176: Small things English teachers can do

Sally Rooney, Claire Keegan & Cillian Murphy, Jennifer Roberts, King Lear, Shakespeare in America, Deborah Levy and more.

Nov 09, 2024

I have spent a lot of time with Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These over the last three years. This week I went to see the film.

And this week it seemed right to reassert what English teachers can do.

Small Things Like These

has arrived in the cinema, featuring Cillian Murphy’s powerful central performance, with Enda Walsh’s screenplay directed by Tim Mielants.

It’s not always a great idea to see a film of a book you know so well, but the short version is that I can recommend this, with minor reservations.

For the much longer version, here’s what I thought, with plenty of comparisons between the book and the film.

What can English teachers do?

Sometimes it feels like a particularly dark and perplexing time. How much impact can we have in these circumstances? This week I tried to answer that question.

With references to Katherine Rundell, John Donne, Maryanne Wolf, Ian Mortimer, Kazuo Ishiguro, Meghan Cox Gurdon, Victoria Kennefick, Molly Twomey, Roger Robinson, Anthony Joseph, Conor Murphy, Carol Atherton, Geoff Barton and more.

Sally Rooney’s latest

caused a big splash. Perhaps surprisingly, she is now literary fiction’s equivalent of J.K.Rowling (midnight launch parties) or even Taylor Swift.

I read Intermezzo during half-term. Disconnected comments:

I think it’s her best book so far. It has a warmth and capacious empathy which shows her talent deepening.
Oddly, that empathy seems to bypass one of the four main characters, Naomi, the one who maybe needs our attention most, but whose inner life is denied to us.
It’s probably also overlong. Evidence: some sex scenes.
It’s powerful on the surprising and unpredictable ways grief strikes.
As with previous Rooney books, you can be simultaneously drawn along and find the characters and the milieu irritating.

Jennifer Roberts

is a Professor of Art History at Harvard, and I have often cited her idea of making her students focus for three hours on a single painting (such as here, when I wrote about poetry textbooks) as a corrective to our tendency to inattention.

Now the New York Times Learning Network has posted a (mere) 10-minute task for your pupils [gift link] using James McNeill Whistler’s ‘Nocturne in Blue and Silver’.

Shakespeare in America:

this is the week for Drew Lichtenberg’s essay. He describes a decline in Shakespeare’s presence on the American stage: .

Yet what makes Shakespeare controversial is also what makes him essential — and contemporary. His work deals with issues that remain just as relevant and contested today as they were in his time … We need Shakespeare, especially in moments of conflict and unrest. Theaters owe audiences a chance to reclaim him, in all his blood and guts.

The outstanding book here is James Shapiro’s Shakespeare in a Divided America. Shapiro came to the Dalkey Book Festival in June, and I had the chance then to ask him a couple of questions.

BBC Sounds Audiobooks

Here’s a treasure trove.

The Thirty-Nine Steps to A Christmas Carol to Wuthering Heights, and plenty of contemporary books (often abridged: Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, and Vesper Flights by Helen MacDonald, for instance.

Books for English Teaching:

this time, Reading -

Meghan Cox Gurdon: The Enchanted Hour: the miraculous power of reading aloud in the age of distraction (2019). Reading aloud is for everyone, and while, and while of course parents are the first and most important readers, teachers should be reading to their pupils as much as possible. My thoughts here.
Robert Macfarlane: Landmarks (2015). This outstanding writer gives us a rich word-hoard of ‘the astonishing lexis for landscape’ in Ireland and Britain.
Donalyn Miller: The Book Whisperer: awakening the inner reader in every child is now ten years old (it started as an online advice column), but still fresh and inspiring: Miller's relentless focus is on promoting independent reading and individual choice.
Thomas Newkirk: Minds Made for Stories: how we really read and write informational and persuasive texts (2014). Newkirk shows how narrative can and should be harnessed for non-fiction texts. He always writes really well: check out the earlier, and brilliant, The Art of Slow Reading (2011).
Kenny Pieper: Reading for Pleasure: a passport to everywhere. This beautifully-written short book echoes much in Donalyn Miller's. "We need to step up and be their reading mentors, getting involved in their lives, or at least be the ones who will properly encourage them to turn the key. It won’t happen by accident."
Maryanne Wolf: Reader, Come Home: the reading brain in a digital world (2019) should be read by all English teachers (lots of others, too, of course). "The transition from a literacy-based culture to a digital one differs radically from previous transitions from one form of communication to another." My thoughts here.

King Lear scene by scene:

this series of podcasts (with transcripts) has reached number 6:

Act 1 scene 1: the memorable and explosive opening, which sets up the subsequently disastrous events of the narrative.
Act 1 scene 2: introducing the sub-plot starting with the memorable Edmund.
Act 1 scenes 3 and 4: themes of loyalty and service, and of course of blindness, which is everywhere. Also, dog-owners look away.
Act 1 scene 5, Act 2 scenes 1 and 2: three short scenes which mark Lear’s growing isolation, and a sense that darker forces are gathering strength.
Act 2 scenes 3 and 4: two scenes connected by ideas of ‘nothing’.
Act 3 scenes 1, 2 and 3: the storm begins.

Teaching and Learning Things:

Slides and other resources from this week’s repeated webinar on teaching Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. On Monday there were 350 teachers online, on top of 950 back in September, so there is an extraordinary take-up of the book in schools. A few international attendees, too.
My colleague Humphrey Jones following up on ‘Additional Assessment Components’ in the Irish Leaving Certificate, this time in Science, after a report in Scotland:
There are many ‘red flags’ within the report. It is deeply concerning to hear of students and teachers having to pay to fund their research projects and, as the report highlights, it widens the already significant social gap. There are significant budgetary and resource constraints evident, which need to be addressed in our schools before the introduction of the new assessment procedures. Coupled with the emergence of AI, it is clear that the AACs, as they are currently envisaged, will not provide a level playing field.
Also from Scotland, Bruce Robertson on lessons the ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ (a good example of what not to do). Of particular interest to teachers in Ireland.
Teachers, students and parents need to be able to look at curricular statements and be crystal clear about what students should be learning. The time teachers spend in planning should focus on how best to teach them this. If what is to be taught isn’t clear, we inevitably end up with teachers planning activities that are loosely related to a theme, but which lack a specific focus on helping students to learn specific things.

Et Cetera

Daisy Christodoulou’s new book, I Can’t Stop Thinking about VAR, is out, and it I’m half-way through it, so my reactions next time. Meanwhile, David James in The Critic:
Christodolou goes beyond a simple analysis (if that’s possible) of the off-side rule: she looks at associated themes, including how much reality human beings are prepared to accept, and what is the nature of authority when ‘transparency’ is demanded at all levels of rule making
Also looking forward to Deborah Levy’s new book, The Position of Spoons and other Intimacies. My comments on her ‘living autobiography’. John Self in The Guardian:
The pieces that work best at this length are those unanchored to anything else: a telegram to an electricity pylon; the half-fictional, half-essayistic pieces Charisma and The Thinker. They are the sort of borderline thing that Levy does best. And the way these variform texts rub up against one another makes the book, curiously, feel more like a unified entity than a collection of bits and pieces.
For Black History Month (October): Five Poems of Note.
Groucho Marx: ‘Gentlemen, he may talk like an idiot and look like an idiot. But don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.’