As reported in today’s Telegraph [sometimes one has to…] the news about Nicky Morgan’s misspelling of sincerely as sincerily has not been justified/dismissed/countered/lied about/deflected/massaged by DfE drafters whose job it is to whitewash any criticism of government error as they have come up against the proverbial brick wall in the challenge and task of writing a defense for this whopper of a mistake:

A Department for Education spokesman said: “That’s not something we’re going to comment on.”

Subversion

It is unlikely teachers would have the time – and the relief of not having to set the KS1 Spelling Tests, even if for one year only, is a feeling to understandably pause and savour – but a further cathartic pleasure as well as creative tangent would be to take the existing tests and subvert them for actual teaching and learning.

It would be difficult, I admit, at KS1, but we are encouraged to be challenging! Whatever, and for wherever and whenever, here is an idea for stimulating groups of students to explore and discuss and write their own versions of answers to the original spelling tests: not as spelling, but in thinking about the potential of meanings prompted by single word choices [and no, not the nonsense of ‘Wow’ words, but real words].

The more words students encounter and use, there will be the experience of spelling these too, so two birds with one throw of the existential word-dice.

The following posts include the original answers to the now withdrawn spelling test, and the original ‘answer’ pages with substituted words to use, or use as ideas:

Originally posted February, 2014:

I have posted this poem before as part of a triplet, but it does, I think, stand on its own. It is a true account of an experience when I was a young boy, maybe around 8, when my father and his friend marched out ahead of me on a disused railway bridge over the Missouri River [*] raging some considerable distance below. We were all going fishing, me following behind. The gaps between the wooden ties they confidently strode across and along seemed huge to me then, and the fall to the river below was palpable both in its apparent inevitability and the fear it caused me, even now as I recall it. We also climbed down onto one of the concrete pillars that supported the railway line as our fishing platform. I don’t know how I did this either. What I do remember so clearly is almost immediately dropping my bamboo fishing pole into the river, so scared and shaking that I couldn’t hold onto it, and equally vividly, but I’m bound to doubt for some reason, there was a petrified fish [no pathetic pun intended] laying on the top of this pillar.

Fishing

Did someone further down the Missouri
snare my bamboo fishing pole,
maybe by accident and, later,
when the river slowed and lowered,
sit down calmly at its side and dangle
a line into the cold steady flow,
hooked a fish I could only dream about
when scared by rapids I’d dropped it
from a railway bridge up near Niobrara?
It is always possible that someone
will find triumph in another’s fears
and it could be this optimism that drives us on,
even if we only discover it years later
when hankering after an idea of hope.

[*] Researching this evening it might have been the Niobrara River, a tributary of the Missouri. I found the picture below too just now, but I have no idea at all if this is the actual bridge. On the one hand it doesn’t in any way reflect what I recall as a massive fall to the river below, but on the other there is a sense of the huge expanse and remoteness of the place. I’m sure it is a mistake to try and literally capture and explain. Of contemporary interest as we deal with the flooding here in England, Niobrara as a village, founded in 1856, had been flooded itself so often it was eventually and literally moved to higher ground in 1977. That’s flood avoidance on a grand scale.

NB This poem also appears in my collection The Precarious Real, details here.

All this creative angst and then the forced-to-be-righteous Nick Glib goes and cancels the KS1 SPaG tests for one year.

As this topsy-turvy day draws to a good close, we can only hope another cock-up has the knock-on effect of getting the KS2 tests cancelled too.

Here’s to the paradox of thanking ineptitude for triumphing over policy-making.

He is about four years old
and like most kids his age,
he is walking along the wall
above the footpath,
because it is there,
now coming to its end
where his mother is coaxing
him down with
‘Good boy, good boy’
and it is a parent’s
positive encouragement
with her love and care,

yet then she says,
‘Good parenting’
which surprises me,
this self-referencing as a
kind of paternal narcissism,
and I wonder if she has been
reading a book
on how to raise a child,
needing advice and help when
there isn’t any other in her life?

But no, we do not need
guidance on how to stop the
boy from falling off the wall
or telling him he is doing well
because this is instinct and
common sense,
whereas that one strange line
seems like some form of
absurd mantra from a
self-help scheme
in the extreme.

There are many things to learn
but we do it from experience,
and there are many things to do
to protect a child or help
them along in life
and a wall,
like that encouragement,
and there are many things you
just know not to let them do
like running across a road
or sticking a finger in a socket
or even taking tests when they
are still young and not
walking on the pavement provided,
or even older and getting lost
or running out of breath
and falling over into walls;

tests for example
on grammar and spelling and
punctuation which are built on
barriers dangerously high above
the ground, and not built on
solid foundations,
so you must not
let your child take these tests
that do not encourage them
or offer protection.

But then, as I go through this
to and fro of thinking,
and over-thinking,
and walking along the wall too
and recalling something I read,
a dire warning by someone
who claims they know best,
and tell me what I have to do,
perhaps there is a need
because ‘Good parenting’ isn’t a
complete sentence,
is it?

Psssssst – the answers are in italics

Education Secretary Nicky Morgan would seem to make mistakes faster than her predecessor Michael Gove but they are neck in neck as disasters. Nicky, who would seem to have a sunny disposition compared with Gove’s pompous poo face, is really the same in arrogant incompetence.

On the face of it, we can group education decisions by the pair of these into a singular – if you excuse the paradox – ‘two fingers gesture’ to students, teachers and parents. It all paints a familiar despairing picture of nastiness and ineptitude.

And Morgan is not a fluffy kitten when it comes to mistakes. She would no doubt try to distance herself from the latest Education error, and she can only be ironically thanked for presiding over the DfE leaking of KS1 Spelling Test papers. Ironic because it is like making a Saturday a holiday off from work: the tests have already in many cases been done as the sample they were intended to be, or they are expected to be done with no hope whatsoever of achieving their intended purpose. It is like making sweets laced with laxatives, or baking a birthday cake with exploding candles, to give to the nation’s children.

Morgan knew these tests were useless anyway, or she should have done. They exist like all the others simply as a model of measuring over actual teaching and learning: a whale full of blubber as a deceit for substance. They exist to cause a world full of pain for students, teachers and parents who are force-fed their fatuous fat.

The DfE drafters hurried out a dismissive deflection that the leaked tests were not really important anyway, like pulling each petal from a flower to destroy the evidence. It is a rainbow of deception across the blackest sky.

And then we all woke up in a peaceful bed surrounded by our teddies and this fantastical tale was just a dream……

Just a quick comment on this nonsense [see further details here], but I continue to be bemused by the DfE drafters’ dodging responses to public/media queries, this one of their easier dismissive deflections:

A DfE spokesman said the paper had been removed from the website.

He added: “Fortunately this is a Key Stage 1 test which is provided to schools to support teacher assessment judgments.”

Well that’s OK then! It’s not a monumental cock-up, just an annoying erection of ineptitude.

Never Better

I saw Richmond Fontaine at The Tunnels in Bristol on Monday as they tour their final album and as a band for the last time. The Richmond Fontaine discography is considerable and it plots over time their punkrock roots, but most importantly the memorable songs written by Willy Vlautin. His musical narratives with this band, and also The Delines, tell stories as evocative as those of his novels, and of course there are reflections of themes and motifs across all. This latest album is very much a part of that continuing literary significance, as well as musically superb: as seen in a live performance of the song A Night in the City above.

In all our worlds, time advances inexorably – it is a simple law of nature – but in Vlautin’s and that inhabited by his many personas, that ‘progress’ forward is not as the cliché would have it, even if ironically, a move to betterment. Invariably, it is about dissolution, or at best, change: but it is never the same. As the album title tells us – and I am sure the line is directly or indirectly stated in many of Vlautin’s songs over the years with Richmond Fontaine and The Delines – you can’t go back. You can physically and therefore literally, but if you do, things will not be the same and they will most likely be worse, in most cases depressingly so.

Documenting such a harsh reality, as Vlautin will do from the caustic to the tenderly empathetic, is the forward momentum of this final album from his long-standing band Richmond Fontaine, and one presumes that having made this decision to end, he and the others will not go back. In many ways, all of the song-narratives are brutal, but there are those that take observation to its plainest honesty, and even the music refuses to offer plaintive sympathies to sooth the story-line. That’s how it is with the third on this album, I Got Off the Bus, and even before we listen we know the narrator has returned somewhere that should have been left in its past:

Our protagonist has returned home where a ‘friend’ said he’d pick him up, but doesn’t show; he makes his own way to Little Mexico, once a small street but now a sprawl that never ends; he calls a girl he used to know, a nurse, who had a place on 7^th Street, but her dad says she has moved and is married, living in Stockton with her baby, and the dad says he remembers him, but the narrator knows he is lying; he wakes up from a sleep somewhere to see a policeman standing over me [the chorus]; he goes to the movies but falls asleep there where a nervous 16 year old tells him he has to leave; the narrator – perhaps seeing himself in the boy – reflects you can’t go back if there’s nowhere to go back to; he goes to sit by the river where the sky was full of stars and the water was rust and the night was never ending; then there is a return to the chorus and he tells the policeman I didn’t mean to run out of everything but the policeman replies he doesn’t care as long as the narrator got out of there, and the song draws musically, and simply so, to its close.

This isn’t lyrical, but it is realistic, a tale told in the nothingness of its ordinariness but which touches because of that. The music here is more backdrop to the delivery than a mimetic carrier, and that gives it its own significance amongst the other stories of drifters and losers who reflect on their loss and misery. However – and this grows with the listening again and again – other songs are transferred with a greater musical partnership, this often conveyed through the inherent yearning of pedal steel, as with fourth Whitey and Me.

There are two songs that stand out for me in this memorable whole of such emotive storytelling, and the first is I Can’t Black It Out If I Wake Up and Remember. Rather than paraphrase the narrative – you will know its despairing reflection – it is Vlautin’s wholly empathetic vocal that pains here, the constant inflections upwards mirroring the hurt, it seems, and a beautiful wordless chorus line – also the guitar vibrato that slowly follows. The musical build-up to that cooed chorus – drums and bass so gently worked to offset the relative crescendo, and a brooding synth backdrop like we hear in Springsteen’s similar slow ballads – is unsettling.

The second is the penultimate song on the album, A Night in the City, and the pedal steel here, played by Paul Brainard, conveys the haunted telling again of unhappy living, this time the narrator breaking routine in some useless hope of the different and better: for once I didn’t go home after shift, called my wife and said I’d be late, every day it gets harder to go home after work, so he instead and ironically goes to the home of a workmate where his life is the same or worse, and the rest of the escape from this monotony is a tale of ordinary woe, and here the relentless slow beat of the drum drives to the mean poetry of the chorus the night in the city, oh the city at night [having arrived as listeners in a musical crescendo again], this symmetry offering no more than its platitude and this rhetorical question: is this all there is, is this what life is, a job that means nothing, a woman who sleeps right next to you – and she ain’t yours at all….?

It is hard to know/describe the engagement one has as a listener to this despair without redemption of any kind [though the music, of course, in all its – there is no other word – plaintive glory does affect] and the best answer I have is its utter honesty. For a final album, Richmond Fontaine as a band and Willy Vlautin as a songwriter have never been better, especially in their musically melancholic but memorable evocation of lives that are never better for being lived, compelling us as listeners to engage with this certainty even though we believe it will never happen to us.

I am delighted to have three poems in the new edition of iOTA Poetry.

Also, I am particularly pleased to be in the company of Samuel Taylor Coleridge whose poem Frost at Midnight is included. That pleasure is, of course, because I am a member of the Coleridge Memorial Trust, so I like the long lineage as a link!

This latest edition can be ordered here.

I provide the following which can be perused rather than closely scrutinised – unless you have the stomach – and it proves a number of things, the first that pedantry is alive and well beyond myself [was so in 2005/6, but there are current examples], and to acknowledge the source it comes from the englishforums.com site, but there are plenty of others similar to this out there.

It also proves what an utter waste of time it is to set the type of grammar test the government currently proposes for Key Stage 2, or any other level. The point is, the degree of disagreement, and the intensity of the analysis and interpretation applicable over a single grammatical query like this exemplifies the messiness of seeking to engage with it. More pertinently, the idea of setting a test with definitive answers to grammar questions like this is nonsensical.

I’ll let the following thread speak further. And this is just one page: it continues, but I didn’t have the stomach:

The continuous (or progressive) verb forms in English are constructed with the present participle (-ing form), not the past participle (-ed form) of the verb.

In your example, sat is an irregular verb, so its past participle does not end in -ed. Nevertheless, sat is indeed its past participle, so cannot be used in this active progressive sentence.

Of course, if this sentence were considered passive (which it is not, since you have also given us the correct equivalent), then sat would be possible– but such a sentence would no longer be progressive:

The little boy has been sat at the table by his father and is not permitted to leave it until his plate is clean as a whistle.

(I presume that you meant to write at rather than on in your original?)

goldmund:
AnonymousCan anyone tell me why it is not correct English to say “He has been sat on the table all day” as opposed to “He has been sitting at the table all day”
Dear Anonymous,

I have observed that English people may say «was sat» in place of «was sitting». It appears to be a northern English idiom. In my opinion, it is used for humorous effect by southern English persons. It is perhaps no longer amusing.

Kind regards,

Goldmun
Reply

Forbes:
I agree that was sat (when not passive) is a colloquial expression and should be avoided in formal situations. It is interesting to note that in Spanish when talking about sitting and other bodily positions it is necessary to use the past participle – the use of the present participle would suggest that you are actually in the process of sitting. Perhaps this thought is behind the use of the past participle in the colloquial expression.
2nd September 2005Regular Member933

Reply

MrPedantic:
The ‘humour’ in ‘I was sat there’ seems to reside in the thought of ‘being plonked there’, like a small child.

It is annoying when southern folk say it, though. Makes you want to slap a few heads.

MrP
3rd September 2005Veteran Member12,806

Reply

Forbes:
Is it in fact a northern expression? I am sure people in the south (I am from Brighton and you cannnot get any more south than that) use the expression. It may just be though that I have heard it a lot on TV.
3rd September 2005

Reply

MrPedantic:
That’s true. Maybe it just sounds northern.

MrP
4th September 2005

Reply

Anonymous:
I think the “I was sat” may have originated with a very popular TV commedienne who some years ago would fold her arms and push them under her bosom and commence her next joke with “I was sat sitting…” or “I was stood standing..” which immediately had the audience falling about laughing before she told her joke.
29th March 2006

Reply

MrPedantic:
Some tv comedians have certainly milked the phrase. I think Victoria Wood used to say it a lot; and perhaps still does. (Or was that who you were thinking of, Anon?)

MrP
30th March 2006

Reply
Rotter:
The little boy has been sat at the table by his father and is not permitted to leave it until his plate is clean as a whistle.

1] Is it correct to say ‘has been sat at the table’ in any context?

2] What is the meaning of the words ‘his plate is clean as a whistle’ ?

In football, referee blows the whistle.

Given the context, whilstle blowers are like watchdogs.

Politicians or rather government ministers and prime minisers make whistle-stop tours.
30th March 2006Regular Member959

Reply

paco2004:
RotterThe little boy has been sat at the table by his father and is not permitted to leave it until his plate is clean as a whistle.
1] Is it correct to say ‘has been sat at the table’ in any context?
Yes, it is correct. It is a (present perfect) passive construct. The boy didn’t want to sit but his father made him sit.
Rotter2] What is the meaning of the words ‘his plate is clean as a whistle’ ?
In football, referee blows the whistle.
“Clean as a whiste” is an idiom to mean “very clean”. A whistle makes a very sharp and clear sound. So Dickens used a phrase “clean as a whistle” in his novel and it became an idiom.

paco

Reply

Rotter:
Paco says the following is correct.
The little boy has been sat at the table by his father and is not permitted to leave it until his plate is clean as a whistle.

OK, then the following should be correct too.

The little boy has been cried because his father did not permit to play outside when it drizzles.

If the past tense of the word ‘sit’ fits here, the past tense of the word ‘cry’ should fits too.
30th March 2006
Reply

CalifJim:
a very popular TV commedienne who some years ago would fold her arms and push them under her bosom and commence her next joke with “I was sat sitting…” or “I was stood standing..”
Exactly. That was Mollie Sugden playing Mrs. Slocum in Are You Being Served?. It was nearly always the expression of outrage at having to wait.

CJ
30th March 2006Veteran Member67,639

Reply

Rotter:
CalifJim

The following must be an Amrican affair or rather American TV program.

Mollie Sugden playing Mrs. Slocum in Are You Being Served.

I am not aware of it.
30th March 2006

Reply

paco2004:
RotterPaco says the following is correct.
The little boy has been sat at the table by his father and is not permitted to leave it until his plate is clean as a whistle.
OK, then the following should be correct too.
The little boy has been cried because his father did not permit to play outside when it drizzles.
If the past tense of the word ‘sit’ fits here, the past tense of the word ‘cry’ should fits too.
Hi Rotter

You cannot say “The little boy has been cried”. “Sit” can be both intransitive (=”Someone sits”) and transitive (=”Someone sits other person”). But “cry” is only intransitive (=”Someone cries”).

paco
30th March 2006

Reply

CalifJim:
Rotter,
It’s British. Probably at the height of its popularity before you were born! (1970’s)
I only know it through more recent reruns in the States.
CJ
31st March 2006

Reply

Anonymous:
You should only use “he has been sat on the table” if you meant that someone else picked up the person and put them in a sitting position. For all other circumstances, you should use “he has been sitting on the table”.
5th June 2007

Reply

Anonymous:
When I was at school, one of the teachers used to say to the pupils ” I want all of you children sat over here”. Is this correct english? I always thought it should be “….sitting over here”.
13th July 2007