The English Miscellany

Is there a genuine excuse for your essay crisis ?     If you leave all your essay work until the last moment, will the result be a disaster? Are you risking the tragic demise of your academic career? Is there a survival strategy?     First, let's confess that some students work well under pressure. Last minute writers argue that you are less likely to be distracted if you have six hours left to finish, than if you have six days of leisure, sleep and study combined. Also, with less time you are less likely to be bogged down in wider reading, excessive contextualisation, and profound but confusing speculations. Crisis-driven writers maintain a sharp focus that helps them to maintain a clear sense of priorities and relevance in their work.      While many great works have been the labour of many years of apprenticeship, and multiple arduous revision and drafts, there are admittedly examples of poets and writers who have achieved pro...

Is this a question? - Is this an answer? It's quite stressful for children to sit exams at the age of 10 or 11. It is perhaps fortunate that many young people are not fully aware of what is happening to them, and have a poor understanding of its rationale or relevance. Typically, children are trained how to revise, and they are taught exam technique, but no one really explains why they are being asked questions based on their comprehension of a text, or their verbal reasoning. Obedient children simply get on with the task, and some of them succeed from will-power alone. Creative children tend to become bored and rebellious, no matter how much you tell them that this is vital for their future career prospects. In order to begin to fix this problem of justifiable resistance, we need to step back from the compulsory testing regimes and the machinery of educational selection. New strategies are required. I'm sure testing is here to stay, but I do think that children shou...

For the Ancient Greeks, memory was a highly prized skill, and a crucial faculty of the mind. Orators, poets, performers, lawyers and philosophers developed astonishing powers of memory. Their capacity for recall was prodigious. Because their culture valued orality, and the authenticity of speech as direct communication, memeory was a key skill. In a sense, the devaluation of the role of memory could be deemed to be progressive. As writing progressed the key role of memory became less significant. You did not have to remember everything if the answer was in a book, or indeed if it had been recorded acccurately somewhere, in some form. Nonetheless, memory work has often been perceived as a necessary regime and a desirable discipline for character formation and spiritual rectitude. Medieval monks and renaissance scholars devised memory systems to help them to meditate on the circles of Hell, or to focus on aspects of theology; or simply to remember the sacred texts. Learning to recit...

"I failed my exam because the examiners were tough this year." "This exam board is tougher than that one." Surprisingly, it does not actually work the way that these comments suppose. Examiners do not start (or finish) the process with a policy to be harsh or strict, unless there is significant political interference with the process, which could undermine public confidence in the exam system. Where you start, ideally , is with a benchmark, sometimes called a 'descriptor'. As the name indicates this categorisation attempts to describe the kind of work that is deemed appropriate in each category:  e.g. 'A' = excellent: independent thinking and critical skills, high level of subject knowledge of all the topics outlined in the syllabus/curriculum. The benchmarks in turn ought correspond to national subject standards. When these have been agreed, everyone in the process has to stick to them. There are also international standards of comp...

There is a great gap between those children who have discovered reading and take delight in it; and those who are resistant and have to be dragged to it. There are also many alternatives to reading; the modern world offers a vast range of audio-visual and  interactive distractions. How do we respond to these challenges and how to we begin to promote enjoyment in reading? In recent years I have been asked to work with parents and children to improve reading skills. I have been asked to take part in this heroic struggle! Indeed, there is strong evidence that boys' reading skills are increasingly falling behind those of girls, and that boys come back to school after the summer holidays with poor reading skills. Let's investigate two questions: How do we guide and support the enjoyment in reading and help to improve skills? How could we link reading to creativity, community, and interactivity? The results . Here are 15 motivational tips (with an emphasis on readi...

You have probably come across the SMARTER model as a way of organising a project.  It works like this S          Specific              Significant, Stretching, Simple M         Measurable              Meaningful, Motivational, Manageable A         Attainable Appropriate, Achievable, Agreed, Assignable, Actionable, Ambitious, Aligned, Aspirational, Acceptable, Action-focused R          Relevant           Result-Based, Results-oriented, Resourced, Resonant, Realistic T          Timely Time-oriented, -framed, -based, -bound, -Specific, -tabled, -limited, Trackable, Tangible E      ...

In recent years we have moved a long way from teacher-led Practical Criticism Q&A. As learners we are always searching for fun ways to explore texts. Experience demonstrates that allowing children to be creative is an excellent way to build critical engagement. Fun means deeper learning, and in my view, play cultivates questions. So let's have the courage to allow our students to play with plots and create their own interpretations of them. This approach need not displace traditional literary/critical writing exercises. Rather, it serves as a way of incubating enjoyable and engaging point(s) of entry to the text. How does this approach work? I'm not going to write up a detailed lesson plan, but you will find a short case study below. The newspaper model can be adapted to any text. (I recently worked with this approach using Charles Dickens's Great Expectations .) The project briefly sketched below will also help the learners to be more aware of style, tone, a...