The class reader is dead, Jim.

When people read this, I am sure that I will be crossed off a few Christmas card lists. I think the class reader, as we know it, is dead. It wasn’t a prolonged, melodramatic death, but a quick, did that really happen, death. Yes, ‘Holes’ has found its final hole. ‘Skellig’ has finally met his Doctor Death. ‘Private Peaceful’ has finally found true peace. Mr Tom has said good night for the last time.  Before I lament the passing of such an established ingredient of English teaching. I need to explain what I mean. A class reader is a novel. Generally, these novels are modern. It is a novel that is used in lessons to teach aspects of English, and, usually, the students will be assessed on their understanding of the text or how the novel is written.  I was taught this way with novels at secondary school. We would read the novel and the teacher would think of some related activities borne out the text. We'd write a letter as one of the characters. We’d write a missing chapter.  

So, why do I think the humble class reader is dead? One reason I think this is the case is primary schools. The changes in primary schools means that schools are trying to push students with their reading and analysis. So texts regularly used in secondary schools are finding their way into primary classrooms. Often, I have students inform me that they did a text in Year 6. Don’t get me wrong: I am not angry with this. It makes sense. A natural progression of improving reading would be to choose tougher texts. That’s why primary schools look to texts taught in secondary schools as they have a certain kind of kudos. It motivates students knowing that they are reading / studying a book that Year 8s study.

The class reader is usually chosen with a mixed set class in mind. The success of some of the novels is that they work for a wide range of groups. The novel might have complex issues for able students, yet the novel is written in an accessible style for less able students. It is seen as a win win situation. Furthermore, we aim for books that will appeal to both boys and girls. Add to that, we look for a book that is pacey and will hook non-readers. We are, simply, asking too much from these books. Complex, yet easy. Boy friendly and girl friendly. Interesting plot as well written prose. In fact, we ask a lot of class readers and I argue that books used in class struggle to cover all these bases. You might be reading this and say ‘poppycock’ to all this, because you have the perfect book. I happy to be proven wrong, but, in my opinion, I think with our obsession on boy/girl friendly texts, accessibility and engaging the non-readers has meant that they quality of reading material student has dipped. All reading is good. But, maybe, we have sacrificed something along the way in the search for engagement.

I have novels that I adore teaching such as ‘Of Mice and Men’, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘Lord of the Flies’ to name a few; but when I think of the other books I have taught, and especially KS3, I haven’t really enjoyed them. Why? Because, simply the texts do not naturally incline themselves for analysis by inexperienced readers. They do some subtle things and clever things with language, but they are at such a level that only a teacher can spot these clever things.  The patterns are vague. They are tenuous. I teach ‘Great Expectations’ and it is interesting to see how students react differently to Dickens’ writing to other writers’ work. They spot patterns, techniques and subtle shifts in Dickens. Sadly, this doesn’t happen as freely with class readers. Students find things watered down. A theme that is woven without a whole chapter in a Dickens novel is spread across a whole novel in a class reader. It is hard for students to see the patterns as they have to make connections between sporadic moments in the texts. It relies on students knowing the text on such a high level that it is akin to being the teacher.

Also, the style of the class reader hinders analysis in secondary schools - now, don’t do throwing the ‘Holes’ description at me. They normally feature a paragraph of setting description, a line of description for each character and then the rest of the writing is made up of feelings of the character and dialogue the characters say. This makes it all fast and pacey, but it means the analysis you can do is short and spread out. There are no long extracts to unpick and question. It is all nice bitesize blocks of things to analysis. Recently, I picked up a class reader to prepare for a lesson and I had no idea what to do. I looked at the text for inspiration. I looked again and again… and again. I struggled to find some language point about the chapter. This mental block is something I rarely experience with a classic text. Each page inspires or has some juicy nugget to discuss and explore. A class reader tends to have nuggets but they are so far apart in the text, or subtle. What I really want to say is: Right, we will read the whole book and only analyse the ending. I am not bothered about the stuff before it, so we will just read it and talk about the ending.  

Then, there is the overall assessment. Writing an essay on a modern class reader is tricky. I find that a lot of the time I am leading them directly to the ideas, rather than the students coming up with the ideas. Take a theme based essay. A theme in a classic text tends to be integral to the plot and everything in the text. A theme in some of the modern class readers is like a fart. You can smell it but you can’t judge the source of the smell easily. So, I might spend looking at courage in a novel. However, I have to tell them in a way what ways the writer shows courage. I’d rather have them tell me.

The class reader for me is dead. It has ceased to be. It no longer is.  How am I passing this sad loss? Well, I am thinking that as part of the curriculum changes in our department that we are going to do something with those class readers. I don’t want whole units of work around a class reader. I want the class readers to be read without the analysis focus. I want the reading for enjoyment to be promoted. A lot of these class readers are good reads. They should, in my opinion, be read and not analysed within an inch of their lives with vacuous comments. Theses books I want to be devoured and enjoyed, and maybe questioned. I want the downtime in a week to reading a few chapters a week of the book without the fear of some work, without the fear of some assessment on the horizon and without the navel gazing analysis that has taken place in the past. Then, we can spend time working with complex and challenging. The best work I get from students is with ‘Great Expectations’ and not with ‘Abomination’ by Robert Swindell.  

Modern class readers should be enjoyed.

Classic texts should be devoured.    

We are gathered here today to pay our respects to our dearly beloved class reader. It has now passed over to the other side. Let us sing hymn number 233.  

My condolences,  

Xris

P.S. No novels were harmed in the making of this blog.

Preparing for the end

It is that time of year again! No, not Christmas. I mean the seasonal regeneration of Doctor Who. Like the makers of ‘Downton Abbey’  and ‘Eastenders’, there seems to be nothing more Christmassy than a death*.  It could be a psychological trick to make us feel happy. You might be bloated with a combination of Roses’ chocolates and sprouts (Did I ever tell you they were sexy?), but at least you are not dead. Or, maybe on a far deep-rooted level: the death of a well-known character in a show displaces and embodies the secret feelings we have towards an annoying relative. You may be stuck in a living room listening to an uncle or aunt fart and spout rubbish at you, but there on the shining television is a character that if you close your eyes you could imagine taking the form of your uncle or aunt.

Anyway, the Doctor is being bumped off and while I am waiting for the inevitable to happen I was thinking about the ending of novels, and in particular how we deal with the ending of a novel in lessons.   I teach and have taught lots of novels and plays and the ending is always an interesting thing to concentrate on in lessons. It is the culmination of everything you have done. It is the showstopper. It is the climax. It is a make or break moment. You often love or hate a book, film or novel based on the ending.  We always hear: ‘It was a great film apart from the ending.’ Or: ‘Wow- what an ending. I can’t possibly say why, but you have to watch it for the ending’.  In fact, I have become one of those sad people that are the last to leave a cinema, because somewhere in the credits there will be another ending tagged on that is ‘like amazing’.

For an English teacher, the ending has become a tactical nightmare. My opening talk on ‘Of Mice and Men’ is like the opening of ‘The Fight Club’:

The first rule of reading ‘Of Mice and Men’ is that you don’t look at the last page or chapter.

The second rule of reading ‘Of Mice and Men’ is that you don’t talk to a student in another class who has read the novel.

The third rule of reading ‘Of Mice and Men’ is that you don’t talk to your parents about reading the book, as they will probably have read it.

The fourth rule of reading ‘Of Mice and Men’ is that you don’t type the words ‘Of Mice and Men’ on any search engine.

The fifth rule of reading ‘Of Mice and Men’ is that you don’t mention anything, if you find out, about how the story ends.

The sixth rule of reading ‘Of Mice and Men’ is that you don’t discuss the book or these rules.

I know: it is all a bit convoluted. I should just say: ‘George kills Lennie, but you don’t know why, so let’s read the book.’ But I don’t. Instead I have this tightrope act of balancing between spoilers and secrecy. Usually, a crafty student discovers the ending and plants massive hints when we predict future events in the novel.  This is further evidence for teaching a wider variety of books at GCSE.

I hear of legends where students have openly cried in lessons over the ending of a novel.  Mine just cry with relief that they can talk about the ending, which they have known of since the first lesson.  It seems that everybody knows because Tim shouted it out on the bus home.

So what do you do when they have finished reading the book then? Well, here a just a few things that I do, or have done in the past.

Rapid Reactions

This is something that I have used again and again with endings.  All too often we have a big intelligent question to ask students when we finish a book and we neglect the emotive response to the ending.  When I close the book, I ask students to not talk and just fill in the sheet of paper, explaining I want their first impressions.

The sheet usually has the following things on it:

Event that sums up the novel:

Greatest scene:

Realistic moment:

Wasted opportunity:

Character you empathise with the most:

Character you loved to hate:

Character most like you:  

One thing you would improve:

Best line:

The beauty of this is that it always generates discussions. And the most surprising of things are found. I did this recently with ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and I was surprised that when a student said they thought the visit to the church was the most important scene.  She was right as it was a symbol of harmony in the novel and that is something we never see in the trial, which is the scene the majority of students picked.  

Evaluate the ending

I used to teach the WJEC GCSE exam and in some ways I hated and loved this question at the same time:

How satisfying is the novel’s conclusion?

For the most able, it was a challenge to justify the resolution by linking it to the structure, language and themes of the text. For the rest, it was a simple task of retelling the story and explaining why the ending was so good – something they thought the Examiner would be happy with, as if he had written the book.  However, with a bit of structure students can achieve a lot with this question.

Rewrite the end

There are several books I wish had a different ending.  A few years ago I got fed up with modern novels and their postmodern ways. I escaped this with Victorian novels.  I just got tired of the silly ways that contemporary novels ended. Trying to be too clever often ended with vague wishy-washy conclusions.  All too often the protagonist was left like they had smelt a fart, looking pensive and worried about the future. Cue the Victorian novel. A nice neat ending with no loose threads.  Baddies punished. Tick. The good guy or woman live happily ever after. Tick.

How different would the novel be if George was killed alongside Lennie?

How different would the novel be if Boo was stabbed at the end of the book?

Making links

Write a brief summary of the ending and get students to work backwards and label it with connections to other sections in the book. Students then easily see mirroring or foreshadowing.

Objects

I have done this a few times.  Students fill a shoebox with items that link to the plot. They justify putting the item in and then as a bonus I use the shoebox with another class when we start reading the book for the first time.

Finally

Some endings are clearly predictable and they were sign posted from the beginning. Others take you by su………

Reading in lessons: Welcome to our book group.

I turned 50 not so long ago. I mean: the blog achieved over 50,000 hits and I was genuinely surprised. I started blogging a year and a half ago out of a mixture of boredom, frustration and loneliness. How did I celebrate this milestone? Did I bathe in champagne? Did I broadcast it to the world? Did I change my info on Twitter? Nah. All I did was eat a twix. In fact, I ate two – it was a special occasion! Sorry, I am not going to go all mawkish on you and blog like I am writing my Oscar speech.  No, I am going back to my main reason for writing a blog: to share my experiences and things I have done.

When I started blogging, I was feeling a tad bit miffed about the fact that some of the things I was taught in my PGCE did not help me in my teaching career. I was given lots of ‘nice’ tips, but the real stuff was something I had to learn during my time teaching. I had to learn that when ringing parents up it always best to ask for the child’s mother or father, rather than Mr Smith or Mrs Smith. I had to learn that sitting next to a child is better for getting students to work than telling them over and over again to get on with their work. I had to learn marking one paragraph can be more effective than marking seven pages of work.  In fact, NQTs and students you don’t know you were born.  Advice now is pouring out of every laptop thanks to blogging and Twitter. However, I still think there is more to be said.

How miffed do you think the voice was?

Do you think these pieces of advice should be taught to PGCE students?

What would you add to the list?

The one piece of advice is the one I am going to discuss in an INSET session this week on reading.  I wish that I had this advice when I was first starting out teaching and I am a little embarrassed to say this, but I only really started using this advice myself last year.  It is about how we deal with texts in lessons and I think it can apply to most subjects in school.  When you are feeling bogged down and you need some breathing space, get students to have ‘book group’ lesson. Sometimes, teachers hold back a DVD or a video for when they want a breather from the demands of a term, but I found a book group lesson worked. I used it with various novels, poems and non-fiction texts and this week I am going to promote it across the school. Before you think I am peddling this as the latest thing in teaching, I am not. I feel that we often overlook the classics in favour of the new shiny thing.  

 What do you think the INSET will be on?

What does the ‘demands of the term’ really mean?

Do we often overlook the classics?

Anyway, how do I structure a book group lesson? Well, I read the text and plan a set of questions to be read at a certain point in the reading. Then, students are placed into groups, or pairs, and they read together. When they reach a certain point, they stop and discuss the questions. At the end of the lesson, we meet together and discuss what they had thought when discussing the questions. I did this with a Year 8 class and it transformed their ideas of a novel, because they were talking in an atmosphere where there were no right and wrongs. It was a warm, cosy environment to chat and discuss. The lovely thing about book groups is that you can chat and explore a book. This approach helped me unlock some hidden potential that is lost in comprehension tasks and lost in class discussion. It was all about exploring and it meant that I had a low planning lesson and a no marking lesson, which if you are a student or an NQT is a joy.  Once the students have experienced the process first-hand, then they can create the questions for you, and you have even less to plan. That is one of the things I wished someone told me all those years ago.

Have you done something similar?

How are book groups structured?

I did this book group lesson this week and it was a joy to listen to as students experimented with American accents when reading out ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and them discussing what a character really meant when they used a particular word.  We all work hard to create an environment that is positive, but this form of group work works. However, there are some important principles behind this strategy in the classroom and it has something to do with ‘Deep Reading’.

What do the most able readers do when they are reading? My experience, of listening to students read to me, has enlightened me on this. Less able students tend to focus on reading the words out with the hope that they have pronounced it correctly. They have the basics of the text’s outline. The most able students tend to read with varying intonation. So, the question is: How do these able students pick up the tone of the words and, therefore, the underlying meaning of a text? For years, we have had the idea that good readers predict, question and visualise things, but I am starting to think that the questioning element is the key thing. Good readers do not process reading like an automaton and just simply decode things; they reflect and question all the time. I will repeat that: all the time. The problem with how we often teach at the moment is that the questions come at the end of the process. In lessons, we get students to read something and THEN answer some questions. We get students to work through an activity and then answer the questions at the end of this.

How do you think students pick up tone?

Is questioning the key element?

Does it really matter when the question is asked?

There is always a big step up from GCSE and A-level, but I do think that that could be partly to do with the questioning of things. I watched an AST teach some A-level class about ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ and the questioning in the lesson was phenomenal. Everything was questioned in the text. Every subtle aspect was broken apart so that the students and teacher had fully understood text.  The teacher evaluated the information and credited or discredited ideas based on the information before them.  What did that look like? Well, using the opening paragraph, I will give you an example:

 I turned 50 not so long ago. What does ‘50’ refer to? Can we assume it means age? As this is a first person perspective, can we trust this writing as reliable? Who is it speaking to? When was this written? I mean: the blog achieved over 50,000 hits and I was genuinely surprised. Who read this blog? Does hits mean readers or visits? Can people visit more than once? Was the voice surprise because he thought it worthless or was he surprised in a mock surprise way? Is the voice really smug but trying to hide it? Why use the word ‘genuinely’? Is the voice convincing himself or the audience?  I started blogging a year and a half ago out of a mixture of boredom, frustration and loneliness. Why is the voice so vague about starting? Is blogging something you can start? Is it natural for someone to blog about boredom? What are the reasons for blogging? Is the voice exaggerating for sympathy or are they attempting to be funny? Is loneliness a result of boredom? How did I celebrate this milestone? Compared to other blogs, is this really a milestone? Has the voice achieved anything else? Is this voice male because it feels a need to assert its achievements? Or, does the emotional point about ‘loneliness’ reflect a female voice? Can we clearly ascertain gender from writing style? Did I bathe in champagne? Is it true that people bathe in champagne? How much did it cost? Why would you do this?Did I broadcast it to the world? How would they broadcast it? Are they in a position to broadcast it? Did I change my info on Twitter? Nah. All I did was eat a twix. In fact, I ate two – it was a special occasion!

There are obviously loads of questions that I have missed or haven’t addressed; however, I think you can see my point. As an adult, I have made this questioning process a subconscious one. I, we, do that all the time. My head is full of questions. The problem comes, I think, is when we look at what we do with reading texts. We focus on doing the reading first and then get students to look back and question things. On one hand that is great because they can see the whole picture. But, on the other hand, it does mean that complex understanding needed to fully understand the task isn’t provided at the right moment. The right question at the right time is very important. Five minutes late and it is lost.

I have blogged about reading as being a journey here. But, if we don’t address the questions at the start of the reading journey, then we have lost sight of the full journey. Yes, they might be able to pick things up, but the full understanding isn’t there. I think we need to build students up to ask questions as they read. This can be internally, verbally or in writing, but we need to build this up. Admittedly, I have been guilt of not focusing on questioning during reading, because I have been so concerned with heads down reading in silence.  However, maybe I am not preparing students fully. Yes, I do lots of questioning before reading a text and I do tonnes of questioning after, but now I need to do a bucketful during.    

Thank you for reading the blog,

Xris32

P.S. Learning from my mistakes t-shirts, key rings, plates and badges will be available soon.

Sweating with style

There are two things in life I don’t understand. One: why schools don’t have air-conditioning? Two: why is it that English males insist on taking their t-shirts/shirts off if there is a mere glow of sunshine? The first thing is obvious: it is about cost. Timothy must eat healthily. Timothy must exercise lots. Timothy must have personalised learning. Timothy must have lots of support. What – give Timothy a comfortable environment to work in? No. No. No.  Mothers and fathers work in cool, air-conditioned offices, while their children work in the equivalent of a foundry. I took one class to read outside this week, as the heat rocketed and melted the crayons in the boxes in my classroom. Thankfully, my school is great and I work with people who understand these things; yet, I have worked in places where you have to K.B.O., or leave. It is all about cost at the end of the day, but I have sweated and sweated so much this week that I think students have wondered that the sweat patches on my shirt are a design made by shirt maker.  And, I didn’t resort to the second thing and take off my shirt, which I cannot fathom why people do. You could have the largest beer gut in the world, but there seems to be something coded in the English DNA that as soon as the clouds part, men take their shirts off and parade as if sunny Nottinghamshire is the hot Caribbean.
 

As I was perspiring my way through a lesson, I had a flashback to an incident that happened several years ago. It was one of those things that happened and left me stunned:

I was in a classroom made up of one hundred breezeblocks and a postage stamp of a window. The class were all sat in rows, melting as the July heat exuded from the walls. We had been working through some poetry and I was sat on a desk, reciting some lines of worthy verse. As the students were visibly wilting before my eyes, I left the door open, so that if any particles of air were floating in the corridor they might try to pop into our room, and reduce the temperature. The students were passive, but I understood, given the circumstances. Then, one student raised their head up like a sunflower in a row of withered weeds. The student’s eyes widened. My head turned and then it hit me. Water exploded across my back. Stunned, shocked and cooled, I froze in panic. I saw that a stranger was in the doorway, but I also saw that he had another water bomb. Like the Sixty Million Dollar Man, everything went slow-motion at this point. I moved to apprehend the water throwing yob, but he had released the educational grenade. My body flew through the air. If I was lucky, I would stop the bomb in time, sacrificing my dignity so that the students could be protected.

I failed.

The bomb circled over and over in the air as it made its way into the heart of the room. It flew over my head and carried on its destructive path. Did it hit the lad who was always making fun of me in lessons? Did it hit the student who never did as I told him to? Did it hit the student who thought he was the toughest in the class? No. It hit the sweetest student in the world. The student that had never seen a water bomb in her life. Nor even bought one. It exploded over the student who had worked so hard for me over the year. Her lovely workbook was a soggy pile of mush and her face was almost as shocked as mine.

Then, one clever lad shouts out to me, the soaked teacher, and the drowned student: “I bet it’s pee.” He was trying to goad me. He knew that the teacher had been humiliated in style and he wanted to add salt to the wounds. To which, I smelt my sodden shirt, and said: “Well, it is nice smelling pee, if it is pee’.    

 

The assailant ran off and my head teacher promised that it would never happen again. But, on a hot, scorching week like this one, I wish I had a water bomb chucked at me, just for a few seconds of coolness.  Anyway, I want to talk about style this week. My response to a comment about a water bomb being filled with wee lacked the style of James Bond. I don’t have the witty comments to throw back at people. I usually think of something clever to say a week later.

This week I have done something about style with Year 10s. Style is always an interesting thing. It is that next stage in analysis after the spotting of things. It is the looking for patterns in writing. In the past, I have always adopted the draconian approach of telling students what makes a writer’s style interesting. I have tried to get them to see style, but it always seems as if style is like a big chasm. They can spot interesting things, but a very, very, very large rope is needed, if they are to get across the Grand Canyon of thought and talk about the style.

I have also done interesting things, like comparing extracts between books, and playing spot the difference. I have even talked about clothes and how clothing and writing links to style. We wear roughly the same kinds of clothes, yet the clothes we wear are different colours, textures, sizes and styles; this is like writing. A writer dresses their writing according to their preference.  But, it is very hard to equate this to writing. Or, for students to get this notion independently. In reality, we are talking about patterns and spotting them. However, my years of reading and teaching means that I am attuned to this way of thinking. Your average student in the class is barely getting the plot and the characters, yet the teacher is expecting them to now approach the story like a ‘magic-eye’ picture. Like a magic-eye picture, you need to see the whole thing to get it, and often in English, we don’t always have the time to see the whole picture. I can spot Dickens’ style of writing, because my view of the picture is large. The students that come to our classrooms only see one corner of a picture. They don’t see the whole picture, but we expect them to.

This week I tried something that partly addresses this question about style. I don’t think for a second I have solved it, but in a sweltering classroom, I felt some students grasped the subtly of a writer’s style. At the moment with my Year 10s, I am teaching ‘The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ by R. L. Stevenson and I am loving it. We are close to the end of the story now and I decided that I wanted to explore the style of the writing a bit more. We had already analysed a few extracts and made several pages of notes. Therefore, I wanted to talk about style, but what I didn’t want to do is tell the students what were the features of Stevenson’s writing style; I wanted them to find it out for themselves.  

I started by revealing this slide one line at a time. I told the students that one column described Steinbeck’s style of writing in ‘Of Mice and Men’ and the other column described Susan Hill’s writing style in ‘The Woman in Black’. They had to guess which is which. I made it harder for them by having quite a few similar.

After revealing the real answer to the enigma, the students then discussed if there were other things I could add to the lists.

BINGO! Finally, we played style bingo. I produced an A3 sheet of possible features of a writer’s style. It was double sided and included techniques, plot ideas, themes, imagery and other things. Hidden amongst them were some stylistic features of Stevenson’s writing. I then gave the class a blank bingo grid to fill in with some of the features. What was great was that to get a chance of winning they had to use the prior knowledge and some prediction at the same time.

Then, we read a chapter and as we were reading they ticked off the features as the spotted them in the writing, but instead of a tick they had to write the page number and a brief quote. For me, this worked as it meant that students were reading with a purpose, but they could also see that these elements of style are woven in the text and not just in the bits that I have printed out for them; the writer dresses their writing all the time and not when it suits them.  

One student on their grid wrote the following:

·         Exaggeration

·         Use of size

·         Dialogue

·         Use of setting

·         Contrasts

·         Lists

·         Personification

·         Slow pace

·         Violent descriptions

·         Use of the weather

 

I have talked about technique vomiting in the past (if you are not sure what I mean, then read this blog) and this, I feel, took this idea of spotting things to another level. To be honest, I still need to refine how I use this in the lesson, as I could have reinforced the writer’s style  more, and I will do this next week. However, it did step things up a bit. The students were deciding what the patterns were and they were looking for them, which I think is some clever stuff.  They will also be able to link the use of one writing choice with another made by the writer somewhere else in the text – that for me is much better, as it shows that the student has an understanding of the text as a whole thing, rather than isolated extracts and feature spotting.  

 

Talking of style, I am off to invent the armpitless long sleeved shirt. I think it will catch on. Yes, I know, what you are thinking – why doesn’t he wear a short sleeved shirt? Well, I am sorry but ties and short sleeved shirts do not mix; it’s just not my style. Tell you what: let’s make that three things I don’t understand about the world.  

1)      Schools that are not air-conditioned

2)      English men taking their shirts off

3)      Short sleeved shirts with a tie

Thanks for reading,

Xris32  

Blogsync 6: Pinging the elastic band of tension

Warning: no students were harmed in the making of this blog. Sadly, the same cannot be said for teachers.

This month’s Blogsync is an interesting one: it is about explanations and, in particular, the best examples of effective explanations used in the classroom. I have found this quite a hard thing to write about, as I do spend most of my time explaining things in the classroom. This experience is a bit of navel gazing: explain a good explanation. Is there one explanation that is better than another? I suppose if I am honest, I use several different methods to explain the same thing. I don’t just rely on one single approach to explain ideas. I should know; I am the father to two 5 year old daughters. Fatherhood, at this stage, is permanently explaining things to children. Why do dinosaurs eat meat? Why do we die? Why do cats poo in our garden? Why do you have a hairy nose? Why is that man over there really fat? Why are we leaving the shop quickly? Why have you got that angry look on your face?

I think, in response to the topic, I am just going to walk through a lesson about explaining tension. As with some parts of English, you enter ‘the clouds’ when you explain some ideas and concepts. Some parts of English are just naming concrete things like a technique. Yet, as soon as we look at things like the effect and the feelings created by a text, we fire our rocket to the stars and start to talk about woolly, ethereal things. We start using abstract nouns and adopt tentative phrases like ‘it could be’ or ‘perhaps they mean that’. It is the part of the lesson where the firm ground disappears and we are flying from one cloud to another. The clouds are indefinable and they constantly change and move and they often become something different.  Of course, this I used to refer as ‘the shades of grey’ aspect of English teaching. There are no clear yes or no answers, only better ways of answering questions. Sadly, ‘shades of grey’ has taken another meaning and now I daren’t mention the phrase unless I want a cacophony of sniggers and a set of awkward questions. The lack of concrete foundations in English is its strength and its weakness. The greyness, or abstract nature, is pure poison to the wannabe scientist or mathematician in the class, but to the creative and artistic child it is pure elixir.  Grammar and techniques give students this concrete foundation for the literal minded. They like the answers , the rules to things and grammar offers that to them. Personally, that’s why I prefer the bringing back of the explicit teaching of grammar. I love the English language, but I know there are students that need something concrete to work with. We had shifted too far to the abstract way of teaching and neglected some of the concrete aspects. Thankfully, we have moved to more concrete aspects in teaching. But, like most things we need a combination of the two. We need a balance.

The Explanation

Equipment:

A large rubber band
A pair of scissors
DVD of Jaws
Extract from the novel of ‘Jaws’
A teacher
A student
 

I think part of explaining things for me is making things ‘real’ or making things enter a student’s reality. I know I am, in effect, talking about Vygotsky and  his ‘zone of proximal difference’ here, but I feel that is so important when teaching. That is what I think Youtube was invented for - just so a teacher can quickly find a clip to highlight a point or show something as being real. 

 

Tension in texts is one of those abstract things. It is about the reader and their relationship with a text. Basically, tension is saying how scared you are about things in a text. But, sadly, this doesn’t always equate well when students write. I have read hundreds of essays with students saying things are really tense or that things aren’t tense. Tension just gets lumped with interest. The more tension, the more interesting a story is.  The less tension, the less interesting it is. The explanations from students are simple and might be explained further with a ‘because’ but they are on a losing track when they think tension is either on or off. A graph can help develop this further, but sometimes something else is called for.

Enter the humble elastic band. Make sure it is one of those thick ones. The thicker the better. Cut the band so it is a single strip of elastic. Ask one student to hold one end of the band, while you hold the other. I find it helps to pick a student that hasn’t always been helpful in class. Explain to the student that they have to hold on to the band very tightly. Then, I talk about tension. I ask the class what would happen if the student lets go of the band. The student does and it is not very interesting. This is when it starts gets interesting. I then spend the next 10 minutes playing a hilarious game with the class.

I play around with their expectations. They secretly want the teacher to be pinged by the elastic band so I play up to this. I make the student move away, so the band becomes strained and stretched.  The class love it as they are waiting for the pain to be inflicted. The student holds the power. I create more tension by adopting a ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ bank of phrases. Are you sure you want to let go now? Sure? You could walk away now and be a happy person… Then, we try to stretch the piece of elastic as far as it will go. (Dear reader, I have never let go. I wouldn’t.) The class are then shouting for the student to let go. One student calls out: ‘He won’t do. Sir’s bluffing’. I then tease them further by moving closer to the student and a move away, again. Finally, with a little nod I indicate to the student that he can let go, when he/she wants to. Ouch!

We then, as a class, explore how tension was created and how we felt when watching the incident. They start to use words like ‘less’ and ‘more’ when describing things, because it is real. The band is a metaphor for the tension and you can see visibly what the result is when tension is increased or reduced. I had a colleague who taught tension with the idea of a toy car. The car would be wound up and then let go. It worked for them, but toy cars are not as cool as elastic bands and inflicting pain on a teacher. I certainly earn respect points by using this method. Finally, we look at a tense moment in text or in Jaws and relate the tension of the rubber band to it.  

When the lesson is finished, my tough manly exterior crumbles as I nurse my throbbing finger.

I do similar things with dramatic irony or suspense; I make them a real experience. I make them a transparent or a shared experience, which we can all comment and discuss. Each reader has a different experience when reading a book, so it is hard to explore tension and our reaction to a text as there are so many shades, perspectives and ideas.

 

Dramatic irony
This idea is stolen from ‘The Merchant of Venice’. I kick a student out of the classroom. Then, I put three boxes on a table at the front of the classroom. In one box, I put in a chocolate bar and in the other two I put a lunchtime detention or five demerits. The class all know where I have placed each item in the boxes, so when the student is invited to the room, they are hoping he/she gets the punishment. Is that your final answer? Are you really sure?

Suspense

Three empty boxes with nothing in them. Don’t say what is in or isn’t in the box and get a student to bravely put his hand in each box.
 

Teaching is about explanations, explaining what the student needs to do, explaining what the student needs to know and explaining a student’s progress. Effective explanations aren’t about dumbing down and using teenspeak. Effective explanations are about reality and making things real.

Follow this link to read more effective explanations.

 Thanks for reading,

 Xris

Sentenced to six years of APP - APP and reading

I am preparing for my first ever teachmeet in Leeds next week and part of that is talking about sentences. Next week, I will blog about the topic of sentences, but in my preparation for it, I thought I’d talk about APP in English - with a bit about sentences at the end.  

I remember a couple of years ago when APP was introduced as the next best thing in teaching. It was designed to make marking easier and more focused; yet, at the same time it reduced the English language to a series of bullet points. There were a lot of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ at the time it was unveiled. I was quite excited at the time, as it meant that marking could be more focused and you could ditch the usual general marking of things like spelling and accuracy, and focus on word choice and the effect on the reader. Then, schools went mad and everything was obsessed and focused on doing it, and showing evidence in lessons of its use. It is interesting in this age of ‘progress in lessons’ there is very little mention of APP (assessing pupil progress). Obviously, there is a political agenda; it was a Labour initiative and so under a Conservative rule it is neglected, but I think it is still bubbling away in pockets of classrooms.    

Several years on, I am not so positive about it. Don’t get me wrong – it can be used effectively, but is only a part of a successful approach to teaching. From an English point of view, I struggled with the framework because of the assessment focuses (or foci – depending on the attitude of the reader). To get about a level 6, everything becomes vague. Level 7s tend to do things with flair and creativity, which sadly doesn’t really equate to the mark scheme. It almost says ‘does it really, really well and better than others in the class’.  I always felt that the APP grids were focused on the level 5s and how to achieve to a level 5. As soon as you got to a level 5, it read as ‘blah blah yes you do it really well’.

Furthermore, the grids allowed you to have students being proficient in writing for an audience and using superb vocabulary, yet the basics of sentence control and punctuation were often missing from their writing. You ended up with a mixed view of a student’s capabilities. It almost said: yeah, I know you can’t punctuate to save your life, but look... pretty words.  Some people might say that this was great because it gave an idea of the student’s priorities. It directed them and showed them how to improve. Other people might say that this just masked their weaknesses, as naturally most people will ‘upsell’ a student’s skills. I always felt that you shouldn’t be getting to the dizzy heights of a level 6 unless you could punctuate accurately. I recall one teacher insisting that you couldn’t give a level 5 unless they used paragraphs, which has stuck with me to this day.

One major problem: showing evidence of it once means that you are proficient in a skill. I have scored a goal once, by accident. I was standing near a goal, when a ball hit me and bounced into the net. This one event does not make me suitable for the England football team. Just because you do something once, doesn’t mean you are an expert. It just means that you are lucky. I was lucky. Students are lucky too and get it right by accident and fluke. But, does that mean that they are skilled at that particular element?  The APP grids were highlighted, ticked or shaded if a student demonstrated a skill once. As evidence, it looks great. But, it really masks the whole problem: what can they do independently?  Guided by the APP grid, you could probably help students to show a lot of high level skills. Take a lesson for each focus and you can tick them off one by one, but what can they really do without the 'stabilising wheels' of your help and instruction?

It became a reductive process:  Today, we are looking at AF3 and AF5.   Lessons became focused on a very narrow skill and the learning process was reduced to a simple step ladder. This isn’t too much of a problem in small doses, but it can lead to a culture of breaking down each skill one by one and teaching them in isolation. When looking at a poem, you tend to look at one aspect and then bring other aspects in along the journey. I felt that a culture focused on AF1 or AF2 meant that it became stuck on that focus. The beauty of teaching English is that you can start talking about a poem and end up looking at something completely different by the end. To paraphrase a quote from Doctor Who, if we capture a star and put it in a box, we miss the true beauty of the star, for the star is beautiful in relation to other stars in the sky. Boil a lesson down to focusing on sentence structure alone and you miss the relationship between the audience and the purpose of the text. You also miss how the punctuation works with the structure used to create a desired effect. Furthermore, you miss out the use of effective vocabulary that is necessary for a sentence to be really effective.

I use APP occasionally, when the task is appropriate, but it isn’t the focus for all assessments. It is a tool. A tool for helping students improve, but it is not a hammer to hammer in learning. It can help with AFL, but it isn’t the miracle cure that we were led to believe. Recently, I was preparing students for writing about a novel and I was faced with the grid of doom again. Looking at a huge grid and colouring different bits doesn’t help them or me, so I came up with these sentence to help them unlock that skill. In the past, I have given them bullet points or a list of questions, but my new strategy helped them better:  I gave each student a set of structures for them to articulate the skill I was assessing. Too many times have I talked about a skill for students to repeat bland statements like: ‘The writer uses structure to show us the theme of loneliness’.

I warned students that this wasn’t a case of a Woolworths' pick and mix. They had to find one that best fits what they were trying to say. I know they are quite dull and boring, but they are a starting point for them to articulate the complex ideas. They are much more effective than looking at a grid and saying to get a level 5 you must link the structure to the meaning and take several quotes from across the text to support your ideas. The students that used them demonstrated effective evidence of the skill assessed.

AF2 – Retrieve information from texts and use quotations 

·         We see this when ‘___________________’.

·         An example is when _________ says: ‘________________’.

·         The best example of this is when _______ says ‘___________’

·         POINT: ‘___________________’.

 

AF3 – Infer or interpret information or ideas

·         This suggests that …

·         He could also be hinting that ________

·         Although it seems that he is saying ____________, he really means_______ .

·         The fact that he ____________ and ___________ shows that he means ______

·         On the outside it looks like he _____________________. However, on the inside he is _________ because he says_______

 

AF4 – Comment on the structure of the text

·         At the start, you notice that_________

·         The second half of the books shows a change in the way that __________________

·         As the book progresses, we see_______________.

·         The more ______________, the more__________________.

·         As the story progresses, we see that_____________________ .

·         By the end of the book, we see ________________ .

·         The last chapters explain __________________.

 

AF5 – Comment on the writer’s use of language

·         The writer uses _____________ to show / highlight / suggest ______________________ .

·         The character tends to use ____________ when ___________________.

·         When the character uses___________, it shows us that_________________ .

·         The use of ___________ suggests that _____________________.

·         By using ______________, the writer shows us that._____________ .

 

AF6 – Comment on the writer’s purposes and viewpoints

·         It would seem that the writer is ________________________ towards___________.

·         The writer suggests that ________________ .

·         The writer uses __________________ to show us that ______________________.

·         The writer wants the reader to feel _________________ so that _________________ .

·         The novel demonstrates the writer’s view that _______________________________.

 

Thanks for reading. I think I have been let off early for good behaviour.

 

Xris32

The Woman in Black, The Lady in Red, The Woman in Green and The Pink Lady

During a dinner party, there is a heated argument between several ladies. One lady was dressed in black. Another was dressed all in red, while the two next to her were dressed in green and pink.  Which of the ladies won the argument? Why?

I awoke this morning to mist. Mist everywhere. It seems to be one of those ‘rimy’ mornings. There’s frost aplenty – well, from what I can see in all the mist.  The perfect environment to talk about ‘The Woman in Black’.  Several months ago I blogged about ‘Of Mice and Men’ and impressively it still gets views on a weekly basis.  I wanted to share some of the different things I did and do with the novel.  I assume I am like most people in teaching; I look for resources on Google and then create my own. In fact, I do enjoy the making of teaching resources, but I also look  at others for inspiration. I need a muse.

The problem I find with a lot of teaching websites is that they are geared to the quick resource. Need something for teaching spellings? Try this. Need something for teaching symbols in ‘An Inspector Calls’? Try this. Need something for teaching genre? Try this.  When I look for resources, I want ideas and not ready made lessons. Therefore, this blog is about inspiration and ideas for the teaching  of ‘The Woman in Black’.

 
Weather
Susan Hill uses pathetic fallacy by the bucket load in the novel and I have worked really hard to stop students constantly spotting this in the novel. The weather is bad, so it must tell us what is going on in his head.  Instead of tracking tension through the novel I have tracked the weather. You crazy man, I hear you say. Yes, I have turned into a weather man. Today, we will have some misty patches with a few sunny spells.  Personally, I think the weather in the novel functions on a number of levels and the class have embraced this charting of weather in the book. As a class, we come to the following ideas:

·         The weather helps to create tension. As the weather gets worse, there chances of something bad happen increases.

·         The weather relates to the key mystery. The main mystery is introduced to us in fog. You can’t see things clearly in fog like the mystery. The weather improves when the mystery is unravelled.

·         The weather challenges our expectations of  what is safe and unsafe. Scary and bad things happen on pleasant days. We see the ghost for the first time on a sunny day. We also have the horrific conclusion on a fairly pleasant day. The use of weather unsettles us. The connection between plot and weather isn’t consistent.

·         The weather links to Arthurs’s feelings and also the woman in black’s feelings.

Narrator

If you have read my blog recently, you’ll know that I have gone a little mad on choices. In particular, the choices we make as writers and the choices other writers make.  Therefore, I started one of my lessons with the following questions about the narrator.

Why use a man?

Why use a young man?

Why use an old man?

Why have the changes in time?

Why use 1^st person perspective?

Why use an outsider?

Why use an arrogant man?

Why use a rational / sane man?

Why use a sceptic?

Then, as a class we discussed how the story would change if we had a shy child narrating the story. Or, a Victorian woman who is a mother.  

Furthermore, how would the story change if it was told by a minor character. (@Gwenelope's idea)

Questions

I have had a nasty bout of man-flu and I had one of those days where I felt that I really should stay in bed and recuperate. I bravely soldiered on and taught.  Well, I say taught; I read the chapter ‘Across the Causeway’ with them, and instead of a dull as dishwater task of answering some questions, I got them to think of questions. During the reading of the chapter, I would ask them to think of a question and write it down. In a previous lesson, I had highlighted to the students that the exam question will either be about the presentation of something or about the tension or the mood of a section. Therefore, the students produced questions relating to these two possible areas.  The results were great. They all had twelve questions each and we ranked those in terms of complexity and answered them. Also, John Sayers' blog on questioning has been very helpful in developing complex questions.

 Film Posters

Source: http://scream-trilogy.net/2011/03/ladies-and-gentlemen-your-official-scream-4-cast-poster/

One of the problems I have found with teaching the novel is the question of genre. The recent film version of 'The Woman in Black' was a horror film disguised as a ghost story. It has some good bits in it, but it is simply a horror film. (It was even made by Hammer Horror Films and like a stick of rock it has ‘horror’ written all the way through it.)There is no better proof of this than the opening few minutes: three children die in a horrific way. For a lot of my students, they have a vivid memory of the film and that contrasts all the time with their reading of the novel. The horror elements beat the ghost elements in their memory. The ‘AHHHH!’ always beats the ‘Oh!’ when reading the book. I often hear a voice say: “It was much scarier in the film.”  We all know that the imagination is far more powerful for scares, but students often feel that the 'visual scare' is more powerful that the 'imagined scare'.

Source: http://www.impawards.com/intl/uk/2012/woman_in_black_ver4.html

Even in my research of the novel, I found lots of contrasting views of what the novel’s genre is. Is it a ghost story? Is it a horror story? Is it a gothic horror story? Is it all three genres? I felt that I had to start with genre and the students’ understanding of particular genres. In the past, I have always referred to book covers and this has generated lots of ideas and discussion, but the problem with book covers is that they work in symbols, clues and hints. They don’t explicitly tell you the plot, genre or the experience you are going have. That’s why we have the old cliché: don’t judge a book by its cover. I have often read a book and found it to be something totally different to the one advertised on the cover. There is no correlation between the cover and the ending or resolution of a book. However, with film posters there is a correlation. Film posters are about selling an immediate experience. Come to this film and you will laugh. Come to this film and you will learn something about history. Come to this film and your wife will love it and you will hate it.  Wrapped up in one image is the story, the genre and the emotional experience you will get when you watch the film. That is why I started the discussion on genre by focusing on two film posters. The poster for a ‘Scream’ film and the poster for ‘The Woman in Black’ film.  Simply: What are the differences between these two posters? We came up with the following differences:

 

lots of characters vs. one main character

monster above the characters vs. monster behind the character

red and black vs. blue, grey and black

no setting featured vs. setting featured

 
Behind each of these choices lies meaning and the students inferred for themselves what each element meant. Focusing on one character means that you can get under the skin of the character and explore the psychology of events. Focusing on lots of characters could mean that the monster is picking off victims.

 

I then developed the understanding of genre with my own bullet points of genre features. I know that some of these are questionable and ‘genre’ is sometimes hard to define, but these on bits of paper gave students a starting point to develop their understanding of genre. Later, I add ‘gothic horror’ to the mix and see what they notice. If nothing else, they make a good tick list for the features. Now, I find students referring to the genre throughout their discussions. The writer could have used X but they didn’t, because that would make the story a horror story.

A ghost story

·         Features very few characters and the plot concerns two or three main characters

·         Concerned with the mystery of why the ghost haunts people

·         Explores the psychology of fear

·         Focuses on one particular fear. For example, the fear of loneliness or isolation

·         Plot will be slow to develop the atmosphere and build tension

·         Always a first person narrator

·         Suspense is used rather than tension – you know something is going to happen, but you don’t know what.

·         A story of mystery and solving the story behind the mystery

·         Features uncertainty and doubt

·         Usually takes the form of a character telling another their story

·         Focuses on fears caused by the mind

·         Will contain some element of madness

·         Features a character who doubts their senses or sanity

·         Will take place in darkness

 

A horror story

·         Features a group of characters who slowly disappear / die

·         Concerned with the identity of ‘the horror’

·         Focuses on blood or gore – body horror

·         Moments of tension are created by the audience’s awareness that something bad is going to happen to a character. Tension is created by the waiting for the obvious to happen.

·         Plot will be quite fast going from one shock to another

·         Can be a first person narrator, but often a third person narrator

·         A story of survival

·         Features unmasking or hiding

·         Focuses on fears about something happening to our body

·         Usually will contain some kind of warning and a character ignoring the warning or common sense

·         Might take place in darkness

 

Which actor for the role?

This is a thing from an old friend in another school. Find nine or so pictures of possible actors to play a role in the book. I chose nine possible actors for a new stage version of the book. In groups, students had to decide on which actor was the best for the role.  During the process, the groups worked out how the character is presented in the book.  Obviously, some girls talk about how fit one or two are, but after a while there were some clever discussions taking place. The group I did this with felt that the character for Arthur shouldn’t be geeky, naïve, too young and too attractive. Then, we explored further why we had these ideas.

 

Script

As there is so much description in Hill’s writing, I think that the dialogue is easily ignored or neglected by students.  Therefore, I got students to write down bits of the dialogue and act these out. It helped them to see what was going on in the dialogue and see the language of the dialogue under a microscope.

A sequel

What would the class do with a sequel of the book? As I was planning this question with students, news came to me of a real sequel.

Dickens

Miss Havisham is ‘the woman in white’.  Yes, there is the novel 'The Woman in White', but there is a clear nod to good old Miss Havisham. Students compared how the woman in black is presented in the book with the first description of Miss Havisham. It makes for lots of shocking discovery. The students felt that Miss Havisham was the woman in black. It wasn’t just inspired by Dickens; they thought it was copied from Dickens.   In fact, some words seem to have been lifted.

 

Scooby Doo

This started as a ‘thunk’ but turned into something else. I started showing the class a picture of the Scooby Doo gang and asked them how it related to the story. To cut a long story short, the gang became different aspects of Arthur Kipps’ personality. Each character represented a part of his personality and the students could even identify when Arthur went all Fred, or when he went all Daphne.  Freud eat your heart out. Why have the id, ego and superego when you have Fred, Daphne, Shaggy, Scooby Doo  and Wilma.
 

And in walks Susan Hill

I had a colleague several years who used to do this all the time. She would spend a bit of a lesson in role as a character. Years later, I always felt squeamish at the thought of pretending to be someone else in a lesson. This week I tried it and I was amazed at how successful it was. Students who usually remain quiet were scrambling to ask me, or Susan Hill, a question. We did laugh a few times, as I was given a few questions relating to my gender. As a woman, how do you think the novel would be different if it was written by man? Cue me fanning myself with a piece of paper and muttering the following in a style of Emily Howard in ‘Little Britain’, “As a lady, I think…”.  I didn’t really put a silly voice on or fan myself - honestly.

 

And finally…

I am surprised that there hasn’t yet been a fancy dress costume for the woman in black. It is a missed opportunity for Halloween. There is a bit of an appeal of dressing up in the aforementioned costume and hanging around churchyards hiding behind a gravestone. As soon as someone turns their back, pop out and stand there. As soon as they turn away, hide again.  Some frivolous japes.

Strangely, on Twitter 'David Walliams News' has started following me. I think I am starting to see why. First, pretending to be Susan Hill in a lesson. Second, suggesting that I dress up as the woman in black would be a fun thing.

 

Thanks for reading and thanks to @Gwenelope for your usual help,

Xris32

 

P.S. I will add more to this list as people mention them.