Today marks the final day that American authors can be examined for GCSE English Literature. It is one of the most despicable legacies of Michael Gove’s tenure as Education Secretary to have effectively banned the study and examination of all American prose authors at GCSE from September 2015, today’s AQA GCSE English Literature examination [I don’t know if there are any from other Awarding Body exams yet to take place] being the last time students will respond at this level and thus my final time of marking these generally engaged and knowing responses.

My arguments about and against this as well as Gove’s and other philistines’ responses, including those from the notorious DfE drafters, are contained in the body of this blog.

It is difficult to imagine any change of government in the future having the will at that time to reinstate these authors: Labour, for example, not having had any obvious concern at the demise in the first place.

The debate that prompted my first response to the notion there is an inherent intention to fail a percentage of students in the English/British [universal?] examination system [here], continued/continues where it started, and I have no wish in general terms to try and disprove its overall gist. I think my first response endorsed that ‘purpose’ to fail overview, though I was characterising its fundamental structure, at GCSE in particular, to have a pass and fail dichotomy pivoting on the notorious C/D borderline. The most sinister aspect of this is the annual adjustment of grade borderlines, especially at that point, in order to maintain an annual average/expectancy.

Just briefly on that grade borderline adjustment: I can understand a theory that this needs to exist to accommodate any perceived deviation from sustained ‘standards’ in the levels of question setting and objective assessment. But I don’t want to defend its other workings, and/or corruptions of design, and won’t.

Where I have continued to feel ‘defensive’, and very much as an examiner [I don’t question set, but I do train and standardise], is in responding to any idea that GCSE exams have questions set which are designed to fail students. I’m not saying this doesn’t exist – though it seems unlikely to me – but I am saying this hasn’t been my experience.

And in my experience – which is what I offer here, so take or leave as you will – where there have been errors in question setting, so this could have an impact on student responses, you meet as teachers/examiners to make adjustments in assessing this. I recall one particular example, and I think it was a question about Of Mice and Men [not Wilfred Owen, and you’ll understand in a moment], and the short question contained the word ‘futility’. Immediately after the exam was sat, schools rang the exam board to complain that their students hadn’t understood this word and it had confused and worried them trying to respond. When we as a wider body of examiners saw this question [and indeed as teachers in our own schools] it was obvious that this one word could be a genuine barrier to students responding as the question was intended: to explore the theme of the book, so to speak and to paraphrase, whether its ending was positive or negative – you get the gist!

So there you go. A mistake had been made, but it was a mistake. The question setter didn’t decide to make it difficult for a perceived percentage of students to struggle with answering. It was a thoughtless moment that should have been spotted and corrected by those who check and indeed should scrutinise the accuracy and appropriateness of all the questions on an exam paper. It wasn’t the first or last mistake to be made and not spotted.

At standardising, it was agreed that any response to that question would be accepted. It would be unfair to penalise students for not understanding, or misunderstanding a key term/word. I actually harboured a slight concern that many or most 16 year olds wouldn’t understand the word ‘futility’, but I accepted entirely that it could and probably was the case.

Now, you can imagine pedants then being concerned that such a decision would disadvantage those students who did indeed understand the term and answered astutely within that personal comprehension. Well, the overall spirit of the exam – as it was and still is – to reward what candidates could/did do [rather than penalise for what wasn’t covered…] accommodates that. But this takes us into another area of debate I’m not interested in here.

The history of national school exams, at all levels, but especially GCSE and A Level, is riddled with errors in question setting and other mistakes. Things should be more efficient than this, but they aren’t. I remember when examination papers in my subject were stolen three years in a row [!] and substitute papers had to be used.

I also know as an examiner I have questions on my paper that I like and those I don’t like. I certainly do not like any questions that make it difficult for students to answer [and I do not believe this is by design: it is by difference of opinion]. I am not a believer, for example, that questions must change in obvious ways each year so that they don’t appear to be familiar. If there are ‘obvious’ questions to ask of a text [e.g. ‘friendship’ or ‘loneliness’ in Of Mice and Men] then ask them again and again. Don’t look for new for the sake of it. On my paper, there are context passages that I think have been excellent, and those that I personally wouldn’t have chosen. I have my own view on setting questions that maximise the widest possible response, but I don’t set the questions.

So I don’t believe in a conspiracy theory about actual exam question setting, but I do believe people and exam boards make the stupidest mistakes with this.

But I do believe in conspiracy theory in some respects when it comes to national exams.

Michael Gove’s tenure as Education Secretary and intrusions to create a nefarious aspect of controlling certainly GCSEs is an historical disgrace. In general terms, his decision that all examinations should be more ‘rigorous’ [so harder, and by extrapolation depressing ‘success’] meant he presided over a move to include more content in examinations, especially that which is ostensibly to do with ‘knowledge’ – these finite [as if…] and right/wrong answers [as if…] for the syllabus and question setters to elicit. Madness. But he is the consummate mad twatter.

In English Literature, Gove’s myopic, ‘golden age’ perception of what GCSE should include, was less easy to narrow but he made an appalling and successful attempt to do so by, for example, banning American authors from study: a completely personal choice. He tried to make the study of Romantic poetry a compulsory element, but that is one area which I and fellow examining colleagues did have an impact on preventing. Had he succeeded, Gove wouldn’t have introduced ‘rigour’, he would have alienated thousands of students from engaging as widely as possible in the study of English Literature at this level.

But this too gets me moving at a tangent from the intended focus of this posting. I just want to make clear I am no apologist for much of the GCSE examination system. I don’t, however, believe it is structured to fail a percentage of students through its ‘questioning’ as a conspiracy of intent.

As I also said in my first posting on this, by all means scrap the whole system and set up a national framework, especially at GCSE [if there is a need to ‘test’ at this level, and there isn’t really with most students attending school until 18….], where we have students engage with their studies at school in lessons responding in the widest and most creative means possible for teachers to make formative assessments and ultimately detailed, positive commentaries on personal achievements.

I admit to being a little desperate now. I had in fact finished with the few found pieces from my Grandpa’s wallet and brief commentaries on these, but I have enjoyed my recent visits with him so much I returned just now but could only find this scrap, just a receipt for milk and eggs, and to make more of it than what it is would be silly.

I left the image of it large though.

So this is it from the wallet and memories prompted by some contents. I have many more memories of my Grandpa from my visits at his and my Grandma’s home, and I have a few photos that I might share with similar explanations, done for me really as an important process of recall. I do want to tell the story of Christmas Eves there in Elk Horn, and Santa Claus with his grotesque plastic face.

Other memories of time in that archetypal American [Danish!] small town, mainly from when I lived there for a while rather than the occasional visits, will always be with me: the bluejay that swooped down to slap me on the head with her wing and I thought – I don’t know why – it was my aunt Maxine who had hit me with her broom; the toy soldiers that melted in the summer sun on the pavement; the rock fights; the older boys who did mean things; the cherry bombs and chicken heads [shared already here]; nearly burning down the town; the barbaric abattoir; crouching under desks in case of atomic bombs.

A couple of years ago I bagged up all of my neckties, most that I had worn whilst teaching [a strange sartorial proclivity for me, but a colourful one for a period], and posted a picture before I threw them away.

But I didn’t. They are still in the bag in the conservatory.

The following is a post of the ones I allegedly ‘saved’ [which I did, but not on their own, in the end] and a poem written about one from my collection Nearing the Border. Originally posted December, 2014:

Four ties that have today survived a cull of all the others.

These are special: one is a silk facsimile of a Vanilla Fudge at the Fillmore poster – quite expensive to buy as I recall; one a family gift for a Trekkie; one that prompted the following many years ago,

Mickey’s Tie
[for Kev]

I down the last beer
it’s Mickeys
think of Tom singing
‘Frank’s Wild Years’
get some kinda insight
into how a gruff voice so fine
can spin tales like that

especially when the cerulean fish
gets tied around the neck
just hangs about
waiting for a blue smooth jacket
one helluva sartorial splendour
in a drunk’s eyes

it’s swimming now
in a knot
time to get more liquid
a river sea ocean of
celebration

gonna look real cool in the
morning

This card intrigued because I have no idea why or how my Grandpa acquired this and had it in his wallet with the few other assorted ‘calling’ cards and folded sheets of paper I have been exploring here recently.

This is neither here nor there, but my Grandpa wasn’t an ‘educated’ man, certainly not in the formal sense, though I will always think of him as wise. These following details are what I have acquired from the internet, and explain his ordinary roots, aspirations and  achievements, all honest and worthy in their own right, obviously:

He was born June 21, 1885 near Atlantic, the son of Chris P. and Anna Carlson, and was baptized and confirmed in the Elk Horn Lutheran church and had since been a member. He spent part of his childhood at Elim Children’s Home in Elk Horn.

As a young man he worked on farms in the Atlantic and Council Bluffs area, then filed for a homestead in North Dakota. He did not prove up on his claim but returned to Iowa and worked in a hardware store in Elk Horn.

I couldn’t find any autobiographical information about Dr Spier on the internet, but I did find a reference to this following book: Graphic Teaching Aids in Basic Anthropometry,  R. F. G. Spier, D. R. Henning, J. R. Vincent.

It is most likely the same Spier who is on the calling card, the book published as it was in 1962 at the University of Missouri. ‘The Science of Man’, again researched, is I am guessing from the David Hume 18th century text A Treatise on Human Nature, but I cannot be sure, in the same way I cannot be sure my Grandpa will have actually read anything on this subject. But I will assume he did.

I am currently following/engaged in a debate about the inherent intention of all education examination systems to fail a proportion of students. I don’t think it is possible to dispute that as a self-evident consequence of any such system: in the context of Education, and therefore teaching and learning, that examination seeks to measure what has been learned by the examinee, and as a measurement there will be an explicit criteria for pass and fail [otherwise it wouldn’t be an ‘examination’].

Now anyone who knows about and understands the actual workings of English SATs [and presumably all SATs] knows immediately that this ‘measurement’ is far broader, and sinister, and is intended to be used – as raw data – to measure the ‘success’ [and by implication for those not attaining this, the ‘failure’] of teachers and schools – not just examinees.

I think GCSE is a little more problematic in ascribing to it the same inherent purpose, but I acknowledge fully that grade boundary adjustments, made on an annual basis, are done so to provide a distribution curve, and like any such graph there is a point on that arc where above is ‘success’ and below is ‘failure’. I would also add that as a Head of English I did suffer the appalling impact of this at an individual school level where regular meetings of senior staff at ‘Grade Watch’ focused almost entirely on targeting students wobbling on C/D borderlines: hardly a worthy position to defend, though I have to say its imposition was entirely political, and not exclusive to any one political Party.

Before progressing, let’s just dismiss SATs as inherently crap. I’ve said enough on this blog to make my feelings known about these, especially for English and especially for SPaG.

I don’t intend to wholeheartedly – or even halfheartedly – defend GCSE. The key problem with GCSEs is that there is this notional ‘success’ of attaining a grade C or above, whereas a D and below is essentially a ‘failure’. This is inscribed in the public consciousness by years of having this dichotomy [and I guess GCE and CSE, in my student and early teaching lifetime, was the first polarity] in the public examination culture. It is further reinforced by employer expectations – you can’t apply for many jobs without a grade C or above in Maths and English, and/or a certain number of such passes; and you can’t apply for further education without similar. So, this is about as insidiously inherent a system programmed to fail a set number of students as one can have.

As teachers, we will all know students we have taught who at GCSE didn’t attain a grade C or above and yet who we would never regard as ‘failures’. Indeed – and this is almost a crass simplification, but nonetheless true – we will know many students who achieved a C and even well above who we might regard as less ‘successful’ than our ‘failed’ students: for all kinds of academic but also personal reasons!

A precursor to this problem in my teaching experience at secondary level was Key Stage 3 results in English. Students who didn’t attain level 4 and above were in many respects deemed as ‘failures’ at this level [and worse, if they had a L4 at KS2 and didn’t then get a L5 or above at KS3, they and their teachers were also then ‘failures’, despite the fundamental differences in the type of testing, though equally punitive and narrow]. What I know from this experience, however, is that KS3 results were very often completely crap at being a judge of future ‘progress’ and ‘attainment’ [I might just as well stop using quotation marks as we can assume all references to such are suspect terms].

So, pausing, what is the answer? Scrap all of it? Probably a good idea. I’m all for revolution, but in my 30 years of teaching plus 6 years of retirement and still angry as hell at the system/s, I don’t think the profession as a whole has the stomach for this. It could have the collective strength, but it doesn’t use this. Shameful really.

Therefore, I have argued consistently on this blog that we should focus our attention and attack on what can be demolished. SATs, especially SPaG in English [these are blatantly ridiculous], could be stopped, as events this year – much of it simply government incompetence – have shown. And that attack should be based entirely on the educational arguments. Leave the elements of stress caused to students [and teachers] and other unacceptable consequences to the broader public and profession to argue.

Back to GCSEs. So do we get rid of these? OK, I’m up for that. I’ll probably mark them only one more year before my paper – the last I think – goes online. And replace with what?

The obvious answer would be teacher assessment, and at GCSE presumably coursework. However, that route has been heavily compromised by the technology that can aid plagiarism – and very clearly has [probably because of the relentless pressure to succeed] – so this isn’t really an option, and controlled assessments, which began in earnest after I left teaching, proved very unpopular and also problematic for many reasons. And even coursework suffered the pass/fail dichotomy because the C grade pivot still existed.

Teacher assessment then would have to be on all kinds of in-class and somehow supervised tasks with detailed written commentaries from teachers – avoiding all grading, numerical or alphabetical – that relate knowingly to and as a celebration of the attributes demonstrated, with even perhaps [this is very tentative] recommendations to their usefulness/application and so on.

Bugger. That would be tough. I’m up for it though. It would require the most colossal, sustained and committed in-service training on a regular national scale, and there are existing models of such good practice historically from trial marking and attendant consortium meetings, as well as examination face-to-face standardising meetings. Costly? No cost would be too big to produce a system that worked for all students. Likely?

So, as someone [as I have written recently] diminished as a Head of English by a target culture that meant I and my school failed to meet both KS3 [in the past] and GCSE targets, reinforced by the philistinism of an Inspection system, and even that of a local advisory service, I am not going to be a complete champion of the GCSE system as it exists, but I do work in it now and do the best I can. And I hate the sound of that ‘the best I can’ because it can seems so pathetically noble, but I see and use it much more pragmatically, and with eyes wide open – and very often mouth shouting – and think for now it has to do.

Unless you’ll join the revolution. Teachers don’t even join unions let alone unions join unions, so I’m not holding my breath. Let’s beat the shit out of SATs. If we do that, we can assess how ready our gathering is for further conquest.

‘Restricted’. This made sense to me when I noticed, and I presume it was on the basis of my Grandpa’s age at the time of issue in 1963, a two-year license.

I don’t have a photograph to hand of my Grandpa’s car, but I feel sure I must have one somewhere. My memory is that it was large, rounded and dark, a Buick or Plymouth I imagine for no informed reason. I can only recall being driven in it once as a very young boy, so this in itself is an odd memory to have retained, as I must have been in the car more than that one journey.

It was into town, along that one main road in and out, so on the rise outwards where my Grandpa lived, down into town to park, as I have called it elsewhere, in that butterfly parking way common in American small towns, the cars at diagonal angles lining the single road either side: like splayed wings to each side of the body of a road.

We went into the bar/saloon, and I can’t imagine my Grandpa went for a drink – and I don’t have any memories of him drinking alcohol at home, just chewing tobacco and smoking a pipe and the occasional cigar – not least because he was driving, so perhaps just to meet up with and talk to a friend. It was a long dark narrow room with men in the back to the left, probably playing pool. I’m thinking I would have been around 8 years old, or younger, though I have no idea, so this is a strange recall.

I also remember feeling so completely safe being driven in the car. I sat in the back seat, I’m sure, and it was a huge space with the most wonderful comforting smell that I know as an olfactory memory but have no other way of defining in detail, and I don’t imagine it was leather as it seems to me it wouldn’t have been a car made to that expense.

My Grandpa drove into town so slow, but it wasn’t through uncertainty – again, this is all the surmise of thinking back all those years – and it was steady and sure and a consummate feeling for me of being safe and secure. How I will at the young age have instinctively transferred his love and care into a simple trip into town in a large car.

Consummate Journey

I’m sure, I’m sure
with Grandpa and secure

in that butterfly,
parked,

after he drove into town
to splay wings,

lining the road either side,
not to drink

I think; I think
having no idea,

but I am sure
feeling so completely safe

on that simple trip
into town

for no informed reason
down into a strange recall

because he was driving,
just chewing the

surmise, back all those years:
wonderfully comforting

to have retained –
memory is no expense.

Expect their ghosts
to explain

why those before you
in the middle of history

and architecture
erase the residue

of a great city.
Left behind for others,

comfort cannot
be layered in open space.

This was of simple interest: my grandpa was a big man but not obese, and he had worked hard all his life and had wholesome home-cooked food throughout that time [no ready meals or take-aways…] so I was surprised, probably naively, that back in 1961 there was already a concern for diet and healthy eating. I do like the warning imperative at the beginning! That double negative is quite foreboding.

David Briggs is an Eric Gregory Award winner and published widely, including with Bloodaxe and Salt. This new chapbook from Maquette Press is a collection of poems bristling with ideas that challenge the reader to hang on to the unravellings, encountering clever handholds of language along the visionary way.

The title poem offers an insight into the workings of the Vision Helmet, a device to reveal the partially known/recalled as fuller if only momentary revelations, perhaps like poetry itself that grasps the fleeting but with its clarity, or even a more mundane if comforting moment ‘like old friends at a reunion party’ who share social memories. The visions can also offer more than you ever imagined, but you’ll need to read the poem to discover that surprise.

Briggs further explores in Sauce for the Goose what seems to be this notion of sudden if temporary self-discovery by looking at those who don’t seize their day’s moment, or cannot process the randomness of percipience,

‘catching in their minds
like plastic bags in winter trees’

This poem too ends on a wonderfully oblique metaphor, and you know what you’ll have to do to make this literal discovery.

More overt observations are cast in political poems about Afghanistan and Angola, and the first The Games We Play chronicles the 35mm film reel narrative of ‘a ten-year-old boy/playing stick-and-wheel’ whose in-situ story of play is viewed in the paradox of the ‘white AC’ed room/in a gallery in Downtown Toronto’ where the poet uses his own art to empathise with the film’s art in placing one moment of simple pleasure against the consciousness of potential catastrophes inherent in war and/or the subsequent, apparent peace ‘…post-Bush/Blair Afghanistan’; and the second Newsworthy uses a satirical tone to present more of these everyday poles of existence in worlds far more precarious than ours, where the distance between play and death or the classic haves and have nots is encapsulated in this bleak apt line, ‘in that landline-poked limbo’.

Throughout this excellent collection Briggs presents potent and evocative ways in which the writer envisions the world and makes it known – in its literal or metaphoric moment – so that the more ostensible in First They Came… is seen in the same way most of us see it, ‘…I saw the refugees on television/cradling confused dogs in dinghies’ and the context for such desperation is simply if catastrophically real, like the Mediterranean drought which

‘….came so often that farmers walked away
from their fields, were found hanging
from rafters in barns even the rats
had abandoned….’,

whereas the more mysterious in Faustian is seen by choices we make or are made for us, here as the soldier returning home is ‘waymaking a desire line’ where reflections on being a ‘…blue-eyed,/ghost-haired, cornstalk boy’ are played against the judgement/proposition offered by an unknown watching old man, so that the soldier is faced with his own decision-making,

‘This, then, is your one chance: a moment
wherein the accumulated wisdom
of a turbulent life will be weighed
in the feather-light scales of your choice.’

I’ll close this brief review by mentioning two further poems that typify both the richness of Briggs’ crafting within poems and that which shines overall in this delightful chapbook collection.

The first On Show Time represents a lightish mood as the poet reflects on middle age (well, forty – he clearly hasn’t heard how sixty is the new forty and hopeful middle age….) with a comic commentary on how ‘Adland’ seeks to assuage advancing years with its ‘slowness fetished’ advertising like

‘the pyroclastic flow of gravy
over beef and potatoes,

a solitary 4×4 on a silver ribbon
of clear road through a National Park, etc.’

This is set against memories of youth and an energetic bike ride where the poet crested a hill on a heath to look out on his ‘untested potential’.

The second is the closing poem Lullaby, a darkly ironic rumination on the dire ‘cost/of the sleep that eluded us’ when ‘black dreams….fledged into the room/seeking the mosquito-thick/skies of their nighthunting’, a long line I have truncated to give a gist of the poet’s distinctive skill with language and ideas rather than spoil the reading of the whole – a genuinely lively experience.

And it is that truly engaging reading experience that draws us into these at times perplexing ideas, as well as work layering more concretely yet no less meaningfully. After all, it is as a reader of poetry that you want more than surface detail about or familiar interpretation of the world in which we live and, occasionally, share similar experiences, and Briggs’ writing in this collection will encourage you to ‘risk the night’s small teeth at your throat’.

For further details, and to purchase for £5, go here.