Let’s talk about effect, baby!

The relationship people have with a text is a really fruitful one for English lessons, yet it is an area that students struggle to articulate in their writing. They can easily spot a linguistic device. They can easily chuck in a quotation or two. They can easily spout off about the historical background to the text. Yet, when it comes to discussing texts, students are pretty bad when explaining their relationship with a text and ultimately its impact on them. We get ‘the reader reads on’ or ‘it stands out’ as a default. 

We’ve lost that loving feeling…when it comes to texts. And, probably, more importantly, we’ve lost that hating feeling. There’s a tricky thing in the English classroom. We are there to promote literature, but we are not car salesmen. This ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is a beaut. Reads like a dream. Nought to page 70 in an hour. Love it.  What I loved about literature was that I could have an opinion and I could talk about that opinion. But, my opinion could be positive and negative. In fact, where I enjoyed it most was when I was critical. Texts are not sacrosanct. They invite us to think, imagine and feel. I am forever moaning how I cannot stand Tiny Tim, Romeo and the entire cast of ‘An Inspector Calls’ in lessons. I show them how to engage emotionally with texts. They can hate and love different bits. That’s what grounds students to a text. 

Recently, I have been working on helping students to mine their emotions when talking about a text and exploring how it impacts them. With my work, I have noticed several points when it comes to discussing how a text affects a person. 

# Students struggle to match a word to a feeling. 

# Students don’t ‘see’ the effect immediately when reading a text.  

# Students simplify or condense the experience to a word or a bitesize phrase. 

# Students make no connection to the writer’s intent. 

I hate that bloody emotion wheel that is trotted out every so often by teachers. For me it is the equivalent of pin the tail on the donkey or a Year 7 let loose with a thesaurus for the first time. Pow - you’d got a sentence which looks like it is written in the English language, but doesn’t make one bit of sense. The emotion wheel overcomplicates emotions to teenagers who are in that stage of life where they are trying to understand their own emotions and feelings. If you plonked the emotion wheel in front of me now, I couldn’t tell you what I am feeling. I might be able to do that later, but I am in the eye of the storm at that moment. It is hard to articulate feelings and even harder when you have a bazillion options to pick. 

[1]  Positive or Negative?

A common question I ask in lessons is ‘positive or negative?’. Students never stumble over an answer for it. We’ve just read this description about Scrooge - positive or negative?  For me this is much better than a Yodaish question like ‘Feelings, what are you experiencing?’. Instead of having to search your brain for a word and then match that word with feeling experienced, they work on a simple option. Identifying if it is positive or negative then helps with the words they can use to define the feeling, but it starts with a concrete starting point. 

Positive  - warm - magical - special 

Feelings are hard to articulate and we have to acknowledge that in the way we teach things. Use emotion wheels like you do a thesaurus. Sparingly. Cautiously.  

[2] Dehumanising or Humanising?

 

I have just taught A Christmas Carol around the concept, and lens, of dehumanising and humanising. Throughout the reading of the text, we’ve explored whether Dickens is dehumanising or humanising an aspect, which is a bit of speciality of Dickens. 

We explored how Scrooge is initially dehumanised in his opening description, yet by the end of Stave 1 Dickens has done quite a bit to humanise him. We explored how the poor were humanised in the Cratchits and dehumanised in Mrs Dilbur.  

Underpinning all this is the reason why. Dickens wanted the rich and poor to live symbiotically. Dickens needed the rich, the buyers of his novella, to see the poor as worthy of their respect. Dickens didn’t want to insult the rich and so throughout the book there is a movement to humanise the rich and the poor. 

Having a clear dichotomy helped to build understanding of the effect for students but also a 

greater level of cohesion with the writer’s intent. They knew why Dickens dehumanised aspects and what he hoped to do by doing that. Therefore, they were able to articulate the effect and intent in their writing. We now have an angle to look at other texts. 

This works with non-fiction texts and using ‘personalise and depersonalise’. 

[3] Magical

There isn’t enough teaching of specific effects. Sometimes, you cannot rely on two opposing feelings. Magical and not magical? Therefore, I feel there is a need to explore a particular effect. With ‘A Christmas Carol’ we explored the magical effect. How does Dickens create a sense of magic in ‘A Christmas Carol’? 

There’s a magical glow on certain characters like Fred and Belle. They are so magical they sparkle. Why does Dickens make them magical? Why are the Ghost of Christmas Past and Ghost of Christmas Present twinkling too? Once you put the effect at the front of the discussion it raises some interesting ideas. The magical things are beautiful. 

But, there’s a throughline with effects. A narrative we can build when we talk about effects. When Rosabel sits on the bus and looks out at the sparkling and twinkling shops she sees, we can build that connection. How did Dickens create a sense of magic? How does the writer do it here? 

Build a bank of effects. Teach students specific effects and help them to spot effects. Good examples to use are inferior, superior and boredom. 

 

[4] Structure

Like emotion wheels, I cannot stand tension graphs. They look pretty and take up lesson time, but they rarely support learning. Instead, we should be looking at how our feelings change across the course of the text and not ‘ooh things are tense now and they are going to get tense’. Do we grow to like a character? 

[1] What’s our first impression of the character? 

[2] When did our impression of the character change? 

[3 ]What is our last impression of the character? 

Or, even simpler. 

Do we like them? 

Do we still like them? 

Do we like them after everything has happened? 

The feelings across the text are important. Take Scrooge in ‘A Christmas Carol’. We are made to dislike them at the start, yet as the story progresses we see him become likeable. Why does Dickens make a rich man likeable? 

The structure around liking a character is really important in texts. It happens again and again. Once students can see that our relationship towards a character changes they can then start interrogating how that warmth is created. Look at how we grow to like Sheila in ‘An Inspector Calls’ and at the same time grow to dislike practically every other character in the play. 

Talk about liking characters and how the writer makes us like or dislike them. This isn’t solely related to the main characters. Shakespeare is great for this. Look at what he does with the Nurse and Mercutio in ‘Romeo and Juliet’. 

[5] Complexity and Plurality

I can be both happy and sad at the same time. Students need to understand that you can often have two opposing feelings at the same time. A character can be feeling inferior in one way and superior in another. 

Rosabel on her bus is both hopeful and hopeless. Emotions can contradict one another and that’s fine. 

I find that focusing on one effect and then introducing a second, seemingly contrasting one, afterwards helps.  

Emotions are complex things and we, as adults, need to help students to articulate, read and explain them. The teenage and adult me struggled to manage my emotions. We experience so many emotions in a day that it becomes hard to see the wood for the trees. Let’s provide a bit more clarity.

Thanks for reading, 

Xris