As always, my sincere thanks to IT and Rupert for publishing this in the International Times – read here. My thanks [and acknowledgement] as well to Atlanta Wiggs for another wonderful image.

I am especially pleased when IT gives the occasional platform to my poems about education in general, but more often than not about teaching and the teaching of Writing. I can’t recall exactly what nonsense prompted this poem, but I will have come across, at random, some education ‘advice’ about writing intervention which was typically meaningless, invasive, and most likely quite brutal in its ‘corrective’ designs.

I don’t believe I ever used the term ‘writing intervention’ when working as an English teacher. I confess to occasionally having had to adapt the language of ‘leadership management’, for example in needing to prepare documentation for inspection. One such I can recall is ‘work scrutiny’, which isn’t as appalling as most, and the actual Writing stimulation and task we used collectively as a department was engaging and creative [as ‘proven’ by the work scrutiny of its outcomes!]. Maybe I should have called it ‘work discovery’…

I have written consistently my criticism of nonsensical approaches to the teaching of writing on this blog, not least about the previous and current SATs testing regimes and therefore consequent teaching to this. However, one of the dumbest but also brutal ‘celebrations’ of a teacher’s writing intervention idea was featured here.