170: Perfect classes, mind-fracking
Henry James, 'rote learning', Sarah Gilmartin, Max Porter & more.
That’s it for this academic year.
Thanks so much for the support for this newsletter, which started in 2016. This year saw it move to Substack: joining a good writing and thinking ecosystem has been pleasing.
I’m also most grateful to those who are supporting my writing by being paid subscribers: thank you!
At the start of July there will be the first appearance of The Occasional, for paid subscribers, and another is planned for the start of August. A kind of off-shoot, and a thank you for supporting this venture. Then the Fortnightly will return in late August.
This morning I head off to the Dalkey Book Festival to hear James Shapiro talk to Fintan O’Toole about ‘Shakespeare in America’. I’ve started reading his new book The Playbook.
The Perfect Class
is an impossibility. But just once in your career you should have the opportunity of having classes which come close.
27 years ago I did, together with my colleague John, when we co-taught Henry James’s masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady on a series of sun-drenched May evenings.
At the bottom of the post is an audio recording of a discussion John and I had in 2009 about the novel. As I say at the start, it’s perfect summer reading for July and August, so…
Audio Corner: The Portrait of a Lady
Here is the the marvellous opening page of the novel, which starts:
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
My article in The Irish Times
last week about the Leaving Certificate, ‘rote learning’ and more seemed to strike a note, at one stage being the third most-read piece on the site. It was born out of an exasperation with one of those bromide ‘this is the way to transform education’ pieces in March which resurface dismayingly often.
Time to look at some facts. The dismal banality of the phrase “21st-century skills” obfuscates what basic critical thinking should show: those skills are indeed crucial to human society, but they are permanent human conditions. Shakespeare would be surprised to be told he would have to wait four centuries to deploy the skills that underpinned the achievements of his great company of actors.
Some notes on things I couldn’t say within the 900-word limit. Also, my comments on the Leaving Certificate Higher Level English examinations last week: Paper 1 (Language) and Paper 2 (Literature).
Two recent reads:
Sarah Gilmartin’s novel Service is set in the fevered atmosphere of a high-end restaurant Dublin some years ago, an environment which is notoriously intense. She weaves together several perspectives which gradually come to the central event prompting the narrative: a court-case involving sexual assault. The narrative is sharp and compelling.
Max Porter’s short novels often play with form. Shy’s form is determined by the personality of the chaotic eponymous character, a very disturbed teenager now at the well-meaning ‘Last Chance’ boarding institution. He’s not Holden Caulfield. The story is often powerful, sometimes poetic, occasionally mis-firing, always interesting.
Summer reading -
Reading Lessons by Carol Atherton
is a book I’ve recommended to all English teachers.
Below, she is interviewed by Professor Robert Eaglestone, whose pamplet “Powerful knowledge, ‘cultural literacy’ and the study of literature in schools” I commented on in 2021, and whose book Literature: Why it Matters has plenty of interest for English teachers.
Attention
is a subject well-worth thinking about now: so crucial to all our lives, especially in this fractured world, and also vital to the classrooms in which I spend much time. I have written a few posts connected to the subject: for instance, on Maryanne Wolf’s book Reader Come Home: the reading brain in a digital world.
Recently there was an excellent discussion [gift link with full transcript] on the Ezra Klein show, ‘Your Mind is Being Fracked’, in which D. Graham Burnett explored ways in which our attention is being assaulted in contemporary life:
This is creating conditions that are at odds with human flourishing. We know this … and we need to mount new forms of resistance.
Teaching and Learning Things:
- ’s new book, Why Learning Fails (and what to do about it) is another clear and helpful guide for teachers (his ‘Closing the Gap’ trilogy was excellent). My comments, starting with Roger Federer.
More: via
’s 3Rs Substack: a new study on ‘Making mistakes easy aids teacher–student relationship’:Results showed a moderate negative correlation between alienation and error climate; students who, at the first point of the study, felt that their teachers had created a safe space to make mistakes were less likely to report alienation from their teachers at the second point of the study. Conversely, those who felt afraid of making mistakes at early in the study were more likely to feel alienated later on.
‘Enhancing Learning Through Storytelling’ by Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel on the Learning Scientists blog. An area I’m interested in as an English teacher, but this piece is primarily about other subjects. Thomas Newkirk’s 2014 book Minds Made for Stories: how we really read informational and persuasive texts is worth reading. He calls story-telling ‘an innate and indispensable form of understanding’.
BBC World Service documentary on the much-noticed initiative in primary schools in Greystones to delay smartphones for children.
A pre-holiday plug for my free webinar next term for teachers on revising and thinking King Lear for the 2025 Leaving Certificate, via Tralee Education Support Centre on Wednesday 16th October, 7.00pm. Registration link.
Et Cetera
Where to start with that Marmite contemporary writer, Rachel Cusk, by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett. Cusk’s latest novel Parade is getting wildly different responses; I’m certainly a fan of the Outline trilogy.
Will Tosh on the poetry of Shakespeare’s contemporary Richard Barnfield:
Generations of critical discomfort with Shakespeare’s homoerotic sensibility conjured up a cloud of false witnesses, in the process seriously misrepresenting early modern queer culture and denying Barnfield his due as a major influence on Shakespeare.
The film Birdsong (now on RTÉ Player) is just lovely. Not the war story but the opposite: Seán Ronayne collecting recordings of birds in Ireland. More in The Occasional next time.
A podcast discussion this time on the Venetian ghetto: lots of interesting insights from Erin Maglaque.
Last time I mentioned the Vermeer Visits display in the National Gallery of Ireland (until mid August). Here is a talk on it by curator Lizzie Marx.
A new series from in ‘The Priory’ on John Donne has started with a sonnet I often teach ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God’: knotty, tense, strangely ‘erotic’. A reminder of my Book of 2022, Katherine Rundell's superb Super-Infinite: the transformations of John Donne.
À propos of nothing, but signing off with joy: Morecambe and Wise backing Tom Jones in 1971.
Thanks for the link to the LRB podcast about Venice's ghetto! I am definitely going to listen — it's such a fascinating topic.