Ye Nationale Curriculume By Steve Way

 

As well as writing I am teaching several adults in Spain English via the internet. A large portion of the 30 – 50-year-old students tend to be reluctant to speak in English. They’ve explained to me that in their generation at school (which they were grateful to attend as so many of their parents didn’t have that opportunity) the teaching of English was carried out by Spanish teachers, who were themselves reticent to speak in English. This meant that the focus of the lessons was almost exclusively directed towards the teaching of grammar. Some of my students can wipe me off the floor when it comes to identifying the multitude of verb forms in the passive tense, formal variations of conditional statements etc etc. They just need enormous support and encouragement in gaining confidence in expressing themselves verbally. Indeed, the agency I work with has been offering ‘conversation club’ sessions for the last few years where the participants are supported in just talking and listening in a ‘safe’ environment, rather than having ‘normal’ lessons. (Though our lessons don’t comprise endless exercises in grammar!) It has been very interesting to be involved with this process as I’ve seen many of the participants gain considerable confidence and skill from ‘just’ speaking and listening. I think it’s partly because the process is closer in form to the way we learn our first (or if we’re lucky first few) language(s). How many toddlers consciously delineate between their use of the present continuous or the past simple? They (we!) eventually work out how to do so and more besides without attending a single formal lesson in grammar.

The purpose behind outlining this experience with my students is that their learning represents what I see as another example of the consequences of an imbalanced approach to teaching. I think I’ve written before about referring to a heffalump to a few groups of children and being met with blank faced incomprehension. Having seen my grandson having to fiddle around with frontal adverbials in uninspiring exercises similar to those my Spanish friends no doubt endured, it continues to concern me that nowhere near enough time is set aside for children to read – or have read to them – complete stories, or to be able to write freely without having to worry about peppering their prose with ‘powerful’ adjectives, or having to compose while constantly looking over their shoulders for other reasons.

I wondered how a Shakespeare in a slightly different parallel universe would have coped with a common approach to themed writing, resulting in the piece below. Shakespeare’s imaginary teacher gained his own voice as I wrote it, so I do want to emphasise that his views, although perhaps historically accurate, are very much not the views of the author.

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Dailie Reviewe

Straforde-upone-the-Avone Primarye Schoole fore Boyse.

Literacye Lessone.

This day I did ask the boys to write a story. I did give them much stimulus by explaining the history of the tragic Scottish king Macbeth. I did show them artefacts I had bought in, and we did then create a most magnificent piece of artwork that doth now adorn one whole wall of the school room that doth show the succession of the Scottish kings. We then weaved cloth of tartan and the children dressed as characters in the troubled history of this king and the children did role play exercises acting out imagined scenes in the life of this evil man, leading up to his killing of the previous King of Scotland, King Duncan. In this, as he hath done before in role play, young Williame Shakespearee did excel, taking on the role of the aforesaid Macbeth most brilliantly, suggesting a gradual moral decent that finally led to tragedy.

After all this stimulus I did then ask the boys to write their own versions of this story. I have to say that the results were most disappointing, even the unusual effort of the above mentioned Williame. I do declare most vociferously that I cannot understand it! I did give the boys all the stimulus herewith described and then did but remind the boys what they should be thinking of when’ere write.

As always I dids’t request them to recall that they must each moment consider the spelling of each word as they dos’t write their piece, forgetting not each rule of word construction that I hads’t aforetimes instructed them to do. Furthermore, I dids’t remind them to remember that every passing second they should be on guard to ensure their punctuation be perfectly and accurately executed. We did briefly run through the various perplexities of the use of full-stops, commas, apostrophes, colons, semi-colons, ellipses, capital letters, paragraphs, chapter headings and more besides though we had often aforetimes considered each in long and arduous detail.

Straight after did I then remind the boys, recalling to them their target of writing for this terme, to make copious use of “words of power” (whereof we do refer to adjectives) and thereof to on occasion present them in adjoining groups of three, a powerful impression upon the reader for to make; of the use of simple sentences, of short sentences and long, simile, metaphor, irony, pathos, bathos, pork-scratchings, rhetorical devices, implicit and explicit meaning (and much more besides).

Finally, did I review the need for a beginning that doth catch the attention of the reader, then the development of the plot that doth grow from the seed of the aforementioned appealing beginning, with many a problem being introduced into the text that doth by some absorbing means or contrivance have some resolution. Finally, I did further remind them - as I always do before allowing the boys to begin their writing - that the piece must be drawn to a most satisfying and edifying conclusion that will be much appreciated by the audience for which they doth write withal… which usually be just me. Naturally it then behove me, as night doth follow day, to ask the boys to consider, as they doth paint their plot, that they remember to develop the portrayal of the characters that they doth introduce as consequence of the story they expound but in doing so not forgetting to set the scenes of their narrative with many a diverting illustrative device.

So thus I had, methought, most excellently prepared the children for the task of writing. I cannot understand why all the boys but Williame produced not one line of entertaining or improving text and in Williame’s case he did in - contradiction of my instruction - write a most ill-formed play and not a story. As I told the boy myself while admonishing him before his fellows there had not been one mention of the supernatural in our preparatory work and yet this boy had incorporated witches and diverse unnatural beings, including ghosts, into his piece. Not only that his piece introduced the idea that Macbeth’s wife played a considerable role in stimulating the moral demise of this man, an propostion which is of course inconceivable, as though a woman could have equal status in a marriage as a man! Methought I would like to see how young master Shakespeare would portray the actions of this woman since women (rightly) be not allowed to perform in or even witness any play! Any form of developed narrative would of course quite overheat their simple minds… but I digress.

Young William did become much agitated as I most correctly did chastise him for writing such a poorly conceived composition. Verily, it is a tale told by an idiot I dids’t tell him, signifying but nought. Williame did then exclaim, “Forget writing then! I shall become a glovemaker!”  This was but the one part of our lesson that did please me, for we could do with another glovemaker in Straforde-upone-the-Avone and it doth not seem conceivable that master Shakespeare surrendering his pen for his needle will be much of a loss to posterity.

Some People Don't Like Writing Stories (plus bonus Carnegie winners) by Paul May

My grandson (aged 6) does not like writing stories. I was a teacher in primary schools for more than thirty years and I always wondered why such emphasis was placed on the ability of young children to write stories. This relates, I think, to Anne Rooney’s piece last month about the relative values placed on fiction and non-fiction both by schools and by parents. 

 

I am still wondering why we make little children write stories. I suspect it is because, when teaching five- and six-year-olds to do something which they would never need to do if they weren’t at school, (ie writing) you have to think of something—anything—for them to write. For this reason most tasks (‘learning activities’) given to children of this age are highly artificial. They don’t really need to write instructions on making a cup of tea, or a postcard home from a place they have pretended to have gone. They do not need to recount their visit to the safari park in writing, especially if it’s only going to be written in an exercise book and read by no one but the teacher.

 

But, sadly for all our futures, here in the UK we force our children into full-time formal education from the age of 5 and often younger, and if we’re going to teach them to read and write we have to think of something for them to write about. Imaginative teachers find ways to make this work by doing their best to make the children’s writing purposeful, by making books, by sharing and publishing the writing or, for example, by writing real letters to real people. 

 

But stories? Does a 6-year-old really know enough about people and life to start making it up? What they usually do if asked to ‘write a story’, is retell, with changes, stories they’ve heard or movies they’ve watched or computer games they’ve played, which is kind of OK if that’s what you like doing (and some would say it’s what all fiction writers do), but it’s like those display boards covered with Van Gogh sunflower copies you see in primary schools these days – isn’t it better to forget about Van Gogh and look at a real flower, any flower?

 

And the process of getting these young children to write a story can be so laboured and tortuous that it is hard to believe that it doesn’t put most of them off. Often it’s story writing with ‘scaffolding’, one paragraph or even one sentence at a time, following a pre-ordained structure and embellished with ‘wow’ words, so a character can’t be ‘sad’, or ‘big’ but has to be ‘melancholy’ or ‘gigantic’ in order to attract maximum praise, whether or not the child or even the teacher knows if the multisyllabic replacement means what they think it does.

 

Are the children’s lives enriched by this process? Is it increasing their chances of becoming a wealthy writer of fiction when they leave school? And where did it originate, this idea that ‘making up stories’ is a good thing for small children to do? This is not myth, or legend; it’s not folk-tale or fairy-tale, because these are things traditionally passed on orally, and while they may be embellished by the teller and changed subtly over time, they aren’t conjured out of thin air. 

 

I suspect that some time in the last 100 years a teacher was watching young children play make-belief games and reasoned that if they were so good at pretending to be mums and dads and dogs and babies and making up things for them to do, or if they were so totally absorbed int miniature worlds, then they’d be able to write stories. But writing, for me at least, is nothing like playing games. And isn’t it interesting that when engaged in role-play children so often revert to roles they know intimately (even when the ‘role-play area’ has been laboriously Star Wars themed by dedicated teaching assistants)?

 

For me, the act of observing the real world and the actions of people and creatures in it, comes before making things up to write on a piece of paper or a computer. The National Curriculum guidance for KS1 is actually balanced and sensible though it doesn’t, it seems to me, reflect what really goes on in schools, and also manages to sound daunting. If only I could ‘encapsulate my thought, sentence by sentence’. Maybe one day. Which reminds me that writing stories, making them up, is very, very difficult; way more so than describing what you have seen and done and thought, and goodness knows, that’s hard enough!

 

Frontispiece from Sea Change
by M Leszczynski 

And so to the Carnegie. I haven’t been neglecting my reading and can report that Richard Armstrong’s Sea Change, the 1948 winner, was the first YA title to win, although the category didn’t exist then as far as I know. It’s a straightforward coming-of-age story in which a sixteen-year-old boy becomes a man, saving a ship in stormy seas, recognizing his own misjudgements and mistakes and reaching the end of the story with ‘confidence in his stride and eagerness in his face.’ There is no sex in this book, and no women either. Not one. It is not Conrad and it is not Hornblower—the one more complex and the other more fun. It has a moral, too. It’s a serious piece of work, written with the best of intentions to prepare its readers for the harsh realities of the adult world, but I would not have read it as a boy and to a modern adult the writing seems laboured and the characterisation thin.

 

Lots of words from Agnes Allen

I also read Agnes Allen’s The Story of Your Home (1949). Hooray! It’s a non-fiction title! I enjoyed it in parts, but despite the illustrations by Allen's husband, Jack, it is very wordy indeed, and although it is good on the development of the timber-framed house it is vague about the huge developments in building technology in the 20th century. Allen makes a valiant effort to describe the homes and lives of the less well-off, but the central thread about the development of dwellings inevitably focuses on those historical buildings we know most about, mostly the homes of the wealthy.

More words but better ones

I also found the tone of the book off-putting, as it constantly addresses the young reader with ‘I expect you . . .’ ‘You see . . .’ ‘I’m afraid you would have had rather a rough time . . .’ I know it's of its time, but the Quennels’ books about Everyday Life in England are far less 'teachery' despite being written thirty years earlier, and R J Unstead’s slightly later history books are much more accessible. Unstead's writing style and layout feel far more modern, even though the history itself is suspect. Try looking for 'slavery' in the index of A History of Britain. It is entirely absent, and you will read that Britain's wealth in the 18th and 19th centuries was based on 'trade.' 

Marcus Crouch thought that Agnes Allen was ‘neither condescending nor aggressively didactic.’ He also pointed out that there was a very real danger of ‘crowding the story with detail and confusing the reader with a multiplicity of facts.’  He thought Agnes Allen avoided this pitfall, but I'm not so sure. Maybe children back then had a greater thirst for knowledge and a greater tolerance for this slightly cloying mode of address, but if any child ever read this book (‘easy to read and as absorbing as a story book’) from cover to cover, I will eat my hat. 

A more welcoming spread from
Unstead's Looking at History (1955)

Here are a couple of extracts from The Story of Your Home that indicate both the tone of the text and the way in which the book has dated.

 

“I am sure you have all read exciting stories of the Middle Ages in which people have hidden behind the arras and heard things they were not meant to hear.”

 

“What a difference such a simple thing as a box of matches has made in our homes. We wonder how people ever got on without them.” 

 

It occurs to me that these would make perfect cartoon captions—perhaps in the style of Glen Baxter or the New Yorker magazine. 

Paul May's website

 

 

 

SPAG, SATs and other Horrible Things - by Emma Barnes

This post is an expanded version of one that I wrote a few days ago for GirlsHeartBooks.  In particular there is new section on "Where is the evidence?" for the current approach.

 

If I'm looking a bit pained, not to mention puzzled, it's because I'm staring into my computer trying to do some of the questions that 10 and 11 year olds were doing for their SATS test papers this year. 

If you didn't do SATS yourself, you might want to take a look .  See how you do. 

 I'm a writer, so you'd think I would find these questions about the English language pretty easy.  Not so.  Sad to say I have never heard of a "subordinating conjunction", to take but one example.  And do you know what?  It hasn't exactly held me back so far. 

Ah, but that's because I write creative, airy-fairy stuff, I can hear you say.  Children's fiction.  I can even get away with starting this paragraph with "Ah". 

Think again.  I was once a civil servant.  I wrote briefings, letters, minutes and even politicians' speeches.  (I hope my writing was better than some of the stuff that comes out of government departments.)  I also went to graduate school, and not to study creative writing either, but political science. 

Actually, I'm not even against teaching grammar.  I didn't learn much of it in school (it wasn't fashionable then) and it would have been helpful when learning a foreign language later.  Also, some children enjoy a more formal approach to English. 

But like a lot of writers (and teachers and parents and - I'm guessing, because nobody seems to ask them - children) I think all this testing has gone too far.  The worst thing is, I can't see the link between the kind of tasks that children are being asked to do and actually improving their literacy in any meaningful way.  Meanwhile, a lot of truly valuable things - such as actual reading and writing - are being squeezed out. 

 And what's taking their place? SPAG! Now how bad can that be? Sounds like it's short for spaghetti, right, and everyone loves spaghetti.

But no, SPAG is actually short for Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar, and in its current form many children probably feel it was dreamt up purely as an instrument of torture!

 On visits to schools, I meet too many stressed teachers and children, who are being forced to concentrate on SPAG and other SATS prep when they could be doing something more interesting - like actual reading and writing - instead.  When I do workshops, children write down their versions of the stories that we have invented.  In the process, they are practising description, narrative, dialogue, setting, sentence construction and many other important things.  They are also having fun.  What saddens me is that they often have little chance to do this kind of writing at school.  Something is going very wrong.

 I'm not the only writer who thinks this.  In fact, children's writers as a whole have said that they think SATS are actually damaging children's writing.  For example:

• Read about the views of the Society of Authors here.
• Here's a letter condemning SATS whose signatories include writers Philip Pullman, Michael Rosen and Alan Gibbons.
• Here's a piece by writer Anne Rooney showing that the rules for using exclamation marks given to primary children are plain wrong.
• Here's another piece she wrote about Wow Words.
• Here's a post by Nicola Morgan on grammar in the current tests.
• Here's a post by writer C.J. Busby on why the current approach is actually detrimental to children's writing.
• Here's a post by Michael Rosen about his son's SPAG homework - his blog also has many examples of the illogicalities of the current tests.

As I've said, I'd actually like to know more grammar.  Sometimes I'm not certain which version of a sentence is correct.  But do you know what?  It's not that hard - I just look it up.

My Trusty Grammar Guide

What you can't just look up is language itself.  To be a fluent reader and writer, there is no substitute for practice.  You can give children endless rules to learn.  But they won't be able to read and write well unless they read and write regularly.  If they do, then most likely their grammar will be correct most of the time anyway.

 This requires time, and access to books.  So why not concentrate on those things rather than dreaming up ever more bizarre and convoluted tests?

Where's the evidence?

What I increasingly wonder about it where is the evidence for the current approach to teaching English?

If you go to a doctor, and are prescribed treatment, you tend to hope that there is some kind of evidence - based on research - that lies behind the choice of that treatment.  In fact in the UK there is an entire agency, NICE, which exists to look at particular medical treatments, review the evidence supporting them, and advise doctors on the best ways of treating various conditions.

You would think that educational policy - prescribing the way children are taught in school - would also be based on some kind of evidence.  Especially as it is constantly changing - placing additional burdens on the teachers and children who have to adjust.

Is there evidence that the approach taken at the moment is actually effective?  Does it produce more literate children - able to read and write more fluently, to cope better with the demands of their high school eduction?  Are they more likely to possess the literacy skills they need in adult life?

If there is such evidence, I'd love to see it.

By contrast, there is a huge amount of evidence that reading for pleasure is hugely beneficial to children's educational attainment - not only their literacy, but across the board.  This research regularly appears, and is international in scope.  Here's a link to just one such study - there are many more.

But what are the government doing to respond to this evidence?

I'm sure they would respond that they are not trying to deter reading for pleasure.  But they don't exactly seem to be going out of their way to encourage it, either.  Regional School Library Services - whose role it is to support schools - are closing.   The Society of Authors has campaigned for every school to have a library (every prison must have a library by law, but schools don't have to) - but so far without success.  With so many public libraries closing too (a truly national scandal) many primary children do not have access to the range of books they need to turn them into readers.

Furthermore, there is only so much time available.  The increasing focus on tests and SPAG inevitably squeezes out library time, quiet reading, the shared "read aloud" class novel.  Money spent on SATS revision guides cannot be spent on books for the school library.

Yes, I wish I'd learnt more grammar - but not the way it's being taught now.  Not at the expense of so much else.  In the end I did pretty well in that test.  That's because I've always been a reader and a writer. That's what I'd like to see children doing - learning to become lifelong readers.

There is a lot more to writing and reading than knowing a "subordinating conjunction" when you see it. As a first step - go and pick up a good book instead. 

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• Emma Barnes writes funny, contemporary fiction for children - for more information see her web-page.
• Her latest book, Wild Thing Goes Camping, is the third in her series about the naughtiest little sister ever.

 

How To Judge Children's Writing? - by Emma Barnes

Earlier this year I was asked to be Judge of the Hope/Findel Writing Competition for children. Schools across the UK submitted stories by their pupils, in three age categories, with the chance to win prizes of books for the school, cinema tickets, and signed copies of my book Wild Thing. My job was to pick the overall winners from the shortlisted entries.

Being a Judge was enormous fun – and also a complete nightmare. Enormous fun because there was so much talent in the shortlisted stories. They were truly a pleasure to read. A complete nightmare because reading and enjoying the stories was one thing, but picking out a winner – and a second and third place – in each category was another thing entirely. I wanted to be like the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland who declares: "Everybody has won, and all must have prizes."

The Dodo as Judge by Tenniel (Image: British Library.  Public Domain)

Now the results are out, and here I am reading out the winning entries on film. Well done, you brilliant young writers.

But how do you judge children's writing? (How do you judge any piece of creative writing?)

With great difficulty.  There's the quality of the prose, which could be marvellously rich and poetic (or crisp and concise).  There's also the structure - a story needs a beginning, a middle and an end (or usually it does).  A story needs pace.  And then what if the story is genuinely funny and surprising, but the ending lets it down? What if the story is highly polished and well-structured but somehow predictable? What if there's a brilliant idea, but it's not quite carried through? What if an entry is brilliant but over the word count?

Even trickier, how do you judge realism against humour against a thriller against a piece of dystopian sci-fi against a story with talking animals?

Having drawn up various lists, and devised elaborate points systems, none of which worked, in the end I followed my instincts.  I chose the stories that most surprised and delighted me. But I had terrible pangs about the wonderful stories I couldn't choose. And I now have a huge sympathy for teachers – the people who day in, day out have the job of assessing children's writing.

It did make me think about the way we teach children to write. Writer CJ Busby has spearheaded a campaign (started on this blog) to address some of the ways writing is taught in primary school.  Reading the stories I did find that simplicity could be a breath of fresh air, and there was an occasional story where the phantom of the National Curriculum, standing at the writer's elbow and whispering "squeeze in just one more metaphor...how about another complex sentence?" was not helpful.  A good story is not a checklist, and maybe we need to remind ourselves of that.

Meanwhile I got to be media star for a day. In my writing career, this is the first time I've had a film crew in my house. Many thanks to Findel designer Gary Hadfield (top left), and the guys from the EGL video (left to right) Andrew Birtwell, Simon Ashton and Luke Margetts who cheerfully set up their gear in my livingroom, braved my crazy dog, and didn't worry too much about the building noises from next door.

Getting ready to read

The team from Findel/EGL

Many congratulations, not only to the winners but to all the young writers who took part - I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did.

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Emma's Wild Thing series for 8+ about the naughtiest little sister ever. (Cover - Jamie Littler)
"Hilarious and heart-warming" The Scotsman

 Wolfie is a story of wolves, magic and snowy woods...
(Cover: Emma Chichester Clark)
"Funny, clever and satisfying..." Books for Keeps

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