I taught for 30 years and rather like this poem:

At the Pedagogy Panel

he learns that he’s been doing it all wrong
for over thirty years.

so why do his students
keep coming back for more?

a guy his age who seems to feel similarly
tells a story of a study of child-rearing
in denmark and the united states.
the gourmet parents of america read
every book on parenting and put
the latest theories into practice. the
laid-back danes just pretty much
fed and clothed their kids and otherwise
stayed out of their way. there was
no discernible difference in the results.

toad waits twenty minutes to be called on,

then says “what i’d like to know is
if they conceive their kids differently
in denmark.”

This unit of work is a little more functional, though nonetheless encouraging some element of playfulness. I wrote this at a time where I felt compelled by the Literacy Strategy – not entirely sure to do what exactly – but instinctively driven to make whatever I did respond with contain an element of creativity in its urgings. It continued work I had done on Rhymes and Syllables, posted previously on this blog, so if used without that precursor, the ‘continuing’ exhortations can be removed! The target audience was year 7, but linked to other similar activities:

Rhymes, Verbs and Nouns

The aim of this unit is to continue your practice in using rhyme and add to this the use of simple verbs and nouns.

Verb and Noun

This exercise continues the use of rhyming couplets, but in addition to this you will need to end each first line with a verb and then each second line with a rhyming noun. Here is an example:

VERB AND NOUN

With special trainers you will run
but never catch a setting sun.

Camels smile but cautiously jump
when water fills each rounded hump.

With soft cement you can render
but do not mix it in a blender.

The ball’s lined up and with a whack
you slip and fall upon your back.

Turn a cheek and take a slap
to wake yourself up from a nap.

Make sure you look before you dive
if you’re above a concrete drive.

Slip on North Pole ice and slide
upon a never-ending ride.

Writing the Poem

First stage: You need to collect pairs of rhyming words where one is a verb and one is a noun. The verb will describe an action of some kind and the noun will describe an object, place or situation. It might be easier to start with a list of verbs, and then match these with nouns, or vice versa, rather than struggle to find matching pairs at the same time.

Final Stage: You now need to shape your verb and noun pairs into individual rhyming couplets. Each of these must make sense on their own, but they do not have to link with one another. You can try to make them amusing like those in the poem you have seen. For example, the noun hump suggests writing about a camel. This leads to the idea that a camel must be cautious with a jump if the humps are filled with water.

Go on then, you try and be funnier!

I came across the pamphlet the pittsburg poems last night that Gerald Locklin produced with fellow poet Mark Webber [one of those inverse/back to front chapbooks] and I read all the Locklin who I always enjoy so much.

I like particularly the poem LEGACIES that I shall copy here, identifying with the sentiment, and finding amusing the reference to the English who get a bit of a hard time in a few poems in this collection – not sure why. It also seemed apt at the moment in the line about dionysians against apollo: not wanting to corrupt that too much but I do think there is a pertinence here to the coming general election, especially if we ironically accept the ‘chaos’ tag given to Labour by the Tories, and assuming we’d rather have that kind of chaos over their totally controlled uncaring:

as a kid whether in the world
of the three musketeers or the
wars to claim this continent,
we always rooted for the french
against the english, montcalm in
his tragic uphill struggle against
wolfe, the catholic against the
protestants, the hurons over the iroquois.

this presented problems with
james fenimore cooper,
not to mention history.

i think that we were championing
the dionysians against apollo.

today that’s still a losing battle.

[published 1996]

I am delighted and humbled to have this generous review [on amazon] of my eBook novel Writing With Hammers:

This is a funny and surreal memoir of a teacher who charts the frustrations and joys of a life inside the classroom. Government initiatives and his colleagues’ futile attempts to corral him into a more corporate mentality are resisted with bewildered, incredulous and increasingly desperate responses. The episodic narrative takes in the impact on his family life (they often fail to recognise him), fairly disturbing characters flit in and out as the beleaguered main character tries to carve a way through a quagmire of statistical and bureaucratic oppression. This is funny, sad, at times bitter and ironic but retains at its heart a generous spirit and moving affection for young people, the students, the individuals that the writer deals with every day. Harry, with his interesting speech patterns, is at the heart of this book and shows where the writer’s sympathies lie, despite the attempts of the system to ignore individual needs. You don’t have to be a teacher to enjoy this. It’s quirky and lifts the lid on the way education, indeed most of our lives, have been shifted into a corporate routine despite our best intentions. Moving, funny, sad. Enjoy. I did.

I have now sold 3 copies! No Booker for me this year I suspect……

A little additional information to my previous posting: I rang the DfE to try and speak with Anthony Hunter who wrote the meaningless letter to me [copied in that post] in order to ask him to explain, if he could, the few things that were said. I was told he was unavailable. More interestingly, I was also told he couldn’t answer any specific questions because he didn’t actually write the letter. He is a ‘drafter’. Apparently this means he just signs the letters [though I presume there might possibly be some element of ‘cut and pasting’ those little snippets of mantra-esque meaninglessnesses I characterised also in the previous posting]. Even more revelatory, Daniel Metcalfe to whom I had initially written and for whom Anthony Hunter had made his reply, is also a ‘drafter’. So neither of these ‘Ministerial and Public Communications Division’ employees is able to communicate anything of any substance. They exist to draft responses and then dodge responses because they are unavailable and unable anyway.

This explains everything. No, really, it does.

For those who have followed this thread, I have received the latest response from the DfE which of course completely ignores the substance of my complaint about the effective banning of texts from GCSE English Literature from September 2015.

I am not in the least surprised to have received such a stonewalling and arrogant reply having been used to this deflection and avoidance from the DfE, in its many guises, over the years. My ‘acceptance’ of that fact is nonetheless an angry and disgusted one, but my only ‘consolation’ is in having witnessed totally similar – from all political parties – over the recent weeks of the General Election campaign.

Two examples from yesterday will suffice to illustrate, both from Tories who I think have been the worst [or most proficient in executing], but I acknowledge all Parties have been rehearsed to the most immaculate degree of stubbornness in persisting with a mantra of key words/phrases regardless of the precise or even quite general question being asked.

One was Andrew Neal on his lunchtime BBC2 politics programme asking a question of a Tory minister about a potential threat to child benefit should her Party be elected, and for her then to repeatedly ignore that question – asked again and again by Neal – by rehashing a rehearsed generic reply. We have seen similar from so many throughout the campaigning, but it was still, and will continue to be, obnoxiously brazen and arrogant and – simply but profoundly – rude.

The other was by David Cameron on the Question Time special last night being asked a question about the proliferation and need for food banks during his 5 years in government and, as a related though more specific point by the same person, a question about a disabled child who had died and whose parents were subsequently being charged the bedroom tax for that child’s now vacant room: highly emotive questions, especially the second, asked with clarity and sincerity. When Cameron responded with yet another repeat of the mantra, one he had already regurgitated 3-4 times up to that point, and never once – not once – addressing or even acknowledging the emotive reality of that question [agreed with or not], I was utterly disgusted……but sadly not surprised. And that is the horror: not to be surprised, as I am not surprised with this response today – though I am not comparing the emotional and moral aspects of these two situations.

I probably haven’t articulated the depth of anger and frustration in all of that as I would like to have done, but it will have to do. Posting the following letter even seems a little insignificant within the context of the wider picture I have placed it, but it is still a part of that overall persistent stonewalling and arrogance which is so prevalent now.

The Teacher’s Resource to accompany the Writing Workshops student book should soon be available from Cambridge University Press.

In writing this I have presented extra guidance about individual workshop aims; further support of routes through each; ‘answers’ to questions posed [to aid busy teachers who can do without extra preparation before teaching any unit]; exemplar/illustration where discussion topics do not expect finite outcomes, and throughout all of this a reinforcement of the overall ethos that underpins the intention of the workshops: to treat students as writers.

Here is a sample page, but it can also be found on the CUP site, as well as other samples across the entire GCSE English package:

In reviewing recently the excellent theoretical and practical teaching resource Making Poetry Happen – Transforming the Poetry Classroom here, I singled out one chapter by Emma Beynon, Engaging Invisible Pupils through Creative Writing.

I subsequently came across my poem Debbie which I will post at the end of this brief introduction. In Benynon’s chapter she references a Write Team project funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation which aimed to engage ‘pupils who keep a low profile: invisible pupils who are quiet and undemanding’.

My poem’s subject Debbie was actually the reverse in terms of being quiet and undemanding: she was vocal and complaining and a classic disaffected student. The other person I mention, Mark, did however fit the quoted profile perfectly.

Both were liberated by their love of creative writing in those few occasions I could give time to this in their GCSE English lessons, though I also feel they were both engaged by the chance to just express themselves and have that valued – and for both this was through writing as Debbie’s voluble anger and Mark’s almost total reticence were in their separate but similar ways a block to conveying private, meaningful thoughts and feelings.

The poem dedicated to Debbie was written shortly after her sad and untimely death in her early twenties – a tragic accident – and after she had found peace and security in a job in a retail outlet locally where I would occasionally see her working and talk briefly about old times at school: again, a ‘classic’ example of the annoying [though not to me] and angry student who grew up and found a place in life for herself.

I wrote the poem after attending her funeral and talking with Mark there, who had also grown up to [without being sarcastic] talk and share his feelings. A little sentimental perhaps, but genuine in how I know creative writing had been a positive outlet for Debbie and many others like her.

Debbie

The church is dark and dull
but all the pews are full
as I sit with friends from school
wrapped in our sharing spool.

She wrote poems whispers Mark
and he smiles but they were dark
as he offers what she got
from the lessons that I taught.

Yes she snarled and she sneered
and I’d no idea what she feared
so for her noises and her looks
I gave paper, pen and books.

But with goading and with guile
anger turned a fleeting smile
and in such a switch as this
are the moments I will miss.

I always used to enjoy this activity with whole classes, one that very much fuels the ‘accident of meaning’ ethos underpinning the best experimental and exploratory writing.

It is a great parlour game – yes it is! I once ‘performed’ this on a transatlantic flight with a row of strangers. They loved it. And I think it was more than the love born of a need to fill a long time [no individual seat TV screens then!].

I have also shared this with adult French friends – with exceptional English but still fascinating understandings/perceptions of the outcomes – and also with a group of visiting German students to my school: now that was a challenge to their basic language understanding and then the extra conceptual leap to accommodate metaphoric meanings, yet it ‘worked’ in wonderful ways, because it just does.

Students can struggle at first to endure the literal or uninteresting pairings that transpire, but with patience and persistence this actually then foregrounds the amazing fortuity of those that do startle and work in their surprise metaphoric ways. Like so much of this kind of experimentation, students [anyone] need to encounter it as much as possible to learn to understand the patience required and the thrill of arriving: like good writing itself, there is work and great patience needed.

ConcreteAbstract

The aim of this unit of work is to get you to write a concrete/abstract poem. You will do this by playing a game in which definitions of both concrete and abstract things are mixed up and interchanged. Here is an example:

What Is?

What is the moon?
It is the burning of anger.
What is a door?
It is the looking forward to happiness.
What is a river?
It is an opening into another room.
What is hatred?
It is a car slamming into a wall.
What is hunger?
It is the winding of water.
What is an accident?
It is the reflection of sun in the sky.
What is hope?
It is an emptiness inside.

As you can see, there are some unusual answers to the questions in this poem! Mixing up all of the original questions and answers causes these. The random pairings that are produced by this mixing can create new and sometimes dramatic meanings.

Can you match the questions to their real answers?

Some questions and their new answers will not necessarily be startling. However, notice how some do work particularly well together, for example:

• hatred is a car slamming into a wall – this works literally
• hope is an emptiness inside – this works because having hope or being hopeful can leave you feeling empty until it is fulfilled

Writing the Poem

First stage: This can be done individually or in a pair. If working individually, you ask and answer your own questions; if working in a pair, one person asks the question and the other provides an answer.

You should make sure that you have an equal mix of both concrete and abstract questions and answers:

• your concrete question will ask about something that someone can see, hear, smell, touch or taste [for example, stone, sausage, house, trumpet and so on]
• your abstract question will ask about something that does not have any of these material qualities for someone to sense [for example, love, happiness, silence, indecision and so on]

Each question must be written as What is a/an _______________ ? and each answer must be written as It is a/an ______________

Consider carefully the tone of the poem you hope to write. You will get comic and entertaining results if you mix things like sausages and indecision! If you want to keep it serious, be selective about what you ask and answer.

The way you answer questions will also help to determine the likely tone of your poem. A river can be described as moving water or the winding of water; hatred can be described as being angry or the burning of anger.

Second stage: When you have the number of questions and answers you want, cut these out and put them in their separate piles face down on a table. These should then be shuffled. Next, you turn them over, a question first and then an answer, and write what they now say in full on a separate sheet of paper. Because of the random nature of this part of the exercise, there should be some interesting combinations (and there will be times when you get the original, actual answer to a question!).

Final stage: When you write your concrete/abstract poem you can lay it out as in the example you have seen. This can either be written in the sequence you produced during the second stage of this exercise, or you can rearrange pairs of questions and answers to produce the most interesting contrasts and comparisons.

You can also edit out any lines that are just not interesting.

The exercise outlined here is totally random. However, you can vary this by making sure that only concrete questions can be given abstract answers and vice versa.

Considering my recent post on Labour and Tristram Hunt and the future of education in this country in their potential hands, I was interested and reasonably pleased to read Hunt’s largely endorsing review of Ken Robinson and Lou Arinoca’s book Creative Schools in today’s Guardian.

As I already stated in a quick Facebook posting on this, the likes of Gove [though he is probably too obvious to reference] and others would not have the capacity to embrace the kind of ambitious and progressive ideas on education from Ken Robinson, and for Hunt to declare an understanding of and support for these is reassuring. My biggest concern could be that this is a singular light merely shining bright in a black hole of well-established conservatism and philistinism.

I would add to this concern by quoting the following caveat Hunt puts in his review, though I guess this is predictable given the electioneering ‘caution’ that abounds at the moment:

Robinson rightly makes the case for the rigour of creative learning – “creativity in any field may involve deep factual knowledge and high levels of practical skill” – but we always need to guard against the soft bigotry of low expectations: the worrying trend of play and expression being adequate for working-class pupils, while leaving the tough stuff, the physics and history, for their better-off peers.

I can’t imagine many teachers or schools would currently support such an ethos of ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ for working class students [though a legion of proletariat poets seems no bad army for the future] and it is a shame for Hunt to engage in this familiar and silly scaring rhetoric. But if in government Labour and Hunt were to provide substance to the following endorsement:

We need to call time on the exam-factory model, ensure a broad and balanced curriculum in our schools, and focus on improving teaching rather than fruitlessly reforming school structures – not only because a childhood at school should be a rich, enjoyable and challenging time; but also because the coming economy demands exactly the kind of rigorous creativity and personal resilience that Robinson advocates.

then this could begin to realise the kind of seismic curriculum shift we desperately need and whose absence, under the Tories, Labour and Coalition, I was ruing in the posting already mentioned. Given my own caveat about the electioneering ‘caution’ prevalent at the moment, and accepting some of the reasonable pragmatism Hunt inserts into his generally positive response, I think his review articulates one of the more radical statements I have heard from a potential Education Secretary for a very long time.

NB: adding these links – Hunt’s review here; and perhaps less enthusiastically in championing Hunt’s views being stated now [rather than years ago by anyone in Labour…], this link to Warwick Mansell’s book Education by Numbers – The Tyranny of Testing which back in 2008, as well as through his consistent insights on similar before and since, articulated the problems very much sustained by Labour in power. However, as a teacher of 30 years, I have to believe that lessons can be learned, eventually…..