The final three: it is time to finish with this. I have presented a similar exposé before on this blog, more than once, and the tests keep coming back. It isn’t that I think what I have to say/satirise will have an impact and thus am disappointed when it doesn’t. I do this essentially as a catharsis for my deep and genuine anger. So I will, no doubt, do again. The only way these tests will be ended is when teachers themselves refuse to mark them. It is this simple. We should not collude.

I simply disagree with the premise of this question. It is ‘easy’ to deduce that one should have a question mark. So what? It is the notion that the other three require an exclamation mark which annoys me. Lest anyone thinks I am not concerned with ‘accuracy’, or appropriate, sensible and meaningful punctuation use from students, that’s adamantly not the case. In my experience, students over-rely and therefore over-use exclamation marks in an attempt to declare exclamation! [You see, my use is apt]. I think we should encourage students, probably as they continue maturing as writers so not necessarily aged 11, to explore vocabulary further, but the words ‘hilarious’, ‘loved’ and ‘laughed [so much]’ carry enough weight of meaning here to not need a superfluous addition to that. Does this seem pernickety here? Perhaps, but it is the repetition of such inane premises in so much of the questioning that matters – this is one example.

My last spoof answer this year. But really – what matters more: knowing a ‘word class’ or appreciating the purpose and effect of word usage?

I don’t know the answer to this. Does this bother me? Yes and no. As an English teacher and writer I feel I should know. But it really doesn’t matter if a student, or anyone, can’t name the grammatical term.

I can imagine/understand [though ultimately not care] if a teacher would be disappointed that a student couldn’t name this having been taught explicitly, and probably relentlessly to the test and such feature-spotting exercises. I once read a teacher writing proudly about how her KS2 students could knowingly use such technical features – and quite complex ones – as if this was a significant achievement. No, it’s a dog, a clever one, doing tricks. I think it is sad [I’m being polite] when a teacher foregrounds this over students being writers. And enjoying writing.

I am very pleased to have a found poem about found poetry included in the June edition of this zine which, as editor Julius Smit outlines,

‘The Projectionist’s Playground is an international quarterly A5 size zine for innovative and experimental work in photography, montage, art and poetry. Poetry can range from collage, concrete, sound poetry, found poetry, juxtaposition, deconstruction, manipulation, appropriation, to open field, dada, cut-up and beyond; the emphasis being on the visual.’

It’s great to see a zine/chapbook [this physical thing] dedicated to work like this, and of course for me to be included – my thanks to Julius. The following is the concluding part of my poem

and if you would like to read what precedes this, and naturally the other poems in this edition, please go here for further information.

The mark scheme being prescriptive, it would not allow for this answer to earn a mark. Is it because:

1. The hyphen is in the ‘wrong’ place and corrupts the intended talent for which the grandmother is a champion?

2. The Oxford comma is technically inaccurate?

3. The concept of ‘correct’ is intellectually flawed?

Yes, it is from this year’s KS2 GPS SATs…

Excusing the punning, it is easy to just play games with these rather than maintain a focus on how they fail as ‘tests’ of writing competence [and by extension, as a part of the purposeful teaching and learning of Writing], so here I want to also query how the question can only be worth 1 mark for three required ‘correct’ answers compared with a question about placing a single comma in a sentence which is also worth 1 mark.

It is yet another layer of inconsistency and irrelevance when looking at these. The primary objection is to the discrete and disparate nature of the questions themselves – designed simply to provide ‘data’ – but when the marking system is also hopeless, that compounds the nonsense of it all.

It is more complex than this, I know, but I shouldn’t need to explain further.