. This was all on a spidediagram around that original sentence. 

[6] Finally, around the outside we wrote our inferred reasons for the writer thinking or feeling this way. 

Not positive but emotionless - ‘nothing happened’ / ‘ice in their eyes’ - Owen’s bleakness as he doesn’t think things will change

Students then did the same for Charge of the Light Brigade. 

From the start, we were looking at forming inferences around the writer’s thoughts and feelings. That was the focus and not the techniques. Structuring the analysis around the person then makes the choices more personal. 

We like to think English is about characters, but I think we undermine the subject if that’s all we discuss. It is more about personality and personalities. Maybe, we need to make the subject more about the people and less about the texts. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris 

P.S. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or actual events is purely coincidental.