172: English teachers galore.
King Lear, Katriona O'Sullivan, Ros Atkins, Thomas Kinsella, Noreen Masud, Jamie Clark and more.
A few English teachers in this one.
A highlight this week was giving a webinar to 950 English teachers on Small Things Like These (see below). How about that for eagerness to learn on a September evening!
Other English teachers below via Katriona O’Sullivan, John Tomsett and, more wackily, Brian Jordan Alvarez.
Next week, a one-issue edition in between the Fortnightlies: English teaching and AI.
Next webinar:
Wednesday 16th October at 7.00pm via Tralee Education Support Centre. Similar to but also modified from previous Leaving Certificate webinars on Hamlet and Macbeth.
Poor by Katriona O’Sullivan
has been a huge success, and indeed won The Last Word Listeners’ Choice category in the 2023 Irish Book Awards. I’ve taken a while to catch up on it, but flew through the pages in a couple of days last week. She writes compellingly.
Education is central to this autobiography: the author’s faith in its power to change her life (and indeed it did, though as she points out there was a large slice of luck involved) from childhood, all the way to her university entrance via the Trinity Access Programme before getting her doctorate and now lecturing.
She remembers the impact of teachers, both good and bad, and of course here I’ll note her appreciation of her English teacher in Coventry, Mr Pickering:
Mr Pickering was a northern man in his forties. I loved him. I loved his pronunciation of Shakespeare, the way he thoughtfully read through the texts and explained each phrase to us, telling us how we might say it today. I took notes in his class, always wanting to make good on my homework. His praise meant more to me than other teachers’. I wanted to be the best in his class; he was hard on all of us, so you knew when he told you that you’d done well, you really had. In his class I gladly shot my hand up; even wrong answers were engaged with.
‘Another September’
by Thomas Kinsella is a poem that all of us who taught and studied the famous collection Soundings will remember. Posted here again given the month. Above, Sean McKinley performs it.
Dreams fled away, this country bedroom, raw
With the touch of the dawn, wrapped in a minor peace,
Hears through an open window the garden draw
Long pitch black breaths, lay bare its apple trees,
Ripe pear trees, brambles, windfall-sweetened soil,
Exhale rough sweetness against the starry slates.
A Flat Place
is Noreen Masud’s intense account of her travels around ‘flat places’ such as Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay and the Newcastle Town Moor, and of how her childhood traumas from Pakistan manifest themselves.
The most powerful part is her marvellous story of travelling to Orkney with a surprise companion, her mother, who comes across vividly in all the complexities of her personality. Her father, now dead, is more elusive: his impact on the lives of all his daughters was plainly disastrous. In the end the book itself remains elusive and not fully achieved, though there are some vivid moments.
Communicating with Ros Atkins
is a BBC Sounds series of 15-minute interviews with excellent communicators, like Rob Brydon (a genuinely funny comedian), Michael Johnson and Saradi Peri, who used to write for President Obama (and is also a former English teacher).
Good listening for those of us who are teachers, since at the core of our practice is communication (and, all too often, sadly failing to communicate).
A year ago I commented on Atkins’s book The Art of Explanation: how to communicate with clarity and confidence. Also, here’s an example of how to use his analysis, in a video on Manchester City’s financial situation.
King Lear resources:
The second in a series directing you to things I’ve written on the great tragedies. Next time, Hamlet.
Light and Dark’: links and notes from my webinar on the play for Wexford Education Support Centre in May 2024, hosted by Joe Rolston.
My essay comparing Caravaggio’s ‘The Taking of Christ’ and King Lear.
James Shapiro: 1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear. The outstanding book on the play’s historical background, by our age’s outstanding scholar. Here are my notes from the book concentrating on the development from the source King Leir to Shakespeare’s play.
Emma Smith on Lear in her superb book This is Shakespeare: my notes. Listen to her Oxford University lecture on Lear here. Why does tragedy give pleasure?
Quizlet quotation self-tests as retrieval practice. This isn’t for ‘mere’ recall: it’s to make pupils think about key issues in the play.
Thinking about King Lear: a series of exercises about quotations that you can do on your own, or even better in a pair. These are for when you know the play very well.
The sequence of events…. here is a chart for pupils to fill in, and to get a clear overview of the play, and here is a second one to use as retrieval practice - what happens in each scene, based on the question (a harder but more valuable task/test).
Essays on aspects of the play (modified versions of the podcasts below):
Some revision podcasts I did a few years ago:-
The first talk examines the explosive and crucial opening scene, during which the King sets in train the disastrous train of events which leads to personal and public catastrophe.
The second looks at the extreme bleakness of Shakespeare's vision in the play, especially through its treatment of religion and the gods.
The third looks at the ‘good guys’, Kent and Albany, and how they affect the central story and its themes.
The fourth features ten quotations from the play for pupils: pause after each, and self-test on who spoke the words, and their context, and then listen to the answers and a commentary on the quotation.
The fifth, using the notorious scene in which Gloucester is blinded as a starting point, looks at ideas of blindness and seeing throughout the play, particularly in the stories of the two old 'blind' men, Lear and Gloucester.
The sixth looks at the end of the play, considering how the famously bleak ending is constructed by Shakespeare. Lear so nearly becomes a play with a comic ending.
Teaching and Learning Things:
Jamie Clark’s work is always pleasingly clear and succinct. His new book, Teaching One-Pagers: evidence-informed summaries for busy educational professionals, covers a huge amount of ground, but does that in a highly accessible way. This is the sort of book I would have loved when training many years ago. Some more comments.
John Tomsett on This much I know about…what makes great teaching, with a focus on his own English teacher, Dave Williams:
Dave was firm, fair and fearsome. He knew his stuff. He never once wandered round the room. We never did group work, or presentations. He explained every page of The Return of the Native and Mill on the Floss, every line of The General Prologue and The Wife of Bath’s Tale, every nuance of Shakespeare’s dense comedy, Love Labour’s Lost, and we dutifully made notes in our copies of the text, which still sit on my bookshelf, just to my right as I type.
My slides and links from Tuesday’s webinar on teaching Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. There were 950 teachers online for this, which means that the book is having a serious impact in schools. We hope to repeat the webinar later this term for those who missed it.
Jonathan Firth - ‘Licking an ice lolly at school might make a good memory – but this isn’t the secret to learning science’:
If we want students to build up their knowledge of science and be able to use it in future, it’s vital that the focus is on strategies that build deep understanding of concepts and how they are structured, rather than relying on gimmicks or one-off experiences. All of this is to say nothing of the practicality of storing an ice lolly for every school pupil, handing them out in class – or cleaning up afterwards.
Et Cetera
English Teacher as the title of a series was always going to draw me in. The new FX series (on Disney+ in this part of the world) is a bit of light-hearted fun. Brian Jordan Alvarez plays a gay high school teacher trying to maintain his equilibrium in the confusions of the contemporary world. A pleasure is the quality of acting in the minor roles, such as Enrico Colantoni as the put-upon, sympathetic and tired Principal. And the students are often hilarious: a line from one girl about her having asymptomatic Tourette’s was perfect.
Another (training) English teacher: Nell Frizzell on re-reading her school texts.
Casting is underway for a BBC adaptation of Lord of the Flies. Many years ago I met Charles Montieth, who described how the novel had been discovered and shaped.
Evan S. Connell was born 100 years ago. Mrs Bridge is a fine novel, and its relationship with Mr Bridge fascinating. Steve Paul on the novelist:
“Evan flew under the radar,” Helene Young, a onetime Sausalito neighbor, told me. “It was his comfort zone. He would quietly drift into an art event. Then quietly drift out like the fog wisping past the Golden Gate. With Evan, one knew him and didn’t know him simultaneously.”
Camille Ralphs on Geoffrey Chaucer. I’m ordering Mary Flannery’s book, on Unveiling the Merry Bard. Meanwhile, here are some pieces on books Ralphs mentions, by Marion Turner, Zadie Smith and Patience Agbabi, as well as an interview with the late great Professor Terry Dolan.
This, perhaps, is Chaucer’s great innovation in our literature, surpassing even the invention of the decasyllabic English line that found its way to iambic pentameter: a level narrative playing field, inviting interaction and discussion.
Finally, an open invitation to Culture Night on Friday 20th September. I’ll be giving this talk about and tour of a beautiful campus.