Narrowing those feelings

Effect is such a funny thing to explore when reading texts. It is wrapped up in so many things. What has happened previously? What does the reader think will happen next? What is really going on in the story? A lot of what we expect from students is precision. Precise identification of a mood or a feeling.The best students are those that can identify a range of precise moods and even some of those moods are conflicting moods. Take the ‘Life of Pi’ paper and the conflicting disgust and comical moods surrounding the description of the hyenas. The problem is that we are expecting teenagers to articulate feelings, which, in all fairness they are struggling to identify in themselves and not just in an extract from a story. 

The biggest problem we have in English, aside from apostrophes on everything ending with an s or the fact that a lot is two words, is oversimplification of overgeneralization. I had to write some curriculum documents and the word ‘oversimplification’ was the one I used in every box and on every page when it came to misconceptions. Knowledge isn’t the problem. It is how that knowledge is used in context that is the problem. It is the fact that it can be used in other contexts but it isn’t precise or appropriate. Take the students who use the word ‘discombobulated’ in their writing. They use it in every piece of writing, including essays. The same is seen with quotations from key texts that appear in creative writing. Or, voltas applied to non-fiction texts. 

For this reason, I have been looking at how we can support precision around thinking in texts. Effect is such a nebulous concept and it is hard to pin down. That’s why I explored if I could group the feelings around something more precise. 

• Is the feeling related to power? 

• Is the feeling related to the place? 

• Is the feeling related to a character in the text? 

• Is the feeling that the reader feels differently to the characters in the story? 

It is alright asking students what they feel in response to a text, but it takes quite a bit of skill to hone those feelings down. Quite sophisticated readers could do that easily, but most students can’t. That’s why I think it is important to think about what is causing the feeling before a student even grasps for words. 

That unpicking of feelings is really important for understanding stories. Otherwise we get generalised comments. It feels creepy. It feels sinister. Take the Hartop paper. The car has a claustrophobic setting. Hartop is dominating the car. The women are powerless. Once we have established the different feelings. We can explore the subtext. Why is it claustrophobic? Why is Hartop dominating? Why are the women powerless?  

Within any text, there are competing sources for our feelings and students need to see that there is a level of plurality in texts. We feel opposing feelings for different things in the text. Weaker students tend to generalise this fact and blanket everything with the same feeling. The better students pinpoint the differences in feeling. 

Once students have the idea of opposing sources of feelings, we can then explore the what and the why behind them. To start that discussion, I used this table this week. 

 

Size /Power	Mood /Place	People	Reader
Intimidating	Sinister	Confined	Uneasy
Superior	Tranquil	Imprisoned	Pity
Domineering	Boredom	Ensnared	Confusion
Dominating	Monotony	Alienated	Amused
Overpowering	Foreboding	Isolated	Relate
Unrelenting	Menacing	Detached	Fearful
Inferior	Dreary	Outcast	Anxious
Fragile	Claustrophobic	Overwhelmed	Concerned
Vulnerable	Suffocating	Suppressed	Unsettled
Feeble	Idyllic	Ecstatic	Surprised
Overpowered	Harmonious	Inspired	Expecting
Defenceless	Magical	Determined	Unexpected
Helpless	Perfect	Hopeful	Empathise
Powerless	Lifeless	Connected	Sympathise
Timid	Chaotic	Appreciated	Intrigued

 

This week we explored Rosabel and discussed the claustrophobic bus compared to the magical outside. We further discussed the level of detachment she felt in her situation. We often have word bingo behind tables like this, but the students used this to narrow their thinking. The narrowing down on meaning is key. Instead of throwing everything out including the kitchen sink, we were refining and narrowing. How would we describe the mood of the bus? How would we describe Rosabel’s feelings? 

We need students to be self-refining their ideas and words when approaching texts. That's what makes the best responses. They have sifting through their brain to be precise. They have picked out the right word and not the first word that comes to mind.

English is a massive subject and lots of things lead teachers to explore and grapple loads of things at once. The longer I teach, the more I come to the idea that exploring should be happening on a microscopic level. We should be refining and narrowing the ideas to be clear. As teachers, we should be working constantly on refining and sifting through things to get to the kernel of a idea. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris

Symbolism, structure and chat

It is that annual time of year where I teach Question 3, the structure question, to students. The more I teach this question, the more I think we need to work more on symbolism in English. And, to an extent teach them the background knowledge to identify those symbols. Symbolism is what we think we do a lot in lessons. We look at poems and explore the symbols through similes, metaphors and personification in them. Yet, when we take out metaphorical language, students find it really hard to spot and discuss them. 

Every play studied has lots of symbolism embedded in it yet symbolism tends to be isolated to the language. A character giving a soliloquy on stage on their own is a symbol of isolation. A scene set inside can be a symbol of secrecy and a lack of transparency. A scene set at night symbolises something bad, sinister or that something is ending. An Inspector Calls being set at night is symbolic. It is all leading to a new ‘dawn’. There’s a reason it is set at night. The end of the old ideology.   

The problem we have is that students can’t get their head around the idea that symbolism is often not linguistic or figurative. It is structural. I think over the years we have become too focused on identifying techniques to the point that we have missed something powerful within our subject. The meaning around all choices a writer makes.  Over time, we have subconsciously created a hierarchy around choices that sensible choices around structure, positioning or content are neglected for something with a name. Something easily nameable. Something easily tested. Something easily taught. In fairness, something that is easily explained, but not something that is easily explored. 

Symbolism is fuzzy. In one context, an object can symbolise and then in another it can symbolise something completely different. Take the colour red. It can symbolise paradoxically positive and negative things. It can represent love and passion, but also it can symbolise death and danger. Our job is to help students see that duality and how it fits in the context of things at the moment. 

The reason Question 3 is such a difficult question is that you cannot explain it fully, because it is a question about exploring. It is why we see so many people tripping up on it. Let’s teach them about cyclic structures because we can explain that. That generates lots of students explaining a cyclic but not of them explore it.  

Let’s have a look at things in one of the past papers. The following images are from the ‘Labyrinth’ paper. 

The bottle of water is often skipped when students read this paper. However, structurally the bottle symbolises so much about the character. Water is a symbol of life. Here we see that character’s full potential and her hope at the beginning. At the end of the extract, we see how that hope and potential is running and at risk. One last drop represents her one last hope that she has in the situation. Yes, there is a cyclic structure, but in terms of storytelling there is so much going on here. The bottle is a symbol of her hope. The story is structured around her lack of hope or the slow dwindling hope she had. 

We can take that further in looking at other things described. 

Each one connects to the character’s personal journey. Usually students focus on the reader and how the reader feels, when actually they’ve missed the character and forgotten about the reader’s interaction with the character. The images above are all about lots of big things. They symbolise how things are against Alice. She is looking for something small and the odds are stacked against her. The plane is a symbol of her imminent journey home. The mountain is a symbol of the challenge before her. The flowers are a symbol of her but also her hope: small, delicate and time-sensitive. The boulders are a symbol of another obstacle, like the mountain, that is in her way. 

Then, we can see how the whole thing is put together. She starts with optimism, but that is slowly dwindling as the story progresses. 

That exploration is really important, but we aren’t allowing students to do it enough. Here is another example I used with students. This goes alongside the ‘Silk Factory’ paper. Here what is interesting is the use of domestic imagery and symbolism. It is used in the story to convey a sense of safety. We have repeated references to domesticity which provides us with comfort and a level of expectation. That is contrasted with the dangerous elements in the garden. 

I think we need to get exploration back into the classroom. We’ve become too obsessed with explaining that we’ve got ourselves in knots over it. Look at how our analysis has become knotted with paragraph structures. PEEL. PEE. PEETAL. What/How/ Why. Our discussion in the lessons has placed emphasis on the concrete. What technique does the writer use? Why has the writer used it? We’ve moved away from abstract thinking and that’s where symbolism comes in. You can teach explanations, but the student independently explores in English - with a little direction from the teacher. 

Building confidence in exploration starts with talking. Getting students to talk about images amongst themselves and exploring what they could mean is paramount. That talk gives them experience and confidence. The melting pot of ideas. Here’s a little discussion sheet I have created for Year 10 as we explore this question.

It isn’t a writing frame, but a discussion tool for them to articulate what they notice about images, symbolism and storytelling. It isn’t  perfect. It isn’t definitive. But, it is something to latch ideas onto. Let’s take a break from explaining and let’s open our lessons to exploring. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris 

One word drafting

Drafting is a very tricky aspect of teaching. Rarely do students draft effectively. They are usually in one of two camps. ‘The tickle brigade’ likes to dot an i or add a comma or apostrophe in one place.  ‘The blunderbuss gang’ likes to scribble everything out and start again. There’s no happy medium. It is either all or nothing.  

I find the process is problematic as a teacher. What do you do? Do you give students a list of things to check in their writing? Or, do you show it as a stepped process? Right, people, let’s start by checking we have used capital letters correctly!  Rarely does the process of drafting link to effect and impact. The drive is always on making it look or sound better, but it is never on making the impact better. 

For that reason, that’s why I have been focusing on one aspect of drafting: one word to improve a sentence. Very simply I give students a sentence and they have to add /change a word to lift it or make it better. Basically the same thing. 

Example: The mist surrounded the gravestones. 

I am not a fan of purple prose and, in fact, I’d rather read concise, crisp prose than anything else. Drafting always focuses on turning writing into purple prose. Add a simile. Add a list. Rarely, does it ever focus on reducing and condensing. Good writers do that. They say so much in one sentence that there’s no need for a paragraph. Students, on the other hand, say one thing but use fifty sentences instead of one.  

The example sentence can become one of the following: 

[1] The mist swallowed the gravestones.  [A sense of power and something destructive]  

[2] The mist silently surrounded the gravestones. [A sense of unknown danger] 

[3] The cold mist surrounded the gravestones. [A negative atmosphere] 

What I love about this is that as soon as it becomes focused on one word, the student is focused on meaning and effect. Students don’t often think about the effect when adding a technique like a personification. They don’t go: I need to add a piece of personification because I want to create an unsettled atmosphere. They just throw some personification at the text with the hope that it will work. 

Focusing on one word helps them to get under the bonnet and look at the mechanics of the writing. All too often, the techniques are the drivers for improvement and rarely do they do much in a piece. No English teacher has gushed over the use of alliteration, but they have gushed over an interesting choice or word or combination of words. If we want students to be better at analysing language, then we need them to be better at using language themselves. In the beginning was the ‘word’. 

Look at how the approach can be easily used for non-fiction. 

Example: Taking a holiday in Britain has its benefits. 

Taking a holiday in sunny Britain has its benefits.   [sarcasm]  

Taking a holiday in Britain has its rewards.  [emphasis on positivity]  

Taking a cheap holiday in Britain has its benefits. [emphasis on money]  

Taking a vacation in Britain has its benefits. [makes it seem better than it is] 

So you can see with one word the meaning can be changed and the impact of the text changed. This thoughtful exploration of word meaning is valuable for students to get better with language and language analysis. All too often, we focus on the techniques and not the word choice. Everything, for me, begins with words. 

Students already have this thoughtfulness to language composition. We see that when they message their peers. They know that the wrong word in a sentence can destroy a relationship. Because the consequence is largely immediate. With writing in lessons, the consequence isn’t immediate. The teacher isn’t going to have a strop if the wrong word is used. That’s why I think we need to attune students to drafting the word choice. We need to teach them the importance of considering and pondering a word in a sentence. We know they can write, but the best writers consider and ponder the words they use. They don’t throw everything in. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris 

P.S. Here are a few sentences we are using with students this term. To get them in the ‘zone’, we are giving them these sentences and asking them to lift them up with one word. And only one word! 

[1] Light appeared through the cracks in the door.  

[2] He paused for breath. Unsure what to do. 

[3] The footsteps could be heard upstairs. 

[4] Light fell from the window and revealed a figure in the corner. 

[5] The scratching started behind the door. 

[6] The silence was painful. 

[7] The shadow moved slowly. 

[8] The trees slowly tapped the window. 

Alice, Mr Fisher, Rosabel and Hartop walk into a pyramid (I mean pub)…

I have been listening and watching quite a bit of Philip Pullman – I think he has a book out or something. Anyway, he got me thinking about storytelling and how we teach it. The more I teach the current GCSE for English Language the more I realise the mechanistic approach we have been using is ineffective and reductive.


Take ‘Freytag’s Pyramid’. I device used to teach the structure of a story. Personally, it is the dullest thing I have encountered when looking at story structure. It is basic. It is rudimentary. It is simplistic. Let’s plot ‘War and Peace’ on it, shall we? Look how a complex narrative can be simply pegged to a pretty pyramid. The pyramids are still around because they are heavy and robust and not something delicate and ephemeral. If ‘Freytag’s Pyramid’ is so special, then why don’t writers, and famous writers at that, go on about it all the time. J.K. Rowling boasting how the pyramid helped her achieve success with Harry Potter.


The problem with ‘Freytag’s Pyramid, and similar devices we use to teach storytelling, is that they are simplistic. Storytelling is subtle, nuanced and complex. That’s why students who read lots are able to pick up the subtleties, the nuances and the complexities of text. A lot of this comes with experience.


I have reassessed how I teach fiction across the whole of KS3 and KS4. That doesn’t mean that I talk about GCSE questions in Year 7. It means that I am places a stronger emphasis on narrative and, in particular, the construction of a story. Rather than just plonk a story in a class and hope for natural osmosis, I am directing my comments and teaching around storytelling. It isn’t pretty. It isn’t ‘terminology’ driven. It isn’t neat and tidy. But, it is about the art of storytelling. If we read like storytellers, then our writing will reflect this level of understanding.



The following are some of the things that I have brought to the forefront of my teaching in light of the new GCSEs.



Subtext

The subtext or, as I like to call it, ‘what is really really really going on’, is a key milestone for students to grasp. Getting students to see that the story isn’t just a teacher marking exam papers or just a woman in a hat shop is key for understanding. Yes, on the surface it is about a sad woman, but underneath it is about a class struggle or a loss of hope. What is this really teaching us about?


When a student understands the subtext of an extract, all the words, techniques or structural devices have a layer of understanding and an anchor to latch ideas on.

If struggling, I ask the students: What wouldn’t a seven year old get from this that I do?



Reader’s connection

Throughout my current reading of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ I was a bit silly whenever Capulet was in a scene. I’d say: good dad? Or, bad dad? The students would appropriately respond with good or bad dad depending on where it happens in the play. Recently, we went through the Hartop paper and ‘good dad/ bad dad’ reared its head. The connectivity to a character is key in storytelling. Yet, do we spend much time on looking at how a writer builds a connection subtly?


The whole opening of the Mr Fisher extract is designed to make us feel empathy towards the character. We need to keep going back to the connection with the text. Am I supposed to like or dislike this character at the moment? Look at the Hartop extract and you can see how at the start we are fooled into liking, but then that suddenly shifts to disliking the character.

Of course, we can build up the level of explanation when we get beyond like and like, but that way we avoid the ‘reader wants to read on’ or ‘hooks the reader’. We empathise with the character and so we want to see their situation change. We need to get students connecting with characters. Like or dislike?



World Building

I find this phrase much better than exposition. ‘Exposition’ is a dull, bland word. ‘World building’ is so much better. This is what writers do in the opening of any story and it is what we forget when exploring stories. How does the writer create a world? How does the writer build up the world around our protagonist?


Take the Hartop extract and you see the world build up through the van. From that van, we see poverty, family dynamics and power struggles from the description of the van and the people sat in it. He builds the world through the weather and the symbolism of the van and how people are sat in it. Compare this to the bus in the Rosabel extract. We see the world build through a bus, hat shop and a meal.


Recently, my Year 8s have been studying ‘Great Expectations’ and it is interesting that Dickens builds the world through a graveyard in the opening. A visceral image but one that says death, loss, family and faith.


How does the writer build the world? A simple question, but far more effective than ‘what’s interesting about the structure?’



Setting / People / Objects  

Most openings and stories start with these. In fact, it is often setting or people. Occasionally, you’d get an object. Understanding why writers start with these is key. Setting is about context and atmosphere. People is about understanding and connecting to a character’s experience. Both are key when talking about stories. The relationship between the two is interesting and helping students to see the choice to be made.


When looking at ‘Great Expectations’ the opening starts with people and then moves to setting. This is because Dickens wants us to connect with Pip first so that when the setting is introduced we are concerned about for him and worry.



Juxtaposition of characters  

Adding characters is key to understanding a story. Fred is introduced in ‘A Christmas Carol’ after a length introduction of Scrooge to prove that Marley isn’t the only person in Scrooge’s life. We are expected to believe this from Dickens’ opening of the book. Fred proves to us that there are people in Scrooge’s life who care from him and that he isn’t alone. Then, Dickens adds the men from the charities to the story and Dickens heightens how mercenary Scrooge is. Each character added to a story adds meaning to the protagonist.


Rosabel is an interesting extract as it deals with a clear foil. A character that makes our protagonist seem dull and boring. Less glamorous. We don’t see that until the woman with red hair appears. Then, we understand why. The egg and the flowers. We see the plain and the interesting. The two characters show an extreme contrast, which heightens how far apart they are and how Rosabel will never achieve success, in her eyes. Like the colour of her hair, success is determined from birth.


Students need to see that writers add character to help us understand the protagonist. They are a bit more subtle than goodies and badies.  



Relationships

If you understand the relationships, then you understand the subtext. The recent Hartop extract demonstrated this. It was all about the relationships between the characters. The squeezing out of the wife and daughter was key to understanding the relationship. This is made worse by the fact that Hartop makes his daughter go out in the rain and walk a considerable distance to get back in the van. We see how the women try to make everything fine. Clearly, they worry about ‘rocking the cart’. Alice’s ‘ironed’ stance reflects her fear and determination to not disrupt the status quo. She dare not put a foot wrong. The blood on Hartop’s hands indicates that he could commit violence.


If you look at how the Hartop extract works, we can see how the relationship is key to the extract. We empathise with Alice’s plight and as the text goes on we want her to escape and that’s what is engaging.



Inside / Outside Conflict

All characters have an inner turmoil. Understanding the inner conflict of a character is key. Alice’s conflict between family and freedom. Maybe she is ‘ironed’ and ‘clay’ because she fears how Hartop is going to react if she left. What would he do to the mother? Hartop’s conflict is between the money and family. Maybe he is a man that is losing in life and the business is struggling. He views success in terms of money and he clearly hasn’t got the money. Hartop has dependents and maybe they are the problem for him. They are a drain. Therefore, he is metaphorically pushing them out of his life. 


The characters on the exam papers so far have all had an inner conflict. They are quite subtle in the case of the Labyrinth extract and in some cases they are quite explicit, Mr Fisher.  Looking at what point we are in the inner conflict is interesting. Both Hartop and Rosabel are stories introducing the inner conflict. They are never resolved and that’s why they end quite bleak. There’s a bit missing from the story. The next bit is the ‘action stage’. They do something to break the cycle. They do something life transforming or they are rescued. Mr Fisher is different because we see the conflict resolved. His unhappiness and conflict is partly solved by one student’s work.

We need to teach students about character’s having inner conflicts and how those inner conflicts affect relationships and how they can be externalised or internalised in the story. The structure of the story is always wrapped around the character’s inner conflict.



Symbols

Everything is an opportunity for a symbol. I joked in the summer that I am going to town with flower symbolism as almost all the exams have featured flowers in some way. They are a relatively easy symbol. They represent beauty, nature or weakness. A lot of the time they link to the character. In Rosabel, the flowers are a symbol of how she wants to make her life better. She buys boring food, yet she purchases flowers. Something that doesn’t add much to her life but looks beautiful, highlighting the emphasis in the story on appearance and making a person better through their appearance (hats, hair, jewellery).



Grand Design  

Students forget about the end point. Where does the story end? That is the point that the previous paragraphs have been building up to. When we look at structure, we need students to think of the end feeling. What does the writer want us to feel at the end of the extract? Happy. Sad. Then, everything before it was leading up to that point. Everything. Every time detail. Everything is a crumb leading us down this path. 

That’s why the writer in the Hartop extract describes the isolated landscape and the bad

weather.There’s no prince in shining armour ready to save Alice. She is on her own. It is up

to her to change the situation.We need to see this isolation from the start. The weather

attacking the van is just a metaphor for Alice. Match that with Rosabel.The egg and the 

violets are discussed in the opening because at the end we see the contrast between Rosabel 

and the lady with red hair. Rosabel is the egg and the other woman is the violets.

That’s why I think the ending is key. Look at the end point and look to rest of the story to see

how it links together. When making a jigsaw, you look at a picture of the finished image to 

help you construct it. Look at the end point and work back.   

Note none of these things are about how to answer the question on the exam paper. This, for me, is the knowledge we should be working on in KS3 to help students understand texts better in KS4. This is what we should be looking at more and more. Instead, we have been looking at the questions but not focusing on the learning. What sort of things do students need to learn about stories? What would help them to understand stories better? I think the above would be a start. There are so many things I could mention and I haven’t. Maybe, I will do at one stage, but we’ll leave that for another story.  





How does one get better at teaching storytelling and fiction? Simple: just read more. Read things you’d normally read. Read things you wouldn’t normally read. Read anything and everything.

  

Alice, Mr Fisher, Rosabel and Hartop walk into a pub and started to read a book. They all agreed that the book helped them. Hartop learnt that there’s more to life than money. Rosabel learnt that the beautiful people lack personality and integrity. Mr Fisher learnt that he wasn’t alone. Alice learnt that archaeology isn’t the job for her.  



Thanks for reading,

Xris