For those of us who have been there, and more so those currently in it, the idea that the stress caused to students and teachers by the exam factory at primary and secondary levels [and beyond, perhaps] is somehow easy to ignore, or an exaggerated assertion, or any other form of casual denial of its impact and effects, is as absurd as it is rude.

Seeing this reality written about doesn’t of itself make it any more true, but doubters should take note. This article today by Zoe Williams in The Guardian articulates the problem carefully and with supporting evidence and I encourage readers here to read.

I simply also want to post one paragraph from the article about a test for 6 years olds that Williams quotes as having seen. This should be absurd, but sadly I believe it must be another truth.

In parental quarters, what you notice most about the new curriculum is how joyless it is, how little of it makes sense on its own terms. I have seen literacy questions for a six-year-old in the past week that I couldn’t answer. (You think I’m exaggerating. Of course you do. So try this: “‘Kajal looked at the time and jumped out of the chair she was sat in. She had just enough time to meet her friend Julia at the cinema across town if she caught the bus. She ran out of the house towards the bus stop, just as the bus began to drive away. ‘Stop!’ she shouted. What do you think happened next? Why?” Never mind that the text itself is drivel, and strips out any gift of interest, wisdom or magic that a paragraph has ever bestowed upon a reader. I don’t have a clue what happened next.)

And I shouldn’t be seeming to put pedantry before astonishment, but surely sat in ought to be sitting on? I am mentioning here my concern for accuracy in the interests of a balance I always try to maintain in my criticisms of educational matters. I visited the TES resources pages again yesterday, looking at what is on offer for teaching Writing [usually at GCSE level] and yet again I have found material, written presumably by teachers, that seems to me quite appalling. I’m not going to mention by resource, but one PowerPoint being offered for free [and that shouldn’t make any difference] is littered with errors in its own writing. Inaccurate spellings [in one ‘narrative’ exemplar, there is quite for quiet – easy error to make, easy error to check and correct before publishing!] and absence of apostrophes are two consistently common problems. One persistent error comes up with an error-indicating red line on one of the PowerPoint slides!

I know, pedantic and pompous. But 1 mark for the apt use of alliteration…..

I have been dogged in my response to the sample KS2 English grammar, punctuation and spelling tests [or SPaG as they were previously arranged and therefore abbreviated – and those of us in the know, know they were terrible then, as now, as if a new acronym of GPS helps designers to ‘navigate’ to a brighter territory…], but Michael Rosen has been hounding these with a bark and a bite that has already achieved Crofts Championship Super Supreme status.

Through Twitter, Facebook and his personal blog postings, Rosen has mounted a sustained rationale against this primary school test regime. With Twitter he has satirically posed brisk teasers to expose the nonsense of so much of this, and on Facebook and his MR blog he has provided detailed, informed and instructive grammatical and linguistic analysis to not only counter the aims and purposes of these tests but also their accuracy. Yes, their accuracy!

His latest convincing argument is a 13 part collation and summary of the points and evidence he has marshalled against the English test, and it should and can be read on his blog here.

In a further nutshell, I think the simplest objection [though it requires these detailed background arguments] can be summarised by three points:

1. These tests are too complex and difficult for 11 year olds

2. These tests only exist to provide a simplistic means of measurement as a performance in these, and only these, tests

3. These tests have nothing whatsoever to do with the teaching and learning of how to write

Whilst I have constructed my own arguments against the testing principles as a whole and then particular test questions – challenging these as educational tools – I have also mounted my own satirical dismantling. However, much of my satirical reaction has been in providing alternative approaches to actual test questions. I am considering working more carefully on these to see if they could provide an actual substitute set of questions/tasks that could be used to aid student learning about aspects of Writing [including grammatical and linguistic choices].

I know there are immediate dangers/divergences in this: using original questions, even in subverting them, somehow still provides credence to their existence; my ideas are generally to encourage actual writing rather than discrete ‘answers’ about writing, and my ideas usually encourage group work rather than individual student questioning.

But I am considering…

Below are three ideas already posted on this blog and which I will use as models should I continue to explore this idea:

Of further interest, there are two points in Rosen’s list of 13 that are personally poignant, for different reasons:

No. 5 about Michael Gove’s insistence, when he was Education Secretary, that questions about ‘subjunctives’ having to be including in the tests – against informed advice – could seem unbelievable [it is certainly ridiculous] but as I have argued so often on this blog that he is solely responsible for the banning of American authors for study in GCSE English Literature, I found this both appalling and yet reassuring because I don’t think enough people believe he wielded this kind of crazy dictatorial power.

No. 7 because I used to have and teach from a red binder Language in Use when I started teaching English in 1980 in my then secondary school [later a comprehensive] and my recollection is of how purposeful and informed it was about exploring and teaching language usage through a wide range of contextualised and meaningful ideas and tasks.

Finally, it is absolutely clear that the only effective fight against the existence of these tests will be in a boycott of them. Whilst of the utmost importance to have argued convincingly against them – and I think that has already been achieved, surely – we know [take the Gove interventions as evidence; and the current White Paper on national academisation of all schools] that no amount of truth will alter that myopic and arrogant course of this government on education policies.

Originally posted February, 2014:

Sunset From Omaha Hotel Window

INTO the blue river hills
The red sun runners go
And the long sand changes
And to-day is a goner
And to-day is not worth haggling over.

Here in Omaha
The gloaming is bitter
As in Chicago
Or Kenosha.

The long sand changes.
To-day is a goner.
Time knocks in another brass nail.
Another yellow plunger shoots the dark.

Constellations
Wheeling over Omaha
As in Chicago
Or Kenosha.

The long sand is gone
and all the talk is stars.
They circle in a dome over Nebraska.

I did find a beautiful picture of a sunset over Omaha but it seemed for too beautiful and comforting for the ennui that Sandburg encapsulates here. It is probably to do with personal emotions of the time, but I imagine also an oppressive summer heat and humidity, not that this is mentioned.

There is an excellent Guardian page here today of various writers’ and readers’ observations on their love of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I certainly can’t compete with the collective wisdom of this – and wouldn’t want to –  but I am happy to join in the celebration.

I came to Jane Eyre late in life [compared to the world of teenage readers], studying Charlotte Bronte in Oxford as one of the major English novelists whose entire works you were expected to know. I was heavily influenced by my dynamic tutor Anne Wordsworth to approach this and her other work, especially Villette, with a Freudian reading, Bronte having been constrained as a writer by the expected propriety of the Victorian novel, yet sexual realities erupting through this as awkward narrative interventions or apt metaphor, the former as the ghost in Villette – though no longer ‘awkward’ if you appreciated its necessity – and the latter as the burning stubble in Jane Eyre.

I simplify, but I believe entirely in that reading. I do also agree with DH Lawrence who intuited the Freudian reading that Bronte emasculated Rochester with his injuries at the end of the novel, the passion he and Jane felt for one another held to the implicit propriety by the physical inability to consummate, or consummate in the way Lawrence would have done so, as well as what he and we should rightly expect of Bronte’s other implicit but real narrative drive before the actual fire.

This reading never detracted from my appreciation of the novel as a powerful story of independent thought and romance, as I imagine many would argue it could.

It is also such an excellent read, especially the opening 10 [or is it 11, I don’t have the book to hand…] chapters, a separate book in many ways plotting Jane’s abuse and rousing the reader’s anger and contempt with such masterly storytelling.

A few years ago I discovered details about my birth father, though searching on the net, the most significant that he had died. In the process of discovery, I learned more from his surviving wife who generously supplied details through kind letters, photos and, obliquely, sending me his wedding ring from their marriage – an unusual artefact – that I had a half-sister with whom I am now in contact but also another brother or sister though I haven’t been able to find out any information about this sibling, two years younger than me.

It is in searching for any information about my unknown brother or sister that I bought limited access to the Omaha World-Herald newspaper online archives, hoping that there would be relevant detail in the ‘Births’ section at the very least. There wasn’t. I did, however, find a selection of references to my birth father, Olin Stanfield, and it was the increasing amount of purely numerical rather than personal details that struck me as an impersonal acquisition of precious material, though, excusing the pun, amounting to little.

Most of those references were quite simply about his existence as a teacher in an Omaha school as the paper made annual statements about employment in these city establishments. I did, however, find the following, and wrote the poem that follows this:

$9.95 and Other Numbers

For 5 cents short of 10 bucks, all I actually buy are numbers,
30 downloads in 24 hours and yet little of any revelation
in these newspaper archives about my history: the
unknown father; brother or sister too – my sibling still with us,
possibly. 2 years younger than me, there are no mentions in
Births for that May in ’56, nor me, surprisingly, in an
otherwise documented March of ’54. Nearly 60 years ago and
none the wiser. But another sister is announced in 1960 with
our new dad, 6 years further down but in another Omaha road.
I find the pictures of that home, number 1406 on North 40th,
the duplex’s concrete porch still staring out at the passing cars
as the years rolled by. Thousands and thousands, some still in
primer grey. Olin is mentioned 13 different times, only 1 quote
of ‘his boys work hard’ – students with him in 1961, Oct 29.

Originally posted February, 2014:

A world’s disappearing.
Little street,
You were too narrow,
Too much in the shade already.

You had only one dog,
One lone child.
You hid your biggest mirror,
Your undressed lovers.

Someone carted them off
In an open truck.
They were still naked, travelling
On their sofa

Over a darkening plain,
Some unknown Kansas or Nebraska
With a storm brewing.
The woman opening a red umbrella

In the truck. The boy
And the dog running after them,
As if after a rooster
With its head chopped off.

Sometimes I don’t just argue against….

This is from yesterday’s Teachit mailshot and I hope teachers at the very least get to hear about the book’s existence.

‘And you are?’

‘Just call me Marlowe.’

‘Thank you. I mean what do you do?’

‘I’m a Private Investigator.’

‘Why are you here?’

‘You have a serious case of tax fraud I’ve been asked to look into. I was told the well is deep and it is very dark at the bottom.’

‘What do you mean by tax fraud?’

‘The fraudulent dealing with tax.’

‘We don’t have that problem here. You do realise who lives here?’

‘Yes. I was told it’s Dodgy Dave’s place.’

‘Is this some kind of joke?’

‘Where I come from not paying your taxes is no joke, it’s a crime.’

‘You are talking about the Prime Minister David Cameron.’

‘That’s the guy. Dodgy Dave.’

‘Listen here. The person that used that slur was banned from the House of Commons for saying so there and I’d ask you not to keep repeating it.’

‘Didn’t Dave Cameron dodge questions about his tax affairs for days? Telling people he didn’t have any tax affairs to disclose and then later changing his mind and disclosing quite a bit of information about his tax affairs? Sounds dodgy behaviour to me.’

‘Why is an American here, asking these questions and being this rude? You are an American?’

‘I am. I’m a Private Dick from LA and I’ve gum-shoed my way through this kind of sewerage for a lifetime. It’s a big problem in the big city. I’ve had some success tracking down the avoiders. You heard of the Panama Papers?’

‘You’re not responsible for leaking those, are you?’

‘Hardly. Just wanted to make sure you had heard. Seems strange if you have that you can’t work out why I’m here. It’s a worldwide problem.’

‘Our Prime Minister did nothing wrong. All of his tax dealings were perfectly legal.’

‘That’s what the bums tell me when they get caught peeing in the alley. They tell me they paid for the liquor and they can get rid of it how they please.’

‘I hardly see the relevance of your analogy.’

‘I do like the way you English talk. It has such an elegance. Let me explain it to you a different way. We all like our Knights in shining armour. I’m the biggest fan of that kind of nobility. But you can’t keep polishing it to simply get a sheen. Cameron rode about on his white steed saying we were all in this together but too many people were having to walk around at the same time with sore feet or worn-out shoes. When he rode by people didn’t see his reflection in the mirror of the plating – they saw themselves. They saw what they didn’t have.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘And neither do the public. They won’t follow horseshit either. He may not be doing anything illegal now. But when he isn’t Prime Minister, he’ll probably become the King of Panama. You have to see past the here and now.’

‘Well, that’s idle speculation and the British people will soon get fed up with the hounding of our Prime Minister.’

‘Yeah, there’s newspapers out there already telling new stories. The one that matters is Dodgy Dave has been dodging the realities. He isn’t like most other people. Most other people will never have as much money as he does to put where he does, legally or not.’

‘What about the black economy? The cash-in-hand economy?’

‘Yeah, that’s one of those other stories I’ve been waiting to read. I’m surprised some of the papers haven’t run with that one yet. I don’t think the kind of money the very rich put in offshore accounts fits very easily into a hand to pass under the table when you get your picket fence painted.’

‘We don’t have picket fences over here.’

‘We’ve got fences all over the world my friend.’

‘Well, that’s all fine and good, but you can’t see Dodgy, I mean the Prime Minister today. And I’m going to report you to immigration. I don’t believe anyone has really employed let alone asked you to come over here from America to investigate anything.’

‘You don’t surprise me. You had all of the American authors banned from study at GCSE. Now it’s the Dicks. You sure have a peculiar way of doing things legally. You’ll have to wake up one day and see how the British rain falling is the same as that in the June Gloom of LA. It runs along the road and down into the gutter and through the storm drains just the same. I came over here to investigate because I’ve seen a lot of corruption in high places dressed up as normality. It’s universal.’

The guy I’m talking to slams the door in my face. I could pick the lock and go in and push him around a bit, but that would be easy.

I’ll come back another time for Dodgy Dave. But I don’t want to leave this for too long. Like I say, they have fences everywhere and these can be whitewashed in an instant.

Delighted to see this. Not that easy to get messages, let alone the book, out to teachers to see and use:

Full information can be seen here.

My info on this can be found here and here and here!

Originally posted June, 2012:

I wrote the following some years ago about the thieving of my dad’s Chrysler, self-published in a pamphlet called Years where various songs and the year of their recording prompted poetic remembrances. It’s a poem I used to enjoy reading aloud:

the sister said

we took the car
just for a ride
and my boyfriend could drive
but it wasn’t stealing, only borrowing
[with dad in Greenland
he’d hardly know]
and my brother would pay for the gas
with money from his paper round

so we headed out of town
with the Chrysler gliding up and down the long road
like it was floating on air
and in the black of night
speed wasn’t really noticeable

then my boyfriend said something
which reminded me of
why Lenny Bruce was on trial
and my little brother was listening
so we should’ve been thinking
about getting home

her boyfriend said

whata cocksucker of a car
and we’d be on trial
if caught

so who’s Lenny Bruce anyway
a real jerk
not tough like me
i got a razor blade and
carved her whole name down my arm
MXXXXXX in big letters
with the cigarette burns

we’ll dump the car
and wipe it clean
like on TV

i said

this is neat
i’m with the boyfriend who
looks like James Dean
combs his hair back
and rolls up his t-shirt sleeves
i was in a car with him once
being chased and going around
a corner on two wheels

i got a razor blade too
and carved my girlfriend’s name
but forgot the D
so have CINY on my arm

he reminds me of the pictures
on my sister’s bedroom walls
Sal Mineo, Ricky Nelson,
Elvis Presley
i heard Roy Orbison’s
Oh Pretty Woman on the radio there
what a song
as cool as being in this car

when we got home
i turned her bedroom light on
to tell them the car was missed
as they drove by

i was scared
the guys on that wall a lot
tougher than me

The reference to the missing D is a true story: trying to be a tough guy like the boys hanging around and chasing after my sister – though not going for the deliberate cigarette burns – I did carve my girlfriend’s name in my forearm in front of her, but got it wrong. Had that misspelt scar for quite a few years, this future English teacher….