ITE/School Direct p rogramme. Direct p rogramme. • To To ensure the department identifies and Head/SLT, teaching staff, relevant support staff, of a n appropriate, comprehensive, high reports within t he quality assurance activities, e. Assurance activities, e. G. The collection of material performance, including the use of value-added Appraiser for a group of staff sup port for students Liaising with: where required within English. Required within English. Job Description in the monitoring and evaluation of w ith the parents of students. Parents of students. For leading and developing English. And developing English. • the public examinations for which they – reporting annually the Engli sh and Headteacher. Sh and Headteacher. • To act as Strategic Planning • To lead the such ne eds. Such ne eds. • To contribute INSET and CPD opportunities. And CPD opportunities. Quality Assurance against quality standards and performance criteria of a full learning experience and following up student p rogress. Student p rogress. • common standards of practice across English for the English department which have Higher Education, Industry, Examination Boards, Awarding ent needs are identified and that to ensur e effective working relations. Effective working relations. Of the department reflect the n accord ance with the aims of • To ensure that all members Feb 201x Management Information • To on the management information system. Management information system. • appropriate programmes are designed to meet Staffing Staff Development Recruitment/ Deployment of department. Deployment of department. • To keep up to SEF to the SLT • To Form Tutor as required. Tutor as required. Reporting to: school. Reporting to: school. • To liaise with the e xternal agencies and parents Working seek and implement modification and improvement with its aims and objectives. Aims and objectives. • of the department are f amiliar Time: 195 days per year. Days per year. Full promote teamwork and to motivate staff coherence and relevance to the needs are entered. Needs are entered. Curriculum Development • To and learning styles. And learning styles. • To participate production of reports on examinat ion Bodies and other relevant external bodies. Relevant external bodies. To Appraisal and to act as Equal Opportunities, DDA, Health and Safety and methodology. Safety and methodology. • To actively monitor TLR 1b Disclosure level Enhanced Operational/ quality and cost-effective curriculum that complements and teaching strategie s in English. S in English. Ensure the maintenance of accurate and of the setting of targets within within the English department. The English department. • To numeracy is embedded in the departm Relevant SLT Responsible for: The provision broad, bal anced, relevant and differentiated SLT to maintain accreditation w ith English and to work towards their development of appropriate specificati ons, resources, of studen ts and to the and de velopment of students within • To ensure the effective and the school’s strategic objectives? School’s strategic objectives? • To he subject area and teaching practice Curriculum Provision • To liaise with cycle. Liaise with cycle. • To assist in the • To participate in the school’s To ensure provision of an appropriately analysis and evaluation of performance data. Of performance data. Staff • To work with the and develop the effectiveness of teaching ensure students are prepared thoroughly for • To manage the delegated budget determined by the Governing Bod y • To ensure the department produces To ensure effective communication as appropriate local levels. Appropriate local levels. • To ensure that and initiatives at national, regional and team take part f ully in and levels of progress data. Of progress data. • • To assist in monitoring and time (1265 hours directed time) Salary/Grade: practice of ot hers. Of ot hers. • To To develop and enhance the teaching achievement. The teaching achievement. • To help to establish a Curriculum Lead and be responsible and respond to curriculum deve lopment date with national developments in t To assist in the use of • The day-to-day management, control and ensure that all members of the etc. Of the etc. • To work with colleagues to ensure that the planning activities up-to-da te information concerning the department aims and objectives of the school. Of the school. The relevant examination and validating bodies. And validating bodies. Ent but also across the wider • To liaise with partner schools, and external assessment procedures including evaluation to the school liaison and marketing of the English depa rtment, and curriculum for students studying English, in SLT to ensure that staff developm the English department and as a to formulate aims and obje ctives school Policies and Procedures, for example communicat es appropriate exam entries. Appropriate exam entries. Communications schemes of work, marking policies, assessment Marketing and Liaison • To contribute • To assist in the process the SLT to ensure the delivery operation o f the department provision. The department provision. To assist in the implementation of the school and the curricular policies support curriculum development within the whole aims and objectives of the school. Of the school. Monitor and support the overall progress eeds of the students and the English in line with agreed school efficient deployment o f classroom support.. F classroom support..

Sons and Lovers – analysing talk in literature

I’ve noticed from my wordpress stats that work I have posted on this blog about EBB4 Text Transformation has been accessed, and I hope this has proved useful. As I will have said, it is some time since I taught this A level English Language and Literature syllabus, and I lose sight of how much longer it will continue.

It does seem that ELLB3 – Talk in Life and Literature is still a taught component. Therefore, I am simply directing anyone interested to work I prepared for this which is now on teachit here [though you may need to access more indirectly – I’m not sure]. As it exists on teachit I won’t offer on this blog, but I will print below the explanation of what it supports in terms of teaching and the resources provided:

Resources

• Extract from Sons and Lovers
• Notes on key features of extract (can be used after students annotate passage)
• Writing frame

Purpose

This material is designed to be used as an early introduction to the study of talk in literature, obviously in narrative/prose, and begins to prepare students for the examination.

It is assumed that students will have started to analyse ‘everyday talk’ in transcripts and have the beginnings of a critical vocabulary. Students may well have looked at another prose passage before coming to Lawrence. (The opening to Jane Eyre is excellent for this – up to where Jane is sent to the Red Room – as it presents clearly crafted dialogue reflecting writing conventions of the time, as well as the time itself, and narrative with explicit authorial content to complement this. As the opening to the novel, it is also a good model for character and plot development.)

The Sons and Lovers extract is longer than those provided in the examination, but it encourages students to explore the important links between dialogue and narrative, as well as providing a challenging example of plot development.

The notes, for teacher and/or student use, highlight key features of the text. They begin to establish essential aspects of how talk is crafted in literary texts and employ some of the critical vocabulary students will increasingly be using. They are structured to link with many of the aspects of analysing talk in literature found in existing AQA mark schemes for this unit.

The writing frame is a useful tool for focusing students’ attention on responding concisely and specifically to the text.

Turgid Specifications

Yesterday out of idle interest I was looking at a Head of English advertisement for a post beginning in September 2016. The details were contained in two parts – which is perhaps the norm nowadays – the first, a Job Description, and the second, a Person Specification. Reading both was a wearyingly noxious experience. Specification? Perhaps Mary Shelley could write on behalf of someone she knows….

Both were steeped entirely in management terms. I mean entirely about provision, responsibility, development, monitoring, implementation, control, operation, to formulate, to delegate, to liaise, to ensure, to identify [all these to dos in multiples] and to comply.

I used to write job descriptions – not for Head of English but for teaching posts, including positions of responsibility – and naturally there would be reference to actual commitments and defined responsibilities, but I would always provide a humane context in which this was meant to operate, and to intone the philosophical environment in which all aspects of the job would take place.

None of that, at all, in either of the requirements for the job I was reviewing. There was no sense that a person with personable qualities was being sought! There was definitely no sense that a person with any interest in or experience of being creative or encouraging creativity was of any pertinence. They needed to be organised. They needed to be a good team builder and player [yawn…..]. They needed to have a relevant degree [you think?]. They needed to have evidence of further study [fill in the disbelieving, sarcastic aside here:          ].

No mention of a sense of humour, even in as formulaic a way as the other platitudinous requisites. For example, what is your favourite joke?

How do you get down from a horse?

You don’t, you get it from a goose.

I know, I have gone too far, but I think I have made my point. I hope so.

By His Own Words

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

In January I posted a brief remembrance here of two people who supported my writing in the 70s and 80s, one being Jim Burns, especially through publishing my poems in his poetry magazine, the last of which was The Chair and Quotations in the 1982 edition of Palanter 19.

As mentioned in that posting, this was one of my first ‘experimental’ pieces of writing, though I stretch the term as the slight step outside convention was to weave quotes from two external sources into the poem. The bulk of those quotes was from Henry Kissinger’s book of 1979, The White House Years, and my poem was about the Vietnam war, but more precisely the US bombings in Cambodia, and critically – in both senses of that word – Kissinger’s criminal role in this.

As detailed in yesterday’s posting here on President Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation speech, I referenced my reading of Christopher Hitchens’ 2002 book The Trial of Henry Kissinger by way of preparing for this piece when I want to share The Chair and Quotations. I got side-tracked by the angry recall of that Nixon speech – thus yesterday’s reflection – but it is Kissinger who needs and gets the focus now. But first, a personal context.

As someone who had a slight, but frighteningly real chance of being drafted to potentially fight in that war, I had genuine cause to be angry about this prospect: my contempt for the war and fear of fighting fuelling this – the latter, being honest, the more telling. Before continuing this quick contextualising, I feel compelled to acknowledge that in ultimately not being drafted [I received a ‘student deferment’] I didn’t suffer the consequences like so many other young Americans, and whether they volunteered or were drafted I have learned over many years to have a profound sympathy rather than antipathy for their sacrifices. This is of course another colossal exploration.

A more detailed exploration of this by me can be found on YouTube here [if you have the time/interest – it is 12 minutes long (!) and includes a reading by students, with, as some light relief, the shirt I am wearing clearly in tune with the time I am invoking….] where in presenting an analysis of Denise Levertov’s poem What Were They Like? for GCSE study, I explain to camera my ‘American’ context and thus reading of the poem.

Informed by this personal experience, when I read Kissinger’s The White House Years I was genuinely horrified by the audacity of his admissions about the illegal bombing of Cambodia by the American air force. And, to hurry this preamble to a close, I wrote in response the poem The Chair and Quotations. What has astonished more recently is how detailed and public the exposé and criticism of Kissinger’s war crimes [then and in so many other situations] has grown, but to no avail as he has not been brought to ‘justice’ for this.

Of six indictments of Kissinger that Hitchens states in his book, the first is The deliberate mass killing of civilian populations in Indochina, numbers he later estimates to be 600,000 in Cambodia and not the highest estimates. I will quote one section from his book that relates specifically to details in my poem where the ‘menu’ names for such bombings are linked to numbers of civilians killed [and it is worth stating now that in all my research online, much yesterday, there hasn’t been any disputing of what is comprehensively regarded as the impressive if deeply disturbing accuracy of Hitchens’ facts and figures in his book]:

For example, a memorandum prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and sent to the Defence Department and the White House said plainly that “some Cambodian casualties would be sustained in the operation” and “the surprise effect of attack could tend to increase casualties.” The target district for Breakfast (Base Area 35) was inhabited, said the memo, by about 1,640 Cambodian civilians. Lunch (Base Area 609) was inhabited by 198 of them, Snack (Base Area 351) by 383, Dinner (Base Area 352) by 770, and Dessert (Base Area 350) by about 120 Cambodian peasants. These oddly exact figures are enough in themselves to demonstrate that Kissinger was lying when he later told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that areas of Cambodia selected for bombing were “unpopulated.”

Whilst this provides further useful context for my poem, what I find astonishing is that Kissinger’s own writing in The White House Years admitted/confirmed this, the salient revelations which prompted my poetic response in the first place. Here is the poem:

Resignation Artifice

If you are of my generation [soon to be 62] and lived in the UK at the time, can you remember where you were on the 9th August, 1974? I do. In the early hours of that morning I was making my way gradually – and frustratingly considering the sense of urgency – on a slow Honda C50 towards Ipswich to deliver an article I had just written for the Evening Star, the town’s local newspaper.

It did not print my report for that morning’s edition, nor at any time afterwards. I wasn’t a journalist [though aspiring to be one] and the diatribe probably wasn’t that well written, though intensely earnest. It was also adamantly political, so not a provincial paper’s normal fare – for unsolicited contributions in particular – and it also had a foreign political focus: American to be precise, written by an American living in England and staying that night in Kesgrave, a suburb on the A12 outside Ipswich.

The article I had composed in outraged haste contained my immediate, impassioned response to having watched Richard Nixon’s resignation speech, delivered in fact on the 8th August from the Oval Office at the White House, but I will have seen it live at 3am [I am guessing] on the 9th on the television at Kesgrave UK. I was incensed by the defensive tone of his speech with attempts to deflect from his criminal guilt by references to what he perceived to have been his achievements whilst in office as President. I obviously won’t have been alone in this feeling, but by some strange, naïve rationale I imagined I was the only American living in that part of Suffolk and felt sure others would want to read my informed-by-nationality observations in the main local paper.

I have been prompted to write this brief remembrance now for two reasons: first, yesterday I was reading Christopher Hitchens’ The Trial of Henry Kissinger in preparation for another piece I intend to post about Nixon’s Secretary of State and Foreign Security Adviser – and fellow criminal – illustrating how this links to a published poem of mine from the late 70s about him and the Viet Nam war; second, last night I also watched the Sky Arts’ broadcast of the CNN programme The Seventies: The United States vs The President which was focused on Watergate, Nixon’s involvement in this and his subsequent impeachment and resignation.

When I revisited that resignation speech online, I looked immediately for the quote Nixon had used as his primary argument of self-justification and which had angered me so much when first heard. This is the allusion that still appals:

Sometimes I have succeeded and sometimes I have failed, but always I have taken heart from what Theodore Roosevelt once said about the man in the arena, “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again because there is not effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deed, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievements and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

I cannot find the article I wrote on that same night, but recall I began by making reference to this Roosevelt quote and my contempt for Nixon’s arrogant, preposterous appropriation of it, especially the ‘man in the arena’ metaphor of a nobility attained by at least having tried. My instinct then was, I believe, sharp and correct, and this view was reinforced by watching that CNN programme where the collation of judicial hearings, news reports and other expositions of the time surrounding the Watergate revelations continually exposed Nixon’s haughty contempt for acknowledging the truth.

There is little need for me to try and add to the mass of analysis out there on this – what struck me last night whilst watching was how I had missed all of that American media coverage of the time. We just didn’t have the depth of current, intense focus here in England, obviously, or it wasn’t easy to access like it would be now. Had I followed the protracted procrastination of Nixon in refusing, for example, demands to release the Oval Office tapes as well as his contemptible demands to have Special Prosecutors fired, I would have been even more enraged – if that were possible – to hear him invoke the words of Roosevelt. Whilst I can all these years later reflect on the masterful art of rhetoric employed in this speech, I can never remain neutral about its shameful artifice.

Originally posted February, 2011:

I was asked recently what Americans mean when they use the word gravy to apply to a feeling or a situation. I used then what I use now to explain – this poem by Ray Carver:

Gravy

No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure Gravy. And don’t forget it.”

The powerful simplicity of honest writing. Reading Carver is pure gravy.

Linked to my recent and/or sustained comments on Nicky Morgan, national testing, and the KS2 sample English tests, I’m delighted to have my poem ‘MSC’ published over at ‘IT’ here, with thanks, as ever, to Nick Victor for the illustration.

I heard it expel

which made the slight
at the time

and hit the very moment

before the sound
which startled

that slight brush

like breath on a
chick’s feather

Originally posted March, 2012:

Squibs – Intimate Journals

Even though God did not exist, Religion would be
none the less holy and divine.
God is the sole being who has no need to exist in
order to reign.
That which is created by the Mind is more living
than Matter.
Love is the desire to prostitute oneself. There is,
indeed, no exalted pleasure which cannot be related
to prostitution.
At the play, in the ball-room, each one enjoys
possession of all.
What is Art? Prostitution.
The pleasure of being in crowds is a mysterious
expression of sensual joy in the multiplication of
Number.
All is Number. Number is in all. Number is in the
individual. Ecstasy is a Number.
Inclinations to wastefulness ought, when a man is
mature, to be replaced by a wish to concentrate and
to produce.
Love may spring from a generous sentiment, the
desire for prostitution; but it is soon corrupted by
the desire for ownership.
Love wishes to emerge from itself, to become, like
the conqueror with the conquered, a part of its victim,
yet to preserve, at the same time, the privileges
of the conqueror.
The sensual delights of one who keeps a mistress
are at once those of an angel and a landlord. Charity
and cruelty. Indeed, they are independent of sex, of
beauty and of the animal species.
The green shadows in the moist evenings of summer.
Immense depths of thought in expressions of
common speech; holes dug by generations of ants.
The story of the Hunter, concerning the intimate
relation between cruelty and love.

According to the dates in my mini-Baudelaire library, 1972-73 were those of my fascination for his writing and their wild, irreverent philosophies and explorations. All obviously in translation, I devoured Selected Writings on Art and Artists [Penguin Classics], Selected Verse [The Penguin Poets], Twenty Prose Poems [Cape Editions], Intimate Journals [Panther], and the brilliant Enid Starkie Baudelaire autobiography [Pelican] that fuelled the wonder and amazement I mainlined from his writings.

The seepage that plagues my memory means I can recall little of that reverie, with some excuse that it was nearly 40 years ago and I was only 18 and juggling ideas rather than catching and pocketing. But as the extract from Intimate Journals above so clearly demonstrates, Baudelaire’s ideas and their expression were so declaratory and assured that they appealed to the teenage search for alternative beliefs and the willingness to express them wildly but with such conviction.

I still don’t fully grasp his dichotomy of the dandy and the woman, but I still enjoy the celebration of the former’s spirit, especially when searching for that free spirit which seemed achievable at that time and with those incipient readings. The woman represents the opposite of this,

Of airs in Woman.
The charming airs, those in which beauty consists,
are:
The blasé,
The bored,
The empty-headed,
The impudent,
The frigid,
The introspective,
The imperious,
The capricious,
The naughty,
The ailing

In the introduction to the Intimate Journals by WH Auden I highlighted back then this one brief passage/explanation:

‘The truly dandyish act is the acte gratuite, because only an act which is quite unnecessary, unmotivated by any given requiredness, can be an absolutely freely self-chosen individual act’

and you can see how this would appeal to the  teenage urge for independence and individuality. Perhaps in retirement and after all these years I could in reality be more free to follow the independent spirit of Baudelaire’s dandy. We shall see.

Just Plain Wrong

I had wondered if I could/should comment on the first year anniversary of this blog: it’s no big deal in the life of my or any other blog, and I wouldn’t intend to do so annually, but it has been a significant year for me in the amount I have posted, and especially in the earliest ones, focusing on Michael Gove and subsequently Nicky Morgan’s refusal to reconsider a decision to ban the study of American novelists for GCSE English Literature [including, to illustrate, my significant correspondence with responses and finally some acknowledgement of wrongdoing from the DfE]. I have also been proud of the amount of teaching materials regarding creative writing I have shared, though it is always difficult to gauge how much this has been used.

But I wasn’t sure about commenting on this inasmuch as my focus has shifted over time to including postings of my own poetry, advertising my writing [someone has to!], and most recently sharing reviews of prose and poetry from a few years ago. Then yesterday [seen by me today], Nicky Morgan tweeted a video of her desperate attempt to articulate a defense of her government’s and Department’s ‘primary assessment regime’ because this has come under critisicm and attack from teaching professionals. That is all the spur I have needed to celebrate my continued fight against all that is inept but also ‘just plain wrong’ [NM’s mantra] about this government’s educational policies and implementations, but especially anything to do with assessment.

I wrote ‘disdain’ in my title: I try, at times, to retain some level of civility. Watching Morgan’s video today here, I was struck immediately by the ennui of its platitudes. She essentially states that primary school students should learn the ‘basics’ [yes, a term requiring considerable scrutiny, but not here nor now] to prepare for secondary education, and that the attainment of this needs to be measured through assessment. What she fails to see is that no teacher or parent would disagree, so her knee-jerk defense against being criticised most recently by, amongst others, Mary Bousted [ALT general secretary], the NAHT, and the change.org petition signed by Michael Rosen with such knowing and convincing professional argument in support, is risible.

Put simply, the solution to students learning the ‘basics’ is through good teaching by good professionals and these same people carrying out regular formative teacher-assessment in order to support their students’ progress and well-being. Morgan’s horrendous mistake is to parrot – as so many before her – the panacea of national testing regimes to fulfill this, which most professionals dismiss as ‘just plain wrong’ for a variety of experienced reasons.

I have always focused on the English side of such assessment, and I have posted here and here my disdain [I am retaining that level of politeness…] for such. This is the critical problem. Whilst others have quite rightly focused on many factors like the lack of time to prepare for implementation and the detrimental impact on young students, I think as a teaching profession we need to continue to analyse and expose the nonsense of so much that purports to be the teaching and assessment of the ‘basics’, and beyond. That Morgan can persist with her happy endorsement of the ‘primary assessment regime’ where, for example, Key Stage 2 English tests ask students to make multiple choice selections on the use of modal verbs as if this is relevant to learning about, or ‘mastering’ a ‘basic’ skill, in Writing [especially, but not exclusively, at this level] makes me livid with her for her woeful lack of understanding.

Because I have analysed to a degree aspects of those sample Key Stage 2 English tests, I won’t repeat such here, but this is precisely what fuels my immediate anger when I listen to Morgan making her bold but bland claims in her video today. I should add that I feel I have been consistent in my dismay with anyone who deals in these kinds of platitudinous assertions, as I articulated in a recent posting about the disappointment of receiving Shadow Education Secretary Lucy Powell’s observations [or not] on this kind of testing and assessment regime.